Part 34

It is no more inconceivable that the faculty of universal understanding should be innate in us than that circles come into this world round, two mountains have a valley between them, water is liquid and fire burns. All things have a certain composition in themselves, they are born with it. Does that require any explanation? The flowers which gradually grow on plants, the powers and wisdom that grow in men in the course of years, are no more easily explained than such innate faculties, and the latter are no more wonderful than those acquired later. The best explanation cannot deprive the wonders of nature of their natural marvelousness. It is a mistake to assume that the faculty of explanation which is located in the human brain, is a destroyer of the belief in natural marvels. Philosophy which makes this faculty of explanation and the nature of its explanations the object of its special study gives us a new and much better understanding of this old miracle maker. It destroys the belief in metaphysical miracles by showing that physical nature is so universal that it absolutely excludes every other form of existence than the natural one from this world of wonders.

I and many of my readers find in our brains the actual consciousness that this general nature of which the intellect is a part is an infinite nature. I call this consciousness innate, although it is acquired. The point that I wish to impress on the reader is that the difference generally made between innate and acquired qualities is not so extraordinary that the innate need not to be acquired and the acquired does not presuppose something innate. The one contradicts the other only in those brains who do not understand the positive outcome of philosophy. Such thinkers do not know how to make reasonable distinctions and exaggerate in consequence. They have not grasped the conciliation of all differences and contradictions in universal nature by which all contradictions are solved.

Philosophy has endeavored to understand the intellect. In demonstrating the positive outcome of philosophy, we must explain that philosophical understanding as well as any other does not rise out of the isolated faculty of understanding, but out of the universal nature. The womb of our knowledge and understanding must not be sought in the human brain, but in all nature which is not only called the universe, but is actually universal. In order to prove this latter assertion, I refer to the fact that this conception, this consciousness of the infinite in the developed intellect, is in a manner innate. If the reader wishes to object to my indiscriminately mixing the innate faculty with the acquired understanding, I beg him to consider that I am endeavoring to prove that any and all distinction made by the intellect refers in reality to the inseparable parts of the one undivided universe. From this it follows that the admired and mysterious intellect is not a miracle, or at least no greater marvel than any other part of the general marvel which is identical with the infinitely wonderful general nature.

Some people love to represent consciousness as something supernatural, to draw an unduly sharp line of separation between thinking and being, thought and reality. But philosophy, which occupies itself particularly with consciousness, has ascertained that such a sharp contrast is unwarranted, not in harmony with the reality, and not a faithful likeness of reality and truth.

In order to understand what philosophy has accomplished in the way of insight into the function of the discriminating intellect, we must never lose sight of the fact that there is only a moderate distinction of degree between purely imaginary things and socalled real things.

Neither the natural condition of our faculty of thought, nor the universality of general nature, permit of an exaggerated distinction between the reality of creations of imagination and of really tangible things. At the same time the exigencies of science demand clear illustrations and so we must distinguish between these two kinds of reality. It is true that in common usage the mere thought and the purely imaginary things are set apart from nature and reality as something different and antagonistic. Yet the rules of language heretofore in vogue cannot prevent the spread of the additional knowledge that the universe, or general nature, is so unlimited that it can establish a conciliation between these limited antagonisms. The cat and the dog, for instance, are pronounced enemies, but nevertheless zoology recognizes them as being legitimate domestic companions.

Human consciousness is, in the first place, individual. Every human individual has its own. But the peculiarity of my consciousness, of yours, and that of others, is that of being not alone the consciousness of the individual in question, but also the general consciousness of the universe, at least that is its possibility and mission. Not every individual is conscious of the universality of general nature, otherwise there would be none of that distracting dualism. Nor would there be any necessity for volumes and volumes of philosophy to teach us that a limit, a thing, or a world outside of the universal, is a nonsensical idea, an idea which is contrary to sense and reason. We may well say, for this reason, that our consciousness, our intellect, is only in a manner of speaking our own, while it is in fact a consciousness, an intellect belonging to universal nature.

It can no more be denied that our consciousness is an attribute of the infinite universe than it can be denied that the sun, the moon and the stars are. Since this intellectual faculty belongs to the infinite and is its child, we must not wonder that this universal faculty of thought is born with the capability of grasping the conception of a universe. And whoever does no longer wonder at this, must find it explicable, must realize that the fact of universal consciousness is thus explained.

To explain the mysterious may be regarded as the whole function of understanding, of intellect. If we succeed in divesting of its mysteries the fact that the concept of an infinite universe is found in the limited human mind, we have then explained this fact itself and substantiated our contention that the things around us are explained by their accurate reflection in our brain.

We summarize the nature of consciousness, its actions, life, and aims in these words: It is the science of infinite being; it seeks to obtain an accurate conception of this being and to explain its marvelousness. But we have by no means exhausted its life and aims in these words. With all the power of language, we can convey but a vague idea of the immensity of the object under discussion. Whoever desires to know more about it, must work for his own progress by observation and study. This much may be safely said: This question is no more mysterious than any other part of the general mystery.

FOOTNOTE:

E. g., given with his consciousness.--EDITOR.

VII

THE RELATIONSHIP OR IDENTITY OF SPIRIT AND NATURE

"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.