VII.

This series of lectures, published in the Volksstaat, have been temporarily interrupted. I shall not speak of the reasons which led to the interruptions, but let me simply say that I am going to continue them, or rather start them anew.

Dialectically speaking, the continuation of the old is at the same time a fresh start, especially in our subject-matter, for the social-democratic conception of the world is a complete system which, in the form of an inverted pyramid, moves, like a whipping-top, on its point. And as the whipping-top spins only in connection with its broad head and with its level plane and with its string which sets it in motion, so can the point of our new, systematic conception of the world not be represented in an isolated manner in itself, but only in the closest connection with the manifold questions which agitate the world. This subject-matter, “the fixed pole in the cease less motion of events,” needs thus continuous variations in order to go on with the old continuation by a fresh start.

Though we Social-Democrats are atheists without religion, we are not irreligious, that is, the gulf between us and the religions is great and deep, but has, like other gulfs, its bridge. It is my intention to lead the social-democratic comrades to that bridge and to show them from there the difference between the wilderness in which the believers are wandering about and the promised land of serenity and truth.

The supreme commandment of the Christian is: Thou shalt love God beyond everything and thy neighbor as thyself. Well, God beyond everything. But who is God? He is the beginning and the end, the Creator of Heaven and earth. We don’t believe in his existence, and yet we find something reasonable in the command which orders us to love him beyond everything.

Those who contemplate the Eternal, Omnipresent and Most Honored cannot fail to perceive that He is in reality nothing else but the personification of the Universe; no mortal can claim nowadays to have seen the All-Father and to have spoken to him. Yet the atheists, too, must acknowledge that reason-gifted man is, despite his intellect and his science, a subordinate creature, dependent on sun and winds, earth, fire, air and water. That means that our mind, destined though it is to rule over matter, is none the less a limited ruler.

With our intellect we can rule in a formal manner only. On a small scale we are able to control the changes and movements of matter according to our will, but taken as a whole, as the substance of things, cosmic matter is superior to all mental capabilities. Science is able to transform mechanical energy into heat, electricity, light, chemical energy, etc., and it may succeed in trans forming all phenomena of matter and of force into one another and to reduce all its forms to one element; but all this granted, science can only change the form, while the essence remains eternal, imperishable and indestructible, a given material. The intellect can get out of matter the secret of its physical changes, but they are after all material ways which the proud intellect can only follow but not command. Sound thinking must always be conscious of the fact that it is, together with the “immortal soul” and the knowledge-proud reason, only a subordinate piece of the Universe, though our present “philosophers” are still occupied with the jugglery of transforming the real world into an “idea” of man. The religious commandment: Thou shalt love God beyond everything, means in plain social-democratic language: Thou shalt love and honor the material world, the corporeal Nature or the perceptible existence as the final cause of all things, as the Existence without a beginning and an end, which was, is and will be from eternity to eternity.

As it is well known and as we have repeatedly stated, the philosophers are a more or less progressive offshoot of the theologians and doctors of divinity. All of them are, consciously or unconsciously, “one reactionary mass,” that is, their common characteristics are to be found in the fact that they regard the Universe as the product of the Intellect, while we regard the Intellect and all other forces, like heat, gravitation and all which is audible, visible and tangible, as a form or species, as a piece or product of the general force, which is identical with the omnipresent, eternal and indestructible cosmic matter. Language has so far treated the conception of force and matter rather arbitrarily. Palpable things like wood, stone, clay, etc., are ponderable forces, while those things which we cannot touch with our hands, for instance, light, heat, tunes, we call imponderable matter. The world of tunes constitutes the matter of the musician. And those who dislike this generalization of the word “matter” may, instead of that, speak of “phenomena.” Bodily, physical, perceptible, material phenomenon is the name of the general species, to which everything belongs, the ponderable and the imponderable, body and soul.

In order to clear ourselves of the “metaphysical craving” it is absolutely necessary to keep in mind that all differences which we may make are but the manifold forms or the attributes of one indivisible unity. Though we differentiate between the bodily and the mental forms, the difference is none the less but a relative one; they are but two kinds of one and the same existence. This difference is no greater than that between cat and dog, who, regardless of their well-known animosity, belong to the same class or species, namely, to that of domestic animals.

Natural science in its narrower sense cannot give us the monistic conception of the world (that is, unity of Nature: unity of matter and mind, of the organic and inorganic, etc.) which is so eagerly looked for in our time, even if science succeed in proving satisfactorily the origin of species and the evolution of the organic from the inorganic. Science achieves all its discoveries through the intellect. The visible, tangible and ponderable part of that organ undoubtedly belongs to the domain of natural science; but the function, the thinking, is investigated by a separate science which some call Logic, or Epistemology or Dialectics. The latter department of science, the understanding or misunderstanding of the mental function, is the common ground of religion, metaphysics and the anti-metaphysical investigation. Here the bridge is to be found which leads from servile, superstitious oppression to modest freedom. Also in the democracy of epistemological freedom modesty governs, that is, submission to material, physical necessity.

The inevitable religion changes in the heads of the philosophers into metaphysics, and in the heads of clear thinkers into the undeniable necessity of a monistic conception of the world. The existing matter-force, also called Universe or Existence, becomes mystified in the heads of the theologians and philosophers, because they do not understand that matter and mind are of the same species, and because they pervert the relation in which they stand to each other. Materialism is, like Political Economy, a scientific, a historical result. Just as we distinguish between modern and Utopian socialism, so also between modern and 18th century materialism. With the latter we have only this in common that we assume matter as the premise, as the cause of the idea. Cosmic matter is to us the substance, while mind is the incidence; the empirical phenomenon is to us the species, and the intellect but a variety or form of it, while all religious and philosophic idealists assume the idea to be the primary, the causative and the substantive force.

What we see, hear, feel, etc., say the idealists, are the intellectual phenomena, insofar as the intellect must exist where things are to be seen, heard and felt. Good and well, say their opponents, but with it there is also matter. Where there is intellect, thinking, consciousness and knowledge, there must be an object, too, a matter which is perceived, and that is the main thing. What is the main thing, matter or mind? That is the old question which separates idealists from materialists. But that question, too, is but a piece of hazy phraseology. The real difference between the two camps is that the one turns the Universe into witchery, while the other camp will have nothing to do with that. All natural phenomena being only perceptible with the aid of our intellect, all our perceptions are intellectual phenomena. Quite so. But in that sum total is included a special sensation, a phenomenon, which especially deserves the adjective “intellectual,” and that is human reason, mind or the faculty of forming ideas, while the other phenomena are collectively called material. Therefore it really comes to this: matter, force and intellect are of the same origin. It is indeed a miserable logomachy to quarrel about the adjectives “intellectual” and “material.” The main thing is to know whether all things are of the same species or whether the Universe is to be divided in a super natural, mysterious witchery and a natural, ordinary clay.

Those who desire to gain a clear notion about that must not be satisfied with simply following the example of the old materialist who reduced everything to ponderable atoms. Cosmic matter has not only gravity, but aroma, light and sound – and why not also intelligence? If the smellable, visible and audible is more spiritual than the ponderable – if the comparative is natural, why not also the superlative? Gravity cannot be seen nor light be smelled, nor the intellect be touched, but we may perceive everything which exists. Don’t we perceive our thoughts as physically as we feel pain, light, heat or stones? The prejudice that ponderable objects are more perceptible than the phenomena which are communicated to us through hearing or feeling in general misled the old materialists to their atomistic speculations, misled them to make the ponderable the final cause of things. The conception of matter must be given a more comprehensive meaning. To it belong all phenomena of reality, also our force of thinking. To the idealists who call all natural phenomena “Ideas” or “intellectual phenomena” we say that the natural phenomena are by no means “things in themselves,” but objects of our sensations. Since also the particular phenomenon called subjective feeling, soul or consciousness is an object of sensation, there is no use here splitting up things into subjective and objective. The objective thing can only be perceived subjectively, and vice versa. Both exist and both are of the same kind; body and soul are of the same empirical material. An impartial observer can have no doubt that spiritual material, or, to be more exact, that the phenomenon of our force of thinking is a part of the world and not the reverse. The whole governs the part, cosmic matter the mind, at least in the main, though it is true that mind reacts on cosmic matter. And it is in this sense that I said we must love and honor the material world as the supreme being, as the cause of all causes, as the creator of heaven and earth.

That confession does not in the least prevent us from regarding the intellect as the primus inter pares, as the first object of all the objects in the world.

When Social-Democrats call themselves materialists, they only want to emphasize their view that they refuse to acknowledge anything which pretends to lie beyond human cognition in a metaphysical way. All witchery must go overboard.

But – so do our philosophical ravens croak – what about “the limits of natural cognition?” Has not the learned Du-Bois-Reymond proved conclusively that the haughty intellect has its limits? And has not our late socialist friend, F.A. Lange, the expert historian of Materialism, agreed to all that and expressly declared that all our knowledge could not penetrate the essence of things, and that, after all, something mystical and inconceivable must remain unsolved forever?

That theory of the limited understanding of common humanity is a fool’s theory, which we shall still further discuss.