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Updated: May 29, 2025
The Mysteries of the Gospel are above reason, so it is usually said, but they are not contrary to reason. I think that the same sense is not given to the word reason in the first part of this axiom as in the second: by the first is understood rather the reason of man, or reason in concreto and by the second reason in general, or reason in abstracto.
It is there, however, in our opinion, that it must be sought. Is it extension in general that we are considering in abstracto? Extension, we said, appears only as a tension which is interrupted. Or, are we considering the concrete reality that fills this extension?
It is true, with such a concession alone we have not gained anything directly. For in abstracto everything is finally conceivable which does not contradict the logical laws of reasoning even the basilisk and the mountain of diamonds in stories and fairy tales.
That I, when abstraction is made of these relations, have nothing more to think, does not destroy the conception of a thing as phenomenon, nor the conception of an object in abstracto, but it does away with the possibility of an object that is determinable according to mere conceptions, that is, of a noumenon.
Now the reason of this again is that apperception, and with it thought, antecedes all possible determinate arrangement of representations. Accordingly we think something in general and determine it on the one hand sensuously, but, on the other, distinguish the general and in abstracto represented object from this particular mode of intuiting it.
In general, we who are advocates or opponents of the war tend to pass judgment on it almost exclusively in abstracto. We conceive it as static and absolute. It may almost be said that as soon as a thinker concentrates upon a subject in order to study it, his first step is to kill it. To a great biologist all is movement, and movement is the material of his study.
Nor in such a world will it be true that the cause of the cause is unreservedly the cause of the effect; for if we follow lines of real causation, instead of contenting ourselves with Hume's and Kant's eviscerated schematism, we find that remoter effects are seldom aimed at by causal intentions, that no one kind of causal activity continues indefinitely, and that the principle of skipt intermediaries can be talked of only in abstracto.
But what gesticulation alone really conveys to me is the essential matter be it of a moral or intellectual nature of the whole conversation in abstracto. That is to say the quintessence, the true substance of the conversation, remains identical whatever has brought about the conversation, and consequently whatever the subject-matter of it may be.
And really, Mr Engels? Do you not believe that the American federal system is the best political form which statecraft has so far devised? You shake your head? What? You deny that the American federal system has ever been devised by statecraft at all? And that there are "best political social forms" in abstracto? But that is the last straw.
In what respect, I pray, can this statement be strengthened by any reasoning about the nature and distinctive essence of miracles 'in abstracto'? What purpose can be answered by any pretended definition of a miracle? If I met with a disputatious word-catcher, or logomachist, who sought to justify his unbelief on this ground, I should not hesitate to say "Never mind whether it is a miracle or no.
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