Now we have a more than sufficient quantity of such speculative systems. If we measure them with the aforementioned standard of unanimousness, we find that philosophy agrees only on its disagreements. In consequence, the history of speculative philosophy, unlike the history of other sciences, consists less of a gradual accumulation of knowledge, than of a series of unsuccessful attempts to solve the general riddles of nature and life by "pure" thought, without the help of the objects and experience of the outer world. The most daring attempt in this line, the most artificial structure of thought, was completed by Hegel in the beginning of the nineteenth century. To use a common expression, he became as famous in the world of science as Napoleon I did in the world of politics. But Hegelian philosophy has not stood the test of time. Haym, in his work entitled "Hegel and His Time," says of Hegelian philosophy that "it was pushed aside by the progress of the world and by living history."
The outcome of philosophy up to that time, then, was a declaration of its own impotence. Nevertheless, we do not underestimate the fact that a work occupying the best brains for thousands of years surely contained some positive element. And in fact, speculative philosophy has a history, which is not merely a series of unsuccessful attempts, but also a living development. However, it is less the object of its study, less the logical world system, which developed, than its method.
Every positive science has a material object, a beginning in the outer world, a premise on which its understanding is based. Every empirical science has for its fundament some material of the senses, some given object, on which its understanding is dependent, and thus it becomes "impure." Speculative philosophy seeks a "pure, absolute," understanding. It wishes to understand by "pure" reason, without any material, without any experience. It takes its departure from the enthusiastic conviction of the superiority of understanding and knowledge over experience gained by sense perceptions. For this reason it wishes to leave experience entirely aside in favor of absolutely "pure" understanding. Its object is truth; not concrete truth, not the truth of this or that thing, but truth in general, truth "in itself." The speculative systems seek after an absolute beginning, an indubitably self-supporting starting point, from which they may determine the absolutely indubitable. The speculative systems are thus by their own mentality perfectly complete and selfsufficient systems. Every speculative system found its end in the subsequent knowledge that its totality, its selfsufficiency, its absoluteness, was imaginary, that it could be determined empirically and externally like all other knowledge, that it was not a philosophical system, but a relative and empirical attempt at understanding. Speculation finally dissolved into the knowledge that understanding is by its very nature "impure," that the organ of philosophy, the faculty of understanding cannot begin its studies without a given point of departure, that science is not absolutely superior to experience, but only so far as it can organize numerous experiences. It followed from these premises that the object of philosophy can be a general and objective understanding, or "truth in itself," only in so far as understanding or truth in general can be derived from given concrete objects. In plain words, speculative philosophy was reduced to the unphilosophical science of the empirical faculty of understanding, to the critique of reason.
Modern conscious speculation takes its departure from the experienced difference between semblance and truth. It denies all sense phenomena in order to find truth by thinking, without being deceived by any semblance. The subsequent philosophers, however, found every time that the truths of their predecessors, gained by this method, were not what they pretended to be, but that their positive result consisted simply in having advanced the science of the thought process to a certain extent. By denying the actuality of the senses, by endeavoring to separate thought from all sense perceptions, by isolating it, so to say, from its sensory cover, speculative philosophy, more than any other science, laid bare the structure of the mind. The more this philosophy advanced in time, the more it developed in its historical course, the more classically and strikingly did this kernel of its work spring into view. After the repeated creation of giant fantasmagorias, it found its solution in the positive knowledge that socalled pure philosophical thought, abstracting from all concrete contents, is nothing but thoughtless thought, thought without any real object back of it, and produces mere fantasmagorias. This process of speculative deception and scientific exposure was continued up to recent times. Finally the solution of the main question, and the solution of speculation, was introduced with the following words of Feuerbach: "My philosophy is no philosophy."
The long story of speculative work was finally reduced to the understanding of reason, of the intellect, the mind, to the exposure of those mysterious operations which we call thinking.
The secret of the processes by which the truths of understanding are produced, the ignorance of the fact that every thought requires an object, a premise, was the cause of the idle speculative wanderings which we find registered in the history of philosophy. The same secret is today the cause of those numerous speculative mistakes which we observe in passing over the words and works of naturalists. Their knowledge and understanding is far developed, but only so far as it refers to tangible objects. The moment they touch upon abstract discussions, they offer "lawyers' proofs" in place of "objective facts." For although they know intuitively and in a concrete case that this is a truth, that a conclusion, and that a rule, they do not apply this knowledge in general with consciousness and theoretical consistency. The successes of natural science have taught them to operate the instrument of thought, the mind, instinctively. But they lack the systematic understanding which operates with conscious and predetermined certainty. They ignore the outcome of speculative philosophy.
It will be our task to set forth in a short summary what speculative philosophy has unconsciously produced of a positive nature by a tedious process, in other words, to explain the general nature of the thought process. We shall see that the understanding of this process will furnish us with the means of solving scientifically the general riddles of nature and of life. And thus we shall learn how that fundamental and systematic world conception is developed which was the long coveted goal of speculative philosophy.