Note 77 — THE MONIST. (continued 2)

I laid down my views on the subject in a short monograph of only 82 pages, entitled Ursache, Grund und Zweck, eine philosophische Abhandlung zur Klärung der Begriffe (Dresden: R. von Grumbkow, Hof. Verlag, 1883). In all main points I maintain the same standpoint still. See also Fundamental Problems, the chapter on Causality, pp. 79-91 and 96-109.

Since the publication of my German pamphlet my confidence that we can, (not only in the special sciences such as chemistry, mineralogy, botany, etc., but also in philosophy) arrive at truth, has rather been confirmed than shaken. We can create a common ground on which all philosophers agree, as much as mathematicians agree concerning the Pythagorean theorem. But in order to achieve this ideal, philosophers must abandon all attempts at originality. The hankering after originality is an inherited evil in the family of philosophers. The first philosophers were poets, priests, and prophets; later on in the natural evolution of human culture, a differentiation of their combined functions took place. Originality is a virtue in the poet but a vice in his brother, the philosopher. The philosopher’s ideal must be to free himself of all individualism, subjectivity, and original conceptions; he must become strictly objective. He must renounce his personal likes and dislikes, and make his soul a mirror of nature, faithfully and correctly to represent the facts and nothing but the facts. This is the ethics of philosophical inquiry, and the philosophy that takes its stand on this principle we call positivism.

Almost all divergencies of importance in the different philosophical systems can be traced to different conceptions or rather misconceptions of causation.

This last century since Kant has been the most fertile age of original world-theories, all different in style and manner of construction, but all alike in so far as the author of each system had strained his utmost efforts to be original. Thus all these world-theories were so many beautiful poems on ontology, they were so many grand air-castles produced by the magic wand of a fairy-tale causation. The philosopher’s aspiration must not be to present original ideas but to reach that one solution which any other unbiassed thinker must find, to express that truth which in the end will have to be recognised universally, to formulate facts in objective exactness. The degree of originality in philosophic thought marks the degree of aberration from the common aim of the one sole solution, and the greatest source of original ideas is the confusion of cause and reason, of Ursache and Grund, of event and law, of fact and truth.