The conceptions, partly conscious and partly unconscious, which led to this slogan, are approximately as follows. Natural science has shaken the confidence in spontaneous thinking that means to penetrate by itself to the highest questions of
existence, but we cannot be satisfied with the mere results of natural science for they do not lead beyond the external view of things. There must be grounds of existence concealed behind this external aspect. Even natural science itself has shown that the world of colors, tones, etc., surrounding us is not a reality outside in the objective world but that it is produced through the function of our senses and our brain (compare above, to Part II Chapter III). For this reason, it is necessary to ask these questions: In what respect do the results of natural science point beyond their own limits toward the higher problems: What is the nature of our knowledge? Can this knowledge lead to a solution of that higher task? Kant has asked such questions with great emphasis. In order to find one"s own position, one wanted to study how he had approached them. One wanted to think over with the greatest possible precision Kant"s line of thought, attempting to avoid his errors and to find in the continuation of his ideas a way that led out of the general perplexity.
A number of thinkers endeavored to arrive at a tenable goal, starting from Kantian points of departure. The most important among them were Hermann Cohen (1842 1916), Otto Liebmann (1840 1912), Wilhelm Windelband (1848 1916), Johannes Volkelt (1842 1930) and Benno Erdmann (1851 1921). Much perspicacity can be found in the writings of these men. A great deal of work was done inquiring into the nature and extent of the human faculty of knowledge.
Johannes Volkelt who, insofar as he was active as an epistomologist, lives entirely within this current, also contributed a thorough work on Kant"s Theory of Knowledge (1879) in which all problems characterizing this trend of thought are discussed. In 1884 he gave the inaugural address for his professorship in Basel in which he made the statement that all thinking that goes beyond the results of the special empirical sciences of facts must have "the restless character of
seeking and searching, of cautious trial, defensive reserve and deliberate admission." It should be an "advance in which one must partly withdraw again, a yielding in which one nevertheless holds on to a certain degree" (On the Possibility of Metaphysics, Hamburg & Leipzig, 1884).
This new attempt to start from Kant appears in a special light in Otto Liebmann. His writings, Contributions Toward the a.n.a.lysis of Reality (1876), Thoughts and Facts (1882), Climax of Theories (1884), are veritable models of philosophical criticism. Here a caustic mind ingeniously discovers contradictions in the worlds of thought, reveals as half truths what appear as safe judgments, and shows what unsatisfactory elements the individual sciences contain when their results appear before the highest tribunals of thought.
Liebmann enumerates the contradictions of Darwinism. He reveals its insufficiently founded a.s.sumptions and its defective thought connections, maintaining that something is needed to fill in the gaps to support the a.s.sumptions. On one occasion he ends an exposition he gives of the nature of living organisms with the words: Plant seeds do not lose their ability to germinate after lying dry for ages, and grains of wheat found in Egyptian mummy cases, after having been hermetically sealed and buried for thousands of years, when sowed in a moist soil, thrive excellently. Wheel animalcules (rotatoria) and other infusoria that have been gathered completely dried up from a gutter pipe are newly revived by rain water. Even frogs and fishes that have turned into ice cakes in freezing water revive when carefully thawed out. All these facts are capable of completely opposite interpretations. . . . In short, every form of categorical denial in this matter would be crude dogmatism.
Therefore, we discontinue our argument.
This phrase, "We discontinue our argument," really expresses, even if it does not do so literally, every final thought of Liebmann"s reflection. It is, indeed, the final conclusion of many recent followers and elaborators of Kantianism. They do not succeed in doing more than emphasize that they receive the things into their consciousness. Therefore, everything that they see, hear, etc., is not outside in the world but within themselves and they are incapable of deciding anything concerning the outside. A table stands before me, argues the Neo-Kantian, but, really, this only seems to be so. Only a person who is naively concerned with problems of philosophy can say, "Outside myself is a table." A person who has overcome that naivete says, "An unknown something produces an impression within my eye; this eye and my brain make out of the impression the sensation brown. As I have this sensation brown not merely at an isolated point but can let my eye run over a plane surface and four columnar forms, so the brownness takes the shape of an object that is this table. When I touch this table, it offers resistance. It makes an impression on my sense of touch, which I express by attributing hardness to the picture that has been produced by the eye. At the suggestion of some "thing in itself" that I do not know, I have therefore created this table out of myself.
The table is my mental content. It is only in my consciousness.
Volkelt presents this view at the beginning of his book on Kant"s Theory of Knowledge: The first fundamental condition that the philosopher must clearly realize is the insight that, to begin with, our knowledge extends to nothing more than our conceptions. Our conceptions are the only things that we immediately and directly experience, and for just that reason that we experience them immediately, even the most radical doubt cannot deprive us of the knowledge of them. But the knowledge that goes beyond my faculty of conception is not
protected from doubt. (I use this expression here always in its most comprehensive sense so that all physical events are included in the term.) Therefore, all knowledge that goes beyond the conceptions must be marked as doubtful at the outset of the philosophical reflection.
Otto Liebmann also uses this thought to defend the statement: Man can no more know that the things he conceives are not, than he can know positively that they are. "For the very reason that no conceiving subject can escape the sphere of its subjective imagination, because it can never grasp and observe what may exist or not exist outside its subjectivity, leaping thereby over its own consciousness and emanc.i.p.ating itself from itself. For this reason it would also be absurd to maintain that the object does not exist outside the subjective conception" (O. Liebmann, Contributions toward the a.n.a.lysis of Reality).
Both Volkelt and Liebmann nevertheless endeavor to prove that man finds something in the world of his conceptions that is not merely observed or perceived, but that is added to the perception by thought - something that at least points toward the essence of things. Volkelt is of the opinion that there is a fact within the conceptual life that points to something that lies outside the life of conception. This fact consists in the logical necessity with which certain conceptions suggest themselves to man. In his book, The Sources of Human Certainty that appeared in 1906, we read Volkelt"s view: If one seeks the basis of the certainty of our knowledge, one finds two points of origin, two sources of certainty. Even if an intimate cooperation of both sources of certainty is necessary if real knowledge is to result, it is nevertheless impossible to reduce one source to the other. The one source of certainty is the self-a.s.surance of consciousness, the awareness of the facts of my consciousness. That I am consciousness is just as true
as the fact that my consciousness testifies to the existence of certain processes and states, certain contents and forms.
Without this source of certainty there would be no cognitive process; it supplies the material through the elaboration of which all knowledge is produced. The other source of certainty is the necessity of thought, the certainty of logical compulsion, the objective consciousness of necessity. With it something absolutely new is given that cannot possibly be derived from the certainty of our self-awareness in consciousness.
Concerning this second source of certainty, Volkelt expresses himself in his book mentioned above as follows: The immediate experience allows us to become aware of the fact that certain combinations of concepts show a peculiar form of compulsion to be inherent in them that is essentially different from all other kinds of compulsion that are a.s.sociated with conceptions. This compulsion forces us to think certain concepts as belonging together, not merely in the conscious process in which we are aware of them but also in a corresponding objective interconnection, independent of the conscious conceptions. Furthermore, this compulsion does not force us in a manner to suggest that we should forfeit our moral satisfaction or our inner happiness, our salvation and so forth, but it contains the suggestion that objective reality would have to annihilate itself in itself, would have to lose its possibility of existence if the opposite of what it prescribes as a necessity were to take place. What distinguishes this compulsion then is that the very thought of the opposite of that necessity forcing itself upon us, would be experienced as a call that reality should revolt against the conditions of its existence. This peculiar, immediately experienced compulsion is generally called logical compulsion or thought necessity.
The logically necessary reveals itself directly as an announcement of the object itself. It is the peculiarly meaningful significance, the reason-guided
illumination that is contained in everything logical, that bears witness with immediate evidence of the objective, real validity of the logical connections of concepts. (Kant"s Theory of Knowledge, pp. 208 ff.) Otto Liebmann confesses toward the end of his essay, The Climax of Theories, that in his opinion the whole thought structure of human knowledge, from the ground floor of the science of observation up to the most airy regions of the highest hypotheses of world conception, is permeated by thoughts that point beyond perception. "Fragments of percepts must first be supplemented by an extraordinary amount of non-observed elements linked together and connected in a definite order according to certain operations of the mind." But how can one deny that human thinking has the ability to know something through its own activity as long as it is necessary to resort to this activity even if one merely wants to obtain order among the facts of the observed precepts? Neo-Kantianism is in a curious position. It would like to confine itself within the boundaries of consciousness and within the life of conception, but it is forced to confess that it is impossible to take a step "within" these boundaries that does not lead in all directions beyond those limits. Otto Liebmann ends the second booklet of his Thought and Facts as follows: If, on the one hand, seen from the viewpoint of natural science, man were nothing but animated dust, then, on the other, all nature, as it appears in s.p.a.ce and time, when seen from the only viewpoint that is immediately accessible and given to us, is an anthropocentric phenomenon.
There are many who hold the view that the world of observation is merely human conception in spite of the fact that it must extinguish itself if it is correctly understood. It is repeated again and again in the course of the last decades in
many variations. Ernst Laas (1837 1885) forcefully defended the point of view that only positive facts of perception should be wrought into knowledge. Alois Riehl (1849 1924), proceeding from the same fundamental view, declares that there could be no general world conception at all, and that everything that goes beyond the various special sciences should only be a critique of knowledge. Knowledge is obtained only in the special sciences; philosophy has the task of showing how this knowledge comes about and of taking care that thought should not add any element that can not be justified by the facts. Richard Wahle in his book, The Whole of Philosophy and Its End (1894), eliminates with utmost scrutiny everything that the mind has added to the "occurrences" of the world until finally the mind stands in the ocean of occurrences that stream by, seeing itself in this ocean as one such occurrence, nowhere finding a point capable of providing a meaningful enlightenment concerning them. This mind would have to exert its own energy to produce order in the occurrences. But then it would be the mind itself that had introduced that order into nature. If the mind makes a statement about the essence of the occurrences, it derives this not from the things but from itself. This it could only do if it admitted that in its own activity something essential could go on. The a.s.sumption would have to be made that the mind"s judgment could have significance also for things. But in its own judgment this confidence is something that, according to Wahle"s world conception, the mind is not ent.i.tled to have. It must stand idly by and watch what flows past, around and inside itself, and it would only contribute to its own deception if it were to put any credence in a conception that it formed itself about the occurrences.
What final answer could a mind find that looked into the world structure, tossing about within itself problems concerning the nature and purpose of events? As it seemed to
occupy a firm stand in opposition to the surrounding world, it has had to experience that it dissolved into a flight of occurrences and flowed together with other occurrences. The mind did no longer "know" the world. It had to admit: I am not certain that there are "knowers," but there are simply occurrences. They do, to be sure, make their appearance in a manner that the concept of knowledge could emerge prematurely and without justification. . . . and "concepts"
emerged and flitted by to bring light into the occurrences, but they were will-o"-the-wisps, specters of wishful thinking, miserable postulates whose evidence meant nothing, empty forms of knowledge. Unknown factors must rule the change.
Darkness was spread over nature, occurrences are the veil of the true . . . (The Whole of Philosophy and Its End ).
Wahle closes his book, which is to represent the "gifts" of philosophy to the individual sciences, theology, physiology, esthetics and civic education, with these words, "May the age begin when people will say: once was philosophy."
In the above mentioned book by Wahle, as well as in his other books, Historical Survey of the Development of Philosophy (1895) and On the Mechanism of the Mental Life (1906), we have one of the most significant symptoms of the evolution of world conception in the nineteenth century. The lack of confidence with respect to knowledge begins with Kant and leads, finally, as it appears in Wahle, to a complete disbelief in any philosophical world conception.
Chapter V.
World Conceptions of Scientific Factuality
An attempt to derive a general view of world and life from the basis of strict science was undertaken in the course of the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte (1798 1857). This enterprise, which was presented as a comprehensive world picture in his Cours de Philosophic Positive (6 vols., 1830 42), was sharply antagonistic to the idealistic views of Fichte, Sch.e.l.ling and Hegel of the first half of the nineteenth century.
It also opposed, although not to the same degree, all those thought structures that were derived from the ideas of evolution along the lines of Lamarck and Darwin. What occupied the central position of all world conception in Hegel, the contemplation and comprehension of man"s own spirit, was completely rejected by Comte. He argues: If the human spirit wanted to contemplate itself, it would actually have to divide into two personalities; it would have to slip outside itself and place itself opposite its own being. Even a psychology that does not confine itself to the mere physiological view but intends to preserve the processes of the mind by themselves is not recognized by Comte. Anything that is to become an object of knowledge must belong to the objective interconnections of facts, must be presented objectively as the laws of the mathematical sciences. From this position there follows Comte"s objection to the attempts of Spencer and other thinkers whose world pictures followed the approach of scientific thinking adapted by Lamarck and Darwin. So far as Comte is concerned, the human species is given as a fixed and unchangeable fact; he refuses to pay any attention to Lamarck"s theory. Simple, transparent natural laws as physics uses them for its phenomena are ideals of
knowledge for him. As long as science does not work with such simple laws, it is unsatisfactory as knowledge for Comte.
He has a mathematical bent of mind. If it cannot be treated clearly and simply like a mathematical problem, he considers it to be not ready for science. Comte has no feeling for the fact that one needs ideas that become increasingly more life- saturated as one rises from the purely mechanical and physical processes to the higher formations of nature and to man. His world conception owed a certain lifeless and rigid quality to this fact. The whole world appears to him like the mechanics of a machine. What escapes Comte everywhere is the element of life; he expels life and spirit from things and explains merely what is mechanical and machinelike. The concrete historical life of man appears in his presentation like the conceptual picture that the astronomer draws of the motions of the heavenly bodies. Comte constructed a scale of the sciences. Mathematics represents the lowest stage; it is followed by physics and chemistry and these again by the science of organisms; the last and concluding science in this sequence is sociology, the knowledge of human society. Comte strives to make all these sciences as simple as mathematics.
The phenomena with which the individual sciences deal are supposed to be different in every case but the laws are considered to be fundamentally always the same.
The reverberations of the thought of Holbach, Condillac and others are still distinctly perceptible in the lectures on the relation between soul and body (Les Rapports du Physique et du Moral de L"homme) that Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757 1808) gave in 1797 and 1798 in the medical school founded by the National Convention in Paris. Nevertheless, these lectures can be called the beginning of the development of the world conception of the nineteenth century in France.
They express a distinct awareness of the fact that Condillac"s
mode of conception for the phenomena of the soul life had been too closely modeled after the conception of the mechanical processes of inorganic nature and their operation.
Cabanis investigates the influence of age, s.e.x, way of life and temperament on man"s intellectual and emotional disposition.
He develops the conception that the physical and the spiritual are not two separated ent.i.ties that have nothing in common but that they const.i.tute an inseparable whole. What distinguishes him from his predecessors is not his fundamental view but the way in which he elaborates it. His predecessors simply carry into the spiritual the views they have derived from the inorganic world. Cabanis is convinced that if we start by observing the world of the spiritual as open- mindedly as we observe the inorganic, it will reveal its relation to the rest of the natural phenomena.
Destutt de Tracy (1754 1836) proceeded in a similar way. He also wanted first to observe the processes of the spirit without bias as they appear when we approach them without philosophical or scientific prejudice. According to this thinker, one is in error if one conceives the soul as a mechanism as Condillac and his followers had done. This mechanistic character cannot be upheld any longer if one honestly observes oneself. We do not find in us an automaton, a being that is directed from without. We always find within us spontaneous activity and an inner self. We should actually not know anything of the effects of the external world if we did not experience a disturbance in our inner life caused by a collision with the external world. We experience our own being. We develop our activity out of ourselves, but as we do this we meet with opposition. We realize not only our own existence but also an external world that resists us.
Although they started from de Tracy, two thinkers - Maine de Biran (1766 1824) and Andre-Marie Ampere (1775 1826) were led by the self-observation of the soul in entirely
different directions. Biran is a subtle observer of the human spirit. What in Rousseau seems to emerge as a chaotic mode of thought motivated by an arbitrary mood, we find in Biran in the form of clear and concrete thinking. Two factors of man"s inner life are made the objects of observation by Biran who is a profoundly thoughtful psychologist: What man is through the nature of his being, his temperament, and what he makes out of himself through active work, his character. He follows the ramifications and changes of the inner life, and he finds the source of knowledge in man"s inner life. The forces of which we learn through introspection are intimately known in our life, and we learn of an external world only insofar as it presents itself as more or less similar and akin to our inner world. What should we know of forces outside in nature if we did not experience within our self-active soul a similar force and consequently could compare this with what corresponds to it in the external world? For this reason, Biran is untiring in his search for the processes in man"s soul. He pays special attention to the involuntary and the unconscious element in the inner life processes that exist long before the light of consciousness emerges in the soul. Biran"s search for wisdom within the soul led him to a peculiar form of mysticism in later years. In the process of deriving the profoundest wisdom from the soul, we come closest to the foundation of existence when we dig down into our own being. The experience of the deepest soul processes then is an immersion in the wellspring of existence, into the G.o.d within us.
The attraction of Biran"s wisdom lies in the intimate way in which he presents it. He could have found no more appropriate form of presentation than that of a journal intime, a form of diary. The writings of Biran that allow the deepest insight into his thought world were published after his death by E. Naville (compare Naville"s book, Maine de Biran.
Sa vie et ses pensees, 1857, and his edition, Oeuvres inedites
de Maine de Biran). As old men, Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy belonged to a small circle of philosophers; Biran was a younger member among them. Ampere was among those who were acquainted with Biran"s views. As a natural scientist, he became prominent through the extension of Oersted"s observation concerning the relation of electricity to magnetism (compare above in Part II Chapter I). Biran"s mode of conception is more intimate, that of Ampere more scientific-methodical. Ampere follows with interest the interrelationship of sensations and conceptions in the soul, and also the process through which the spirit arrives at a science of the world phenomena with the aid of thinking.
What is significant in this current of world conception, which chronologically represents the continuation of the teachings of Condillac, is the circ.u.mstance that the life of the soul itself is decidedly emphasized, that the self-activity of the inner personality of the human being is brought into the foreground of the investigation, and that all these thinkers are striving nevertheless for knowledge in the strict sense of natural science. Initially, they investigate the spirit with the methods of natural science, but they do not want to treat its phenomena as h.o.m.ogeneous with the other processes of nature. From these more materialistic beginnings there emerges finally a tendency toward a world conception that leans distinctly toward the spirit.
Victor Cousin (1792 1867) traveled through Germany several times and thus became personally acquainted with the leading spirits of the idealistic period. The deepest impression was made on him by Hegel and Goethe. He brought their idealism to France. As a professor at the ecole normale (1814), and later at the Sorbonne, he was able to do a great deal for this idealism through his powerful and fascinating eloquence that always produced a deep impression. Cousin received from the idealistic life of the spirit the conviction that it is not
through the observation of the external world but through that of the human spirit that a satisfactory viewpoint for a world conception can be obtained. He based what he wanted to say on the self observation of the soul. He adopted the view of Hegel that spirit, idea and thought do not merely rule in man"s inner life but also outside in nature and in the progress of the historical life, and that reason is contained in reality. Cousin taught that the character of a people of an age was not merely influenced by random happenings, arbitrary decisions of human individuals, but that a real idea is manifested in them and that a great man appears in the world merely as a messenger of a great idea, in order to realize it in the course of history. This produced a profound impression on Cousin"s French audience, which in its most recent history had had to comprehend world historical upheavals without precedent, when they heard such a splendid speaker expound the role that reason played in the historical evolution in accordance with some great and fundamental ideas.
Comte, with energy and resolution, found his place in the development of French philosophy with his principle: only in the method of science, which proceeds from strict mathematical and directly observed truths as in physics and chemistry can the point of departure for a world conception be found. The only approach he considered mature was the one that fought its way through to this view. To arrive at this stage, humanity had to go through two phases of immaturity - one in which it believed in G.o.ds, and subsequently, one in which it surrendered to abstract ideas. Comte sees the evolution of mankind in the progression from theological thinking to idealistic thinking, and from there to the scientific world conception. In the first stage, man"s thinking projected anthropomorphic G.o.ds into the processes of nature, which produce these processes in the same arbitrary manner in which man proceeds in his actions. Later, he replaces the G.o.ds
with abstract ideas as, for instance, life force, general world reason, world purpose, and so forth. But this phase of development must give way to a higher one in which it must be understood that an explanation of the phenomena of the world can be found only in the method of observation and a strictly mathematical and logical treatment of the facts. For the purpose of a world conception, thinking must merely combine what physics, chemistry and the science of living organisms obtain through their investigation. Thinking must not add anything to the results of the individual sciences as theology had done with its divine beings and the idealistic philosophy with its abstract thoughts. Also, the conceptions concerning the course of the evolution of mankind, the social life of men in the state, in society, etc., will become clear only when the attempt is made to find in them laws like those found in the exact natural sciences. The causes that bring families, a.s.sociations, legal views and state inst.i.tutions into existence must be investigated in the same way as the causes that make bodies fall to the ground and that allow the digestive organs to operate. The science of human social life, of human development, sociology, is therefore what Comte is especially concerned with, and he tries to give it the exactness that the other sciences have gradually acquired.
In this respect he has a predecessor in Claude-Henri de Saint- Simon (1760 1825). Saint-Simon had presented the view that man would only learn to guide his own fate completely when he conceived of his own life in the state, in society and in the course of history in a strictly scientific sense, and when he arranged it like a process following a natural law. For awhile, Comte was on intimate terms with Saint-Simon. He parted ways with him when it seemed to him that Saint- Simon"s views turned into all sorts of groundless dreams and utopias. Comte continued to work with a rare zeal in his original direction. His Cours de Philosophic Positive is an
attempt to elaborate, in a style of spirit-alienation, the scientific accomplishments of his time into a world conception by presenting them merely in a systematized survey, and by developing sociology in the same way without the aid of theological and idealistic thoughts. Comte saw no other task for the philosopher than that of such a mere systematized survey. The philosopher would add nothing of his own to the picture that the sciences have presented as the connection of facts. Comte expressed thereby, in the most pointed manner, his view that the sciences alone, with their methods of observing reality, have a voice in the formulation of a world conception.
Within German spirit-life Eugen Duhring (1833 1921) appeared as a forceful champion of Comte"s thought. This was expressed in 1865 in his Natural Dialectic. As a further exposition, he expounded his views in his book, Course of Philosophy as a Strictly Scientific World Conception and Art of Life (1875), and in numerous other writings in the fields of mathematics, natural science, philosophy, history of science and social economy. All of Duhring"s work proceeds, in the strictest sense of the word, from a mathematical and mechanistic mode of thought. Duhring is outstanding in his endeavor to a.n.a.lyze his observations of nature in accordance with mathematical law, but where this kind of thinking is insufficient, he loses all possibility of finding his way through life. It is from this characteristic of his spirit that the arbitrariness and bias is to be explained with which Duhring judges so many things. Where it is necessary to judge the conflicts of life in accordance with higher ideas, he has, therefore, no other criterion than his sympathies and antipathies that have been aroused in him through accidental personal circ.u.mstances. This man, with his mathematically objective mind, becomes completely arbitrary when he
undertakes to evaluate human accomplishments of the historical past or of the present. His rather unimaginative mathematical mode of conception led him to denounce a personality like Goethe as the most unscientific mind of modern times, whose entire significance consisted, in Duhring"s opinion, in a few poetical achievements. It is impossible to surpa.s.s Duhring in his under-valuation of everything that lies beyond a drab reality as he does in his book, The Highlights of Modern Literature. In spite of this one-sidedness, Duhring is one of the most stimulating figures in the development of modern world conception. No one who has penetrated his thought-saturated books can help but confess that he has been profoundly affected by them.
Duhring uses rude language for all world conceptions that do not proceed from strictly scientific basic views. All such unscientific modes of thought "found themselves in the state of childish immaturity or feverish fits, or in the decadence of senility, no matter whether they infest entire epochs and parts of humanity under these circ.u.mstances or just occasionally individual elements or degenerated layers of society, but they always belong to the category of the immature, the pathological or that of over-ripeness that is already decomposed by putrefaction," (Course of Philosophy). What Kant, Fichte, Sch.e.l.ling and Hegel achieved, Duhring condemns as the outflow of a professorial wisdom of mountebanks; idealism as a world conception is for him a theory of insanity. He means to create a philosophy of reality that is alone adequate to nature because it "does away with all artificial and unnatural fictions, and for the first time makes the concept of reality the measure of all ideal conceptions"; reality is conceived in this philosophy "in a manner that excludes all tendencies toward a dreamlike and subjectivistically limited world conception." (Course of Philosophy)
One should think like a real expert in mechanics, a real physicist who confines himself to the results of sense perception, of the logical combinations of the intellect and the operations of calculations. Anything that goes beyond this is idle playing with empty concepts. This is Duhring"s verdict.
Duhring means to raise this form of thinking, however, to its justified position. Whoever depends exclusively on that form of thinking can be sure that it supplies him with insight concerning reality. All brooding over the question of whether or not we actually can penetrate into the mysteries of the world process, all investigations, which, like Kant"s, want to limit the faculty of knowledge, are caused by logical distortion.
One should not yield to the temptation of a self-sacrificing self-denial of the mind that does not dare to make a positive statement about the world. What we can know is a real and untarnished presentation of the real.
"The totality of things has a systematic order and an inner logically consistent structure. Nature and history have a const.i.tution and a development that correspond to a large extent to the general logical relations of all concepts. The general qualities and relations of the concepts of thought with which logic deals must also be valid for the special case, that its object is the totality of being, together with its chief forms.
Since the most general thinking decides to a large extent what can be and how it can be, the highest principles and the main forms of logic must set the standard for all reality and its forms. (Course of Philosophy) Reality has produced for itself an organ in human thinking in which it can reproduce itself mentally in the form of thought in an ideal picture. Nature is everywhere ruled by an all- penetrating law that carries its own justification within itself and cannot be criticized. How could there be any meaning in an attempt to criticize the relevance of thinking, the organ of nature? It is mere foolishness to suppose that nature would
create an organ through which it would reflect itself only imperfectly or incompletely. Therefore, order and law in this world must correspond to the logical order and law in human thinking. "The ideal system of our thought is the picture of the real system of objective reality; the completed knowledge has, in the form of thoughts, the same structure that the things possess in the form of real existence."
In spite of this general agreement between thinking and reality, there exists for the former the possibility to go beyond the latter. In the element of the idea, thinking continues the operations that reality has suggested to it. In reality all bodies are divisible, but only up to a certain limit. Thinking does not stop at this limit but continues to divide in the realm of the idea. Thought sweeps beyond reality; for thought, the body is divisible into infinity. Accordingly, to thought it consists of infinitely small parts. In reality, this body consists only of a definite, finite number of small, but not infinitely small parts.
In this way all concepts of infinity that transcend reality come into existence. From every event we proceed to another event that is its cause; from this cause we go again to the cause of that cause and so forth. As soon as our thinking abandons the firm ground of reality, it sweeps on into a vague infinity. It imagines that for every cause a cause has to be sought in turn so that the world is without a beginning in time. In allotting matter to s.p.a.ce, thinking proceeds in a similar way. In transversing the sky it always finds beyond the most distant stars still other stars; it goes beyond this real fact and imagines s.p.a.ce as infinite and filled with an infinite number of heavenly bodies. According to Duhring, one ought to realize that all such conceptions of infinity have nothing to do with reality. They only occur through the fact that thinking, with the methods that are perfectly appropriate within the realm of reality, rises above this realm and thereby gets lost in the indefinite.
If in our thinking, however, we remain aware of this separation from reality, we need no longer refrain from applying our concepts borrowed from human action, to nature. Duhring, as he proceeds from such presuppositions, does not even hesitate to attribute to nature in its production an imagination any more than he does to man in his creation.
"Imagination extends . . . into nature itself; it has its roots, as does all thinking in general, in the processes that precede the developed consciousness but do not produce any elements of subjective feelings" (Course of Philosophy). The thought upheld by Comte, that all world conception should be confined to a mere rearrangement of the purely factual, dominates Duhring so completely that he projects the faculty of imagination into the external world because he believes that he would simply have to reject it if it occurred merely in the human mind. Proceeding from these conceptions he arrives at other projections of such concepts as are derived from human activities. He thinks, for instance, that not only man could, in his actions, undertake fruitless attempts, which he then gives up because they do not lead to the intended aim, but that such attempts could also be observed in nature.
The character of the tentative in the formations of nature is not at all alien to reality itself, and one cannot see why one should allow only one half of the parallelism between nature outside man and nature in man, just for the sake of pleasing a shallow philosophy. If subjective error of thinking and imagining springs from the relative separation and independence of this sphere, why should not a practical error or blunder of the objective and non-thinking nature be possibly the result of a relative separation and mutual alienation of its various parts and driving forces? A true philosophy that is not intimidated by common prejudices will finally recognize the perfect parallelism and the all-pervading unity of the const.i.tution in both directions. (Course of
Philosophy) Duhring is not in the least shy when it is a question of applying the concepts to reality that thinking produces in itself. But since he has, because of his disposition, only a sense for mathematical conceptions, the picture he sketches of the world has a mathematical-schematic character. He rejects the mode of thought that was developed by Darwin and Haeckel and does not understand what motivates them to search for a reason to explain why one being develops from another. The mathematician places the forms of a triangle, square, circle and ellipse side by side; why should one not be satisfied with a similar schematic coordination in nature as well? Duhring does not aim at the genesis of nature but at the fixed formations that nature produces through the combinations of its energies, just as the mathematician studies the definite, strictly delineated forms of s.p.a.ce. He finds nothing inappropriate in attributing to nature a purposeful striving toward such definite formations. Duhring does not interpret this purposeful tendency of nature as the conscious activity that develops in man, but he supposes it to be just as distinctly manifested in the operation of nature as every other natural manifestation. In this respect, Duhring"s view is, therefore, the opposite pole of the one upheld by Friedrich Albert Lange.
Lange declares the higher concepts, especially all those in which imagination has a share, to be justifiable poetic fiction; Duhring rejects all poetic imagination in concepts, but he attributes actual reality to certain higher ideas that are indispensable to him. Thus, it seems quite consistent for Lange to separate the foundation of the moral life entirely from all ideas that are rooted in reality (compare above, to Part II Chapter III). It is also consistent if Duhring wants to extend the ideas that he sees as valid in the realm of morality to nature as well. He is completely convinced that what happens in man and through man belongs to the natural
events as much as do the inanimate processes. What in human life is right cannot be wrong in nature.
Such considerations contributed to making Duhring an energetic opponent to Darwin"s doctrine of the struggle for existence. f the fight of all against all were the condition of perfection in nature, it would have to be the same with man"s life: Such a conception that claims to be scientific is the most immoral thing thinkable. The character of nature is in this way conceived in an anti-moral sense. It is not merely indifferent to the better morality of man but it is actually in agreement and in alliance with the bad moral principles that are followed by scoundrels. (Course of Philosophy) According to Duhring"s life-conception, what man feels as moral impulses must have its origin in nature. It is possible to observe in nature a tendency toward morality. As nature produces various forces that purposefully combine into stable formations, so it also plants into man instincts of sympathy.
By them he allows himself to be determined in his social life with his fellow men. In man, the activity of nature is continued on an elevated level. Duhring attributes the faculty to produce sensations automatically out of themselves to the inanimate mechanical forces.
The mechanical causality of the forces of nature becomes, so to peak, subjectified in the fundamental sensation. The fact of this elementary process of subjectification is evidently incapable of any further explanation, for somewhere and under some conditions the unconscious mechanism of the world must develop a feeling of itself. (Course of Philosophy) But when the world arrives at this stage, it is not that a new law begins, a realm of the spirit, but merely a continuation occurs of what had already been there in the unconscious