The Positive Outcome of Philosophy Part 8

Dear Eugene:

Having written the first letter by way of introduction, I now am ready for a gradual approach to my subject.

Logic aims to instruct the human mind as to its own nature and processes; it will lay bare the interior working of our mind for our guidance. The object of the study of logic is thought, its nature, and its proper cla.s.sification.

The human brain performs the function of thinking as involuntarily as the chest the function of breathing. However, we can, by our will, stop breathing for a while, and accelerate or r.e.t.a.r.d the breathing movements.

In the same way, the will can control the thoughts. We may choose any object as the subject matter of our thought, and yet we may quickly convince ourselves that the power of our will and the freedom of the mind are not any greater than the freedom of the chest in breathing.

While logic undertakes to a.s.sign the proper position to our brain, still it has to remember that nature has already a.s.signed that position.

It is with logic as it is with other sciences. They draw wisdom from the mysterious source of plain experience. Agriculture, e. g., aims to teach the farmer how to cultivate the soil; but fields were tilled long before any agricultural college had begun its lectures. In the same way human beings think without ever having heard of logic. But by practice they improve their innate faculty of thought, they make progress, they gradually learn to make better use of it. Finally, just as the farmer arrives at the science of agriculture, so the thinker arrives at logic, acquires a clear consciousness of his faculty of thought and a professional dexterity in applying it.

I have two purposes in mind in saying this. Firstly, you must not expect too much from this science, for you cannot set contrary brains to rights by any logic. Secondly, you must not think too little of it, by regarding the matter as mere scholastic word-mongery and useless hairsplitting. In daily life, as well as in all sciences, we never operate without the help of thought, but only with it, hence an understanding of the nature of the processes of thought is of eminent value.

Logic has its history like all sciences. Aristotle, whom Marx calls the "Grecian giant of thought," is universally recognized as its founder.

After the cla.s.sic culture of antiquity had been buried by barbarism, the name of Bacon of Verulam rose with the beginning of modern times as a philosophical light of the first order. His most famous work is ent.i.tled "Novum Organon." By the new organ he meant a new method of research which should be founded on experience, instead of the subtleties of the purely introspective method hitherto in vogue. After him, Descartes, or Cartesius, as he called himself in literature, wrote his still famous work, "About Methods." I furthermore recall Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Reason," Johann Gottlieb Fichte's "Theory of Science," and finally Hegel, of whom the biographer said that he was as famous in the scientific world as Napoleon in the political.

Hegel calls his chief work "Logic," and bases his whole system on the "dialectic method." You have only to look at the t.i.tles of these philosophical masterpieces in order to recognize that they all treat of the same subject which we are making our special study, viz., the light of understanding. The great philosophers of all times have searched for the true method, the method of truth, for the way in which understanding and reason arrive at science.

I merely wish to indicate that this subject has its famous history, but I do not care to enter more deeply into it. I will not speak of the oppression and persecution, which was inaugurated by religious fanaticism. I will not enumerate the various events that led to a greater and greater light from generation to generation. The attempt to trace this history would entangle us in many disputed questions and errors which would only increase the difficulties of this study for the beginner.

If a teacher of technology were to instruct you on steam engines and, to explain their first incomplete invention, trace their further development historically from improvement to improvement, until he should arrive at the height of perfection attained in their present day construction, he would also be advancing on a path, but on a tedious one. I shall endeavor to show my subject at the outset in the very clearest light which has ever been thrown on it by the help of the nations of all times. If I succeed in this, it will be easy in the future, in the reading of any author, to separate the chaff from the wheat.

I can afford to dispense with quotations and proofs from others in trying to make my case and demonstrating the positive product of social culture, for we are dealing with the most universal and omnipresent object,--one which enters into every spoken or written sentence with its own body. If anybody tells of far off times or wonderful things, he must quote witnesses. Now, much of what I have to say for my case may sound wonderful, because it runs counter to the popular prejudice, but the only witness required to prove the truth of my statements is the clear brain of my pupil, who has only to examine his own experience without preconceived notions, in order to find proofs on every hand.

It is surprising in the first place, that such a near at hand object has not been understood long ago and that so much still remains to be explained and to be taught after thousands of years of study. But you know that just as the small things are often great, and great things small, so the nearest things are often hidden and the hidden things nearest.

I promised you in the first sentences of this letter, dear Eugene, that I would now pa.s.s from introduction to subject matter. But since I have really continued to move around the outer edge of the subject instead of entering into its midst, you might become impatient, and so I will justify my method. It is a peculiarity of this subject matter that it exposes me to this charge. It is a peculiarity of thought that it never stays with itself, but always digresses to other things. The thought is the plank to which I should stick, but it is the nature of this plank never to stick. Thinking is a thing full of contradictions, a dialectical secret.

Now I know that here I am saying something which it is very hard for you to understand. But look here, has it not always been so? When you began declining Latin words in the sixth cla.s.s, you were unable at once to grasp the full meaning of declension. You knew what you were doing, and yet you did not entirely understand it. Only after penetrating more deeply into the construction of the language did the meaning and purpose of the beginning become clear to you. In the same way, you now must try to digest as much as you can of what I say, and after you have gone more deeply into this matter, you will fully understand me from beginning to end. In taking lessons from an author, on an unknown subject, I have always followed the method of first getting a superficial view of the subject, of glancing over its many pages and chapters, in order to return to the beginning and acquire a thorough knowledge by repeated study. With the growing familiarity with the subject the ability to understand it grew, and at the conclusion the thing became clear to me.

This is the only correct method I can recommend to you.

In conclusion let me say for to-day in pa.s.sing that the recommendation of the correct method for studying logic is not only an introduction, but, as I have already said, the subject matter of science itself.

THIRD LETTER

Dear Eugene:

My task of teaching logic requires two things: a logician and a teacher.

The last named capacity requires that I should clothe the subject in an attractive way. Permit me, therefore, to combine the didactic style with that of the story teller, and to relate at this point an episode from a novel of Gustav zu Putlitz:

The organist of a certain village is lying on his deathbed. His last strength has been spent on the previous day in playing a hymn, and after its conclusion he was carried from the church in an unconscious state.

He had played his masterpiece, but at the same time his last piece. A despised stage girl had accompanied him with a voice like that of a nightingale. But neither she nor the organ player had earned any applause from the stupid villagers.

The old man looked around in his room, his eyes were first riveted on his faithful piano, his friend and companion through life. He extended his hand, but it sank down exhausted. He had not had the intention to touch the piano anyway. It was only like stretching out one's hand for a friend far away. Then he looked through the window trying to recollect what time of the day it was. And when he had taken in the situation, he turned to the girl kneeling at his feet.

"Poor child," he began, "you were deeply disappointed yesterday. I felt very much hurt, when I first heard of it, but after that everything became clear to me while I heard the music all night, until a short while ago. Rejoice, my girl, at being reviled, for it is done for the sake of that sacred music, and it is an ecstasy, a blessing, to be martyred for one's music which is well worth all injuries. I did not fare any better all my life, and if I thank G.o.d for all the good he has done me until this hour, I also thank him first and most fervently for the gift of music which he bestowed on the world, and which he revealed to me most wonderfully in my most painful hours.

"For my music I have starved and suffered all my life, and my gain was delicious, my reward celestial for this poor perishable stake.

"My father was an organist in a little town of Eastern Frisia. His father had held the same position in the same church, and, I think, so did the father of his father follow music for a profession. Music has been the heirloom of our family for generations. True, it was the only heirloom, but I have cherished it and held its flag aloft all my life.

When G.o.d calls me away, I shall leave nothing behind but that old piano and the sheet music which I wrote myself, for in all other respects I have always been poor. I might have done differently, and my wife has often upbraided me for it, but she does not understand the blessing of music. I do not blame her for that, for it was not her fault that G.o.d closed her ear to music as he did the ears of many others. Poor people, how cold and dreary must be their lives when music does not scatter blossoms in their path and bathe their temples in light. But there will come a time when their ears will be opened, and G.o.d will compensate them in heaven for what they missed here below.

"We who love music have tasted a part of eternal bliss here below, for harmony which dissolves all chords is eternal life and its wings are fanning us in this terrestrial life----

"Do you see, I know it well, and no one besides me, how it is when the soul prepares to leave the perishable body and enter the song of the spheres--

"You do not understand me, my girl, but do not worry, you also will understand some day. I will only tell you this much, and it shall be a consolation to you when the world treats you roughly hereafter. All of us, whether rich or poor, whether reclining on soft silken cus.h.i.+ons or on hard straw, all of us enter life with the celestial melodies in our hearts. The beating of time goes with us as long as we are breathing. It is the beating of the heart in our breast. We may seem to lose the melody, even the measured step of time seems to become confused by our pa.s.sion, but in the blessed hours we always find our melody anew, and then we feel at home in the path of our life."

Thus the old organist idolized his music.

But it is not alone the harmony of music which has such a power over the mind. The harmony of colors, every art and science, has the same power.

Even the most common craft, and the most prosaic of all prose, the chase after the dollar, may take possession of a man's soul and prostrate him in adoration before its idol. True, not every one is so sentimentally inclined, and even the sentimentalist is so only in especially sentimental moments. Furthermore it cannot be denied that artists, inventors, and explorers are wors.h.i.+pping the most worthy and most adorable objects. And I admit that no great success can be accomplished without putting your whole soul into some great aim.

Nevertheless you should know that anything which may take possession of one's soul shares its sublimity with all other things, and is for this reason at the same time something ordinary. Without such a dialectic clarification of our consciousness all adoration is idol wors.h.i.+p.

The actual experience, then, that anything and everything may serve as an idol should clearly convince you that no one thing, but only the universe is the true G.o.d, is truth and life.

Now, is this logic or is it theology?

It is both. At closer range you will notice that all great logicians occupy themselves a great deal with G.o.d and deity, and that on the other hand all honest theologians are trying to base their faith on some logical order. Logic is by its whole nature metaphysical.[3]

There exists a cla.s.s of logicians who attempt to deny the inevitable connection between the celestial region and the tangible universe. Some of them do so from excessive religious delicacy of feeling, in order to protect the sublime from the disintegrating effects of critique. Others have such an antipathy against the religious abuses that they do not wish to hear any more about religion. Both cla.s.ses adhere to the so-called formal logic.

These adherents of formal logic may be compared to a maker of porcelain dishes who would contend that he was simply paying attention to the form of his dishes, pots, and vases, but that he did not have anything to do with the raw material, while it is evident that he is compelled to form the body in trying to embody forms. These things can be separated by words only, but not by actions. In the same way as body and form, the finite and infinite or so-called celestial spheres, the physical and the metaphysical, are inseparable.

Logic a.n.a.lyzes thought. But it a.n.a.lyzes thought as it is in reality, and therefore it unavoidably searches for truth. And whether this truth is found above or below, or anywhere, is a question which just as inevitably brings the logician into contact with the theologian. To think of avoiding such a meeting from considerations of sympathy or antipathy, would be a rude lack of consideration for science.

Metaphysical logic which aims to extend its field to eternity, which looks for logical order even in heaven, and seeks to solve even the so-called last questions of all knowledge, differs in a distinct way from formal logic, which selects a restricted field for its research and confines itself to investigating the logical order of the socalled physical world. This difference is worthy of your special attention, because in it there is hidden the kernel of our whole correspondence.

It is quite a practical method to set a limit for one's investigations, not to fly into clouds, not to undertake anything that cannot be accomplished. Yet you must not forget that practical boundaries are not theoretical boundaries, that they are not invariable boundaries for you, or for others. Although you cannot fly to heaven and will give up the idea of flying machines from considerations of practical expediency, yet you will not wish to deny to man the theoretical freedom of infinite striving even in the matter of airs.h.i.+ps, and you will not be so small as to give up the idea of the capacity for our race for metaphysical, or in other words, infinite development.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] In the sense of: mental and physical world embracing, all-embracing.--Editor.

FOURTH LETTER