It is the merit of the philosophical outcome to have delivered the
process of understanding from its mystic elements. So long as cause and
effect are not recognized as a form of thought belonging to the same
species with many other forms of thought, all of which serve the common
purpose of illuminating the cosmic processes for the human mind by a
symbolized picture composed of various conceptions, just so long will
something mysterious adhere to the category of cause and effect.
Philosophy is particularly engaged in illuminating the understanding. It
has learned enough of its specialty to know that it is a part of the
universe performing the special function of arranging the world of
phenomena and its smaller circles according to relations of
consanguinity and chronology. Such an arrangement presents a scientific
picture of the world. The well-known diagram of conceptions used by
logicians, consisting of a large circle symbolizing the general, inside
of which smaller circles crossing and encircling one another represent
the specialties, is a fitting aid in explaining the method by which the
faculty of understanding arrives at its scientific results. Science in
general is the sum of all special kinds of knowledge, differing from
them in no greater degree than the human body from the various organs of
which it is composed. A bodily organ can no more exist outside of the
body than any particular knowledge can exist outside of the generality
of all sciences. No metaphysics is possible under this condition.
As surely as we know that two mountains cannot be without a valley
between them, just so surely do we know that nothing in heaven, on
earth, or in any other place can lie outside of the general circle of
things. Outside of the worldly world there can be no other little world.
A logically constituted human mind cannot think differently. And it is
likewise impossible to discover such an outside world by the help of and
within the limits of experience, because thought is inseparable from
experience and there can be no experience without thought. A man who has
a head upon his shoulders--and there can be no man without a
head--cannot experience any unworldly metaphysical world. The faculty of
experience, which includes the faculty of understanding or perception,
is merely empirical. Our settled conviction of the unity of the universe
is an inborn logic. The unity of the world is the supreme and most
universal category. A closer look at it at once reveals the fact that it
carries its opposite, the infinite multiplicity, under its heart or in
its womb. The general is pregnant with specialties.
This is a comparison, and comparisons limp. A mother has other qualities
beside that of motherhood, while the universe, or the absolute
generality, is nothing but the bearer, the cause, of all special and
separate things. It is "pure" motherhood which can no more be without
children than the children without a mother. In this way, no cause can
be without effects. A cause without an effect--let us dismiss it. The
child is as much a cause in motherhood as it is its effect and product.
In the same way the universe has never been, and could not be conceived,
without the many special children which it carries in its womb.
If thought wishes to make for itself a picture, a conception of the
cause of all causes, it must necessarily take cognizance of the effects.
Thought may very well separate one from the other, but cannot think
correctly without the consciousness that its separating and
distinguishing is only a formality. Imagining, conceiving, knowing,
perceiving, are so many formalities.[9]
But philosophy took its departure from the opposite, the wrong, view. It
regarded perceiving, understanding, as the main thing. It did not use
science as a formality, as something secondary, as something serving a
nature, a cause, a purpose, a higher reason, but it started with the
illogical and irrelevant assumption that the specialty of mind,
understanding, conceiving, judging, distinguishing, is the primary,
supreme, self-constituted cause and purpose, instead of being an element
in logic. Even in Hegel's logic, which, by the way, has given us much
light on the process of thought, this confounding of the original with
the copy is the cause of an almost impenetrable mysticism.
Not nature, but science is to those idealist philosophers the source of
truth. The "true idea" surpassed everything with them. This "idea" is
forced by Hegel to roll about, and wind, and twist as if it were not a
natural child, but a metaphysical dragon. But we cannot deny that in
these twistings and windings of the Hegelian dragon the condition of the
mind is exposed in all its peculiarities and nakedness.
According to Hegel's theosophical opinion I do not become aware of my
friend in material intercourse and bodily touch. Hegel's mark of a true
friend is not that he proves true in life, but that he corresponds "to
his idea." The "idea" of true friendship is for the idealist the measure
of friendly truth, just as Plato measures the ideal or true condition of
states and cooking pots of this valley of sorrows by the standard of an
"idea" of the state, or an "idea" of the cooking pot, supposed to be
derived from some other world.
It is surely a valuable gift of nature that the human mind can form its
ideals. But it is a gift that has also caused much trouble and which
requires for its higher development the clear understanding that ideals
are constructed out of real materials. Without this understanding the
human race will never succeed in making a reasonable use of its ideal
faculty. The beautiful ideal of true friendship may stimulate us to
emulation. But the knowledge that it is nothing but an ideal which in
reality is always mixed with a little falseness serves as no mean
antidote against sentimental transcendentalism. And the same holds true
of truth, liberty, justice, equality, brotherhood, etc.
The striving after an ideal is very good, but it does no harm to be
conscious of the fact and clearly see that any ideal can never be
realized without some admixture of its opposite. What is it that Lessing
says? "If God were to offer me the search for truth in his left hand,
and truth in his right, I should grasp his left hand and say: Father,
keep truth, it is for you alone."
It has not been the task of philosophy to give us a true mind picture of
the world. This it cannot do, this cannot be done by any scientific
specialty. It may be done by the totality of sciences, and even by them
only approximately. Even with them striving is a higher truth and of
higher value than knowing. I repeat, then: It is not the particular task
of philosophy to furnish a true picture of the world, but rather to
investigate the method by which the human mind arrives at its world
pictures. That is its work, and it is the object of this book to sketch
its outline.
A sketch is in itself an inexact piece of work. I may be blamed for
jumbling together such terms as world, cosmos, universe, nature, or such
others as ideas, judgment, conclusion, thought, mind, intellect, etc.,
and for using them as synonyms when many of them have already been
assigned their fixed meaning in the classification of science. But this
is the point which I emphasize, that the method of science, of thought,
has the twofold nature of making fixed terms and still remaining
pliable.
Science not only defines what this or that is, but also how it moves,
how it originates, passes away, and still remains; how it is fixed and
yet at the same time moving. The real being of which science treats,
viz., the universe, is not alone present, but also past and future, and
it is not alone this or that, but it is everything. Even nothing is
something belonging to the aggregate life.
This dialectic statement is rather incomprehensible to the
unphilosophical brain. Nothing and something are conceptions so widely
diverging from one another in the unphilosophical mind that they seem
far more apart than heavenly bliss is supposed to be separated from
earthly misery, according to the declarations of clergymen. Clergymen
are transcendental logicians, and it is likewise transcendental to
regard nothing as an absolute nothing. It cannot be denied that it is at
least a conception or a term. Therefore, whether little or much, it is
something. We cannot get out of existence, out of the universe, any more
than Muenchhausen can pull himself out of a swamp by his pigtail.
There can be no absolute nothing, because the absolute is synonymous
with the universe, and everything else is relative. So it is also with
nothing. It simply has the significance of not being the main thing. To
say: This is nothing means it is not that which is essential at this
time and place. This man is nothing simply means that he is not a man
out of the ordinary, and it does not at all signify that he is nothing
at all.
The category of being and not being, like all categories,[10] which
appear as something fixed to the sound but ill-informed mind, is really
something shifting. Its poles fuse and flow into one another, its
differences are not perfectly radical. These categories give us an
illustration of the mobile universe, which is a unit composed of its
opposite, multiplicity.
The positive outcome of philosophy has for its climax the understanding
that the world is multifarious, and that this multiplicity is uniform in
possessing the universal nature in common. The sciences must represent
these objects in such a contradictory way, because all things live in
reality in this contradiction. What the museum zoologists and the
herbarium botanists have accomplished on the field of zoology and botany
in the category of space, has been accepted by the Darwinians with the
addition of the variety of those subjects in the category of time.
Either class of scientists categorizes, classifies, systematizes. The
chemists do the same with substances and forces, and so does Hegel with
his categories of being and not being, quantity and quality, substance
and attribute, thing and quality, cause and effect, etc. He makes all
things flow into one another, rise, pass, move, and he is right in doing
so. Everything moves and belongs together.
But that which Hegel missed and which is added by us consists in the
further perception that the flow and the variability of the categories
just quoted is only an illustration of the necessary variability and
interaction of all thoughts and conceptions, which are, and must be,
nothing but illustrations and reflexes of the universal life.
However, the idealist philosophers who have all of them contributed
materially toward this ultimate special knowledge, are still more or
less under the mistaken impression that the process of thinking is the
true process and the true original, and that the true original, nature
or the material universe, is only a secondary phenomenon. We now insist
on having it understood that the cosmic interaction of phenomena, the
universal living world, is the truth and life.
Is the world a concept? Is it an idea? It may be conceived and grasped
by the mind, but it does and is more than that. It surpasses our
understanding in the past, the present, and the future. It is infinite
in quantity and quality. How do we know that? We say in the same breath
that we do not know everything which is passing, has passed, and will
pass in the world; we do not understand the whole, and yet we claim to
have fully understood that this whole universe is not a mere idea, but
something absolute, something more than a conception or an intuitive
knowledge, something real and true, something infinite. How do we solve
this contradiction?
The science of the limitation of the individual and of the collective
human intellect is identical with the universal concept; in other words,
it is innate in the human intellect to know that it is a limited part of
the absolute universe. This intellectual faculty of ours is no less
natural and aboriginal than the faculty of trees to become green in
summer and that of the spiders to spread their nets. Although the
intellect is a limited part of the unlimited and aware of this fact, yet
its faculty of knowing, understanding, judging, is a universal one. No
intellect is possible or conceivable which can do more than the
instrument of thought given by nature to the human race. We may indeed
conceive of a mental giant. But when we take a closer look, every one
will perceive that this mental giant cannot get outside of the
traditional race of thinkers, unless he is supposed to be the creature
of imagination.
Thinking, knowing, understanding, are universal. I can perceive all
things in about the same way that I can see all cobble stones. I can see
them all, but I cannot see everything that they are composed of, I
cannot see, for instance, that they are heavy and ponderable. In the
same way all things may be perceived, but not everything that belongs
to them. They do not dissolve in understanding, in other words,
understanding is only a part of the universe, all of which may be
perceived, but the understanding of which is not the whole, since our
intellect is but a part of the universe.
Everything may be understood, but understanding is not everything. Every
pug-dog is a dog, but every dog is not a pug-dog. The conflict of
idealism and materialism rests on this same conflict between genus and
subordinate species. The idealist incarnate contends that all things are
ideas, while we strive to make him see that ideal things and material
things are two species of the same genus, and that they should be given
a common family or general name beside their special name, on account of
their common nature and for the purpose of a sound logic. Wherever this
understanding has been acquired, the quarrel between idealists and
materialists appears in the light of a mere bandying of words.
Everything is large, everything is small, everything extended through
space and time, everything cause and everything effect, everything a
whole and a part, because everything is the essence of everything,
because everything is contained in the all, everything related,
everything connected, everything interdependent. The conception of all
as the absolute, the content of which consists of innumerable
relativities, the concept of the all as the universal truth which
reflects many phenomena, that is the basis of the science of
understanding.