"There is a natural law of analogy which explains that all things
belonging to the universe are members of the same family, that they are
related to one another by bonds which permit of the greatest variety in
individual differences and are not nullified even by the distance
between extremes." If we grasp the meaning of these words in their full
bearing, we recognize the outcome of philosophy up to date. They teach
us how to use our intellect in order to obtain an accurate picture of
the universe.
The intellect is also called by the name of faculty of discrimination.
If in the science of the powers of this faculty we place ourselves on
the standpoint of present-day natural knowledge, we possess the clear
and plain insight that there are no exaggerated distinctions, no
unrelated extremes, in the universe. The infinite is related to the
finite. For all developed and perishable things are the direct offspring
of the imperishable, of the eternal universe. General nature and its
special parts are inseparably interlaced. There is nothing among all
that has a name which is fundamentally different from other things known
by name.
There will hardly be any objection against these sentences, until we
proceed to draw their last consequences. If all things are related and
without exception children of the universe, it follows that mind and
matter must also be two yards of cloth from the same piece. Hence the
difference between human understanding and other natural human faculties
must not be magnified into that of irreconcilable extremes.
In order to become accustomed to scientific distinctions, the reader
should consider that a man can remain under the sway of a belief in
ghosts only so long as he ignores the relationship of all existing
things. He believes in real ghosts whose reality is supposed to be
radically different from his own. Such a distinction is exaggerated and
illogical, and whoever believes in it does not know how to discriminate
scientifically and has not the full use of his critical faculties.
Just as common parlance opposes art to nature and then forgets that art
is a part of nature, similarly as night is a part of day, so the
language of the believer in ghosts does not know that reason and wood,
mind and matter, in spite of all their differences, are two parts of the
same whole, two expressions of the same universal reality. Everything is
real and true, because in the last instance the universe is all, is the
only truth and reality. So I call it a slip of the tongue to speak of
natural nature as opposed to natural art or artificial nature, of
imaginary reality as distinct from real reality. There ought to be a
different name for the day of twelve hours than for the day of
twenty-four hours, so that it might be better understood that day and
night are not fundamentally different, but two prongs of the same fork.
Just as the faculty of thinking is innate in the child, and grows with
its development, so mankind's faculty of thought grows and has hitherto
expressed itself in a language which gave only instinctive conceptions
of the composition of the human brain and of its functions. The
construction of languages explains in a way the condition of the human
mind which had only inadequate knowledge of itself so far. Those
shortcomings of speech which I called slips of the tongue were not
understood until sufficient progress had been made in the explanation of
the process of thinking, and now these same shortcomings offer an
excellent means of representing and demonstrating the results of
enlightenment.
The mind is to give to man a picture of the world, the language is the
brush of the mind. It paints by its construction the universal
relationship of all things referred to in the beginning of this chapter,
and it does so in the following manner: It gives to each thing not only
its own name, but also adds to it another indicating its family, and
another indicating its race, another for the species, the genus, and
finally a general name which proclaims that all things are parts of the
one indivisible unit which is called world, existence, universe, cosmos.
This diagrammatic construction of language furnishes us with an
illustration of the graduated relationship of things and of the way in
which the human race arrives at its knowledge, its perceptions or
pictures.
We said that philosophy is that endeavor which seeks to throw light on
the process of human thought. This work has been rendered very difficult
by the unavoidable misunderstanding of the universal relationship just
mentioned. The transcendentalists insist above all that the process of
thinking and its product, thought, should not be classed among ordinary
physics, not as a part of physical nature, but as the creature of
another nature which carries the mysterious name of metaphysics. That
such a nature and such a science is neither possible nor real is proven
by the construction of language which normally describes everything as
being closely related and corroborates this by its abnormal shortcomings
which we called slips of the tongue.
The shortcomings of language which demonstrate the positive outcome of
philosophy consist in occasionally giving insufficiently significant
names to things belonging to a group in which the distinction between
individuals, species, genera, and families is not clearly defined. It is
not discernible, for instance, whether the term "cat" applies to a
domestic cat or to a tiger, because that term is used for a large class
of animals of which the domestic cat is the arch-type.
But it may be that this illustration is not well chosen for the purpose
of demonstrating that slip of the tongue which is supposed to give us an
exact appreciation of the positive outcome of philosophy. Let us find
another and better illustration which will be a transition from the
inadequate to the adequate and thus throw so much more light on the
obscurities of language.
Another and better example of the inadequacies of language is the
distinction between fish and meat. In this case, we entirely lack a
general term for meat, one kind of which is furnished by aquatic animals
and the other by terrestrial animals.
Now let the reader apply this shortcoming of language to the distinction
between physics and metaphysics, or between thought and reality. We lack
a term which will fully indicate the relation between these two.
Thoughts are indeed real things. True, there is a difference whether I
have one hundred dollars in imagination or in reality in my pocket.
Still we must not exaggerate this difference into something
transcendental. Painted money or imagined money are in a way also real,
that is in imagination. In other words, language lacks a term which will
clearly express the different realities within the compass of the unit.
The understanding of these peculiarities of language is calculated to
promote the insight and enlightenment in regard to that secret lamp
which man is carrying in his brain and with which he lights up the
things of this world. The cultivation of the theory of understanding,
the critique of reason, has an elementary significance for the
elucidation of all things. This is not saying that philosophy, that
special science with which we are here dealing, is a universal science
in the sense in which antiquity conceived of it. But it is universal
nevertheless in the sense in which the alphabet and other primary topics
are universal. Every one must use his brains and should therefore take
pains to understand its processes. Though the knowledge of these does
not make other efforts unnecessary, still it explains many ideas, it
elucidates the nature of thinking which every one is doing and which is
frequently used in a more ruthless manner than a dog would treat a rag.
The inertia which has prevented the one-sided idealists on the one hand
and the one-sided materialists on the other from coming to a peaceful
understanding may be traced to one of those slips of the tongue. We lack
the right terms for designating the relationship between spiritual
phenomena, such as our ideas, conceptions, judgments and conclusions and
many other things on one side and the tangible, ponderable,
commensurable things on the other. True, the reason for this lack of
terms is the absence of understanding, and for this reason the dispute
is not one of mere words, although it can be allayed only by an
improvement of our terminology.
Buechner, in his well-known work on "_Force and Matter_," likewise
overlooks this point, the same as all prior materialists, because they
are as onesidedly insistent on their _matter_ as the idealists are on
their _idea_. Quarrel and strife mean confusion, only peace will bring
light. The contrast between matter and mind finds its conciliation in
the positive outcome of philosophy which teaches that all distinctions
must be reasonable, because neither our instrument of thought nor the
rest of nature justify any exaggerated distinctions. In order to
elucidate the moot question, nothing is required but the insight that
ideas which nature develops in the human brain are materials for the
work of our understanding, though not materials for the work of our
hands. Philosophy has made material efforts to grasp the understanding
and its conceptions and is still making them in the same way in which
chemistry is working for the understanding of substances and physics for
the understanding of forces.
Substances, forces, ideas, conceptions, judgments, conclusions,
knowledge and perceptions, according to the positive outcome of
philosophy, must be regarded as differences or varieties of the same
monistic genus. The differentiation of things no more contradicts their
unity than their unity contradicts their differentiation. Darwin
expanded the conception of "species" and thus contributed to a better
understanding of zoology. Philosophy expands the conception of species
still far beyond the Darwinian definition in teaching us to consider the
species as little generalities and the largest genus, the absolute or
the cosmos as the all in one, the all-embracing species.
In order to closely connect the worm and the elephant, the lowest and
the highest animal, the vegetable and the animal kingdom, the inorganic
and the organic, as members of the same species or genus in a reasonable
way, we must keep account of the gradations in nature, the transitions,
the connecting links and connecting ideas. Embryology, which shows that
the life of the highest animal develops through the stages of the animal
genus, has greatly promoted the understanding of the common nature of
all animals.
"The continuity in the natural gradation of things is perfect, because
there are no gradations which are not represented, because there are no
differences between the various grades which nature does not fill by an
intermediary form.... There is no abrupt difference in nature, no
metaphysical jump, no vacuum, no gap in the order of the world," says a
well-known author of our times whose name I shall not mention, because I
wish to base my argument on the acknowledged facts rather than on names
of authorities.
What Darwin taught us in relation to animal life, viz., that there are
no fundamental differences between species, that is taught by philosophy
in regard to the universe. The understanding of the latter is rendered
difficult by the habit of making a transcendental distinction between
matter and mind.