V.

“God formed the human body out of a clod of day and breathed into it an immortal soul.” Since that time we have the dualism or the two-world theory. The one, the bodily, the material world is dirt, and the other, the spiritual or mental ghost-world is God’s breath. That little story has been secularized by Philosophy, that is, adapted to the Zeitgeist. The visible, audible and tangible, the bodily reality is still regarded as dirty clay, while to the thinking mind is given the kingdom of a transcendental Truth, Beauty and Freedom. Just as the world has a bad name in the Bible, so also in Philosophy. Among all phenomena or objects which Nature offers, Philosophy finds only one object worthy of attention, namely, the mind, the old breath of God; and that only because it appears to those queer heads as a transcendental, unnatural, metaphysical thing. It is surely permitted to the inquirer to limit himself to one object, but he must not deify it, nor tear it from its interconnection, nor worship it in an exaggerated manner. The philosopher who approaches the human mind soberly and makes it the aim of his inquiries, like any other object of the many objects in the world, ceases to be a philosopher, that is, one of those who want to study the riddle of existence in a general, hazy, manner. He becomes a specialist and the special science of the theory of cognition becomes his special branch of inquiry.

Because Philosophy regarded all special objects of the world as dirty and material, nothing remained to it but the hazy speculation in indefinite, misty generalities. The philosophers possess, however, along with the religious soul, an exact Reason with a scientific tendency, a Reason which wants to achieve something definite. They are, therefore, compelled to look out for a definite object, for a scientific specialty. The logic of reality has driven Philosophy to become and to undertake something which it didn’t want to become or to undertake. The reason able desire for success in connection with the traditional worship of the divine breath gave thus to Philosophy as its object of inquiry the matter-of-fact Intellect.

That the common spirit of the human head is their true spirit, the philosophers hardly know; this must be made clear to them by Social-Democrats. The philosophers, as a rule university professors, have an interest in preserving for their professional intellect the character of the divine spark. All the more must it be the interest of the working men to know that this very intellect is a common natural object. Behind the question as to whether there is in our head a sublime idealistic spirit or a common human reason, we find the great social question hidden as to whether might and right are to-day on the side of the privileged class or on the side of the common people.

Struggle of the good against evil is the eternal essence of history. Sometimes the struggle reaches an acute stage, as for instance to-day when the productive working class is struggling against the ruling parasite class. In this struggle a good many splinters are thrown about. Everything is affected by it; even the language is going to pieces. The “highest” conceptions, such as Truth, Freedom, Culture, are being corrupted. “Philosophy” and “seats of learning” must be put in inverted commas in order to mark the equivocal character which they have assumed. Professors have become generals in the army of evil. On the right wing are in command Treitschke, in the centre von Siebel, on the left wing J�rgen Bona Meyer, doctor and professor of Philosophy in Bonn. The latter delivered lately in the Berlin Gegenwart, a logomachy against the Unbelief of our Times, against the religion of Social-Democracy. He leads the crack regiments of his “science,” the labored points of philosophic Idealism, into battle, and he comes just in time to be captured with his war materials in order to enable us to illustrate by them to the students of social-democratic Philosophy our subject-matter.

In the foregoing chapter we have already mentioned the feat of Descartes which the professors of higher magics or Philosophy are in the habit of producing before the public in order to dupe them. They try to demonstrate the breath of God as truth. To be sure that name fell into disrepute, and enlightened, liberal-minded people do not talk any more of the immortal soul. Instead of that they talk in a sober, materialist way of consciousness, faculty of thought and ideas. But to represent it as having a common non-transcendental nature, no enlightened man, even of the liberal class, would dare to do. It is only the Social agitator who represents it like that. To J�rgen Bona Meyer and Co., to the doctors of Philosophy, it is a foregone conclusion, a dogma, that the human mind is of a transcendental nature. Let us have a look at that dogma.

We feel in ourselves the bodily existence of thinking Reason, and with the same sensation we feel outside ourselves the clods of clay, the trees and shrubs. And that which we feel inside, and that which we feel outside ourselves are not far removed from each other. Both belong to the category of perceptible phenomena, of empiric material, and both become known to us through sensation. How to distinguish subjective from objective sensations, the inside from the outside, 100 real dollars from 100 imaginary ones – of that we shall speak upon occasion. Here it is only necessary to grasp that the inner thought, like the inner pain, exists as objectively as the outside world exists subjectively in relation to our organs of sensation. The relation between subject and object, spirit and Nature, thought and existence, which has puzzled so many people, becomes clear when we gain the understanding that the opposition is but a relative one, that these opposites differ only in degrees.

It is the democratic equality of all things in Nature, of the body and the soul, which cannot enter the heads of the “philosophers.” The said Meyer with his science without any given premises starts really from the supposition that the breath of God or the immortal soul or the philosophic intellect is of a higher and more direct Truth than any other children of the common mother Nature. As long as he does not relinquish that idea it is easy to prove that the “external world” is of mere clay, and that its existence does not rest on science, but on belief.

Let J�rgen speak for himself:

“The man who is a non-believer on principle must again and again be referred to the truth proved philosophically that all our knowledge rests in the last resort on some sort of belief. Even the materialist accepts the existence of the world as a matter of belief. He does not possess a direct knowledge of it; he is only sure of the idea of the world which arises in his mind; he believes that there is something which corresponds with his idea, that the represented world is such as he imagines it to be; he does believe in the existence of an external world on the evidence of his mind. His belief in the external world is primarily a belief in his own mind. And why does he believe that the imagined world will be such as the human mind imagines it or must imagine it? – Because it would be irrational to assume that the human mind which has the impulse and the power to imagine an external world, would necessarily be deceived in the exercise of its power ... Thus the belief in the senses is in the last resort a belief in the fitness of our mind. The preconceived notion of the fitness of the world forms thus the last basis of the materialistic conception.”

There you have the feat of Descartes in a new and cheaper edition. “Only the idea is undoubtedly certain,” but also this certainty is uncertain, for he speaks of “the belief in one’s own mind.” Meyer’s belief is “philosophically demonstrated,” yet he knows that he knows nothing, that all is merely belief. He is modest with regard to knowledge and science, but overconfident with regard to belief and religion. Science and belief are used by him in a confused manner, maybe that he does not attach any importance to either of them.

New it is “philosophically demonstrated” that all our knowledge is done for. For the benefit of the reader I may add that the guild of Philosophers at their last general meeting in all solemnity carried a resolution to purge our language from the word “science,” and to put belief in its stead. All knowledge is henceforth merely a believing. All knowledge is now at an end. Sure enough, J�rgen speaks of “direct certainty” and “philosophically proved truth;” but that is simply an unconscious relapse into the bad manners of old. Or, may be, he uses the words like the theologians who regard the mother of Jesus with her eternal virginity, or the talking ass of Balaam as a “demonstrated truth” and “direct certainty.” The Professor, however, corrects himself, for he says explicitly: the belief in the perceptible world is a belief in one’s own mind. Thus everything, spirit and Nature, rests on belief. But, alas, he is surely wrong in trying to impose upon us dialectic-materialists the resolution of his guild. For us the resolution is not binding. We remain true to the use of the language in reserving to ourselves knowledge, and in surrendering all mere believing to the parsons and Doctors of Philosophy.

No doubt “all our knowledge” rests on subjectivity. The wall yonder, against which we could split our heads and find it, therefore, impenetrable, may be passable like mere air for goblins, angels, demons and other ghosts, or for such people who deny the whole dirty clay of the perceptible world – but what of that? Why bother about a world which we can’t perceive? Maybe, that what people call fog and wind are really, purely or “in themselves,” heavenly flutes and counterbasses. But for all that we can have nothing to do with that transcendental moonshine. Social-democratic materialists deal only with things which man perceives empirically. To those things also belongs his own faculty of thinking. The empirical we call truth, and only that do we make an object of science. If Professor J�rgen Bona Meyer and the pure Idealists want to introduce a perverted nomenclature, to give science the name of belief and priestcraft the name of science, then it becomes evident to a good many people that the official Philosophy has turned from a devotee to a servile “menial of the Lord.”

Since Kant made the critique of Reason a specialty of philosophic research we know that the five senses are not alone sufficient to gain experience, but that the intellect must co-operate to that end. The critique of Reason has also taught us that the divine spark can only become active in the material domain, that is, in the empirical world; that Reason without the help of the senses has no sense or understanding, and is therefore a thing of common relationship with all other things. Yet the great philosopher found it too difficult to forget the story of the divinely inspired clod of clay so as to liberate the mind from its ghostly effect and to consummate the emancipation of science from religion. The conception of the disdainful, clay-like matter and of the “thing in itself” or the transcendental truth enveloped all philosophers more or less in a purely idealistic delusion which solely rests on the belief in the metaphysical character of the human mind.

That weak spot of our great critic is now taken ad vantage of by our Prussian and Imperial philosophers in order to make out of it a new religious idol, and a wretched one to boot. “The idealistic belief in God,” says J.B. Meyer in the above mentioned article, “ is surely not knowledge and will never become such, but it is likewise sure that the materialist’s unbelief is not knowledge, but a materialist belief which can no more become knowledge than the idealistic belief.” The metaphysical craving of our philosopher would be quite satisfied if the Social-Democrats would but confess that they understand as little of the question, or that they are as much in the dark about their basic principles as Meyer is about his. He wouldn’t perhaps mind atheism; it is the Social-Democratic self-consciousness which he can’t stand – the self-consciousness which turns even against the thin, consumptive belief of the Prussian and Imperial philosophers. “All religious belief,” continues Meyer, “begins with some exaggeration, with some fallacy, and needs, therefore, constant cutting of its false excrescences ... The progress of belief consists just in this, that through the increase of knowledge, b lief rids itself of superstition.” But he forgets to inform us about that true philosophic miracle of a religion free from superstition which is to remain despite the “constant cuttings.” He goes on angrily: “The popular champions of the materialistic and atheistic unbelief are with few exceptions not leaders of science, but misguided braggarts of knowledge.” Well, dear J�rgen, they do not at all claim the leadership of general science, but are limiting themselves to the study of a specialty, namely, to the theory of cognition, in order to be able to send the parsons of Philosophy about their business.