BENEDETTO CROCE (continued 4)

The definition as answer to a question and solution of a problem.

For every definition is the answer to a question, the solution of a problem. Did we not ask questions and set problems, there would be no occasion for giving any definition. Why should we give them? What need could there be? The definition is an act of the spirit and every act of the spirit is conditioned. Without contradiction, there can be no agreement; without the shock of multiplicity there can be no unity; without the travail of doubt that calls for peace, there can be no affirmation of the true. Not only does the answer presuppose the question; but every answer implies a certain question. The answer must be in harmony with the question; otherwise, it would not be an answer, but the avoiding of an answer. In reply to a question of a certain kind, we should turn our deaf ear, as the saying is, or reply with a blow. This means that the nature of the question colours the answer and that a definition taken in its concreteness is determined by the problem which gives it rise. The definition varies with the problem.

Individual and historical conditionedness of every question and problem.

But the question, the problem, the doubtis always individually conditioned. The doubt of the child is not that of the adult, the doubt of the uncultured man is not that of the man of culture, or the doubt of the novice that of the learned. Further, the doubt of an Italian is not that of a German, and the doubt of a German of the year 1800 is not that of a German of the year 1900. Indeed, the doubt formulated by an individual in a given moment, is not that formulated by the same individual a moment after. It is sometimes said by way of simplification, that the same question has been put by very many men, in various countries and at various times. But in the very act of saying this, we simplify. In reality, every question differs from every other question. Every definition, though it may seem to be the same and bounded with certain definite words, which seem to remain unchanged and constant, differs in reality from every other, because the words, even when they seem to be materially the same, are in effect different, according to the spiritual differences of those who pronounce them. Each of these is an individual, and on that account each finds himself in circumstances that are individually determined. "Virtue is the habit of moral actions," is a formula which can be pronounced a hundred times. But if it be seriously pronounced as a definition of virtue each of those hundred times, it answers to a hundred psychological situations, more or less different, and is in reality not one, but a hundred definitions.

It will be replied that the concept remains the same through all these definitions, like a man who changes his clothes a hundred times. But (setting aside the fact that even the man who changes his clothes a hundred times does not remain the same) the truth is that the relation between concept and definition is not the same as that between a man and his clothes. No concept exists save in so far as it is thought and enclosed in words, or in so far as it is defined. If the definitions vary, the concept itself varies. There are, certainly, variations of the concept, of that which is, par excellence, self-identical. These are the life of the concept, not of the representation. But the concept does not exist outside its life, and every thinking of it is a phase of this life, never its overcoming, since however far we go, it is never possible to swim outside water, or however high we climb, to fly outside air.

The definition as also historical judgment. Unity of truths of reason and of fact.

If we posit individual or historical conditions for every thinking of the concept, or of every definition (conditions which constitute the doubt, the problem, the question, to which the definition replies), we must admit that the definition, which contains the answer and affirms the concept, at the same time illumines by so doing those individual and historical conditions, that group of facts, from which it comes. It illumines, that is to say, qualifies it as what it is, grasps it as subject by giving it a predicate, and judges it. And since the fact is always individual, it forms an individual judgment. This means just that every definition is also an individual judgment. And this agrees with the hypothesis we framed: it is the assumption that seemed doubtful and now is proved. Truth of reason and truth of fact, analytic and synthetic judgments, judgments of definition and individual judgments, do not exist as distinct from one another: they are abstractions. The logical act is unique: it is the identity of definition and of individual judgment, the thinking of the pure concept.

Considerations confirming this.

Such a theory as this, although it goes against the ordinary way of thinking (though this, in its turn, suffers from its own contradictions), can be made convincing even to ordinary thought, when it is led to reflect upon what is implicitly understood in any judgments of definition that are pronounced. For example, definitions have always in view some particular adversary; they change according to time and circumstances, and those definitions that we felt constrained to give, at one stage of our mental development, we abandon at another, not because we judge them to be erroneous, but because they seem to us to be inopportune or commonplace. These and other facts, easy to observe, would not be possible, unless judgment of definite situations intervened to produce the change. And this judgment, though we may try to think of it as preceding or as following each one of those acts of definition, in reality neither precedes nor follows them, but on the contrary presents itself to the mind as contemporaneous, or rather coincident and identical with the act of definition. Every one who attains to a conceptual truth, every one, for instance, who achieves a definite doctrine of art or of morality, is immediately aware in himself that henceforth he knows more adequately not only the kingdom of ideas but also the kingdom of things. He realizes that as soon as an idea becomes more clear ipso facto it makes clearer the things out of whose vortex and tumult it comes. The star-gazer who forgets the earth, will be an astronomer, but certainly not a philosopher. In the act of thought, in the world of ideas, earth and sky are fused in one. Whoever looks well at the sky sees in it (miraculously!) the earth.

For the rest, the identity of definition and individual judgment, which we have demonstrated by various processes that are usually called negative, hypothetical, or inductive and based upon observation, is also confirmed by the process called deductive. For if the thinking of the concept be a degree superior to pure representation, and if in the degrees of the spirit the superior contain in itself the inferior, it is evident that representation as well as conceptual elements must always be found in the concept. But it is also evident that we can never find them distinct or distinguishable, but mingled in such a way that every distinction in them must be introduced solely by a deliberate act. The logical act is certainly spoken, represented, individualized. But when it is split up into concept and individual judgment, one of two things must happen: either we make an empirical and external distinction, of more or less; or two monstrosities are asserted: a non-individualized concept, which therefore does not exist, and a judgment not thought, and therefore non-existent as judgment, and existing, at the most, as pure intuition.

Critique of the false distinction between formal and material truths.

As our distinction between definitions and individual judgments was provisional, so also we must regard the consequence that we showed to issue from it—the partial justification of the doctrine of affirmations formally (logically) true and materially (individually) false. In reality, an error of fact implies a more or less inaccurate and erroneous definition, and an error of definition implies an error of fact. Thus this distinction also retains only an empirical meaning useful for the rough distinction of certain classes of errors from certain others. And resuming another previous observation, we must also say that, strictly speaking, it must be held impossible to err as to facts through the use of pure concepts, since the penetration of concepts, however great one may think it, is also always penetration of facts. This formula, too, cannot have anything but an empirical meaning, to indicate a certain type of errors of concept and of fact, which is popularly called the use of concepts and the use of facts, whereas it is the abuse of both.

Platonic and Aristotelian men.

In ordinary life it is customary to distinguish between those who cultivate ideas and those who cultivate facts, between Platonic and Aristotelian men. But if the Platonists seriously cultivate ideas, they cultivate facts and are also Aristotelians, and the Aristotelians cultivate ideas and are Platonists. Here, too, the difference is practical and extrinsic, not substantial; so much so that we are often astonished both at the singular clear-sightedness and penetration of the actual situation manifested by cultivators of ideas, and at the profound philosophy which we discover in the pretended cultivators of facts.

Theory of the application of the concepts, true for abstract concepts and false for pure concepts.

Hence the further consequence, that we must avoid the formula which speaks of the application of concepts, as, for instance, that in the individual judgment the concept is applied to the intuition. To say this, is, as a saying, innocuous, since like many others, it is metaphorical; but the doctrine implied in it, or that may be suggested by it (and that is indeed rarely separated from it), is altogether erroneous. The concept is not applied to the intuition, because it does not exist, even for a moment, outside of the intuition, and the judgment is a primitive act of the spirit, it is the logical spirit itself. If that formula has been successful, the reason for its success must usually be sought in the theory of the pseudoconcepts. Even these, in relation to the question which engages us now, and in so far as they are empirical concepts, are indistinguishable from individual pseudojudgments. To construct an empirical concept is equivalent to pronouncing that the objects a, b, c, d, etc., belong to a definite class. The two acts of the construction of the class and of effectual classification are only to be distinguished in an abstract manner. In conformity with this, we must now correct the theory that we have given above. But on the other hand, in so far as they are abstract concepts, they are void of all representative content, and therefore constituted outside of every individual judgment. They cannot of themselves give rise to such judgments. Before they can be united to them, we must apply them to individual judgments, elaborated into pseudojudgments, or made homogeneous by the process of classification. And in truth, 'not only the doctrine of application, but also the distinctions between analytic and synthetic judgments, between definitions and perceptions, between truths of reason and of fact, between necessity and contingency, find their confirmation in being referred to abstract concepts, as distinct from empirical. The same may be also said of the other doctrine, which distinguishes between affirmations that are formally true and materially false. Two griffins plus three griffins make five griffins. This is formally true, since it is true that two plus three equals five; but it is materially false, because griffins do not exist. Numbers and their laws would, for example, be truths of reason, necessary, a priori, in analytical judgments and pure definitions; truths derived from experience would be truths of fact, contingent, a posteriori, in synthetic and individual judgments. But though this conception may have currency in a field where, properly speaking, there is neither thought nor truth, in the field of truth and of thought the terms of both series are found in the corresponding terms of the other. Analysis apart from synthesis is as unthinkable as synthesis apart from analysis. In the same way we can empirically distinguish intention and action in the practical spirit. But in reality pure intention outside effectual action, is not even intention, because it is nothing. And an action beyond and without intention is nothing, for practical reality is the identity of intention and action. Here, too, theoretical spirit and practical spirit correspond at every point.

II

THE LOGICAL, A PRIORI SYNTHESIS

The identity of the judgment of definition and of the individual judgment, as synthesis a priori.

If analysis apart from synthesis, the a priori apart from the a posteriori, be inconceivable, and if synthesis apart from analysis, the a posteriori apart from the a priori, be equally inconceivable, then the true act of thought will be a synthetic analysis, an analytic synthesis, an a posteriori-a priori, or, if it be preferred, an a priori synthesis.

In this manner, the identity that we have established between the judgment of definition and the individual judgment comes to assume a name celebrated in the annals of modern philosophy. And by assuming it at this point, it is also able to affirm, since it has already demonstrated, the truth of the a priori synthesis, and to determine its exact content.

Objections raised by abstractionists and empiricists against the a priori synthesis.

This is not the place to enter again into the objections which the Kantian concept elicited (indeed could not fail to elicit): objections which in Italy too gave rise to very acute attempts at confutation, and which ended in the partial absorption of that concept into the mental organism of its opponents. Suffice it to say that all the objections to the a priori synthesis, when thoroughly examined, seem to be derived, as was to be expected, from the upholders of the two one-sided doctrines which were surpassed by the synthesis. Thus the dogmatists or abstractionists believed the concept to be thinkable apart from or above the facts (simple analysis); the empiricists perceived only the representative element and claimed to obtain the concept from mere facts (simple synthesis). Both failed to explain perception, or the individual judgment. The former found it to arise from the external and almost accidental contact between pure concepts and given facts; the latter sometimes assumed it without explanation, sometimes confused it with pure intuition, if not altogether with sensibility and emotion. It can be said that whoever does not accept the a priori synthesis is outside the path of modern philosophy, indeed of all philosophy. Strive to find or to rediscover that path, unless you wish to incur the punishment of trifling with empiricism, of lying to yourself with mysticism, or of wandering in the void with scholasticism.

False interpretation of the a priori synthesis.

Instead of noting and of examining all the objections made to the a priori synthesis (which we have already substantially discussed in the development of our treatise), it will be of assistance to add some explanations, which will prevent false interpretations of that concept. These false interpretations sometimes (as often happens) mingle with the true even in the philosopher who discovered it, and confer force and authority upon several of the objections to the very reality of the a priori synthesis.

A priori synthesis in general and logical a priori synthesis.

In the first place, in accordance with the formula given in Logic we must not speak of the a priori synthesis in general, but of the logical a priori synthesis. The a priori synthesis belongs to all the forms of the Spirit; indeed, the Spirit, considered universally, is nothing but a priori synthesis. The synthesis is operative in the æsthetic activity, not less than in the logical. For how could a poet create a pure intuition, if he did not proceed from a given fact, from some passionate moment of his own, conditioned and constituted in a particular way? Without something to intuite and to express could there ever be a poet? And would he be a poet, if he were to repeat that something mechanically, without transforming it into pure intuition? In his pure intuition, there is and there is not matter: not as brute matter, but as formed matter, or form. Thus it is said with reason that art is pure form, or that matter and form, content and form, in art are wholly one (a priori æsthetic synthesis). The a priori synthesis is not less operative in the practical activity than in the æsthetic and logical (that is, in the theoretic activity). It is impossible to will without material to will, or to will outside the given material. The practical man accepts actual conditions, and at the same time transforms them with his volitional act, creating something new, in which those conditions are and are not. They are, because the action achieved is in relation to them; they are not, because being new, it has transformed them. A priori synthesis, in general, then, means spiritual activity; not abstract but concrete spiritual activity, that is to say, the spirit itself, which is condition to itself and conditioned by itself. Thus the a priori synthesis, which is constituted by the coincidence or identity of the judgment of definition with the individual judgment, is not a priori synthesis in general, but logical a priori synthesis.

Non-logical a priori syntheses.

Having clearly established this point we are enabled to eliminate the confusion caused by the citation of certain spiritual formations, which do not correspond with that logical act, as examples of a priori synthetic judgments. Such for instance is the case of the famous example: "5 + 7 = 12," concerning which it was long disputed whether it were an a priori synthetic judgment or simply analytical; the synthetic element being found or not found in it, according to the point of view. The same thing has occurred in the case of other examples of a different nature, as in the judgment: "Snow is white." Here the dispute has been as to whether it be a priori synthetic, or simply synthetic. The truth is, on the contrary, that in neither of these two cases is there logical a priori synthesis, because the judgment "5 + 7= 12" is the expression of abstract or numerical concepts, and "snow is white" is the expression of empirical or classificatory concepts. This amounts to saying that both are products, not of a logical nature, nor of a theoretic nature, but, as we know, of an arbitrary or practical nature. For this reason, we have denied the very possibility of simply analytic or simply synthetic judgments in pure logic. On the other hand, both these kinds of spiritual formations are a priori syntheses, precisely because, being spiritual formations (though of a practical nature), they cannot fail to be produced by a creative (synthetic) act of the spirit. This explains why they sometimes appear as a priori syntheses, sometimes as something altogether different from the a priori synthesis. It suffices to add to the affirmative solution the adjective "practical" and to the negative the adjective "logical" to obtain agreement and truth.

The a priori synthesis, as synthesis, not of opposites but of distincts.

A question of no less importance is whether the logical a priori synthesis (we might say, the a priori synthesis in general) is to be conceived as a synthesis of opposites; if, in other words, intuition and concept, matter and form, exist in the a priori synthesis in the same way as Being and not Being exist in true Being, which is Becoming; or as good and evil, true and false, and so on, exist in the special forms of the Spirit. The affirmative reply to this question finds, as is well known, its chief representative in the doctrine of Hegel. We do not wish to deny the great truth contained in this doctrine, in so far as by considering the a priori synthesis as a synthesis of opposites, it insists upon this essential point: that intuition and concept matter and form, do not exist in the logical act as two separable elements, merely externally connected. Outside the synthesis the subject does not exist as subject, and the predicate does not exist in any way. We must banish altogether the idea of the a priori synthesis, conceived as the reuniting of two facts existing separately. But having recognized the true side of the doctrine, we must correct the inexactness it contains. This arises from the confusion already criticized, by which the relation of opposition is unduly extended to distinct concepts, and the unity of effectual distinction is confused with the dialectic unity, which declares itself synthetic, only in so far as it makes war against an abstract distinction.[1] The a priori synthesis is a unity of distinct concepts and not of opposites. That which is the material of the logical synthesis and which outside it has no logical character (is not subject), yet in another and inferior grade of the spirit is form and not matter, and is called intuition. Hence, there is distinction and unity together; form is not without matter; but the new matter was already form and, therefore, had its own matter. The logical a priori synthesis presupposes an æsthetic a priori synthesis. When considered in the logical sphere, this is certainly no longer a synthesis, but an indispensable element of the new synthesis. But outside the logical sphere, it possesses its own proper and peculiar autonomy. In the logical act intuition is blind without the concept, as the concept is void without the intuition. But pure intuition is not blind, because it has its own proper intuitive light. The concept contains the intuition, but the intuition transfigured. It is a synthesis, not of itself and its opposite, but of itself and its distinct concept which is indistinguishable from itself, save by an act of abstraction. In this way we satisfy the demand expressed in the formula of the synthesis as unity of opposites, and at the same time repress its tendency to usurpation. This tendency leads to the rejection of the concept of æsthetic synthesis, in favour of the concept of logical synthesis; it means the negation of art by philosophy, not only in the philosophical field (which would be just), but in the whole spiritual field. Extending itself from this to other usurpations and led on by the mirage of an ill-understood unity, it claims all the other syntheses for logical synthesis, and produces a great spiritual desert, in which logical thought itself at length dies of starvation.

The category in the judgment. Difference between category and innate idea.

The logical element, the pure concept or judgment of definition considered in itself, is given the name of category in the logical a priori synthesis. This term is nothing but the Greek equivalent for the word "predicate," which we have hitherto employed. It has been asked if the category is what used to be called an inniate idea. The answer must be that it is both that and also something profoundly different. The innate idea was indeed the category, but the category taken as possessed and thought prior to experience, according to the view that we have described as abstract or dogmatic. First the music, then the words; first definitions, then individual judgments or perceptions. The category, on the contrary, is neither the mother nor the first-born. It is born at one birth with the individual judgment, not as its twin, but as that judgment itself. From this aspect the category or the a priori is not the innate, but the perpetually new-born. From this we see the vanity of the question, whether the judgment or the concept be logically prior, not only in the relation, which we have already examined, of concept with verbal form (judgment of definition), but also in the relation of concept with individual judgment. We can say indifferently that to think is to conceive, or that to think is to judge, because the two formulæ are reduced to one. Equally vain is the question as to whether the categories precede the judgment or are obtained from it. They not only do not precede the judgment, but are not even obtained from it. We never issue forth from the judgment, as we never issue forth from reality and history.

The a priori synthesis, the destruction of transcendency, and the objectivity of knowledge.

A final explanation, not less important than those already given, concerns the importance of the logical a priori synthesis. This too has been diminished by the very man who discovered and defined that mental act, and even more by those who have repeated him, without being capable of reviving again the moment of discovery, and of understanding the intimate reasons that brought it about. When the concept was placed outside and prior to the representative element, and thought prior to and outside the world, so that the former was applied to the latter, the world was bound to appear to be something inferior to the concept, a degradation or an impure contact, which thought had to undergo. When, on the other hand, the representative element was placed outside and prior to the concept, the latter seemed to be inferior to it, almost as though it were an expedient for taking hold of the world, without truly being able to do so, and thus in its turn a degradation or defilement of it. Hence the sigh that we hear already in antiquity and more strongly in modern times: oh, if words (that is to say concepts, because concepts were called words) were not, how directly should we apprehend things! Oh, if thought were not, how vigorously should we embrace genuine reality!

In the first instance, reality is inferior to the concept, in the second the concept to reality; but in both alike, the two elements are always thought—as mutually external and truth as undiscoverable. Thus both these one-sided tendencies end in mystery. According to the former, the world is created by a God external to it, and will be disintegrated when it shall seem good to him, while the latter holds that the truth of things is plunged in impenetrable darkness. But granted the idea of the a priori synthesis, reality is not inferior to thought nor thought to reality, nor is the one external to the other. Representations are docile to thought, and thought conceals representations even less than the tenuous and scanty veil concealed the beauty of Alcina. The interpenetration of the two elements is perfect, and they constitute unity. The false belief in the externality and heterogeneity of reality and thought can only arise when for the pure concept and the a priori synthesis there are substitutes, either abstract concepts with their related analytic judgments, which are void of all representative content, or empirical concepts with their related and merely synthetic judgments, which are without logical form. The value of the a priori synthesis lies in its efficacy in putting an end to doubts as to the objectivity of thought and the cognizability of reality, and in making triumphant the power of thought over the real, which is the power of the real to know itself.

Power of the a priori synthesis never known to its discoverer.

But this efficacy of the a priori synthesis remained obscure to its discoverer (and most obscure to his orthodox followers). To such an extent was this the case, that even to Kant the category did not seem to be immanent in the real and to be the thinking of its reality, but an extrinsic, though necessary adjunct, an inevitable alteration introduced into reality to make it thinkable, an anticipatory renunciation of the knowledge of genuine reality. Reality itself lay outside every category and judgment, a thing in itself. Even in Kant, the a priori synthesis was confused with simple analysis and with simple synthesis. These being manipulations of the real, extrinsic and not intrinsic, practical and not logical, useful, but without truth, so the a priori synthesis appeared to him to be an expedient to which man has recourse and cannot but have recourse, but which constitutes, not his power, but his weakness. Kant, too, dreamed of an ideal of knowledge, which was not a priori synthesis, but the intellectual intuition, the perfect adequacy of thought to reality, unattainable by the human spirit. He did not perceive that the intellectual intuition, which he longed for as an impossible ideal, was precisely the continuous operation of the a priori synthesis, nor did he think that what is necessary and insuperable cannot be defective. He never knew that the a priori synthesis, which he had discovered, is alone the true concept and the true judgment, and, therefore, operates in an altogether different way from simple analysis and simple synthesis, which are neither concept nor judgment; nor finally that if these last postulate a thing in itself, the a priori synthesis cannot postulate it, because it has it in itself.

To understand all the richness of the a priori synthesis is to pay honour to the genius of Emmanuel Kant; but it is also to recognize that the systematic construction of Kant showed itself altogether unequal to the great principle he laid down, but whose value he insufficiently estimated.

III

LOGIC AND THE DOCTRINE OF THE CATEGORIES

The demand for a complete table of the categories.

When the definition of the a priori synthesis and of the category has been attained, it is usual to demand of logical Science (and this will be demanded also of our exposition) that it should say how many and of what sort are the categories, how they are connected among themselves, i.e. that it should draw up a table of them.

A request extraneous to Logic. Logical and real categories.

Logic, in our opinion, should reject this demand, the origin of which lies in the confusion between thought in general and thought as the science of thought. The categories are certainly affirmed in the individual judgment, but Logic, as the science of thought, does not undertake to formulate judgments which will say what are the predicable terms, the ultimate or pure concepts, the categories, with which reality is thought. Logic cannot claim to substitute itself for the other philosophic sciences and itself to solve all the problems which offer themselves to thought as to the nature of reality. Its scope is to define categories and to formulate judgments only on that aspect of Reality, which is logical thought. It is, therefore, under the obligation to face the question as to whether there be logical categories, supreme concepts or supreme predicables from the point of view of logic, and if there be, to indicate and to deduce them. It is not obliged to indicate and to deduce all the supreme predicables and categories.

The uniqueness of the logical category: the concept.

Now we have already treated of the question as to the categories of Logic and have solved it, partly affirmatively, partly in the negative. That is to say, we have denied to Logic a multiplicity of categories, since the three fundamental categories, usually given as concept, judgment, and syllogism, have been revealed to be identical. The others, derived from formalist Logic and relating to classes of concepts, to forms of judgments and to figures of the syllogism (and even these three preceding, if they are taken as separable or distinguishable), have been shown to be empirical and arbitrary. Finally, those that were based upon the gnoseology of the pseudoconcepts have shown themselves to be extraneous to pure Logic. On the other hand, we have affirmed the category proper to Logic,—the unique category to which it gives rise. It has been defined as the pure concept, at once judgment of definition and individual judgment, the logical a priori synthesis. Thus the enquiry can be looked upon as exhaustive as regards this part of the subject.

The other categories. No longer logical, but real. Systems of categories.

A glance at the tables of categories that have appeared in the course of the history of philosophy, from that of Aristotle, which is the first, at least among the conspicuous, to that of Stuart Mill, or if it be preferred, to the Kategorienlehre of E. von Hartmann, which is the last, or among the last, shows at once that the other categories, which have been described as logical categories, can be reduced to verbal variants of this unique one of the pure concept, or belong to other aspects of the spirit and of reality, as distinct from that of logical thought. For if in the Aristotelian table the ousia and the poion, substance and quality, to some extent denote the subject and the predicate of the judgment, that is to say, the abstract elements of the a priori synthesis: the poson, on the other hand, appeals to the processes of enumeration and of measurement, the pou and the poté to the determination of space and time, the poiein and the paschein to the principles of practical activity, and so on. The Kantian table seems to refer, or to mean to refer, to logical thought; but that does not prevent the appearance in it of traces of the principles of mathematical, naturalistic, heuristic, and other processes. Furthermore, in the Kantian philosophy, the whole system of the categories is to be deduced, not from the transcendental Logic alone, but also from the transcendental Æsthetic (space and time), and from the Critique of Practical Reason and Judgment, which all lead to functions or forms, operating as spiritual syntheses and reappearing as categories in judgments. Finally, we must not neglect the Kantian metaphysical categories of Physics.

The Hegelian system of the categories and other later systems.

All this becomes clearer in the doctrine of Hegel, where the categories are not only those of logical thought or subjective thought, concept, judgment, syllogism; but also those of quality, quantity and measure, essence, phenomenon and reality, with their subforms and transitions, and those of the objective concept, mechanism, chemism, and teleology, and those of the Idea, life, knowing, and the absolute Idea. The Hegelian, Kuno Fischer, makes certain declarations in his Logic to which it is expedient to give heed. Following the example of the master, he was induced to include knowing and willing among the categories; "It may at first sight seem strange (he says), that knowing and willing should appear here as logico-metaphysical concepts, as categories. Knowledge has need of categories; but is knowledge itself a category? Willing belongs to Psychology and Morality, not to Logic and Metaphysic. It seems, then, that the categories lose themselves now in Physics or Physiology, by means of concepts such as those of mechanism and organism, now in Psychology and Ethics, with the concepts of knowing and of willing. Objections of this sort have often been made. We have shown that the concept must be thought as object, and that the concept of object demands that of mechanism: the justification of the thing resides in this proof. Willing and knowing are indeed categories. If the test, by which we recognize the categories, consists in that they are valid, not only for certain objects, but for all, and in that they should express the universal nature of things, it is not difficult to see in what a profoundly significant way knowing and willing emerge triumphantly from such a test. They belong not only to what are called the faculties of the human spirit, but in truth to the very conditions of the world. If the world must be understood as end it must also be understood as willing; for the end without the willing is nothing. ... If knowing and willing were only a small human province of the world, they would certainly not be categories. Their concept would belong not to metaphysic, but to the anthropological sciences. Since they are, on the contrary, both of them cosmic principles, universal concepts, without which the concept of objects and of the world cannot be thoroughly thought and known, for that reason they necessarily have the value of categories. And since, in truth, they compose the concept of the world, they are the supreme categories."[1] This argument amounts to saying, that whenever a concept is truly universal (not restricted to this or that class of manifestations of reality and therefore empirical), whenever a concept is a pure concept, it is always a category. This thesis is most exact, but it amounts to excluding such a search from pure Logic, which does not give the concepts or concept of reality, but only the concept of the concept. The attempt of Hegel to embrace the totality of the categories was not understood and was abandoned at a later date, and a return was made in some sort to the categories of the theoretic and practical—theoretic spirit alone—(von Hartmann gives them in his fundamental tripartition of the categories into sensibility, reflective thought and speculative thought). But the tendency to totality reappeared, in an elementary form, in Stuart Mill, who opposed to the Aristotelian table his own, divided into the three classes of sentiments (sensations, thoughts, emotions, volitions), of substances (bodies and spirits), and of attributes (quality, relation, quantity): a vertiginous regression to an infantile conception, which yet sought to embrace in its own way the whole of reality.

The logical order of the predicates or categories.

The doctrine of the categories has been introduced and retained in Logic, not only because of the confusion between the thought of thought and thought in general, which has just been explained, but also because of another confusion, which must now be explained, as it has far deeper roots and far greater importance. It has been and may be argued in this way. It is true that the categories are nothing but simply the concepts of reality; but these concepts, acting as predicates, are presented in logic in a necessary order, which it is the task of logical Science to deduce. In determining reality by means of thought, we begin with a first predicate, for instance being, judging that reality is. This judgment immediately shows itself insufficient, whence it becomes necessary to determine it with a second predicate and to judge that reality both is and is not, or is becoming. This predicate of becoming appears in its turn vague and abstract, and it becomes necessary to determine reality as quality, then as quantity, measure, essence, existence, mechanism, teleology, life, reflexion, will, idea, in short with all the predicates that exhaust the concept of reality.

Illusion as to the logical reality of this order.

But we know that this order, this supposed succession, is illusory and is simply the product of abstract analysis. In the predicate to which verbal prominence is given, there is concentrated or understood every predicate, because in every judgment complete reality[2] is predicated of the subject. Moreover this is shown just by the observation, which reveals the insufficiency of an isolated and abstract predicate, and requires for sufficiency nothing less than the totality of the predicates, the full concept of the Real, of the Spirit or of the Idea. The concept of Reality, of Spirit or the Idea, can without doubt be developed, in its unity and in its distinctions; but (let us yet again repeat) logical Science has for its object, not the effective unity and distinction of the Real, but the concept of unity and distinction..

The necessity of the order of the predicates, not founded in Logic in particular, but in the whole of Philosophy.

The ordering of the variety of the predicates, their gradation according to their greater or less adequacy to reality, arises from the fact that disputes as to reality show themselves as one-sided affirmations of this or that predicate or group of predicates, coupled with the neglect or negation of others, which are not less indispensable. When, therefore, we attack such one-sidedness and affirm the complete indivisibility of the predicates, the single predicates, the objects of the one-sided affirmations, are scrutinized one after the other, in order to demonstrate their insufficiency, and for this very reason a certain order is given to them. This order is, without doubt, necessary, because the possibility of errors, or of one-sided thoughts, is a consequence of the distinctions, in which the unity of the Real lives, and which are necessary to it. But for this very reason the order must be sought, not in logical Science, but in the total conception of Reality. For instance, in researches concerning the ethical concept, only he who thinks, not the concept of the concept (logical science), but the concept of ethical activity (ethical science), will be able to determine what one-sided concepts are there possible and what is their order. Only he who thinks a whole philosophy will be able to determine how many and what and how connected are the one-sided and erroneous modes of philosophy. This cannot be found in the concept of the concept; or rather only those erroneous modes are there found which derive from a one-sided thinking of the concept of the concept. This we shall see in its place. The order of the categories in the sense indicated is certainly not subjective and arbitrary, as a didactic ordering of them would be, a πρότερον prὸs ἡμᾶς; it is a πρότερον φύσει. But since this first by nature is identical with the whole concept of Reality, it is not wholly contained in the concept of Logic.

False distinction of philosophy into two spheres, Metaphysic and Philosophy, rational philosophy and real philosophy, etc., due to the confusion between Logic and doctrine of the categories.

If the confusion between Logic and the Doctrine of the Categories, or between the thinking of the logical category and the thinking of the other categories, had produced no other effect than that of introducing into books of Logic a method of treatment that exceeds their bounds, the evil would not be great. It would chiefly affect literary harmony and clarity of didactic exposition. But from that confusion there has sometimes as rational Philosophy and real Philosophy, sometimes as Gnoseology and Anthropology (or Cosmology), sometimes as Logic and System of Philosophy, and so on. The conception of Reality is thus twice described: once as part of Logic (the Doctrine of the Categories, Ontology, etc.); and again as effective or applied Philosophy. Philosophy is divided into a Prologue to Philosophy and Philosophy, or into Philosophy and a Conclusion to Philosophy. But Philosophy, although it is distinguishable into philosophies (for example, Æsthetic, Logic, Economic and Ethic), is this distinction itself, or the unity immanent in it. It never gives rise to a duality of grades. It is never prologue, development and conclusion, being, at its every point, prologue, development and conclusion. As from empirical and formalist Logic arose the idea of a Logic which should not be philosophy, but an organ or instrument or rule or law for the rest of philosophy; so from the confusion of Logic with the Doctrine of the Categories has arisen the idea of a Logic, or Metaphysic, or general Philosophy, or whatever else it may be called, which should be opposed to or above the rest of philosophy. But the Science of thought, Logic, is at once thought and effective philosophy; it is thought itself which in thinking the Real, thinks itself and places itself, as logical Science, in the place which belongs to it in the system of the Real.

Philosophy and pure logic: overcoming of the duality.

It may seem that in this way thought and reality are again divided and a metaphysical dualism created. But the exact opposite is the truth. When Philosophy is distinguished into general and particular, into rational and real, into pure and applied, into Logic-metaphysic and into Philosophy of nature and of man, an irreparable breach is made, which can only be concealed or attenuated in a more or less ingenious manner. But when that doubleness of degree is destroyed (and thought thinking the real thereby thinks itself), and in the construction of Philosophy, the Philosophy of philosophy, namely Logic, is constructed, the dualism is for ever overcome. This thought is the thinking of the distinctions, which the real presents; but to think distinctions and to think unity is, as has been already demonstrated, the same thing.

SECOND PART

PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY AND THE NATURAL AND MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES

I

THE FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE DIVISIONS OF KNOWLEDGE

Summary of results as to the forms of acquaintance.

The result of the preceding enquiries into the constitution of the cognitive spirit can be resumed, for mnemonic purposes, by saying that there are two pure theoretic forms, the intuition and the concept, the second of which is subdivided into judgment of definition and individual judgment, and that there are two modes of practical elaboration of knowledge, or of formation of pseudoconcepts, the empirical concept and the abstract concept, from which are derived the two subforms of judgment of classification and of judgment of enumeration. If the methods in use in the mediæval schools or in those of Port-Royal (which were not without their utility) were still in vogue, we should be able to embody these results in a few mnemonic verses, which would render the distinctions we have made easy to impart.

Easy to impart, but not understood, or worse, ill understood; because, as we know, both the scheme of classification here adopted and the arithmetical determination of two or more forms are not truly logical thoughts adequate to the representation of the process of the real and of thought. Our grouping constructed to help the memory must therefore be interpreted with the aid of the developments offered above, and not only corrected, but altogether resolved in them. In these developments, the intuition and the concept have appeared as two forms, not capable of co-ordination, but both distinct and united. The judgment of definition and the individual judgment have appeared as logically identical, divisible only from an external or literary point of view, that is to say, by the greater or less importance attached either to the predicate or to the subject. Further, the formation of the pseudoconcepts is outside theory, although founded upon theoretic elements; it belongs essentially, not to the cognitive spirit, but to the practical spirit. And if their subdivision into empirical and abstract concepts is necessary, the necessity is founded upon the fact, that only in these two modes can the concept be practically developed, when its synthetic unity is arbitrarily split up into two one-sided forms. Finally, the two fundamental forms of the spirit themselves, the theoretic and the practical, are not co-ordinate with one another, nor capable of arithmetical enumeration. The one is in the other, the one is correlative to the other, because the one presupposes the other.

Non-existence of technical forms, and of composite forms.

No other cognitive or practical-cognitive forms, or other subforms, beyond those which we have defined, are conceivable. The technical knowledge, which is discussed in some treatises on Logic, is nothing but knowledge itself, which is always and entirely technical, preceding and conditioning the action and practice of life. The same may be said of normative knowledge, by which, as with technical, it is especially meant in ordinary language to designate the whole of the pseudoconcepts. But this is erroneous, when we consider that such knowledge constitutes the true immediate precedent condition of action. The pseudoconcepts must be retranslated into individual judgments, in order that they may be able to form the basis of action, for which, as is justly remarked, we require direct and concrete perceptions of actual situations. Formulæ and abstractions aid perception only in an indirect and subsidiary manner.

The so-called combined or composite forms in which two or more original forms are brought together, must also be rejected, for the reason already given, that composite concepts do not exist in pure Logical thought, and consequently cannot exist in the Science of Logic, which is the science of that thought. The composite form, then, is an empirical and arbitrary determination, as may be observed, for instance, in the case in which we speak of an empirico-philosophic concept, that is, of the union (which is a successive enunciation) of an empirical concept and a philosophic concept.

Identity of cognitive forms and forms of knowledge. Objections to it.

The cognitive forms having thus been established, we pass on to the question, what and how many and of what kind are the forms of knowledge. The reply must be that the forms of knowledge (for example, History and the natural Sciences) cannot be anything but identical with the cognitive forms, and of the same kind and same number as they. The first of these statements finds itself at once at issue with common thought, in which a profound distinction is drawn between the ordinary and the scientific man, the profane and the philosopher, the poet and the non-poet, the ignorant and the learned, layman and clergy; and again, between conversation and science, effusion of the soul and art, collection of facts and history, good sense and philosophy. It is thought that acquaintance belongs to all: every one communicates his sentiments, narrates his experiences and those of others, reasons, classifies and calculates. But art, philosophy, history and science are believed to belong to the few. That alone deserves those solemn names, which is the result of exceptional moments, when man is more than man, or at least when he is no longer one of the crowd, but belongs to an aristocracy.

Empirical distinctions and their limits.

And, certainly, these distinctions are useful, and therefore necessary in practice. We all feel the need of creating an aristocracy of men and things; of distinguishing the word that a sergeant whispers in the ear of a maid-servant from a sonnet or a symphony; the proverbs of Sancho Panza from a treatise on Ethics; and the report of a police-agent from the history of Rome or of England. We distinguish the classification of the glasses and bowls in use at home from that of Mineralogy or of Zoology; the reckoning of our daily expenses from the calculation of the astronomer; and, finally, Tom, Dick and Harry from Aeschylus, Plato, Thucydides, Hippocrates and Euclid. The odi profanum vulgus is a motto that should be appropriated by whosoever labours to promote the life of thought and of art, yet not without adding to it Ariosto's post-script: "Nor do I wish to absolve any from the name of vulgar, save the prudent."

But, admitting all this, we must recognize not less energetically that these distinctions, imposed by the necessities of life, have in philosophy no value at all, and that their introduction there, if it has some excuse in professional custom, is nevertheless the way to shut off from us for ever all understanding both of the forms of knowledge and of those of acquaintance. Man is complete man at every instant and in every man; the spirit is always whole in every individuation of itself. The philosopher in the highest sense (in the philosopher worthy of the name) could be defined as one who raises doubts, collects difficulties, and formulates problems, intent upon clearing up doubts, upon levelling difficulties, and upon solving problems; the artist as a man who limits himself to looking and to recording the significance of what he has seen. In this case, the ordinary man would be he who encounters no theoretic difficulties and is unaware of spectacles worthy of contemplation. But in reality the ordinary man also sets himself problems and solves them, contemplates and expresses the spectacle of the real. The distinction has value, therefore, only in descriptive Psychology, which passes in review types of reality and the perfected organs, so to speak, which reality creates for itself in great philosophers and great poets. But what empiricism always divides, philosophy must always unite. To be scandalized when some one speaks of the poetry, philosophy, science, mathematics, which are in every one's mouth; to mock those who unify and identify; to appeal to good sense and to threaten the madhouse, are things that reveal much pedantry but no humanity, or, at most, very little. It is foolish to fear that such an identification as we propose will lessen the importance of the forms of knowledge and render trivial divine Poetry, lofty Philosophy, severe History, serious Science and ingenious Mathematics. As the hero is not outside humanity, but is he in whom the soul of the people is concentrated and made powerful, so poetry, philosophy, science and history, aristocratically circumscribed, are the most conspicuous manifestations attained by the elementary forms of acquaintance themselves. Such they could not be, were they not all one with them, just as the mountains could not be, were it not for the earth upon which they are raised and of which they are constituted.

It might be said that the forms of knowledge are rich and complex manifestations of the human spirit, if this statement did not open the way to another common prejudice, to the belief that to each of those forms (for instance, to Art, History and Philosophy) several spiritual activities contribute. Were this so, we should have before us a mixture, not a product of an unique and original character, such as we find, as a matter of fact, in a work of Art, a philosophic theory, a narrative, and a theorem. By the law of the unity of the spirit all the forms of the spirit are implicit in one another; and the results, previously obtained from the various forms, condition each one of them. But each one of them is, explicitly, itself and not the others; it absorbs and transforms the results of the others; it does not leave them within itself as extraneous elements, and it therefore makes of them its own results. The strength of each one of those forms of knowledge lies precisely in this purity, which persists in the greatest complexity. A great poem is as homogeneous as the shortest lyric or as a verse; a philosophic system as homogeneous as a definition; the most complicated calculations as the addition of "two and two make four."

Enumeration and determination of the forms of knowing, corresponding to the forms of acquaintance.

If the forms of acquaintance and the forms of knowledge be identical, it is proved thereby that the second are as many and of the same sort as the first; and the existence of combined or composite forms is also excluded from the forms of knowledge. Thus we are henceforth freed from the obligation of enquiring into the particular nature of the various forms of knowledge, a task that we have already fulfilled when enquiring into the forms of acquaintance. It is sufficient to name them (in correspondence) with the names already given to the forms of acquaintance, for thus they will be clearly distinguished and completely enumerated. The method of denomination itself will not be new and surprising, because it has been, as it were, anticipated, and foreseen from the examples of which we have availed ourselves above, and also from some terminological references. We have now only to make it manifest, to declare it, so to speak, in clear tones.

Pure intuition is the theoretic form of Art (or of Poetry, if we wish to extend to the whole of æsthetic production the name given to a group of works of art); and art cannot be otherwise defined than as pure intuition. The thinking of the pure concept, of the concept as itself, of the universal that is truly universal and not mere generality or abstraction, is Philosophy, and Philosophy cannot be otherwise defined than as the thinking, or the conceiving of the pure concept. And since the pure concept can be expressed either in the form of definition or in that of individual judgment, there corresponds to this duplication the distinction of the two forms of knowing, Philosophy in the strict sense, and History. The method of treatment called empirical Science or natural Science, or most commonly in our time, Science, is composed of those pseudoconcepts known as representative or empirical or classificatory. The mathematical Sciences are composed of abstract, enumerative and mensurative pseudoconcepts, and the application of the second of these, by means of the first, to individual judgments, is nothing else than what is called the mathematical Science of nature.

Critique of the idea of a special Logic as doctrine of the forms of knowledge,

It is usual for the treatment of the forms of knowledge to be presented in the majority of treatises as a special or applied Logic; following general or pure Logic, which has for its object the specific forms of acquaintance alone, or as it is significantly expressed, the elementary forms of acquaintance. But we cannot admit the existence of such a Logic, for the reasons already given. The elementary or fundamental forms are the only forms philosophically conceivable and really existing, and the whole of logical Science is exhausted in them. There is no duality of grades for logical Science any more than for Philosophy in general. And as no special Æsthetic exists independent of general Æsthetic, no special Ethic and Economic independent of general Economic, so there is not a general Logic alongside of a special Logic.

and as doctrine of methods.

Special Logic is also inadmissible, when it is presented as doctrine of methods, and especially of demonstrative or intrinsic methods. The method of a form of knowledge and in general of a form of the spirit, is not something different or even distinguishable from this form itself. The method of poetry is poetry, the method of philosophy is philosophy, the method of mathematics is mathematics, and so on. Only by means of empirical abstraction is the method separated from the activity itself; and when this duality has been created, we are led to add to it a third term, which is called the object of that form. But since the method is the form itself, so form and method are the object itself. Certainly, all the forms of the spirit have a common object, which is Reality; but this is not because reality is separated from them, but because they are reality: they therefore have not, but are this object. Thus the forms of knowledge have not a theoretic object, but create it: they themselves are that object. Philosophy has the pure concept for method and object; art has intuition; science the empirical concept, and so on. If we wished to treat of methods in a special Logic, we could not do otherwise than repeat what we have already said in respect to the character of each form.

Nature of our treatise in respect to the forms of knowledge.

All this amounts to saying that the things we shall discuss concerning the various forms of knowledge are not to be understood as a special Logic, although they are grouped in a second part for literary reasons. There we shall examine one by one the various forms of knowledge, in order to confirm their identity with the forms of awareness and to demonstrate how the characters adopted by them are reducible to those already explained for the others, and how the difficulties found in them are overcome by means of the same principles that we employed to overcome the difficulties presented by the others. In so doing, we shall also gain the advantage of making more clear the doctrines already laid down as to the elementary forms, by fixing our attention upon those manifestations of them which are presented on a larger scale. To those who forget or deny the existence of the pure concept or of the abstract concept, it will be of assistance, in giving the speculative deduction of those forms, to point out the masterpieces of Art, of Philosophy, or of Mathematics, and to invite an examination of their structure. It is true that in our day preference is given to another method, which is not only antiphilosophical but also antipædagogic. This method consists in altogether neglecting philosophic demonstration in the attempt to divert the attention from notable and luminous manifestations of the spirit, in order to devote it to rude and uncertain manifestations. Inscriptions of savages are preferred to the art of Michael Angelo, the philosophy that is still crudely enveloped in religion and custom to that of civilized times, something whose nature none can tell precisely, owing to lack of documents and the elements of research, to what is evidently art and philosophy. Such enquirers adopt precisely an opposite course to that followed by the sciences of observation, which have made telescopes and microscopes to enlarge the little and bring the distant near. They seek for instruments which shall diminish the great and make the near remote. Theirs is a strange empirical caricature of philosophy, which substitutes the chronologically remote for the fundamentally conceptual, and for the logically simple, the materially small, which is not, on that account, simple and is far less transparent. For our part (and we say it in passing), we believe that to furnish examples of where to fix the attention in logical enquiry, the minds of an Aristotle or of a Kant afford all we require, without there being any necessity to have recourse to the psychology of sucklings and idiots. But to study Aristotle and Kant does not suffice for knowledge of the truth of the concept. We must find in all beings of whatever grade and importance, the universal Spirit and its eternal forms.

And since we have studied the first and most ingenuous form of knowledge, Art, in a special volume, we shall here begin our examination of the second of its forms, Philosophy; and first of all, of Philosophy in the strict sense.

II

PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy as pure concept and the various definitions of philosophy. Those which deny philosophy.

All the definitions that have ever been given of philosophy will be found to contain the thought that philosophy is the pure concept (or to say the same thing with more words and less precision), that it has the pure concept as its directive criterion. All, be it well understood, save those which, in negating the pure concept, negate also the peculiar nature of philosophy. But such are not, properly speaking, definitions of philosophy, although even these, by contradicting themselves, imply and assume the definition of philosophy as an original form, and so as the pure concept. Such is the case with the theories already examined, of æstheticism, mysticism, and empiricism (and also of mathematicism), to which we shall return. For them, philosophy is art, sentiment, the empirical (or abstract) concept. But it is an art in some way differentiated from the rest of art, a sentiment that acquires a peculiar value, an empirical or abstract concept, which raises itself up and looks over the heads of the others. Thus it is something peculiar, a mode of reflecting sui generis, and so precisely the pure concept. Empiricism especially reveals this intimate contradiction, when it advocates a philosophy consisting of a systematization or synthesis of the results of the empirical sciences. That is to say, it advocates something not given by the empirical sciences, because, were they to give it, they would already be systematized and synthesized of themselves, and the further elaboration asked for would be altogether superfluous.

Those that define it as the science of supreme principles, ultimate causes, etc.; contemplation of death, etc.;

All the other definitions which presuppose the peculiarity of philosophy are reducible, as is easily seen, to the single character of the pure concept. Philosophy (they say) is the science of the supreme principles of the real, the science of ultimate causes, of the origin of things, and the like. In these propositions, the supreme principles are evidently not real things, or groups of real things, or empty formulæ, but the ideal generators of the real. Ultimate causes are not causes (for the cause is never ultimate, being always the effect of an antecedent cause), but ideal principles. The origin in question is not the historical origin of this or that single fact, but the ideal deduction of the fact from facts or from omnipresent reality. The same idea is expressed in the imaginative saying that philosophy is the contemplation of death. For what but the individual dies? And is not the contemplation of the death of the individual also that of the immortality of the universal? Is it not contemplation of the eternal? This remark supplies the motive for that other formula which defines philosophy as "the vision of things sub specie aeterni."

as elaboration of the concepts, criticism, science of norms;

The character of the pure concept is also indicated in the definition of philosophy as the elaboration of the concepts, which the other sciences leave imperfect and self-contradictory. Indeed, since no human activity has the imperfect and contradictory as its aim, if the other sciences are involved in imperfect and contradictory concepts, this means that they do not aim at constructing concepts and that philosophy alone elaborates true and proper concepts. For this reason, philosophy has sometimes been conceived, not as science, but as criticism, and criticism means placing oneself above the object criticized, in virtue of a concept superior to those criticized. For this reason, finally, philosophy has been conceived as the science of norms and values: norms and values, which, if they are to surpass singular things, cannot be extraneous to them. Hence it is the same thing to speak of norms and values, or of universal concepts, surpassing and containing in themselves each single thing.

as doctrine of the categories.

If philosophy is the pure concept, it is also the distinctions of the pure concept; it is all the pure concepts capable of serving as predicates to individual judgments and so of acting as categories. Here there is another definition of philosophy: philosophy is the doctrine of the categories. For this reason we have already refused to assign to Logic the search for the categories: first because the doctrine of the categories is the whole of Philosophy, whereas Logic is only one of its links, and consequently seeks only one of the categories, that of logicity. It could also be said that Philosophy is the doctrine of the categories, and that Logic, as a part of Philosophy, is a Category of categories, or a Philosophy of Philosophy. Hence its singular position among philosophical sciences, so that it appears at the same time within and without Philosophy, because it completes by surpassing and surpasses by completing it. In reality, Logic, like every other philosophic science, is within and not without Philosophy; like the glassy water which reflects the landscape and is itself part of the landscape.

Exclusion of mathematical definitions of philosophy.

These definitions which we have selected to record and to interpret (and others which we leave to the reader to record and to interpret) are all formal, in the legitimate sense of the word. They define the eternal nature of philosophy, they do not determine actually any special solution of other philosophical problems, although naturally they do potentially determine one solution, in that they can agree only with one solution. Obedient to this formal character, we have not taken and shall not take account of definitions that imply the effective solution of all philosophical problems, or of Philosophy in its totality. Such is, for instance, the definition that Philosophy is knowledge of oneself, as was said at the dawn of Hellenic thought; or that it is the return to the inward man where dwells the truth, as St. Augustine said; or that it is the science of Spirit, as we say. This definition offers something more than the simply logical aspect of Philosophy. Looked at from the purely logical standpoint, Philosophy will be the science of God or of the Devil, of Spirit or Matter, of final cause or mechanism, or of anything else that may be suggested as a hypothesis for enquiry, provided that this, whatever it be, is thinkable as a pure concept or Idea. Whoever should negate this condition, would not negate this or that philosophy, but as we have seen, philosophy itself, in favour of art, of action, or of something else.

Idealism of every philosophy.

But if Philosophy is by its logical nature pure concept or idea, every philosophy, to whatever results it may attain, and whatever may be its errors, is in its essential character and deepest tendency, idealism. This has been recognized by philosophers of the most different and antagonistic views (for example, by Hegel and by Herbart). It should be taught as truth to those who are ignorant of it and those who have forgotten should be reminded of it. Determinism negates the end and affirms the cause; but the cause which it posits as its principle, is not this or that cause, but the idea of cause. Materialism negates thought and affirms matter; but not this or that matter, which composes this or that body, but the idea of matter. Naturalism denies spirit and affirms nature; not this or that manifestation of nature, but nature as idea. Finally, when a single natural fact seems to be posited as the principle of explanation of reality, this fact is idealized and stands as the idea of itself, generating itself and everything else. Thus (it has been repeatedly remarked) the water of Thales, by the very fact that it is taken as a principle, is no longer any given empirical water, but metaphysical and ideal water. In like manner, the numbers of Pythagoras are not those of the Pythagorean table, but cosmic principles and ideas. Theism does not believe it possible to obtain the sufficient reason of reality, without positing a personal God, above and beyond the world. But this God is always something non-representative, however much he may be involved in sensible representation, and placed upon Sinai or Olympus. He is the idea of personal divinity, the idea of Jehovah or of Jove. The philosophy which is called idealist in the strict sense of the word (it would be better called activist or finalist or absolute spiritualism), strives to prove that, for instance, cause, matter, nature, number, water, Jehovah, Jove and the like, are not thinkable as pure concepts and as such imply contradictions, and that therefore such philosophies are insufficient. This means that it holds the idealism of those philosophies insufficient, that they are not equal to themselves and are inadequate to the assumption on which they rest; but it does not imply that this assumption is not idealistic.

Were it not idealistic, it would not be philosophical, and so it would not be possible to submit it to criticism from the philosophical point of view.

Systematic character of philosophy.

From the identity of philosophy with the pure concept can be also deduced its necessarily systematic character.

To think any pure concept means to think it in its relation of unity and distinction with all the others. Thus, in reality, what is thought is never a concept, but the concept, the system of concepts. On the other hand, to think the concept in general is only possible by arbitrary abstraction. To think it truly in general, means to think it also as particular and singular, and so to think the whole system of distinct concepts. Those who wish to think an isolated concept philosophically without paying attention to the others, are like doctors who wish to cure an organ without paying attention to the organism. Such a mode of treatment may cure the organ, but the organism dies and with it dies the healed organ a moment after. The true philosopher, when he makes even the smallest modification in a concept, has his eye on the whole system, for he knows that this modification, however small it may seem, modifies to some extent the whole.

Philosophic and literary significance of system.

The systematic character of philosophy, understood logically, belongs to every single philosophical proposition which is always a philosophical cosmos, as every drop of water is the ocean, indeed, the whole world, contracted into that drop of water. It is hardly necessary to distinguish from this the literary sense of system, which is the name given to certain forms of exposition, which embrace definite groups of problems, traditionally held to be those in which philosophy is contained. When some or many of those groups do not receive explicit literary treatment, it is said that system is wanting. It is true that there is wanting the fulfilment of a literary task (or what here amounts to the same thing, of a pedagogic task); but the system is there, even in the case when a very specialized problem is treated, provided it be approached with philosophic and so with systematic energy. That the same thinker, when he passes to another problem, should give a wrong solution contradictory to that previously given, does not prove that he had not at first a system, but that he has lost it when faced with the new difficulty. He was at first a philosopher and so systematic; afterwards, not philosopher enough, and so not sufficiently systematic.

Advantages and disadvantages of the literary form of system.

The traditional groupings of problems, and the construction of system in the literary and pedagogic sense, certainly have their utility (all that exists has its proper function and value). They preserve and promote culture already acquired, by obliging it to examine difficulties, which, were they neglected, might unexpectedly become a great hindrance and loss. Hence the love for system, or for the literary form of system, a love which the author of these pages also nourishes in his soul and of which he has sought to give some proof, by writing a system, although it is long since systems have been written, in Italy at least (unless scholastic manuals be thus called), and it is no slight merit to have braved the ridicule of the enterprise. But systems have also the disadvantage of sometimes leading to a tiresome re-exposition of problems that are out of date and whose solutions have passed into the common patrimony of culture. The treatment of these problems is better left to be understood, that time and space may be gained for the treatment of others more urgent. Hence the rebellion against system, or against the pedantry which can adhere to that form of exposition. This rebellion is similar at all points with that against the pedantry of definition, which is a legitimate rebellion, yet cannot eliminate the logical form of definition. Instead of systems, we write monographs, essays, and aphorisms, but these, if philosophic, will always be inwardly systematic.

Genesis of the systematic prejudice and rebellion against it.

But the rebellion against systems has another more serious cause, less literary and more philosophical. Sometimes the demand for a system becomes a systematic prejudice. This fact merits explanation, because thus stated it may reasonably appear to be paradoxical. However could the demand inherent in a function be changed into a prejudice, or into an obstacle to that function? Stated in these terms, it certainly seems inconceivable. But it becomes clear and admissible, when we remember that philosophical enquiry is both induction and deduction, the thinking of distinction and the thinking of unity in distinction. Neither of the two processes, which are one single thing, should be substituted for or dominate the other. If we think the concept of morality, it should be placed in relation to and deduced from the other forms of the spirit and thus from unity; but it must also be thought in itself. The thinking of the peculiar nature of the moral act cannot remain isolated and atomic, but unity in its turn cannot give the character of the moral act, unless this act be present to the spirit and make itself known for what it is. In the process of research, it is possible to deduce the moral act from the consideration of the other activities of the spirit, without thinking it in itself. But here a heuristic process is adopted, a hypothesis is made, and this hypothesis must afterwards be verified, in order to become effective thought and concept. Now the systematic prejudice consists precisely in thinking the unity without thinking the distinctions, in deduction without induction, in changing the hypothesis into a concept without having seriously verified it. Hence analogical constructions (or falsely analogical, and so metaphysical and fantastic), which take the place of philosophical distinctions, and hence the systematic prejudice, which is a false idea of system. Against this rebellion is justified. But the mistake is usually made of discarding the true demand for system through horror of the false, or of denying the utility of the analogical process, which is blameable in the system, but useful in enquiry.

Sacred and philosophical numbers; meaning of the demand which they express.

Another aspect of this same rebellion which has become universal in most recent times, is the distrust of or open hostility towards the search for symmetry, the arrangement of philosophic concepts in dyads, triads, quatriads, or in other suchlike numbers, which precisely express symmetry in the ordering of those concepts. And such distrust will be judged reasonable by any one who recalls the excesses caused by this love of symmetry and the puerilities to which some even of the loftiest philosophers abandoned themselves, owing to their excessive attachment to certain numbers. The pedantry of the Kantian quatriads and triads is truly insupportable, nor are Hegel's triads less artificial. These were very often reduced by his disciples to conjuring tricks and almost to buffoonery. It was natural that there should be a reaction towards the search for the asymmetrical and towards the doctrine that the concepts attained cannot be arranged in a beautiful order, for they change their order from one sphere to another, but that nevertheless they and no others are the concepts of reality—inelegant but honest; asymmetrical but true. The reaction is comprehensible, the distrust justifiable; but the hostility is certainly unjustifiable. If distinct concepts constitute a unity, they must of necessity constitute an order or symmetry, of which certain numbers, that can be called regular, are the expression or symbol. The concepts of an empirical science may be thirty-seven, eighty-three, a hundred and thirteen, or as many as you like according as they are arranged. But the concepts of philosophy will always be dyads, triads, quatriads and the like, that is to say, an organic unity of distinctions and a correspondence of parts. For this reason, the human race has always had sacred numbers in religion and philosophic numbers in philosophy. Let him laugh who wills; but we do not say that he laughs well. The criterion of symmetry must not become a prejudice. It must, however, act as a control upon the enquiry that has been accomplished, since it greatly aids, as a heuristic process, the enquiry that is yet to be made. Astronomers are praised, when, thanks to their calculations, supported by the criterion of proportion and symmetry, they form a hypothesis that a star, unseen at the time, but which the telescope eventually discovers, must be at a certain place in the sky. Why should not a philosopher be equally praised, who deduces that for reasons of symmetry, there must be in the spirit a form, as yet unobserved, or that for the same reasons, there should be eliminated a form which does not seem to be eliminable, but which spoils the symmetry? Why should the spirit be less rhythmical and less symmetrical than the starry sky?

Impossibility of dividing philosophy into general and particular.

When the systematic character of philosophy is conceived in this way, it is seen that the system is not something superadded, like a thread used for binding together the various parts of philosophy and quite external to the objects that it unites, so that we can consider separately the objects and the thread, the parts and the system. In philosophy, none of the parts are without the whole, and the whole does not exist without the parts. Translated into other terms, this means chat there are not particular philosophic sciences, just as there is not a general philosophy. We have made use of this proposition, in order to confute the usual conception of Logic as a prologue to philosophy, and to show how this error (which in the case of Logic is supported by special reasons) is the principal source of other like errors. Thus Metaphysic or Ontology, or some other science, which is supposed to give the unity of the real, of which the special philosophic sciences give only the distinctions, is placed before or after the special philosophic sciences like a prologue or an epilogue. The truth is that general philosophy is nothing but the special philosophic sciences, and vice versa. The plural and the singular cannot be separated in the pure concept, where the plural is plural of the singular, and the singular is singular of the plural.

Evils of the conception of a general philosophy, separated from particular philosophies.

The destruction of this erroneous idea of a general philosophy has direct practical, importance. For, once the so-called science has been constituted, by means of a group of arbitrarily isolated problems, which really belong to the various sciences called particular, we are led to believe that true philosophy consists of a medley, in constant agitation and shock, and that, thanks to this agitation and these shocks, it becomes ever more worthy of itself, that is, of being a medley. But the problems of God and of the world, of spirit and of matter, of thought and of nature, of subject and of object, of the individual and of the universal, of life and death, torn from Logic, from Æsthetic, from the Philosophy of the practical, become insoluble or are solved only in appearance (that is to say, verbally and imaginatively). Many young men, ignorant of all particular philosophical knowledge, attack them as if they were the first step in philosophy, and many old professors find themselves at the end of their lives in the same state of mental confusion as at the beginning, indeed with their confusion increased and henceforth inextricable, owing to the false path that they have followed for so many years. They have not respected philosophy, in their first relations with it; they resemble those men who will never really love a woman, because they failed of respect to women in their youth. On the other hand, the so-called particular philosophical sciences, deprived of some of their organs and become blind or deaf or otherwise maimed, fall into the power of psychologism and empiricism. Hence the empirical and psychological treatment of Morality, of Æsthetic, and of Logic itself. In regard to this evil, now more than ever rampant in philosophic studies, it is necessary to remember, that the history of philosophy teaches that no philosophic progress has ever been achieved by so-called general philosophy, but always by discoveries made in one or other of the so-called special philosophies. The concept of Socrates and the dialectic of Hegel are discoveries in Logic. Kant's concept of freedom is a discovery in Ethics. The concept of intuition is a discovery in Æsthetic. The critique of formalist logic is a discovery in the Philosophy of language. The old idea of God has been dissolved by those most modest, yet greatest of men, who contented themselves with formulating a new proposition on the syllogism or on the will, on art or history, or with defining the abstract intellect or with fixing the limits of the fancy. Had we been obliged to await these solutions from the cultivators of that anæmic general philosophy, the old idea of God would now be more rife than before. And in truth it is still rife among those philosophers of whom we have spoken, for it reappears from the midst of the medley which they stir, either with the name of the Unknowable, or with the old name that still is reverenced.

III

HISTORY

History as individual judgment.

Since all the characteristics assigned to Philosophy are verbal variants of its unique character, which is the pure concept, so all the characteristics of History can be reduced to the definition and identification of History with the individual judgment.

History, being the individual judgment, is the synthesis of subject and predicate, of representation and concept. The intuitive and the logical elements are both indispensable to it and both are bound together with an unseverable link.

The individual element and historical sources; relics and narratives.

Owing to the necessity for the subject or intuitive element, history cannot be constructed by pure reason. The vision of the thing done is necessary and is the sole source of history. In treatises upon historical method the sources are usually divided into remains and narratives, meaning by remains (Ueberreste) the things which remain as traces of an event (for example, a contract, a letter, a triumphal arch), and by narratives the accounts of the event as they have been communicated by those who were more or less eye-witnesses, or by those who have consulted the notes of eye-witnesses. But, in truth, narratives are valuable just in so far as it is presumed that they place us in direct contact with the thing that happened and make us live it again, drawing it forth from the obscure depth of the memories that the human race bears with it. Had they not this virtue, they would be altogether useless, as are the narratives to which for one reason or another credence is refused. A hundred or a thousand narratives lacking authenticity are not equal to the poorest authentic document. An authentic narrative is both a document and remains; it is the reality of the fact as it was lived and as it vibrates in the spirit of him who took part in it. The search for veracity and the criticism of the value of sources are reducible in the ultimate analysis, to the isolation of this genuine resonance of fact, by its liberation from perturbing elements, such as the illusions, the false judgments, the preoccupations and passions of the witness. Only in so far as this can be successfully done, and in the measure in which it is successful, do we have the first condition of history as act of cognition—that something can be intuited and thereby transformable into the subject of the individual judgment, that is to say, into historical narrative.

The intuitive faculty in historical research.·

On this necessity is based the importance which in the examination of historians is attached to intuition, or touch, or scent, or whatever else it may be called, that is to say, to the capacity (derived in part from natural disposition and in part from practical exercise) of directly intuiting what has occurred, of passing beyond the obstacles of time and space and the alterations produced by chance or human passion. An historian without intuitive faculty, or more exactly (since no one is altogether without it), with but slender intuitive faculty, is condemned to barrenness, however learned and ingenious he may be in argument. He finds himself inferior to others, less learned and less logical than he, inferior even to the uncultured and to the illogical, when it is a question of feeling what lies beneath words and signs, or of reproducing in himself what actually happened. For the same reason, it sometimes happens that an expert in a given trade is astonished to hear the learned arm-chair historian describe certain orders of facts, of which he has no experience and of which he talks as a blind man talks of colours. A sergeant can intuite a march better than a Thiers, and laugh at the millions of men that Xerxes had led into Greece by simply enquiring how they were fed. A political schemer understands a court or ministerial intrigue far better than an honest man like Muratori. A craftsman can reconstruct the successive brush-strokes and the traces of change of mind in a picture better than the erudite and æsthetic historian of art. Historical works perhaps defective or even failures from other points of view, sometimes fascinate by the proof they give of freshness of impression: and this quality may serve to increase our knowledge of facts and to rectify the errors into which their authors have fallen in other respects. To a historian of the French Revolution we can pardon even the mistaking of one personage for another, of a river for a mountain, or the confusion of months and years, when on the whole he has lived again better than others the soul of the Jacobins, the spiritual conditions of the mob of Paris, the attitude of the peasants of Burgundy or of La Vendée. What is called an historical novel sometimes has in certain respects greater value than a history, if the novel is inspired by the spirit of the time and the history contains merely an inventory.

The intuitive faculty in historical exposition. Similarity of history and art.

The intuitive faculty, indispensable in research, is not less indispensable in historical exposition; since it is necessary to intuite the actual fact, not in a fugitive and sketchy manner, but so firmly as to be able to express it and to fix it in words, in such a way as to transmit its genuine life to others. Hence the specially artistic character that must be possessed by true historians. Here they resemble pure artists, painting pictures, as they do, composing poems and writing tragic dialogues. Certainly, every thought, even that of the most abstruse philosopher and mathematician, becomes concrete in artistic form. But the historian (in the somewhat empirical sense of the word) approximates much more nearly to those who express pure intuitions, since he gives literary preference to the subject over the predicate. This has been generally recognized both by historians, who have freely presented themselves as bards of their race invoking the Muse who represents History upon Parnassus, while there is there no representative of Philosophy, Mathematics, or Science; and by theorists, who have constantly debated the question as to whether history is art. It seems indeed to be art, when the predicate or logical element is so well concealed that hardly any attention is paid to it.

Difference between history and art. The predicate or logical element in history.

I say hardly; because if no attention whatever be paid to it, if literary emphasis become logical mutilation, art will remain, but history will have gone. A book of history will no longer merely resemble a poem or romance, but will be a poem or a romance. What is it that, from the point of view of intuition, distinguishes an imaginative vision and an historical narrative? If we open the Divine Comedy or the Rime of Petrarch and read: "In the middle pathway of our life, I found myself in a dark forest ...," or, "I raised my thought to where she whom I seek was and find not upon earth ..."; and if we open Livy's History, at the place where he recounts the battle of Cannae, and read: "Consules satis exploratis itineribus sequentes Poenum, ut ventum ad Cannas est, ubi in conspecta Poenum habebant, bina, castra communiunt," nothing at first seems changed; both are narratives. Yet everything is changed. If we read Livy as we read Dante or Petrarch, the battle of Cannae in the same way as the voyage of Dante to the Inferno, or the passage of the spirit of Petrarch to the third heaven, Livy is no longer Livy, but a story book. In like manner, if we read a book of stories, as, for example, the Kings of France or the Guerin Meschino, in the same way as they are read by the uneducated man of the people, who seeks history in them, the story book becomes transformed into a historical book, although of a kind that must be criticized and refuted when a higher degree of culture has been attained. This suffices to show the importance of that predicate, which is sometimes left to be understood in the words, but whose effective presence transforms the pure intuition into the individual judgment and makes history of a poem.

Vain attempts to eliminate it.

The necessity of the logical element has been several times denied, and it has been affirmed that the historian must let things speak for themselves and put into them nothing of his own. This fine phrase may have some reference to a-certain truth, as we shall see. But if it is understood as the exclusion of the logical element in favour of pure intuition (and worse still, if it intends to exclude also the category of intuition, for in that case we have simple muteness), it proclaims the death of history. Without the logical element it is not possible to say that even the smallest, the most ordinary fact, belonging to our individual and everyday life, has occurred; as, for instance, that I rose this morning at eight o'clock and took luncheon at twelve. For (to give no other reasons) these historical propositions imply the concept of existence or actuality and the correlative concept of non-existence or possibility, since in affirming them I also deny that I only dreamed of rising at eight or of taking luncheon at twelve. All will agree that we cannot speak of a historical fact if we do not know that it is a fact, that is to say, something that has happened; even stories become the object of history, in so far as their existence as stories is attributed to them. A story, told without knowing or deciding whether it be or be not a story, is poetry; perceived and told as a story, it is mythography, that is to say, history; the author of the Iliad or the author of the Niebelungen is not Adalbert Kuhn, Jacob Grimm or Max Müller.

Extension of historical predicates beyond that of mere existence.

But the criterion of existentiality does not itself suffice, as some believe, for the effectual constitution of historical narrative. For what sort of narrative should we have, if we merely said that something had happened, without saying what had happened? That something has happened and does happen at every instant, is not, as we know, the content of historical narrative, because it is the affirmation that being is, or that becoming is. What has been said of the individual judgment, namely, that it is constituted by all the predicates together, that is, of the whole concept, and not by the predicate of existence alone, torn from the others, must also be said of historical narrative. It is truly complete and therefore realized, when the intuition, which supplied it with the rough material, is completely penetrated by the concept, in its universality, particularity and singularity. That the consuls, after having sufficiently explored the routes, followed the Carthaginian, entered Cannae, and seeing themselves face to face with the army of Hannibal, pitched and fortified their camp (as runs Livy's narrative), implies a crowd of concepts, equal in number to the historical affirmations collected in that sentence. No one ignorant as to what is man, war, army, pursuit, route, camp, fortification, dream, reality, love, hatred, fatherland, and so on, is capable of thinking such a sentence as this. And the obscurity of one of those concepts is sufficient to make it impossible to form the narrative as a whole, just as any one who does not understand the meaning of the word castra is not in a position to understand what forms the argument of Livy's narrative. If the sources are changed, the historical narrative changes; but this latter changes no less, if our convictions as to the concepts are changed. The same matter is differently arranged and gives rise to different histories, if it is narrated by a savage or a cultured European, by an anarchist or a conservative, by a protestant or a catholic, by the me of this moment or the same me of ten years hence. Given that all have the same documents before them, each one reads in them a different happening.