[73] Italics are ours.
[74] See _Fundamental Problems_, p. 55.
[75] This is the position of the Societies for Ethical Culture which are
not confessedly but practically agnostics. Professor Adler’s position is
characterised in _The Monist_, Vol. I, No. 4, p. 567, 599, and _The Open
Court_ Nos. 225 and 234. Mr. Salter bases ethics upon “the immovable rock
of conscience.” (See his _Ethical Religion_, p. 295.)
[76] Ernst Schroeder in his great work _Vorlesungen über die Algebra der
Logik_ adopts in the main the results of Peirce. A sketch of Mr. Peirce’s
line of thought, (his _Gedankengang_, as Schroeder calls it,) is found in
the _Einleitung_, pp. 107-118.
[77] I laid down my views on the subject in a short monograph of only 82
pages, entitled _Ursache, Grund und Zweck, eine philosophische Abhandlung
zur Klärung der Begriffe_ (Dresden: R. von Grumbkow, Hof. Verlag, 1883).
In all main points I maintain the same standpoint still. See also
_Fundamental Problems_, the chapter on Causality, pp. 79-91 and 96-109.
Since the publication of my German pamphlet my confidence that we can,
(not only in the special sciences such as chemistry, mineralogy, botany,
etc., but also in philosophy) arrive at truth, has rather been confirmed
than shaken. We can create a common ground on which all philosophers
agree, as much as mathematicians agree concerning the Pythagorean
theorem. But in order to achieve this ideal, philosophers must abandon
all attempts at originality. The hankering after originality is an
inherited evil in the family of philosophers. The first philosophers
were poets, priests, and prophets; later on in the natural evolution
of human culture, a differentiation of their combined functions took
place. Originality is a virtue in the poet but a vice in his brother,
the philosopher. The philosopher’s ideal must be to free himself of all
individualism, subjectivity, and original conceptions; he must become
strictly objective. He must renounce his personal likes and dislikes, and
make his soul a mirror of nature, faithfully and correctly to represent
the facts and nothing but the facts. This is the ethics of philosophical
inquiry, and the philosophy that takes its stand on this principle we
call positivism.
Almost all divergencies of importance in the different philosophical
systems can be traced to different conceptions or rather misconceptions
of causation.
This last century since Kant has been the most fertile age of original
world-theories, all different in style and manner of construction, but
all alike in so far as the author of each system had strained his utmost
efforts to be original. Thus all these world-theories were so many
beautiful poems on ontology, they were so many grand air-castles produced
by the magic wand of a fairy-tale causation. The philosopher’s aspiration
must not be to present original ideas but to reach that one solution
which any other unbiassed thinker must find, to express that truth which
in the end will have to be recognised universally, to formulate facts in
objective exactness. The degree of originality in philosophic thought
marks the degree of aberration from the common aim of the one sole
solution, and the greatest source of original ideas is the confusion of
cause and reason, of _Ursache_ and _Grund_, of event and law, of fact and
truth.
[78] I expect to discuss the problems of sameness, of chance, of
mechanicalism, and the freedom of will in the next number of _The Monist_
under the caption _The Doctrine of Necessity: Its Basis and its Scope_.