After that which we have already said about the beginning and the end of things and about their immortality, it will be easily understood that the thing called understanding has no more historical beginning than all the rest. The known grows out of the unknown, the conscious out of the unconscious. Our modern consciousness, though agreeably cultivated, is still an undeveloped, unconscious consciousness. Nevertheless, development has gone far enough to make it plain that understanding is anti-religious. Especially the understanding of understanding, the outcome of positive philosophy, has a pronounced anti-religious, and to that extent "destructive," tendency. But one should not have an exaggerated idea of this destruction. Here, under this sun, nothing is destroyed without leaving the basis for the growth of new life from the ruins. It belongs to the conception of the universe to understand that it is the main conception required for the conception of conception, for the understanding of understanding.
The history of philosophy begins with the decay of heathen religion, and the history of modern philosophy with the decay of Christian religion. Since religion must be preserved for the people according to the official declarations of the rulers, the official professors are not clear and accurate expounders of the positive outcome of philosophy. No matter how great the work of Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel may be, yet the followers of Kant and Hegel have no freedom of research, and Kuno Fischer, although very close to the root of the subject, is nevertheless doomed to remain in the mystification of the function of conceiving and of understanding. His profession clouds his judgment.
"Nature," says this professor, "is regarded as the first object of understanding, as the principle from which everything else follows. In this respect modern philosophy is naturalistic. It is taken for granted that nature can be understood, or that the possibility of understanding things is given. Modern philosophy makes this assumption dogmatically.... The Kantian philosophy, on the other hand, assumes a critical, not a dogmatic, attitude toward the possibility of understanding." (System of Logic and Metaphysics, by Kuno Fischer, second edition, pages 104 and 109.) In this latter, critical, stage, the subject is kept rather hot by the professors of philosophy. The critics are still engaged in exclaiming: Be amazed, oh world! How is understanding possible?
In the first place, there is nothing to be amazed at. Why is not the "naturalistic" philosopher consistent by recognizing his special object, understanding, as a natural object?
The "supposition" that an understanding of things is possible, is neither a supposition nor anything "dogmatic."
The philosophers should abandon their old hobby of trying to prove anything by syllogisms. Nowadays, a case is not substantiated by words, but by facts, by deeds. The sciences are sufficiently equipped, and thus the "possibility of understanding" is demonstrated beyond a doubt.
"But," say the critics who are so wise that they hear the grass growing, "are those perceptions which are produced by the exact sciences really perceptions? Are they not simply substitutes? Those sciences recognize only the phenomena of things; but where is the understanding which perceives the truth?"
We shall offer it to them. You are naturalists. Well, then, nature is the truth. Or are you spiritualists who make a metaphysical distinction between the truth and the phenomenon? To understand means to distinguish and judge. The semblance must be distinguished from the truth, but not in an excessive manner. It must be remembered that even the most evil semblance is a natural phenomenon, and the sublimest truth is only revealed by phenomena, just because it is natural.
But the old logic cannot stand any contradictions. Semblance and truth are contradictions for it and they cannot be reconciled by it. But the irreconcilable simply consists in entertaining, in this monistic world, thoughts which are supposed to be totally different. Hence old style logic lacks entirely the mediating manner of thought which does not elevate understanding and its faculty of thought to the skies, but is satisfied to regard it as a very valuable, but still natural, quality.
The old logic could not construct any valid rules of thought, because it thought too transcendentally of thinking itself. It was not satisfied that thought is only a faculty, a mode of doing, a part of true nature, but the nature of truth was spiritualized by it into a transcendental being. Instead of grasping the conception of spirit with blood and flesh, it tries to dissolve blood and flesh into ideas. That would be well enough, if such a solution of the riddles were meant to have no other significance than that of symbols.