And yet it is an old story that man's insight grows the more he magnifies a thing. The more excessively we exaggerate a thing, the plainer become its boundaries. Language indeed requires one single name for All, but it also requires an infinite number of names in order to specify the parts of All. Inasmuch as language claims to be only a part of existence, this part has to be bounded, and you should in this connection remember the unlimited freedom of man in drawing such boundaries. Words are not merely empty words, but names of cosmic parts, of cosmic rings of undulation. Language, or rather the mind connected with language, wishes to bound the infinite by the help of language. The instinctive popular use of language does this in a haphazard way. Conscious science proceeds in an exact manner. Just as it has determined on the field of temperature what should be called hot and what warm, so it is at liberty on the field of sounds to determine where the name of language begins or ceases. The end of the discussion of language is therefore this: That which has already been done to horse power has not yet been done to the concept of language; it has been somewhat fixed by common usage, but only insufficiently. And so the moral of this tale is that the things of this world, even mind and language, are connected and intermingling undulations of the same stream, which has neither beginning nor end.
Let me say it once more clearly and without circumlocution: The logic which I teach and the thought which is its object are parts of the world, of the infinite, and every part being a piece of the infinite is likewise infinite. Every part partakes of the nature of the infinite. Hence you must not expect that I should exhaust my infinite subject. I confine myself to the logical chapter of "the One and the Many." I simply wish to make it plain that without any contradiction the whole multiplicity of existence is of the same nature, and that this oneness of nature subdivides into manifold forms. The world is interconnected and this interconnection is subdivided into departments. It adds to the general enlightenment of the human brain to recognize this in regard to language, to mind, to all parts of the universe.
I repeat, then: One may think logically without having attended any lectures on logic, just as one may raise potatoes without a scientific knowledge of agriculture. It was possible to invent the thermometer, to clearly distinguish between sounds and colors, and a hundred other things, without having explained the faculty of discrimination. But the most abstract distinctions, such as beginning and end, word and meaning, body and soul, man and animal, matter and force, truth and error, presuppose for their explanation a logical explanation of their interconnection with our intellect.
EIGHTH LETTER
Dear Eugene:
Logic is going through the same experience as economics. The economists of the capitalist era talk solely of the means and ways by which profit and surplus value may be increased. They discuss only its relative size, its increase or decrease. But the thing itself, its origin and descent, is not discussed. It is passed in silence that profit is extracted from labor power by paying less for a day's work than is produced by it. The gentlemen talk only of the "wealth of nations," but not of their poverty. And though this was due to ignorance in the beginning, it has later become sheer roguery.
The formal logicians are as ignorant as they are roguish, when they persist in discussing the intellect or thought in the traditional manner as if they were isolated things, while ignoring the necessary connection of the object of the logical study with the world of experiences. This interconnection leads to an explanation of truth and error, of sense and nonsense, of god and idols, and this is very inopportune for the professors. For this reason this unwelcome problem is handed over to the mystical departments, to metaphysics and religion, so that these venerable pillars of official wisdom may continue their services to the ruling classes.
I have already stated in my letters that the kernel of my discussion turns on the distinction between formal and what I call proletarian logic. The formal logicians treat the intellect as a thing "in itself," while I express in many different ways the fact that the intellect does not exist by itself, but is interconnected with all things and with the universe.
That intellect has indeed a transcendental leaning, which seeks vent by trying to exclude now music, now language, now itself, now some other fetich from the universal interrelation. But the science of the mind teaches that the brain watching its own activity finds out that all affirmations and negations, assertions and contradictions, belong to the one omnipotent world mechanism, which keeps them stored within itself and which is actually truth and life. Inasmuch as the human brain is of the same nature as this automatic universal being and interconnected with it, logic is at the same time religion, metaphysics, and world wisdom.[4]