Part 18

In order that these petty illustrations may not confuse your mind, it should be remembered that the essential point is the elucidation of the great contradiction between mind and matter, between thinking and being, which includes all petty contradictions.

In order to think in accordance with logical consistency, you must not regard a thing as something independent, but consider everything as fluid particles of the same substance, which is the thing of all things, the world, the truth, and life.

Our logic is therefore the science of truth. This truth is neither above nor below, neither in Jerusalem nor in Jericho, neither in the spirit nor in the flesh, but everywhere.

Our logic is the science of understanding. It teaches that you must not search for understanding by cudgeling your brain, but only in connection with experience, with the interrelation of things.

Since man in his experience also meets errors, science was dominated for centuries by the question whether truth and experience are not two different things, whether all our experience is only an illusion of our senses. Cartesius replied to this: "No; the belief in a perfect, true being cannot admit of such a delusion." By substituting the concept of truth for the concept of God, we are certain that the world of experience is not a ghost, but the most actual reality.

Although the great Kant called the cosmic truth a phenomenon, because he could not divest his mind of transcendental faith, of the faith in a transcendental truth, still we know today that all distinctions which are ever made constitute but a nibbling at the universal unit. As necessarily as all variety in baking produces bakery wares, just as necessarily heaven and earth, and everything connected with them, are parts of the indivisible truth which is also called nature, cosmos, universe, God, and experience. Language gives to its darling truth many different pet names, just as a happy mother calls her heart's treasure by a thousand endearing terms.

Feuerbach reasons in this fashion: "If God is not a personal being different from nature and man, then he is an entirely superfluous being.... The use of the word God which is always combined with the conception of a separate being, is a disturbing and confusing abuse. Why do you want to be a theist, if you are a naturalist, or a naturalist if you are a theist? Away with this contradiction! Where God is confounded with nature, or nature with God, there is neither God nor nature, but a mystical amphibious hermaphrodite."

Feuerbach is right. The name of God is much abused. But truth is also blasphemed by negation and frivolousness. The sober understanding that God, truth, nature, are various names for the same thing permits us to play with them without despairing of the matter. Indeed, this play of words serves to make the subject clear.

But logic demands that we recognize truth as the absolute, as the power, the force, and the glory, which comprises all logical and illogical distinctions, together with the things to be distinguished, even the faculty of distinguishing itself.

Such an understanding of the absolute, such world wisdom, will not make you conceited, because it makes you conscious of the fact that your understanding has grasped celestial truth which at the same time is terrestrial, only in a very general way. You possess nothing but a definition of truth. And without denying that definitions are valuable and instructive, I, at the same time, point out that you know very little about astronomy when you know that it is the science of the stars. No matter, therefore, how clearly I may have defined truth, we require for its complete understanding all the details of science, and that is too much for me, for you, and for any individual human being.

Just as our vision never exhausts the visible, because the eye sees an object but does not fully penetrate it, just so can the intellect never fully understand and fathom the absolute all, the truth, or God. But we can understand and fathom individual truths, parts of the universal truth. What understanding grasps is not the truth itself, but yet it is true understanding.

TENTH LETTER

Dear Eugene:

My previous lectures instructed you as to the very trivial fact that the thought is a part of the world. In proceeding from the part to the whole, I passed logically from the mouth of the river to its source. The universe is the maternal womb of the intellect as of all things.

It occurs to me that you or some teacher of logic might accuse my letters of lack of logic. It may seem that these lectures fail to present the subject matter in a strictly systematized form. You will, please, excuse this in part with the fact that they appear in the form of letters. This form demands that the contents should be logically arranged and rounded off in each letter. It should furthermore serve as an excuse for any defect, that my subject is not a finished one, not perfectly elaborated by others before me. I am here not merely a lecturer, but also an explorer on a field which, though much investigated, yet is still rather obscure.

The conclusion of my last letter explained that the use of the term God for the universe has much to recommend it and much to disqualify it. But it is easily apparent that the universe with its absolute qualities is closely related to that infinite being of whom Jakob Boehme, the philosophical shoemaker, said: "He is neither the light nor the darkness, neither love nor anger, but the eternal One.... Hence all forces are merely one sole force."

That nothing exists outside of the universe, that everything is contained in the All, that the All, with all real and imagined beings, is everything, that it is neither sweet nor sour, neither great nor small, but just everything and all, this statement is as obvious as the often and long repeated statement of identity: A equals A.

The All is omnipotent, omnipresent, all-wise. This last term might be questioned, since the universe is not a dummy with a monster head and giant brain. For this very reason it was considered inappropriate to apply the name of God to the universe, because that creates the impression of a personal being. The All thinks only by means of human brains, and for this reason omniscience cannot be anything but common human knowledge. Of course, you, I, and every other man, are very limited in our knowledge. But still we may indulge in the hope that the things which we do not know are known by other men or will be discovered by future generations, so that the collective human mind will know everything that is knowable. We cannot see everything that is visible; there are animals that can see even better than we can. But since even the most intelligent animal is supposed to lack the highest degree of intelligence, reason and science, there is no one who knows anything except the human race. Mankind is omniscient. But since all our science is derived only from the world, mankind is only the formal bearer of intelligence, and it belongs to the fountain of all things, to eternal nature. Our wisdom is the wisdom of nature, is world wisdom. Although there may be inhabitants of the moon and of other stars who may know things which are unknown to us, still that is in the first place a mere speculation of little value, and in the second place universal omniscience or the omniscient universe would not in the least be affected thereby. It is a reasonable use of the language to regard human wisdom as the only and omniscient wisdom, just as all natural and wet water is called water without any further modification. I believe in the statement of Protagoras: "Man is the measure of all things." Whoever uses a different measure, uses a superhuman, transcendental measure.

Hence, when I call the cosmic essence of all existence omnipotent, you will not think of a senseless magic power which forges knives without handles and blades, nor will you read any transcendental meaning into my use of the term omniscience.

Omniscience belongs obviously under the head of logic, because the organ of science and wisdom is the object of the study of logic. And it must now be stated that the human mind does not only exceed the animal mind by far, but is also the non plus ultra of all minds. But it must be retained that this mind can only be whatever it is in connection with the divine universe which I may also be permitted to call worldly deity. This name is fitting because it is a means of understanding that in the first place no monster mind rules the world, and in the second place the natural universe is not a mere sum of all things, but truth and life.

Of course, the identification of the universe with the religious God is only a comparison, and comparisons are lame. Still we may compare the sun with an eternal lamp or the moon with a candle, or the German prime minister with a butler.

Logic shall teach you that everything which may be distinguished by the faculty of understanding is of the same kind, everything is of common clay, but the whole is sublimely elevated above all that is commonplace. Mere frivolous atheism, as created by the free-thinkers, is not sufficient. A bare denial of God always creates some other idol worship. The positive understanding of the divine world truth is an indispensable requirement for the radical extermination of all idol worship.

Logic must begin with the sublime, infinite, absolute. All logical, consistent or interconnected thinking must take its departure from it. The so-called scientific research after temporal causes, after the egg from which the chicken was hatched, after the hen from which the egg came, after the kindred organisms which developed the hen by natural selection and adaption according to Darwin, this is a very valuable research without which we can never understand the world process. But nevertheless, such research must not satisfy the thinking man. Logic demands from everybody that he or she should search for the highest, for the cause of all causes. Whoever feels the desire to bring logical order into his consciousness, must know that the finite and infinite, the relative and the absolute, the special truths and the one general truth, are contained in one another.

Logical thought as demanded by science means nothing but to be aware of the final cause, the absolute foundation of all thought. This foundation is the universe, an attribute of which is the external and internal human head. The thousand year old dispute between the materialists and the idealists turns on the question whether the spirit is material or the world spiritual. Our answer is plain and clear: They both belong together, they together make up the one thing, the thing of all things. Mind and matter are two attributes of the same substance. They may be compared the same as fish and flesh, the former being called very appropriately by some African tribes "water flesh." In this way, matter and mind are two kinds of meat of a different and yet of the same nature.

I remember reading in a satirical paper the question: "What is a gentleman? Answer: A gentleman is a loafer with money, and a loafer is a gentleman without money." Just as these two types of men are essentially alike and differ only in the small matter of money, so you should remember that there are no essential differences, that all differences are merely matters of attributes and qualities of the same absolute world substance. To distinguish correctly and logically, that is the point which logic is aiming to teach us. To make distinctions is the function which is also called perceiving, knowing, understanding, comprehending. When you consider that this function is innate in man, and that man together with his faculty of understanding is innate in nature, then you recognize all distinctions and the distinguished objects as attributes of the undistinguished One, of the absolute, compared to which all things are only relative things, in other words, attributes.

I am endeavoring to make clear to you that logical thinking requires the awakening of the consciousness of the one supreme general nature. And you must not think of this sum of all existence in the stupid way in which people used to think of the animal kingdom before Darwin, but regard the world as a living organic unit, from which the faculty of understanding has blossomed the same as all other things. In the logic of the narrow-minded, all animal species are widely separated, without any living interconnection, while Darwin has demonstrated the uniform process, the intermingling life in multiform creation. The illustration of this famous zoologist of the transition from one species to another may serve as an example of the logical transitions in the world process, in which all differences are but undulations. All our classifications must always remember the undivided basis on which they are resting.

We have shown that the intellect divides the universal nature, classifies and analyzes it, and we have learned of the universal nature that it not only furnishes to the intellect the material for its work, but also that the world comprises within its general process the intellectual process, that the intellectual movement is a specialization of the natural movement.

The world is not only the object, but also the subject of understanding, it understands, it dissects its own multiplicity by means of the human intellect. Our wisdom is world wisdom in a two-fold sense: The world is that which is being understood, classified, analyzed, and at the same time it is that which, by the help of our intellect, practices understanding, classification, etc. When I call the human mind the cosmic mind, the mind of the supreme being, I wish to have it understood that there is nothing mysterious about this, that I merely intend to show that thought or intelligence can only operate in the universal cosmic interconnection, that it is not an abnormal and transcendental thing, but a thing like all other things.