Dear Eugene:

Today I am going to present my case with the precision of a schoolmaster.

The concept of white cabbage embraces all white cabbage heads that ever were and ever will be.

The concept of cabbage embraces red, white, and many other kinds of cabbage. The concept of vegetable embraces a still wider range. The organic field is still more comprehensive. And finally the world concept embraces everything which we know and don't know, the end of which we cannot conceive, and which therefore is called infinite.

When we trace our steps backward over the same reasoning, we find at once that the universal concept is divided into two parts, viz., the universe and the conception of it. We thus find the world in the concept and the concept in the world, so that both of these parts are interconnected, each is the predicate of the other, and whether we turn the thing to the right or to the left, the concept is in the world and the world in the concept.

Now it is true that the concept, or the faculty of understanding, is the object of our study rather than the world outside of it. The faculty of understanding, by the way, is nothing but a collective noun for all concepts, hence simply another name for concept in general. But what I eternally repeat is this: We cannot make a concept separated from all the rest of the world the object of our study, because that would be an empty abstraction which does not take on any meaning until we connect it with the world, for instance the special concept of cabbage with sense-perceived cabbage and so forth.

The concepts of white cabbage, cabbage in general, vegetables, or plants, etc., are all of them special concepts and at the same time general concepts. The one and the other is relative. Compared to the various species it includes, the general concept of cabbage is abstract, while compared to the general concept of vegetables it is concrete. And so it is with all concepts. They are abstract and concrete at the same time. Only the final concept, the world concept, is neither concrete nor abstract, but absolute. It is the concept of the absolute, which is indispensable for an understanding of logic.

We found a while ago that the absolute world concept consisted of two parts, viz., the concept and the world. In the same way, the chemists teach us that water consists of two elements, each of which by itself does not make any water, while their compound makes pure water. But we do not need such distant illustrations. My table in its present composition is something different from what it would be if the same pieces were put together in some other way and without a plan.

Therefore the world concept is a far more sublime concept than all the parts of which it consists. And in order to make this quite clear, I may honor this compound of the world and its concept by a special name, say "universe," so as to distinguish it from its component parts.

Now I declare, without fear of having the word turned in my mouth by any sophist, that the world embracing the thought, or the universe, is the absolute which includes everything, while the world and the thought of it, each by itself, are but classifications or relative things.

We wish to understand thought, not empty abstract thought, but the universal world-embracing thought, the thought in a philosophical sense. This is not mere thought, but living truth, the universe, the absolute, the supreme being.

It is with the universe and its parts as it is with a telescope and its concentric rings. Our intellect is a special ring which gives us a picture of the whole concentric thing. This photographer, as I have called it in a former letter, is not the object of our study for its own sake, nor for the sake of its pictures, but rather for the sake of the original, of the universe. It is as if somebody were to buy a portrait of some historically renowned person. No matter how much concerned the buyer would be with the picture, in the last analysis he is concerned with that person itself. So it is with the art of understanding the absolute, with world wisdom, which we study not for the sake of the wisdom, but of the world itself.

This lengthy discussion might have been cut short by simply speaking of the world instead of going to so much trouble on account of the world concept. But I should then miss my point, which is that the human intellect is a part of the world, and that the ideological distinction which separates this intellect from the rest of the world, requires for the whole an embracing term.

The absolute concept is the concept of the absolute, of the supreme being. To it applies all the true, good, and beautiful ever attributed to God, and it is also that being which lends logic, consistency, and form to all thought.

Plato is a philosopher who has thrown a wonderful light on the faculty of understanding, though he has not fully explained it. In his dialogue entitled "Gorgias," he makes Socrates say the following: "Does it seem to you that men want that with which they occupy themselves at any time, or that for the sake of which they undertake whatever they may be engaged in? Do those, for instance, who take some medicine prescribed by the physicians seem to want that which they do ... or to want that for the sake of which they take medicine, viz., health?... In the same way those who go on board of ships and trade do not want that which they are doing; for who would care to go to sea and face danger or conquer obstacles? That for which they go to sea is that which they want, viz., to become rich; they are going to sea for the sake of acquiring wealth."

Plato thus says that the immediate purposes of men are not their real purposes, but means to an end, means to welfare or for "good." He therefore continues: "It is in pursuit of good, then, that we go when we go, because we are after something better, and we stand still for the sake of the same good."

Now let us go a step farther than Socrates and Plato. Just as men's actions are truly done, not for the sake of some immediate purpose, but of the ulterior, of welfare, and just as their socalled ethical actions are justified only by the general wellbeing, so all things of the world are not substantiated by their immediate environment, but by the infinite universe. It is not the seed planted in the soil which is the cause of the growing plant, as the farmer thinks, but the Earth, the Sun, the winds, and the weather, in short, the whole of nature, and that includes the seed germ.

If we apply this reasoning to our special object, the faculty of understanding, we find that it is not a narrowly human, nor a transcendental, but a universal cosmic faculty. According to Homer, the immortal gods call things by other names than mortal men. But once you have grasped the concept of the absolute, you understand the language of the gods, you understand that the intellect by itself is but a minute particle, while in the interrelation with the universe it is an absolute and integral part of the universal absolute.

All things have a dual nature, all of them are limited parts of the unlimited, the inexhaustible, the unknowable. Just as all things are small and great, temporal and eternal, so all of them including the human mind are knowable and unknowable at the same time. We must not idolize the faculty of thought nor forget its divine nature. Man should be humble, but without bowing in doglike submission to a transcendental spirit, and he should be sustained by the sublime consciousness that his spirit is the true one, the spirit of universal truth.

Everything can be seen by eyes, including those of a hawk. Just as the eye is the instrument of vision, so the intellect is the instrument of thought. And just as spectacles and glasses are means of assisting the eye in seeing, so senses, experience, and experiments are means of assisting the intellect in understanding. With this equipment the intellect can assimilate everything in its conceptions. It understands "all," but "all" only in a relative sense. We understand all, just as we buy everything for money. We can buy only what is for sale. Reason and sunshine cannot be valued in money. We can see everything with eyes, and yet not everything. Sounds and smells cannot be seen. Just as everything is great and small, so everything is knowable and unknowable, according to the meaning given to "everything" in the language of men or gods. That word has the dual meaning of applying to any particle and to the whole universe. So is the human mind universal, but only a universal specialty.

Look at that magnificently colored carnation. You see the whole flower, and yet you do not see all of it. You do not see its scent nor its weight. In the human language "whole" means a relative whole, which is at the same time a part. Every particle of the universe is such a dual thing. But in the language of the gods, which is spoken by philosophy, only the absolute universe is whole.

When the subject under discussion is not the intellect, but some other part of the world, for instance the eyes, the universal concept of the absolute is not so important, because the faculty of seeing, like the faculty of wealth, is in little danger of being metaphysically abused.

One knows that eyes which can see around a corner, or through a block of iron, or which can perceive the scent of a carnation, are as meaningless as a white sorrel. Even though our eyes cannot see the invisible, that does not prevent them from being a universal instrument which can see everything, that is everything visible.

If you understand this, you will also see through the miserable wisdom of the professors which wallows on its belly in the dust and cries with the faithful: O Lord, O Lord! similarly to Du Bois-Reymond, who cries out: Ignorabimus! It is true that the human mind is an ignoramus in the sense that it is ever learning, because there is inexhaustible material in nature. There is also something unknowable in every particle of nature, just as there is something invisible in every carnation. But the unknowable in the sense used by those ignorant people who cannot understand the human mind because they have a transcendental monster in their mind, such a monstrous unknowable exists only in the imagination of the idolators to whom the true spirit reveals itself as little as the spirit of truth.

Just as surely as we know that there cannot be in heaven any knife without a blade and a handle, nor any black horses that are white, just so surely do we know that the faculty of understanding can never and nowhere be the absolute, but must always be a special faculty. The concept of understanding, like the concept of a knife, is limited to a definite instrument. There may be all kinds of knives and intellects, but nothing exists that has escaped from its own skin or from the limitation of its own particular concept.

By this standard you may measure the silly thought of those who speak transcendentally of an unlimited faculty of understanding. They haven't any right idea of the mind nor of the universe, of the conceivable nor of the inconceivable, otherwise they would not speak in such a nonsensical sense of the "Limits of Understanding." In short, you see that the relative limitation or absoluteness of reason can only be understood by means of the concept of the absolute.