THE POSITIVE OUTCOME OF PHILOSOPHY Preface 327 I. Positive Knowledge as a Special Object 333 II. The Power of Perception Is Kin to the Universe 337 III. As to How the Intellect Is Limited and Unlimited 342 IV. The Universality of Nature 348 V. The Understanding as a Part of the Human Soul 354 VI. Consciousness Is Endowed With the Faculty of Knowing as Well as With the Feeling of the Universality of All Nature 363 VII. The Relationship or Identity of Spirit and Nature 369 VIII. Understanding Is Material 376 IX. The Four Principles of Logic 381 X. The Function of Understanding on the Religious Field 393 XI. The Distinction Between Cause and Effect Is only One of the Means to Facilitate Understanding 401 XII. Mind and Matter: Which Is Primary, Which Is Secondary? 409 XIII. The Extent to Which the Doubts of the Possibility of Clear and Accurate Understanding Have Been Overcome 418 XIV. Continuation of the Discussion on the Difference Between Doubtful and Evident Understanding 428 XV. Conclusion 436 INTRODUCTION THE POSITION AND SIGNIFICANCE OF J. DIETZGEN'S PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS BY DR. ANTON PANNEKOEK In the history of philosophy we see before us the consecutive forms of the thoughts of the ruling classes of society on life and on the world at large. This class thought appears after the primitive communism has given way to a society with class antagonisms, at a stage when the wealth of the members of the ruling class gave them leisure time and thus stimulated them to turn their attention to the productions of the mind. The beginning of this thought is found in classic Greece. But it assumed its clearest and best developed form when the modern bourgeoisie had become the ruling class in capitalistic Europe and the thinkers gave expression to the ideas of this class. The characteristic mark of these ideas is dualism, that is to say the misunderstood contrast between thinking and being, between nature and spirit, the result of the mental unclearness of this class and of its incapacity to see the things of the world in their true interconnection. This mental state is but the expression of the division of mankind into classes and of the uncomprehended nature of social production ever since it became a production of goods for exchange.