True, the world is vain, evil, ugly. But these are merely accidental phenomena, only forms and appendages of the world. Its eternity, truth, goodness, beauty, is substantial, existing, positive. Its negative is like the darkness which serves to make the light more brilliant, so that it may overcome the dark and shine so much more brightly. The spokesmen of the ruling classes are not open for such a sublime optimism, because they have the pessimistic duty of perpetuating misery and servitude. TWELFTH LETTER Logic, the science of correct thought, demands in the first place true, or in other words, reasonable thought. Logic deals with reason and truth. These two things have been endowed with a mysterious nature, while they obviously belong to the entire universe and its tangible nature. Reason and truth are not separated from the other things, are not things in themselves. There is no such thing. Philosophers who have looked for them in the depths of the human brain with their hands over their eyes and engaged in brown study, were on the wrong road. Proletarian logic differs from conventional logic in that it does not look for reason and truth behind the curtains of temples, nor in the brains of the learned, but it discovers them in the actual interconnection of all things and processes of nature. Preachers, professors, judges, and politicians are the leaders of "the wise men of Gotham," and since we have all passed our youth among them, we find it difficult to get rid of their confused logic. We owe much of our better insight to the famous philosophers. These men had many an eccentric notion, but on the whole they were reasonable fellows who followed the doctrine of the unreliability of the senses and the faith in the hidden truth and reason more in a theoretical than in a practical way. In practice they operated with open eyes and ears. Thus correct logic, although confused by queer notions, has been handed down to us from generation to generation. Preachers, professors, judges, and politicians cling to the confused notions, while we take the liberty to discard them. Now we recognize not only that reason and truth are connected with the world, but also that the universe is the supreme reason and truth, is that being which religion and philosophy have long been looking for, the most perfect being, which Plato called the true, good and beautiful, Kant God, freedom, and immortality, and Hegel the absolute. If he is an atheist who denies that perfection can be found in any individual, then I am an atheist. And if he is a believer in God who has the faith in the "most perfect being" with which not alone the theologists, but also Cartesius and Spinoza have occupied themselves so much, then I am one of the true children of God.