CHAPTER VI[ToC]
MORALS AND LAW
Eternal Truths.
We refrain from offering examples of the hodge podge of stupidity and sham solemnity with which Herr Duehring regales his readers for fifty full pages as fundamental knowledge on the elements of consciousness. We merely quote the following: "He who merely conceives of thought through the medium of speech has never understood what is signified by abstract and true thought." Hence, animals are the most abstract and true thinkers, for their thought is never obscured by the importunate interference of speech. With regard to Herr Duehring's thought in particular, it may be perceived that they are but little suited to speech and that the German language in particular is quite inadequate to express them.
The fourth part of his book, however, possesses some redeeming features, for here and there it offers us some comprehensible notions on the subject of morals and law in spite of the tedious and involved rhetoric. Right at the beginning we are invited to take a journey to the other heavenly bodies. Thus, the elements of morality are to be found among superhuman beings among whom exist an understanding of things and a regular system of the harmonious conduct of life. Our share in such conclusions must then be small, but there always remains a beneficent and enlarging idea in picturing that even in other spheres individual and social life follows one purpose which cannot be escaped or evaded by any intelligent living creature.
There is good reason for our altering the position of the statement that Herr Duehring's truth is good for all possible worlds from the close to the beginning of the chapter. When once the correctness of Herr Duehring's notions of morals and law have been established so as to apply to all world the beneficent notion may easily be extended to all time. Here again, however, we run across another final truth of last instance. The moral universe has "just as well as that of universal knowledge its general principles and simple elements." Moral principles are beyond history and the national distinctions of to-day ... the various truths from which in the course of development the fuller moral consciousness, and, so to speak, conscience itself is derived, can, as far as their origin is investigated, claim a similar acceptation and extent to that of mathematics and its applications. Real truths are immutable and it is folly to conceive of correct knowledge as liable to the attacks of time or of change in material conditions. "Hence the certainty of sound knowledge and the sufficiency of general acceptation forbid to doubt the absolute correctness of the fundamental principles of knowledge.... Continual doubt is in itself an evidence of weakness and is merely the expression of a barren condition of confusion, which although conscious of possessing nothing still seeks to maintain the appearance of holding on to something. Regarding morals, it denies universal principles with respect to the manifold variations in moral ideas owing to geographical and historical conditions, and thinks that with the admission of the unavoidable necessity of evil and wickedness there is no need for it to acknowledge the truth and efficiency of moral impulses. This mordant scepticism which is not directed against any false doctrine in particular, but against human capacity to recognise morality resolves itself finally into nothingness, it is no more than mere nihilism. It flatters itself that it can attain supremacy and give free rein to unprincipled pleasures by destroying moral ideas and creating chaos. It is greatly deceived, however, if merely pointing at the inevitable fate of the intellect with respect to error and truth is sufficient to show by analogy that natural liability to error does not exclude the arriving at a correct decision but rather tends to that end."
Up to now we have not commented upon Herr Duehring's pompous opinions on final truths of the last instance, sovereignty of the will, absolute certainty of knowledge, and so forth, until the matter could first be brought to an issue. Up to this point the investigation has been useful to show how far the separate assertions of the philosophy of realism had "sovereign validity" and "unrestricted claim to truth" but we now come to the question if any and what product of human knowledge can have in particular "sovereign validity" and "unrestricted claims to truth." If I speak of human knowledge I do not do so as an affront to the dwellers in other worlds whom I have not the honor to know, but only because animals have knowledge also, not sovereign, however. The dog recognises a divinity in his master, who may, however, be a great fool.
"Is human thought sovereign?" Before we can answer "yes" or "no" we must first examine what human thought is. Is it the thought of an individual man? No. It exists only as the individual thoughts of many millions of men, past, present and to come. If I now say, having comprehended the thought of all men in the future also under my concept, that it is able to understand the entire universe, if man only lasts long enough, and the organs of perception are unlimited, and the objects to be comprehended have no limits upon their comprehensibility, my statement is banal and barren. The most valuable result of such a conclusion would be to cause in us a tremendous distrust of present day knowledge. Because, to all appearance, we are just standing at the threshold of human history and the generations which will correct us will be much more numerous than those whose knowledge—often with little enough regard,—we ourselves correct. Herr Duehring himself explains the necessity of consciousness, knowledge and perception only becoming apparent in a collection of separate individuals. We can only apply the word sovereignty to the thought of these individuals in so far as we do not know of any force which can defeat thought. But we all know that there is no significance to nor power of interpretation of the sovereign power of the knowledge of the thought of each individual, and, according to our experience, there is much more that requires improvement and correction in it than not.