THIRD PART (continued 2)

Distinction between error as error and error as hypothesis.

The distinction between error as error and error as suggestion, between error and hypothesis or heuristic expedients, is of capital importance. It is found as basis of some common distinctions, such as those between mistake and error, between error committed in good faith and error committed in bad faith, and the like. These and others like them show themselves to be certainly untenable, because error as error is always in bad faith, and there is no difference between error and mistake, save an empirical difference, or a difference of verbal emphasis, for it can be said according to empirical accidents that an affirmation is either simply erroneous or altogether a mistake. But although they cannot be maintained as they are formulated, they nevertheless suggest the desirability and the anticipation of this true and profound distinction.

Immanence of the suggestion in error itself as error.

On the other hand, error and suggestion, error and heuristic procedure, since they have in common the practical, extrinsic, and improper combination of ideas, stand in this relation to one another, that the suggestion is not error, but error always contains in itself willingly or unwillingly a suggestion. The erring spirit, though without intending it, prepares the material for the search for truth. It means to evade that search or to bring it to an arbitrary end; but in doing so it breaks up the clods of earth, throws them about, ploughs and fertilizes the field where the truth will sprout. Thus it happens that many combinations of ideas, proposed and maintained through caprice and vanity with the lawyer's object of scoring his point, or of shining and astonishing with paradox, or for pastime and for other utilitarian reasons, have been adopted by more serious spirits as steps in the progress of research. The enemies of the truth not only testify to the truth but come to serve it themselves, through the unforeseen consequences of their work. A sort of gratitude comes over us at times and makes us tender toward these adversaries of the truth, because we feel that from them has come the stimulus to obtain it, as from them come the strengthening of our hold upon it and the inspiration, the clear-sightedness, and the warmth of the defence of it that we make against them.

Individuals and error.

But it is not necessary in yielding to the generous feeling for human fraternity to exaggerate in this last direction. The gratitude that we feel is not deserved by them; at the most, it is God or the universal spirit or Providence who deserves it. They did not wish to serve the truth and did not serve it, save through consequences which are not their work. One-sided and abstract optimism has intruded here also; and perceiving in error the element of suggestion, it has altogether cancelled the category of error in favour of that of suggestion and has pronounced that man always seeks the true, as he always wills the good. Certainly; but there is the man who stops at his individual good, fruges consumere natus; and there is the man who progresses to the universal good. There is the man who combines words to give himself and others the illusion of knowing what he does not know and of being able to attend to his own pleasures without further trouble; and there is the man who combines words with anxious soul and spirit intent, venator medii, a hunter of the concept. Here, too, the truth is neither in the optimism nor in the pessimism, but in the doctrine, which conciliates and surpasses them both. Nor does it matter that owing to the defect of abstract optimism that very philosopher, who did more than any other to reveal the hidden richness of the dialectical principle, was not able to look deeply into the problem of error.

The conscience of humanity well understood knows how to do justice to all men, without, on that account, confounding him who seeks with him who errs, the man of good will with the utilitarian. It does justice to them, because in every man, indeed at every instant in the life of every man, it discovers all those various spiritual moments, both inferior and superior. Error and the search for truth are continually intertwined. Sometimes a beginning is made with research, and it ends with an obstinate persistence in the suggestion that has been made, which is converted into a result and an erroneous affirmation. At others a beginning is made, with the deliberate intention of escaping difficulties by means of some sort of a combination of ideas; and that combination arouses the mind and becomes a suggestion for research, which is followed until peace is found in the truth. Each one of us is at every moment in danger of yielding to laziness and to the seduction of error and has hope of shaking off that laziness and following the attraction of truth. We fall and rise up again at every instant; we are weak and strong, cowardly and courageous. When we call another weak and cowardly, we are condemning ourselves; when we admire another as strong and courageous, we idolize the strength and courage which is active within us. When we are in the presence of a complex product, as, for example, a faith, a doctrine, a book, it would be naïve and fallacious to look upon it as only error or as only suggestion. For it is both the one and the other; that is to say, it contains equally the moments of error properly so-called, and the other moments of suggestion and search; the voluntary interposition of obstacles to the truth and the voluntary removal of such obstacles; the disfigured image of the truth and the outline of the truth. Sometimes we are unable to say of ourselves whether we are erring or are seeking, whether we believe that we have found the whole truth or only discovered a ray of it. The logical criticism which implacably condemns us seems to be unjust, although we cannot contest its arguments which impose the truth upon our thought. We feel that that truth was in a way sought, seen for a moment, and almost possessed in that spiritual state of ours, which has been summarily and abruptly condemned by others as altogether erroneous.

The double aspect of errors.

For this reason even that which has been rejected and blamed as false from one point of view must be accepted and honoured from another as an approach to truth. Empiricism is perverse in so far as it is a construction opposed to the philosophic universal, but it is innocuous and indeed beneficial in so far as it is an attempt to rise from pure sensation and representation to the thinking of the universal. Scepticism as error annuls the theoretic life; but as suggestion it is necessary to the demonstration of the impossibility of dwelling in that desert when all false doctrines have been annulled. Mythologism presents this double aspect in a yet clearer manner; religion is the negation of thought, but it is also in another aspect a preparation for thought; the myth is both a travesty and a sketch of the concept; hence every philosophy feels itself adverse to myth and born from myth, an enemy and a daughter of religions. In what is empirically defined as religion or as a body of religious doctrines, for example, in Christianity, in its myths and in its theology, there is so much of truth and suggestion of truth that it is possible to affirm (always from the empirical point of view) the superiority of that religion over a well-reasoned but poor, a correct but sterile philosophy. Nevertheless, a period of reverence, of attentive harkening, of philosophic study and criticism, which is not pure scepticism, succeeds to a period of encyclopædism, of irreligious scepticism, of enlightenment, and of Voltaireism. Those who in the nineteenth or in this twentieth century have repeated the Voltairean scepticism and have jibed at religion have with good reason been considered superficial of intellect and soul, vulgar and trivial people. The philosophy of the eighteenth century has filled and filled well the office of enemy of religion; that of the nineteenth century has disdained to give blows to the dead and has adopted towards religion the attitude of a pious daughter and diligent heir. For our part we are persuaded that the inheritance of religion has not been well and thoroughly utilized. This inheritance is at bottom indistinguishable from the philosophic inheritance, for is there not religion, in, for instance, the Cartesian idea of God, which unifies the two substances and guarantees with its truth the certainty of our knowledge? And is it not also philosophy, that is to say, the concept (in however gross a form), of the immanent Spirit which is a self-distinguishing unity and certainty of itself?

Last form of the methodological error; Hypothesism.

We have now attained to the theory of research, yet we cannot abandon the survey of the necessary forms of error without mentioning a new form which arises precisely from the confusion between truth and the search for the conditions preparatory to truth, between truth and hypothesis. This error, which converts Heuristic into Logic, may be called hypothesism. It asserts that in regard to truth man can do nothing more than propose hypotheses, which are said to be more or less probable, so that his fate is not dissimilar to the punishments which were assigned to Tantalus, Sisyphus, and the Danaids. But in the kingdom of the True, differently from that of Erebus:

The birds do not feed, The wheels do not turn, The stone is not rolled up the high mountain, Nor water drawn with the sieve from the fountain.

The hypothesis is made, because it serves toward the attainment of the truth; did it not serve this end it would not be made. The spirit does not admit waste of time; for it time is always money. Hypothesism is sometimes restricted to the supreme principles of the real, or to what is called metaphysics, which would thus be always hypothetical; but for the reasons given in our discussion of agnosticism, if the principles of the real were hypothetical, the whole truth would be so, that is to say, there would not be any truth. For the rest, hypothesism, besides being internally contradictory, openly reveals that it is so, in its reference to the greater or lesser probability of hypotheses. It would be impossible to determine the degree of approximation to the true without presupposing a criterion of truth, a truth and consequently the truth. We should hardly have made mention of this error did it not constitute the fulcrum of some of the most celebrated and revered philosophies of our times.

VII

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ERROR AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Inseparability of the phenomenology of error from the philosophic system.

The phenomenology of error, in its double sense of error and of suggestion, coincides therefore with the philosophic system. Both error and suggestion are improper combinations of philosophic ideas or concepts. To determine these improper combinations is equivalent to showing the obverse of that of which the philosophic system is the face. But face and obverse are not separable, for they constitute a single thought (and single reality), which is positivity-negativity, affirmation-negation. There is, therefore, no phenomenology of error outside the philosophic system, nor a philosophic system outside the phenomenology of error; the one is conceived at the moment when the other is conceived. And since the philosophic system and the doctrine of the categories are the same, the phenomenology of error is inseparable and indistinguishable from the doctrine of the categories.

The eternal going and coming of errors.

As such the phenomenology of error is an ideal and eternal circle, like the eternal circle of the truth. Its stages are eternally traversed and retraversed by the spirit, being the stages of the spirit itself. At every instant of the life of history and of our individual life there are represented the stages that have been surpassed and must again be surpassed: the lower stages return and announce beforehand the higher.

Returns to anterior philosophies, and their meaning.

In this lies the origin of a fact which cannot fail to attract attention in the history of philosophy: the tendency which is found there, to return to one or other of the philosophies of the past, or, more correctly, to one or other of the philosophic points of view of the past. The thirteenth century returned to Aristotle, the Renaissance to Plato; Bruno revived the philosophy of Cusanus, Gassendi that of Epicurus; Hegel wished to renew Heraclitus; Herbart, Parmenides; in recent times a return has been made to Kant, and in times yet more recent to Hegel. These are spiritual movements, which must be understood in all their seriousness. This consists wholly in the need of the philosophic spirit of a certain moment, which, struggling with an error, discovers the true concept with which it should be corrected, or at least, the superior and more ample suggestion, to which we must pass in order to progress. And since that concept or suggestion had already been represented in an eminent degree in the past by one particular philosopher, or by one particular school, they speak of the necessity of again asserting the superiority of that philosopher and his school against other philosophers and other schools. In reality neither Aristotle nor Plato returns, nor Cusanus nor Epicurus, nor Heraclitus nor Parmenides, nor Kant nor Hegel; but only the mental positions of which these names are, in those cases, the symbols. The eternal Platonism, Aristotelianism, Heracliteanism, Eleaticism are in us, as they were formerly in Plato and in Aristotle, in Heraclitus and in Parmenides. Divested of those historical names, they are called transcendentalism and immanentism, evolutionism and anti-evolutionism, and so on. To the philosophers of the past, as men of the past, no return is made, because no return is possible. The past lives in the present and the pretence of returning to it is equivalent to that of destroying the present, in which alone it lives. Those who understand ideal returns in this empirical sense, do not in truth know what they are saying.

The false idea of a history of philosophy as the history of the successive appearances in time of the categories and of errors.

But just because the phenomenology of error and the system of the categories are outside time, we must also recognize the fallacy of a history of philosophy which expounds the development of philosophic thought as a successive appearance in time of the various philosophic categories and of the various forms of error. On this view the human race seems to begin to think truly philosophically at a definite moment of time and at a definite point of space; for example at a definite year of the seventh or sixth century before Christ, at a definite point of Asia Minor, with Thales, who surpassing mere fancy posits as a philosophic concept the empirical concept of water; or in another year and place, with Parmenides, who posits the first pure concept, that of being. And it seems further to progress in philosophic thinking with other thinkers, each of whom either discovers a concept or offers a suggestion of one. Thus each takes the other's hand and they form a chain which is prolonged to one who, more audacious and fortunate than the others, gives his hand to the first, and unites them all in a circle. After this, there would remain nothing else to do but to dance eternally, as the stars dance in the imaginations of the poets, without any further necessity to devise suggestions and to risk falling into error. All this is brilliant but arbitrary. The categories are outside time, because they are all and singly in every instant of time, and therefore they cannot be divided and impersonated within empirical and individual limits. It is not true that each philosophic system has for its beginning a particular category or a particular suggestion. A philosophic system, in the empirical signification of the word, is a series of thoughts whose unity is the empirical bond of the life of a definite individual. It is therefore without beginning, since it does not constitute a true unity and refers on the one hand to its predecessors, on the other to those who continue it, and on all sides to its contemporaries. In the strict sense, in that system, in so far as it is philosophic, there is always the whole of philosophy; and therefore, as we have previously seen, all philosophic systems (including materialism and scepticism) have, whether they admit it or not, displayed or implied the same principle, which is the pure concept, and every philosophy is idealism. Nor is it true that there is progress in the history of philosophy, in the sense of the passage from one category to another superior category, or from one suggestion to another superior suggestion. Speaking empirically, we should have in this case to admit regress also, because it is a fact that a return is made to inferior categories and suggestions. Philosophically, we can speak in this case, neither of progress nor of regress, seeing that those categories and suggestions are eternal and outside time.

Finally, this conception of philosophic history itself declares its untenability, since in its last term it is logically obliged to posit a definitive philosophy (which is that represented by him who constructs such a history of philosophy), whereas there is nothing definitive in reality, which is perpetual development. Those very historians of philosophy themselves, who have desired and in part attempted to give actuality to that conception, have been perplexed at the assumption of so great a responsibility as to proclaim a definitive philosophy, that is to say, to decree the retirement of Thought and so of Reality.

Philosophism both of this false view and of the formula concerning the identity of philosophy and history of philosophy.

The error which appears in this conception of philosophic history, is the same that we have already studied under the name of philosophism, and which appears here in one of its special applications. The formula of the error is the identity of Philosophy with the History of philosophy. The sense in which this is meant is at once shown by the tendency which exists in this identity of the two terms, to be enlarged into a third term, that is to say, into the recognition of the identity of philosophy and of the history of philosophy with the Philosophy of history. And this Philosophy of philosophic history, like every philosophy of history, converts representations and empirical concepts into pure concepts assigning to each one the function which properly belongs to the categories, corrupting philosophy and history and becoming shipwrecked in a sort of mythologism and propheticism.

Distinction between this false idea of a history of philosophy and the books that are so entitled or profess a like programme.

But, as in the case of the philosophy of history in general, so also in this application of it to the history of philosophy, it is necessary to recognize the elements of truth. These lie in the works of genius in historical characterization, which under this guise have been achieved by various thinkers and in various epochs of philosophy. Certainly Plato is not only transcendental, nor is Aristotle only immanentist; nor Kant only agnostic, nor Hegel only logical, nor Epicurus only materialist, nor Descartes only dualist; nor is Greek thought concerned only with objectivity, nor modern thought with subjectivity alone. But history takes shape as historical narrative, by noting the prominent traits of the various individuals and of the various epochs. Without this process it would be impossible to divide, to summarize, or to record it; without the introduction of empirical concepts, history could not be fixed in the memory.[1] By means of those characterizations, it also happens that historical names can be taken as symbols of truths and errors: all the crudity of dualism is expressed in Descartes, the paradox of determinism in Spinoza, that of abstract pluralism in Leibnitz. We owe (as is admitted by all those competent to judge) the elevation of the history of philosophy from a chronicle or an erudite collection to history properly so-called, to historians of philosophy who were tainted with phiiosophism. And since Hegel was the first and greatest of those historians, we must impute to Hegel the arbitrary act that he committed, but also the merit of having been the first to give a history of philosophy worthy of the name and accord to him all the more merit, in so far as he almost always corrected in execution the errors of his original plan.[2]

Exact formula: identity of philosophy and of history.

This original plan (and in general the position taken up by the system of Hegel) may perhaps be considered as a deviation and aberration from a just impulse, which still awaits its legitimate satisfaction. This satisfaction we have attempted to give, by going deeply into the meaning of the Kantian a priori synthesis and by establishing the identity of philosophy and history. Thus, as regards the question at issue, the formula that we oppose to Hegel's formula of the identity of philosophy and history of philosophy, is that of the identity of philosophy and history. This difference may at first sight seem non-existent or very slight, but yet it is substantial. Philosophy is indeed identical with history, because by solving historical problems it affirms itself, and is in this way identical with the history of philosophy, not because this is separable from other histories, or has precedence over them, but for precisely the contrary reason, that it is altogether inseparable from and completely fused in the totality of history, according to the unity in distinction already explained. Hence it is seen that philosophy does not originate in time, that there are not philosophic men and non-philosophic men, that there are not concepts belonging to one individual which another individual is without, nor mental efforts which one makes and another does not make, and that philosophy, or all the categories, operates at every instant of the spiritual life, and at every instant of the spiritual life operates upon material altogether new, given to it by history, which for its part it helps to create. This amounts to saying that from that concept we obtain the criticism of philosophism and of the formula expressing the identity of Philosophy, History of Philosophy and Philosophy of history; and a more exact idea of the history of philosophy, free from the chains of an arbitrary classification.

The history of philosophy and philosophic progress.

It may seem that in this way we destroy all idea of philosophic progress; and certainly philosophy, taken in itself, that is to say as an abstract category, does not progress any more than the category of art or of morality progresses. But philosophy in its concreteness progresses, like art and the whole of life; it progresses, because reality is development, and development, including antecedents in consequences, is progress. Every affirmation of truth is conditioned by reality and conditions a new reality, which, in turn, is in its progress, the condition of a new thought and of a new philosophy. In this respect it is true that a philosophy which comes later in time, contains the preceding philosophies in itself, and not only when it is truly a philosophy, adequate to the new times, which comprehend ancient times in themselves, but even when it is a simple suggestion, of the kind we have called erroneous and in need of correction. As erroneous suggestion it will be, ideally, inferior to the truths already discovered. The scepticism of David Hume, for instance, is inferior from this point of view, not only to Cartesianism, but even to Scholasticism, to Platonism and to Socraticism. But historically it is superior even to the most perfect of those philosophies, because it is occupied with a problem which they did not propose to themselves and initiates its solution, by forming a first attempt at solution, however erroneous. Those perfect philosophies belong to the past, this, though imperfect, has the future in itself. Thus it is explained how we sometimes find far more to learn in philosophers who have maintained errors than from others who have maintained truths; the errors of the former are gold in the quartz, which when it has been purified will add weight and value to the mass of gold, which is already in our possession and has been preserved by the latter. Fanatics content themselves with truths, however poor they are, and therefore seek those who repeat them, even though they be poor of spirit. True thinkers seek for adversaries, bristling with errors and rich with truth; they learn from them, and while opposing, love and esteem them; indeed, their opposing them is at the same time an act of esteem and of love.

The truth of all philosophies, and critique of eclecticism.

The philosophy which each one of us professes at a determinate moment, in so far as it is adequate to the knowledge of facts and in the proportion in which it is adequate, is the result of all preceding history, and in it are organically brought together all systems, all errors and all suggestions. If some error should appear to be inexplicable, some suggestion without fruit, some concept incapable of adoption, the new philosophy is to that extent more or less defective. But the organic reconciliation, which preceding philosophies must find in those that follow, cannot be the bare bringing them together in time, and eclecticism, as in those superficial spirits, who associate fragments of all philosophies without mediation. Eclecticism (from the historical point of view also, as for instance in the relation of Victor Cousin to Hegel, whom he admired, imitated and failed to understand) is the falsification or the caricature of the vastness of thought, which embraces in itself all thoughts, though apparently the most diverse and irreconcilable. The peace of the lazy, who do not collide with one another, because they do not act, must not be made sublime and confounded with the lofty peace that belongs to those who have striven and have fraternized after strife, or, indeed, during the actual combat.

Researches concerning the authors and precursors of truths: and the reason for the antinomies which they exhibit.

A proof of this constancy of philosophy, which is immanent in all philosophies and in all the thoughts of men, and also of its perpetual variation and novelty of historical form, is to be found in the questions that have been and are raised, concerning the origin or discovery of truth. Hardly has the truth been discovered, when the critics easily succeed in proving that it was already known, and begin the search for precursors. And there can be no doubt that they are right and their researches deserve to be followed up. Every assertion of discovery, in so far as it seems to make a clear cut into the web of history, has something arbitrary about it. Strictly speaking, Socrates did not discover the concept, or Vico æsthetic fancy, or Kant the a priori synthesis, or Hegel the synthesis of opposites; nor even perhaps, did Pythagoras discover the theorem of the square on the hypotenuse, or Archimedes the law of the displacement of liquids. If a discovery is represented as an explosion, this happens for reasons of practical and mnemonic convenience in narrating and summarising history; and, for that matter, the explosion, the eruption and the earthquake are continuous processes. But the rational side of the search for precursors must not cause the acceptance of the irrational side, which is the denial of the originality of discoveries, as though they were to be found point for point in the precursors, or as though they consisted only in the aggregation of elements which pre-existed, or in like insignificant changes of form. To attach oneself to precursors, does not mean to repeat them, but to continue their work. This continuation is always new, original, and creative and always gives rise to discoveries, be they small or great. To think is to discover. The reduction to absurdity of the wrong meaning of the search for precursors is to be found in the fact that every one of the most important thoughts can be discovered in a certain sense in common beliefs, in proverbs, in ways of speech, and among savages and children. This is so much the case that by this path we can return to the Utopia of an ingenuous philosophy, outside history; whereas philosophy is truly ingenuous or genuine only when it is, and it is not, save in History.

VIII

"DE CONSOLATIONE PHILOSOPHIAE"

Logic and the defence of philosophy.

Attacks upon Philosophy and defences of it have been made as more or less academic exercises. But the true defence of it can only be Philosophy itself, and above all, Logic, which, by determining the concept of Philosophy, recognizes its necessity and function. And since Logic itself teaches that a concept is not truly known, save in the system where it is shown in all its relations, the complete defence is obtained in our opinion only, when this treatise dedicated to Logic is placed in relation to the preceding, which treats of Æsthetic, and with that which follows and has for its object the Philosophy of the practical.

The utility of Philosophy and the philosophy of the practical.

To this last must be relegated the complete elucidation of the problem concerning the utility or non-utility of philosophy. It is a problem about which We can here raise no fundamental question, if the equation posited by us be true: philosophy = thought = history = perception of reality. Thus the doubt concerning the utility of philosophy would be of equal value with the extravagant doubt as to the utility of knowledge. The philosophy of the practical also demonstrates that no action is possible, save when preceded by knowledge, and that presupposed in action there is always historical or perceptive knowledge, that is, the knowledge which contains in itself all other knowledge. And it also demonstrates that reality, being always will and action, is always thought, and that therefore thought is not an extrinsic adjunct, but an intrinsic category constitutive of the Real. Reality is action, because it is thought, and it is thought because it is action.

Consolation of philosophy, as joy in thought and in the truth. Impossibility of a pleasure arising from falsity or illusion.

If thought is so useful that without it the Real would not be, the common concept of an unconsolatory philosophy cannot be accepted. Consolation, pleasure, joy, is activity itself, which rejoices in itself. So far as is known, no other mode of pleasure, joy and consolation has yet been discovered. Now, knowledge of the true, whatever it is, is activity and promotes activity, and therefore brings with it its own consolation. "The truth, known, though it be sad, has its delights." Not a few would wish to attribute these delights, not to truth, but to illusion. But illusion is either not recognized as illusion, or it is so recognized. When it is not recognized as such and yet truly satisfies the mind, it cannot be called illusion, but truth, which has its own good reasons, since nothing can be held to be true without good reasons; it is that much of truth which can be noted in the given circumstances and which from the point of view of a more complete truth can only arbitrarily be called illusion: the consolation given by the pretended illusion resides, therefore, in its truth—or it is recognized as illusion, because the actual circumstances have changed; and then it is anguish and desire to attain to the truth. If there is no desire to attain to this truth, and if in order to avoid it, affirmations are brought forward, which are not adequate to the new conditions in which we find ourselves, there is error, which, as such, is always more or less voluntary; and from error, which is self-critical, arise evil conscience, and remorse, and so again anguish and desire for the truth, which dissipates illusion and produces consolation, because ... "the truth though it be sad, yet has its delights."

Critique of the concept of a sad truth.

Yet (it will be said), the true can be sad; true, but sad. This prejudice also should be eliminated. Truth is reality, and reality is never either glad or sad, since it comprehends both these categories in itself, and therefore surpasses them both. To judge reality to be sad, it would have to be admitted that we possessed besides the idea of it, the idea of another reality, which should be better than the reality known to us. But this is contradictory. The second reality would be not real and therefore not thinkable, and so no idea at all of it could be formed. And if we did attempt to form an idea of it, thought, entering into contradiction with itself and striving in a vain effort, would be seized with terror, and would produce, not that ideal reality, but at the most an æsthetic expression of terror, like that of a man who looks upon a bottomless abyss.

Examples: philosophical criticism and the concepts of God and of Immortality.

Once upon a time and even to-day many found and find consolation in the idea of a personal God, who has created and governs the universe, and of an immortal life, above this life of ours, which vanishes at every instant. And this consolation seems to have diminished in our times, or to many of us, owing to Philosophies. But he who does not limit himself to the surface and analyses the state of soul of sincere and noble believers, realizes that the God who comforted them is the same who comforts us and whom our Philosophies call the universal Spirit, immanent in all of us—the continuity and rationality of the universe—just as the Immortality in which they reposed was the immortality which transcends our individual actions, and in transcending them, makes them eternal. All that is born is worthy to perish; but in perishing, it is also preserved as an ideal moment of what is born from it; and the universe preserves in itself all that has ever been thought and done, because it is nothing but the organism of these thoughts and actions. Philosophy has rendered those concepts of God and of Immortality more exact, and has liberated them from impurities and errors and thus at the same time from perplexities and anguish; it has rendered them more, not less, consolatory. On the other hand, the absurdity which mingled with those concepts, has never consoled any one who seriously thought them—and serious thinking of them is an indispensable condition of obtaining consolation from concepts. If they are not thought, but mechanically repeated, the consolation is obtained from something else, from distraction and occupation with life lived, not from the concepts. In the effort to think a God outside the world, a Despot of the world, we are seized with a sense of fear for that God, who is a solitary being, suffering from his omnipotence, which makes activity impossible for him and dangerous for his creatures, who are his playthings. That God becomes an object of maledictions. Equally, in seriously thinking our immortality as empirical individuals, immobilized in our works and in our affections (which are beautiful only because they are in motion and fugitive), we are assailed by the terror, not of death, but of this immortality, which is unthinkable because desolating and desolating because unthinkable. Ideal immortality has generated the poetic representations of Paradise, which are representations of infinite peace; the false concepts of an empirical immortality can generate no other representation than Swift's profoundly satirical picture of the Struldbrugs or immortals, plunged in all the miseries of life, unable to die, and weeping with envy at the sight of a funeral.

Consolatory virtue belonging to all spiritual activities.

But we do not wish to close these new considerations upon the old theme de consolatione Philosophiae, without noting that philosophy is not the sole or supreme consoler, as the philosophers of antiquity believed, and some among the moderns, who assumed the same attitude. It is neither the sole nor the supreme consoler, because thought does not exist alone, nor does it exist above life: thought is outside and inside life; and if on one side it surpasses life, on the other it is a mode of life itself. Philosophy brings consolation in its own kingdom, putting error to flight and preparing the conditions for practical life; but man is not thought alone, and if he has joys and sorrows from thought, other sorrows and joys come to him from the exercise of life itself. And in this exercise action heals the evils of action and life brings consolation for life. The error of Stoicism and of similar doctrines consists in attributing to philosophy a direct action upon the ills of life and of making it in consequence the whole totality of the real. But philosophy has no pocket-handkerchiefs to dry all the tears that man sheds, nor is it able to console unhappy lovers and unfortunate husbands (as sentimental people pretend): it can only contribute to their comfort by healing that part of their pain which is due to theoretic obscurity. Such part is certainly not small: all our sorrows are irritated and made more pungent by mental darkness which paralyses or fetters the purification of action. But it is a part and not the whole. Every form of the activity of the Spirit, art like philosophy, practical life like theoretic life, is a fount of consolation and none suffices alone.

Sorrow and the elevation of sorrow.

"He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow" is a false saying, because the increase of knowledge is the overcoming of sorrow. But it is true, in so far as it means that the increase of knowledge does not eliminate the sorrows of practical life. It does not eliminate, but elevates them; and to adopt the fine expression of a contemporary Italian writer, superiority is "nothing but the right to suffer on a higher plane." On a higher plane, but neither more nor less than others, who are at a lower level of knowledge,—to suffer on a higher plane, in order to act upon a higher plane.

FOURTH PART

HISTORICAL RETROSPECT

I

THE HISTORY OF LOGIC AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Reality, Thought and Logic.

The three terms, Reality, Thought and Logic, and their relations, could be represented by a system of three circles, the one included in the other, and by marking at will as the first term that which includes all, or that which is included in all: R T L or L T R. Limiting ourselves to the first method, the first circle would be Reality, which Thought (the second circle) would think, in the same way that it would in its turn be thought in the third circle, formed by Logic, the Thought of thought, or the Philosophy of philosophy. This graphic symbol is probably destined to some fortune; but the reader must not seek it in our pages, because knowing how much inadequacy, clumsiness and danger it contains, we share the repugnance, almost instinctively felt at such materializations, which seem to be and are of slight value.

Relation of these three terms.

The vice of that spatial figuration is that it divides into three circles what is three, but three in one, and should consequently be expressed as a triple circle which should also be a single circle, in which all the three coincide; which is geometrically unrepresentable. The relation of Reality, Thought of Reality and Thought of Thought, divided into three circles, legitimately gives rise to the question: Why should there not be a fourth, a fifth, a sixth circle (and so on to infinity) which should include respectively the third, the fourth, the fifth (and so on to infinity)? Why should not a Logic of Logic, or a thought of the thought of thought, and so on, follow the thought of thought, which is Logic? For us, this question raises no objection that need bring us to a halt for a single instant, just because we have never divided the one reality into two or more different realities (matter and spirit, nature and idea, and so on), nor into a series of different realities, the one following the other; but we have conceived it as a system of relations and of correlations, constituting a unity, indeed the only unity concretely thinkable. There is no progress to infinity, when the terms are coincident and correlative; hence to think the thought of thought would not be a new act, but equivalent to thinking thought. The mental act will be new (and any mental act is new) for the individual who accomplishes it in conditions that are always new; but its spiritual form will always be that of Logic, which thinks thought and contains within itself, on its side, the process of reality. Further, the indifference exhibited by the symbol of the triple circle as to the determination of the first as last and the last as first, confirms for us the non-existence of a first that is only first and of a last that is only last; confirms, that is to say, the coincidence of unity in relation that is first and last. Reality is not only thought by thought, but is also thought; and thought is not only thought by Logic, but is also Logic. Those who wish to expound philosophy and history, proceeding from the centre of the logos or Logic, and those who wish to expound them, proceeding from the periphery of facts, are both right and wrong, because the centre is periphery and the periphery centre.

Non-existence of a general philosophy outside the particular philosophic sciences:

By adopting this view, which affirms the most complete immanence, it has never happened that in any part of the Real we have discovered a division between idea and fact, between general and particular, between primary and secondary reality and the like, but we have found, in every part, relation and correlation, unity and distinction in unity. There is no general philosophy opposed to, or consequent on, or alongside particular philosophies; particular philosophy is general, and the general is the particular; nor is there a general history, which is not also particular history, and vice versa. History is always the history of man as artist, thinker, economic producer, and moral agent, and in distinguishing these various aspects, it gives their unity, which does not transcend these various aspects, but is these various aspects themselves.

and consequently of a History of general philosophy outside the histories of particular philosophic sciences.

In like manner, the History of thought, or the History of Philosophy, which is one of these determinate aspects, is distinguished in the histories of particular philosophic concepts, as the history of Æsthetic, of Logic, of Economics and of Ethics; but it is also unified in them and consists in nothing but them, completely resolving itself into them. There is no general History of Philosophy, in the sense of a history of general Philosophy, or of Metaphysics, or whatever else it may be called, outside particular histories (which are unity in particularity).

One of the errors which in our opinion vitiates the writing of the history of philosophy, appears to be just the prejudice in favour of a treatment of the general part of this history, in which, for instance, speculations concerning practice enter only incidentally, a great part of logical doctrine is excluded as not belonging to it, and the doctrines of Æsthetic are hardly referred to at all. The prejudice is derived, in the last analysis, from the old idea of an Ontology or Metaphysic, as the science of an ideal world, of which nature and man are the more or less imperfect actualizations; hence the relegation of a great part of true and proper philosophy to what is called the human and natural world, and the looking upon this as a special philosophy, distinguished from general philosophy and consequently lying outside the true and proper history of philosophy. That prejudice, amounting almost to a survival, persists even in those who have more or less surpassed such a conception, and determines the curious configuration of a general history of philosophy, outside the special histories. Such a scheme, when closely examined, shows itself to be a complex of historical elucidations of some problems of Logic, and of some of the philosophy of the practical (individuality, liberty, the supreme good, etc.), and of some arising from their relations (knowing and being, spirit and nature, infinite and finite, etc.). These are all without doubt arguments of philosophical history; but they must be united with the others, from which they have been wrenched, and without which they prove but little intelligible. Philosophy is present in the Poetics and the Rhetoric of Aristotle as much as in the Metaphysics; not less in the Critique of Pure Judgment of Kant, than in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is never outside those treatises concerning what are called the special parts of philosophy. The present-day historians of philosophy who have overcome so many forms of transcendence and re-established immanence, must also overcome the residue of transcendence, which, so to speak, they still retain in their own house.

Histories of particular philosophies and literary value of such division.

Certainly, the reality of the distinctions between the various aspects of the real and between the various particular philosophies renders possible literary divisions, through which there are composed special treatises upon Ethics and so upon the history of Ethic; upon Logic and so upon the history of Logic; upon Æsthetic and so upon the history of Æsthetic; but it is not possible by a like method of division to construct a treatise upon general Philosophy and a corresponding History of general philosophy. It is not possible, because this literary division presupposes a distinction of concepts; and a general philosophy is not conceptually distinguishable. When the attempt to distinguish it is made, we have, as we saw, a mass of historical fragments taken from the various philosophic sciences; that is to say, not the coherent historical treatment of problems relating to a definite aspect of the real, but a more or less arbitrary aggregate.

History of Logic in a particular sense.

With these considerations, we have answered the question concerning the relation between the History of Logic and the History of Philosophy. This relation is the same as that between Logic and Philosophy,—terms which are capable neither of distinction nor of opposition. The history of Logic is not outside the history of Philosophy, but is an integral part of this history itself. To make it the object of special treatment always means to compose a complete history of philosophy, in which, from the literary point of view, prominence and priority are given to the problems of Logic, the others being thrown, not outside the picture, but into the background. The same may be said of the History of Æsthetic or of Ethic or of any other particular discipline, which is never held to be distinguishable.

Works relating to the history of Logic.

Logic being more or less profoundly renovated (as we have sought to do in this book), it is natural that the histories of Logic hitherto available can no longer be completely satisfactory. For they are written from points of view that have been surpassed, such as Aristotelian formalism or Hegelian panlogism, and therefore either do not interpret facts with exactitude, or they give prominence and exaggerated importance to certain orders of facts, neglecting others far more worthy of mention and of examination.

Of the special books bearing the title of the History of Logic, there is really only one—that of Charles Prantl—which, based upon wide researches, is truly remarkable for its doctrine and for lucid and animated exposition. Unfortunately this does not go further than the fifteenth century and omits the whole movement of modern philosophy.[1] But even the period exhaustively treated by him (Antiquity and the Middle Ages) is looked at from the narrow angle of an Aristotelian and formal temperament. Other works bearing the same title are not worthy of attention.[2] On the other hand, the better histories of Logic must not be sought under this title, but especially in the better Histories of Philosophy, beginning with that of Hegel, which, for the most part, is precisely a history of Logic.

In inaugurating a new treatment, governed by the principles which we have defended, we shall confine ourselves, in the following pages, to a sketch of the history of some of the principal parts of logical doctrine, without any claim to even approximate completeness, and with a view to giving simple illustrations of the things that were said in the theoretical part. In this theoretical part, in virtue of the identity of philosophy and history which we have explained, history may be said to be already contained and projected, even though names and dates are mostly omitted and left to be understood.

II

THE THEORY OF THE CONCEPT

Question as to who was the "father of Logic."

Just as whenever in Æsthetic any one sought the "father" of the science Plato was usually named, so whenever a like enquiry has been proposed for Logic that honourable title has been almost unanimously bestowed upon Aristotle. But even if we admit (as we must) in a somewhat empirical and expedient sense, the propriety of these searches for "discoverers" and "fathers," Aristotle could not in our eyes occupy that position. For if Logic is the science of the concept, such a science was evidently begun before him. Further, Aristotle himself claimed the distinction only of having reduced and treated the theory of reasoning[1] and recognized elsewhere that to Socrates belonged the merit of having directed attention to the examination and definition of the concept (τούς τ' ἐπακτικοὺς λόγους καὶ τὸ όρίζεσθαι), that is to say, to the very principle of logical Science,[2] the rigorous form of truth.

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

In this affirmation of the consistency and absoluteness of knowledge and of truth (sustained in him by a vivid religious and moral consciousness) lies the significance of Socrates as opposed to the Sophists; as indeed in the same thing lies the importance of Hellenic Logic of the truly classical period. This Logic elaborated the idea of conceptual knowledge, of science or of philosophy, and transmitted it to the modern world with a terminology, which is in great part that which we ourselves employ. We too reject in almost the same words as the Greek philosophers the renascent sophism, the perennial Protagoreanism, and the sensationalism which denies truth, and (like the ancient Gorgias), by declaring it incommunicable by the individual, individualizes and reduces it to practical utility. In Plato, the affirmation and glorification of conceptual knowledge was accompanied by contempt for the knowledge of the individual, and in comparison with the immortal world of ideas, the world of sensations was for him so dark and obscure as to disappear in his eyes like phantoms before the sun. But Aristotle, although he held firmly that there is no science of the accidental and individual, and of sensation, which is bound to space and time, to the where and the when, and that the object of science is the universal, the essence, which is being, was less exclusive than he; and as he saved the world of poetry from the condemnation of Plato, so, in all his philosophy and in all his work as physicist, politician and historian, he affirmed the world of experience and of history.[3]

Enquiries concerning the nature of the concept in Greece. The question of transcendence and immanence.

On the other hand, there was in Socrates only the consciousness of the universal still indefinite and vague; in Plato there appeared for the first time the consciousness of the true character of the universal, and so of its distinction from empirical universals; and in Aristotle this enquiry gave important results. The problem of the nature of the concept became, then and afterwards, interwoven with that other problem of the transcendence or immanence of the concepts; but since, notwithstanding many points of contact, the two problems cannot be completely identified, they must not be confounded. Indeed, the problem of the transcendence or immanence of the universals is reducible to the more general problem of the relation between values and facts, the ideal and the real, what ought to be and what is; whereas the other, concerning the nature of the universals, centres upon the distinction between universals that are truly logical, and pseudological universals, and upon the greater or less admissibility of one or the other or of both, and so upon their mode of relation. The point of contact between the two problems lies in this, that where pure and real universals are denied and only arbitrary and nominal universals allowed to subsist, the question of the immanence or transcendence of the universals also disappears. And as to the first problem and the polemic of Aristotle against Plato concerning the ideas, it has appeared to some critics (to Zeller and others) that Aristotle misunderstood his master and invented an error that Plato had never maintained, or attacked merely certain gross expositions of doctrine which were current in some Platonic school. To others again (to Lotze, for instance), it has seemed that Aristotle thought this problem, at bottom, in the same way as Plato, who by placing the ideas in a hyper-Uranian space, in a super-world or a super-heaven, thus came to refuse to them that reality which Aristotle himself refused to them and to consider them as values, not as beings; although Greek linguistic usage prevented Plato from expressing the difference, just as it prevented Aristotle from expressing the same thing, when it led him to describe genera as "second substances" (δεύτεραι οὺσίαι). However, as regards the first interpretation, it certainly seems to us that it is impossible to raise doubts about such a document as the testimony of Aristotle[4] by means of such frequently uncertain documents as the Platonic dialogues. And as regards the second interpretation, it seems to us that it does not so much purge Plato of the vice of transcendence as convict his adversary also of sharing that vice. On this point the opposition of Aristotle to his predecessor does not coincide with that of modern nominalism and empiricism to philosophic idealism, for the former sets in question the truth of the concept itself. Aristotle denied this truth as little as Plato; indeed he expressly asserted that his predecessor was right, and approved his definite accusation of the sophists that they were occupied not with the universal but with the accidental, that is to say, with not-being.

Controversies as to the various forms of concept in Plato.

The beginning of the enquiry as to the nature of universals or of ideas is to be seen, on the other hand, in Plato's embarrassments before the questions as to whether there are ideas of everything, of artificial as well as of natural things, of noble things and vile things alike, of things only or also of properties and relations; of good things or also of bad things (καλὸν καὶ αἰσχρόν, ἀγαθὸν καὶ κακόν)[5] He does not escape from the embarrassments, save occasionally, by making strange admissions, by accepting ideas of all the preceding, only to fall immediately afterwards into contradictions, through which however we see the outlines of the problems of to-day. Are the ideas representative concepts (of things) or are they not rather categories (ideas of relation)? Arc opposites particular kinds of ideas (if there exist ideas of base and ugly things, as well as of beautiful and good things)? Is it possible to distinguish, from the point of view of the Ideas, between the natural world and the human world (between natural things and artificial)? Plato himself refers to mathematical knowledge as distinct from philosophic knowledge.

The philosophic concepts and the empirical and abstract concepts in Aristotle. Philosophy, physics and mathematics.

In Aristotle, the determination of the rigorous philosophic concept and its distinction from empirical and abstract concepts make great progress, although this does not amount to a solution of those Platonic embarrassments. Aristotle accurately traces the limits between Philosophy (and so the philosophic concept) and the physical and mathematical sciences. Philosophy, the science of God or theology (as he also calls it), treats of being in its absoluteness, and so not of particular beings or of the matter that forms part of their composition. The non-philosophical sciences, on the other hand, always treat of particular beings (περὶ ὄν τι καὶ γένος τι). They take their objects from sense or assume them by hypotheses, giving now more, now less accurate demonstrations of them. All the physical sciences have need of some definite material (ὕλη) because they are always concerned with noses, eyes, flesh, bones, animals, plants, roots, bark, in short with material things, subject to movement. There even arises a physical science that is concerned with the soul, or rather, with a sort of soul (περὶ ψυχῆς ἐνίας), in so far as this is not without matter. Mathematics, like philosophy, studies, not things subject to movement, but motionless being; but it differs from philosophy in not excluding the matter in which their objects are as it were incorporated (ὡς ἐν ὔλῃi): the suppression of matter is obtained in them by aphairesis or abstraction.[6]

The universals of the "always" and those of the "for the most part."

This divergence between philosophic and physical or mathematical procedure is the point upon which empiricism and mathematicism rely; but these, inferior here to Aristotle, deny the science of absolute being (περὶ ὅντος άπλῶς) and leave in existence only the second order of sciences, which deal with the particular and abstract. There is another important distinction in Aristotle, but to tell the truth it is impossible to say how far he connected it with the preceding distinction between philosophy and physics, with which it is substantially one. Aristotle knew two forms of universal: the universal of the always (τοῡ ἀεί) and that of the for the most part (τοῡ ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ).[7] He was well aware of the difference between the first, which is truly universal, and the second, which is so only in an approximate and improper manner; and he even asked himself if the for the most part alone existed and not also the always; but his interest was directed not so much to the comparative differences of the two series, as to the common character of universality which both of them asserted as against the individual and accidental. Science (he said) is occupied, not with the accidental, but with the universal, whether it be eternal and necessary (ἀναγκαῖον) or only approximately universal (ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ).[8] Philosophy, physics and mathematics felt at this period that they had a common enemy in sensationalism and sophism, and they formed an alliance against this common enemy, rather than as happened later, dissipate their energies in intestinal welfare.

Controversies concerning Logic in the Middle Ages.

Without dwelling upon the later scepticism, mysticism and mythologism, which represented the dissolution of ancient philosophy and the germ of a new life (especially in Christian mythologism, which had absorbed elements of ancient philosophy and was accompanied by a very developed theology), we must pass on to note the progress which the logical problem made in the schools of the Middle Ages. To look upon mediæval philosophy (as many do) as a negligible episode, a mere detritus of ancient culture quite unconnected with the later spiritual activity, is now no longer possible. Certainly in the disputes of the nominalists and realists, the problem of transcendence and of immanence was neglected. It could not be solved on the presumptions of a philosophy which had at its side a theology, of which it constituted itself the handmaiden. The Platonic transcendence was incurable in Christianity, and those who even to-day seek to purify Christianity from survivals of Greek thought, do not perceive that, in this purification effected by their philosophies of action and of immanence, they are destroying Christianity itself.[9]

Nominalism and realism.

But in those disputes, besides the question of the place that belongs to science in relation to religious faith, or to mundane science in relation to revealed and divine science, the question of the nature of the concept was also raised; that is to say, they continued the Platonic-Aristotelian enquiry into the doctrine of the concept in the second of the meanings that we have distinguished. But no true conclusion was reached in this enquiry. The conciliatory formula of the Arabic interpreters of Aristotle, accepted by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, in which the universals were affirmed as existing ante, in and post rem, in so far as it is possible to confer upon it an exact meaning, was understood in a superficial manner, and therefore it has not unreasonably seemed too easy and too expeditious.[10] A dispute of this sort cannot be solved by summarizing discordant opinions, as in the formula we have mentioned, or by fixing a mean, as in conceptualism. But the realists, bravely maintaining the truth of the philosophic universal, maintained the rights of rational thought and of philosophy; and the nominalists, on their part, asserting in contradiction to the former, the nominalist universal, prepared the modern theories of natural science. Realism produced philosophic thought of high importance, as in the so-called ontological argument of Anselm of Aosta, which (though through the myth of a personal God) asserts the unity of Essence and Existence, the reality of what is truly conceivable and conceived. Gaunilo, who confuted and satirized that concept, by employing the example of a "most perfect island," thinkable yet non-existent, seems an anticipation of Kant; at least of the Kant who employed the example of the hundred dollars to illustrate the same case—if it is not more accurate to say that Kant was, in that case, a late Gaunilo. Anselm replied (as Hegel did to Kant) that it was not a question of an island (or of a hundred dollars of something imaginable that is not at all a concept), but of the being than which it is impossible to think a greater and a more perfect (the true and proper concept). On the other hand, the nominalists, who like Roscellinus maintained that the universelles substantiae were nonnisi flatus vocis, performed the useful office of preventing the sciences of experience from being absorbed and lost in philosophy. In Roger Bacon we see clearly the connection of nominalism with naturalism. He considered individual facts, so-called external experience, in its immediacy, as the true and proper object of science. Concepts were for him a simple expedient, directed towards the mastery of the immense richness of the individual. "Intellectus est debilis (he said); propter eam debilitatem magis conformatur rei debili, quae est universale, qitam rei quae habet multum de esse, ut singulare."

Nominalism, mysticism and coincidence of opposites.

But the nominalists, dialecticae haeretici (as Anselm called them), were heretics only in the circle of the dialectic. The truth remained for them something beyond; the concept, the secunda intentio, was certainly something arbitrary and ad placitum instituta; it was "forma artificialis tantum, quae per violentiam habet esse," but beyond it were always faith and revelation. God is the truth, and in God the ideas are real; hence Roger Bacon gave to inner light (as the positivists or neocritics of to-day give to feeling) a place beside sensible experience. Mysticism, being developed from mediæval philosophy, both from one-sided realism and from one-sided nominalism, extends its hand at the dawn of the new Era to the philosophy of Cusanus, to scepticism, to docta ignorantia. This was not a mere negation; so much so that in it (though in a negative form and mixed with religion) there appears in outline nothing less than the theory of the coincidence of opposites, that is to say, the cradle of that modern logical movement, which was destined definitely to conquer transcendence. The coincidence of opposites is the germ of the dialectic, which unifies value and fact, ideal and real, what ought to be and what is. This important thought reappears in German mysticism; and (significantly for its future destinies) rings out upon the lips of Martin Luther, who declared that virtue coexists with its contrary, vice, hope with anxiety, faith with vacillation, indeed with temptation, gentleness with disdain, chastity with desire, pardon with sin; as in nature, heat coexists with cold, white with black, riches with poverty, health with disease; and that peccatum manet et non manet, tollitur et non tollitur, and that at the moment a man ceases to make himself better, he ceases to be good.[11] And before it became dominant in Jacob Böhme it was stripped of its religious form and eloquently defended in Italy by Giordano Bruno.[12]

The Renaissance and naturalism. Bacon.

This realist, mystical and dialectical current of thought was destined to yield its best fruits some centuries later. For the time being, in the seventeenth century, and yet more in the century that followed, the victory seemed to rest with nominalism, that is to say, with naturalism. In Italy, Leonardo da Vinci laughed at theological and speculative disputes and celebrated, not the mind, but the eye of man, that is, the science of observation. The same tendency appeared in the anti-Aristotelians and naturalists, who placed the natural sciences above scholasticism. In England, the other Bacon, however slight his importance both as philosopher and naturalist, yet has much importance as the symptom and spokesman of the self-assertion of naturalism. In the Novum Organum, the universal of the for the most part claims its rights as against the universal of the necessary and eternal. He does not wish, however, to do away with the latter, but rather to complete it; the syllogism is insufficient, induction also is needed. Philosophy and theology are well where they are, but a science of physics is also needed; philosophic induction, which goes at a leap to first causes, must be accompanied by a gradual induction (the only one that interests the naturalist), which connects particular facts by means of laws more and more general; final causes must be banished from the study of nature, and only efficient causes admitted. Anticipationes naturae, that is to say, the invasions of philosophism into the natural sciences, are to be prohibited. These utterances are far more discreet than those that have so often since been heard.

The ideal of exact science and the Cartesian philosophy.

By another school of this period, on the other hand, the pure concept was wrongly identified with the abstract concept. Thus speculative rationalism took the form of mathematical rationalism and the ideal of philosophy was confused with the ideal of exact science. This tendency is also to be found in Leonardo, who exalted "reason" alone, that is calculation, as outside of and sometimes superior to experience. Galileo expressed similar thoughts later. The Cartesian philosophy is animated with it, that is to say, the philosophy of Descartes and of his great followers, especially Spinoza and Leibnitz. Thus this is especially an intellectualist philosophy, full of empty excogitations and rigid divisions, developed by a mechanical or by a teleological method, which always operated by means of mechanism. It is true that even under these improper forms, philosophic thought progressed. The consciousness of the inner unity of philosophy progressed with Descartes, that of the unity of the real by means of Spinoza's concept of substance, and that of spiritual activity by means of the dynamism of Leibnitz; but Logic remained as a whole the old scholastic logic. The purity of the concept was asserted at the expense of concreteness; thus the concept, in the Logic of those writers, is always something abstract, although its reality is so far recognized that it is thought possible to think with it the most real (the God of Descartes, the substance of Spinoza, the Monad of Leibnitz). The eighteenth century, mathematical, abstractionist, intellectualist ratiocinative, anti-historical, illuminist, reformist, and finally Jacobin, is the legitimate issue of this Cartesian philosophy, which confuses the Logic of philosophy with the Logic of mathematics. France, which was the country of its birth and where it became most firmly rooted and most widely disseminated, owes to it, perhaps even more than to Scholasticism, the mental imprint which it still bears and which the strong Germanic influence that has made itself felt there also in the last century has not sufficed to eradicate. It is only in our day that the country which is the type of the abstract intellect strives to become philosophically more concrete. It is now occupied with æstheticism or intuitionism, and, unless the movement is suffocated or dissipated, it may effect a true revolution in the traditional French spirit.

Adversaries of Cartesianism. Vico.

The opposition to abstractionism had no representatives in the seventeenth century and for a great part of the eighteenth, except among thinkers of but slight systematic powers, with whom it did not progress beyond the logical form of the presentiment and the literary form of the aphorism. In France, Blaise Pascal was one of these, with his anti-Cartesianism, his restriction of the value of mathematics, and his celebration of the reasons of the heart which reason does not know. In Germany there was Hamann, who possessed such a strong sense of tradition, of history, of language, of poetry and of myth, and finally of the truth contained in the principle of the coincidence of opposites which he had met with somewhere in Bruno. The Italian Giambattista Vico was the only great systematic thinker to express opposition to abstractionism and Cartesianism. Prior to and more clearly than Hamann, he perceived the unity of philosophy and history, or as he called it, of philosophy and philology. He conceived thought as an ideal history of reality, immanent in the real history which occurs in time; he abolished the distinctions of the concept as separate species and substituted the notion of degrees or moments, which (as Schelling did after him) he called ideal epochs; he considered the abstractionist and mathematical century which he saw rising before him, as a period of philosophic decadence, and foretold the evil effects of Cartesian anti-historicism. (His presage was fulfilled.) In this way, he sketched a new Logic, very different from that of Aristotle or of Arnaud which was the most recent, a Logic in which he attempted to satisfy Plato and Bacon, Tacitus and Grotius, the idea and the fact. But if the other opponents of abstractionism had very little effect, because of their immaturity and want of system, Vico also was ineffectual, because he was born in Italy precisely at the time when Italy as a productive country was definitely issuing from the circle of European thought and was beginning passively to accept the more popular forms of foreign thought. Finally, Naples, the little country of Vico, was then becoming encyclopædist and sensationalist, and did not really begin to know until a century later the remedy for such evils composed in anticipation by Vico.

Empiricist Logic and its dissolution—Locke, Berkeley and Hume.

The surpassing of the Logic of the abstract concept and the achievement of that of the concrete concept or pure concept or idea, was realized in other ways, primarily by a sort of reduction to the absurd of empiricist and mathematical Logic, in the scepticism which was its result. This reduction to the absurd, this final scepticism, is to be observed in the movement of English philosophy, beginning with Locke or even with Hobbes, to Hume. Locke, starting from perception as his presupposition, derived all ideas from experience, with the sole instrument of reflection; and rejecting innate ideas and looking upon others as more or less arbitrary, he preserved some objectivity to mathematical ideas alone, which relate to what are called primary qualities. Berkeley denies objectivity even to the primary qualities. All concepts, naturalist and mathematical alike, are for him abstract concepts and to that extent without truth. The only truth is the "idea," which means here nothing but sensation or the representation of the individual. His Logic is not empiricist, because it is in no respect Logic. At the most it is an Æsthetic substituted for and given as Logic. It is true, notwithstanding his complete denial of universals—of empirical and abstract, no less than of philosophic, which he never even mentions—that he deludes himself into thinking that he has overcome scepticism; and it is true also that he laid the foundations of a spiritualist and voluntarist conception of reality, which in our opinion should be preserved and adopted by modern thought. But this proves only that his philosophy does not wholly agree with his Logic, and not that his Logic is not the complete denial of the concept and of thought. The logical consequence of Berkeley could not, then, be anything but the scepticism of David Hume, who shakes the very foundation upon which the whole of the science of nature rests, namely, the principle of causality.

Exact science and Kant. The concept of the category.

As the effect of this extreme scepticism, the surpassing of empiricist and abstractionist Logic had to be begun with the restoration of that Logic itself (because that which does not exist cannot be surpassed), that is to say, with the demonstration, against Hume, that the exact science of nature is possible. Such is the principal task of the Critique of Pure Reason, which contains the Logic of the natural and mathematical sciences, thought no longer by an empiricist, but by a philosopher who has surpassed empiricism and recognized that the concepts of experience presuppose the human intellect, which originally constructed them. Leibnitz had already travelled this road, when in a polemic against Locke he maintained that reflection to which Locke appealed, referred back to the innate ideas: for if reflection (he said) is nothing but "une attention à ce qui est en nous et les sens ne nous donnent point ce que nous portons déjà avec nous," how can it ever be denied "qu'il y est beaucoup d'inné en nous, puisque nous sommes, pour ainsi dire, innés à nous mêmes? Peut-on nier qu'il y ait eu nous être, unité, substance, durée, changement, action, perception, plaisir et mille autres objets de nos idées intellectuelles?"[13] The New Essays, in which theses and other similar themes were developed, remained for a time unedited, but appeared opportunely in 1765 to fecundate German thought, and acted upon Kant, together with English empiricism and scepticism, the latter giving the problem and the former almost an attempt at a solution. But the innate ideas of Leibnitz are profoundly transformed in the Kantian concept of the category, which is the formal element and really exists only in the very act of judgment, which it effects. Mathematics are thus secured in their possession, no longer by means of the primary qualities of Locke, but because they arise from the a priori forms of intuition, space and time. The natural sciences are also secured, because the concepts of them are constituted by means of the categories of the intellect, on the data of experience. In other words, mathematical and natural science have value, in so far as they are a necessary product of the spirit.

The limits of science and Kantian scepticism.

But a limitation of value due also to Kant, accompanies this theoretic reinforcement of exact science. That science is necessary, because produced by the categories; but the categories cannot develop their activity except upon the data of experience; so that exact science is limited to experience, and whenever it makes the attempt to surpass it, it becomes involved in antinomies and paralogisms and gesticulates in the void. Science moves among phenomena and can never penetrate beyond them and attain to the "Thing in itself."

The limits cf science and Jacobi.

It would seem from this that Kant was bound to end in a renovated nominalism and mysticism, and indeed such is partly the case. Contemporaneously with him, Jacobi also observed the limit in which is enclosed the mechanical and determinist science of nature (the highest philosophic expression of which was then found in the Ethic of Spinoza), since it works with the principle of causation and is impotent, unless it wishes to commit suicide, to leave the finite which it describes in a causal series, and Jacobi concluded in favour of mysticism and of feeling, the organ of the Knowledge of God. Kant, like Jacobi, in his turn has recourse to the non-theoretic form of the spirit, to the practical reason and its postulates, to provide that certitude of God, of immortality, and of human freedom, which is not evident to the theoretic reason. But in Kant there are other positive elements which are not in Jacobi, and these elements, although not sufficiently elaborated by him and not harmonized with one another, confer upon his philosophy the value of a new Logic, more or less sketched. For he recognizes not only a theoretic but also a practical reason, which cannot be called simply practical, if it in any way produce (although only under the title of postulates), knowledge (and knowledge of supreme importance). He recognises also an æsthetic judgment, which, although developed without concepts, does not belong to the sphere of practical interests; and a teleological judgment, which is regulative and not constitutive, but not on this account arbitrary or without meaning. Finally, the very contradictions, in which the intellect becomes involved, when it wishes to apply the categories beyond experience, could not reasonably be considered by him to be mere errors, because they constitute serious problems, if the intellect becomes involved in them, not capriciously, but of necessity. All this presages the coming of a new Logic, which shall set in their places these scattered elements of truth and solve the contradictions.

The a priori synthesis.

But the Kantian philosophy also contains, in addition to these elements and these stimulations, the concept of the new Logic in the a priori synthesis. This synthesis is the unity of the necessary and the contingent, of concept and intuition, of thought and representation, and consequently is the pure concept, the concrete universal.

The intimate contradiction of Kant. Romantic principle and classical execution.

Kant was not aware of this; and instead of developing with a mind free from prejudice the thought of his genius, he also allowed himself to be vanquished by the abstractionism of his time and out of the logical and philosophical a priori synthesis he made the more or less arbitrary a priori synthesis of the sciences. In this way, the apriority of the intuition led him, not to art, but to mathematics (transcendental Æsthetic)[14] the apriority of the intellect led him, not to Philosophy, but to Physics (abstract intellect): hence the impotence which afflicted that synthesis, when confronted with philosophic problems. When he discovered the a priori synthesis, Kant had laid his hand upon a profoundly romantic concept; but his treatment of it became afterwards classicist and intellectualist. The synthesis is the palpitating reality which makes itself and knows itself in the making: the Kantian philosophy makes it rigid again in the concepts of the sciences; and it is a philosophy in which the sense of life, of imagination, of individuality, of history, is almost as completely absent as in the great systems of the Cartesian period. Whoever is not aware of this intimate drama and fails to understand this contradiction; whoever, when confronted with the work of Kant, is not seized with the need, either of going forward or of going backward, has not reached the heart of that soul, the centre of that mind. The old philosophers who condemned Kant as sceptical and as a corrupter of philosophy, and who confined themselves strictly to Wolfianism and to scholasticism, and the new who greeted him as a precursor and made of him a stepping-stone on which to mount higher,—these alone came truly into contact with Kant's philosophy. For in his case there are but two alternatives: abhorrence or attraction, loathing or love. In the midst of a battle one must flee or fight: to sit still and take one's ease is the attitude of the unconscious and the mad. Certainly it is better to fight than to flee, but it is better to flee than to sit inactive. He who flees, saves at least his own skin, or, to abandon metaphor, saves the old philosophy, which is still something; but the inactive man loses both life and glory, the old philosophy and the new.

Advance upon Kant: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel.

The new philosophy was that of the three great post-Kantians, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. With Fichte, all trace of the thing in itself has disappeared and the dominating concept is that of the Ego, that is, of the Spirit, which creates the world by means of the transcendental imagination and recreates it in thought. In Schelling is found the concept of the Absolute, the unity of subject and object, which has, as its instrument, intellectual intuition. In Hegel, there is this same concept, but it has itself as instrument, that is to say, it is truly logical. All three are Kantians, but all three (and especially the last two) are not simply Kantian. They employed elements which Kant ignored or employed timidly, and in particular the mystical tradition and the new tendencies of æsthetic and historical thought. Thus they pass beyond the abstractionism and intellectualism of the Kantian period, and inaugurate the nineteenth century. They are connected ideally with Vico (Hamann was the little German Vico), and they enrich him with the thoughts of Kant.

The Logic of Hegel. The concrete concept or Idea.

Neglecting the particular differences between these thinkers and the genetic process by which we pass from one to the other, and taking the result of that speculative movement in its most mature form, which is the philosophy of Hegel, we see in it (like a new, securely established society after the frequent changes of a revolution) the establishment of the new doctrine of the concept. Kant's unconsciousness of the consequences of the a priori synthesis had been such that he had not hesitated to affirm that Logic, since the time of Aristotle, had possessed so just and secure a form as not to need to take one single step backward, and to be unable to take one forward.[15] But Hegel insisted that this was rather a sign that that science demanded complete re-elaboration, since an application of two thousand years should have endowed the spirit with a more lofty consciousness of its own thought and of its own essential nature.[16] What was the concept for Hegel? It was not that of the empirical sciences, which consists in a simple general representation and therefore always in something finite; it is barbaric to give the name concepts to intellectual formations, like "blue," "house," or "animal." Nor was it the mathematical concept, which is an arbitrary construction. All the logical rationality that there is in mathematics is what is called irrational. These so-called concepts are the products of the abstract intellect; the true concept is the product of the concrete intellect, or reason. It has therefore nothing to do with the immediate knowledge of the sentimentalists and of the mystics, and with the intuition of the æstheticists; such formulae as these express the necessity for the concept, but give only a negative determination of it. They assert what it is not in relation to the empirical sciences and then misstate what it is in philosophy. For the rest, the shortcomings of the abstract intellect, generating the pure void or thing in itself(which far from being, as Kant believed, unknowable, is indeed the best known thing of all, the abstraction from everything and from thought itself) prepare the environment for the phantasms and caprices of mysticism and intuitionism. The true concept is the idea, and the idea is the absolute unity of the concept and of its objectivity.

Identity of the Hegelian Idea with the Kantian a priori synthesis.

This definition has sometimes seemed whimsical, sometimes most obscure; yet it presents nothing but the elaboration in a more rigorous form of the Kantian a priori synthesis, so that these two terms could without further difficulty be regarded as equivalent; the a priori logical synthesis is the Idea and the Idea is the a priori logical synthesis. If Hegel has not been understood, that is due to the fact that Kant himself has not been understood. Those who assert that they understand what Kant meant to say, but not what Hegel meant to say, deceive themselves. For Kant and Hegel say the same thing, though the latter says it with greater consciousness and clearness, that is to say, better.[17]

The Idea and the Antinomies. The Dialectic.

The idea, the concrete universal, the pure concept, rebels against the mechanical divisions employed for the empirical concepts. For it has its own division, its own proper and intimate rhythm, by means of which it divides and unifies, and unifies itself when dividing and divides itself when unifying. The concept thinks reality, which is not immobile but in motion, not abstract being, but becoming; and therefore in it distinctions are generated one from another and oppositions reconciled. Hegel not only gives the true meaning of the Kantian a priori synthesis, recognizing it as the concrete concept, but replaces the antinomies in its bosom. The contradiction is not due to the limitation of thought before a non-contradictory reality, which thought is unable to attain; it is the character of reality itself, which contradicts itself in itself, and is opposition, coincidentia oppositorum, the synthesis of opposites, or dialectic. A new doctrine of opposites and the outlines of a new doctrine of distinction accompanies the new doctrine of the pure concept. In this philosophy is truly summarized all the previous history of thought. The concept of Socrates has acquired the reality of the idea of Plato, the concreteness of the substance of Aristotle, the unity-in-opposition of Cusanus and Bruno, the Vichian reconciliation of philosophy and philology, the unity-in-distinction of the Kantian synthesis and the æsthetic suppleness of Schelling's intellectual intuition.

The lacunæ and errors of the Hegelian Logic. Their consequences.

Nevertheless, the history of thought does not stop at Hegel. In Hegel himself are found the points to which later history must attach itself; the lacunæ which he left and the errors into which he fell. The fundamental error was the abuse of the dialectic method, which originated for the philosophic solution of the problem of opposites, but was extended by Hegel to the distinct concepts, so that he interpreted even the Kantian synthesis itself as nothing but the unity of opposites. Hence arises his incapacity to attribute their true value and function to the alogical forms of the spirit, such as art, and to the atheoretic, such as the natural sciences and mathematics; and even to logical thought itself, which, violating the laws of the synthesis, ended by imposing itself upon history and the natural sciences, attempting to resolve them into itself by dialectizing them, as the philosophy of history and the philosophy of nature. To this, therefore, is due the philosophism or panlogism which is characteristic of the system. This error was assisted by Hegel's want of clearness as to the nature of the empirical sciences. For him as for Kant, these remained sciences, that is to say, knowledge of truth, although imperfect knowledge of it. They therefore constituted even for him the material or the first step in philosophy. It is true that he also had other more acute and profound thoughts upon this subject. Amid a number of incidental observations, he emphasized the arbitrariness (Willkurlichkeit), with which those forms are affected; and this is tantamount to declaring their practical and atheoretic character. But instead of respecting this character, he decided upon surpassing it by means of a philosophic transformation of those sciences, which was not so much their death as pretended philosophies (a most true conclusion), as their elevation to the rank of particular philosophies by means of a mixture of empirical concepts and pure concepts, of abstract intellect and of reason. The erroneous tendency found nourishment and took concrete form in the idea of a Philosophy of nature, which Schelling had obtained, partly from Kant himself and partly had found in his own at first latent and then manifest theosophism. In this way, the system of Hegel became divided into three parts, a Logic-metaphysic, a Philosophy of nature and a Philosophy of Spirit, whereas it should on the contrary have unified Logic and the Philosophy of Spirit, and expelled the Philosophy of nature. By its internal dialectic, panlogism or philosophism was converted, even in Hegel himself, and still more among his disciples, into mythologism, and from the system of the Idea and of absolute immanence, because of the imperfections which they contained, there reappeared theism and transcendence (the Hegelian right wing).[18]

Contemporaries of Hegel: Herbart, Schleiermacher, and others.

It would be vain to seek the correction of Hegel among those thinkers that were his contemporaries, for they were all, though in various degrees, inferior to him. None of them had attained, through Kant, to the height attained by Hegel. Dwelling on a lower level, they could certainly refuse to recognize him and vituperate him, but they could never collaborate with and beyond him, in the progress of truth. Herbart held those concepts to which the particular sciences give rise to be contradictory, but he claimed to surpass the contradiction by means of an elaboration of the concepts (Bearbeitung der Begriffe), conducted in the very method of the old Logic, that is, of the Logic of the empirical sciences. Schleiermacher renounced the attempt to reach the unity of the speculative and the empirical, of Ethic and Physics, that is, the realization of the pure idea of knowledge; and he substituted for that ideal, which for him was unattainable, criticism, a form of worldly wisdom; that is to say, of philosophy (Weltweisheit) which gave access to theology and to religious feeling.[19] Schopenhauer accepted the distinction between concept and idea, the first abstract and artificial, the second concrete and real; but so slight was his understanding of the idea (which he called the Platonic idea) that he confused it with the concept of natural species,[20] that is to say, precisely with one of the most artificial and arbitrary of empirical concepts. Finally, Schelling, who had been a precursor of Hegel in his youth and had collaborated with him, not only failed to improve his logic of the intuition in his second philosophical period, but he abandoned even this embryonic form of the concrete concept, and gave himself over as a prey to the will and to irrationality. In his positive philosophy the old adversary of Jacobi made a bad combination of the alogism of Jacobi with the Hegelian idea of development and with mythologism, as in metaphysic he had anticipated the blind will of Schopenhauer.[21]

Later positivism and psychologism.

The ensuing period, both in Germany and in the whole of Europe, had little philosophical interest. It was marked by the reappearance of a form of naturalism and of Empiricism, in part justified by the abuse of the dialectic, which had sometimes, in the hands of Hegel's disciples, seemed altogether mad. But this recrudescence was in every way very poor in thought and inadequate to previous history. With this Empiricism is associated the deplorable Logic of John Stuart Mill, one of those books which do least honour to the human spirit. That less than mediocre reasoner did not even succeed in producing a Logic of the natural sciences. He became involved in contradictions and tautologies, talking, for instance, of experience, which criticises itself and imposes its own limits upon itself, and of the principle of causality, as a law which affirms the existence of a law that there shall be a law. Still less had he any notion of what it is to philosophize, maintaining that in order to make progress in the moral and philosophical sciences it is necessary to apply to them the method of the physical sciences. Nothing is more puerile than his nominalism, which gives language a logical character, and then pretends that language must be logically reformed. Logical science was altogether lost in the evolutionism or physiologism of Spencer, and in the psychologism which had and still has many followers in Germany, in France, and in England, not less than in Italy. The state in which the Logic of philosophy is found in such an environment can be inferred from the fact that even mathematical Logic fared ill there, since there have not been wanting those who have dared to conceive a psychology of arithmetic. Finally, as a healthy corrective of psychologism, the danger of which to the old Logic had already been noted by Kant,[22] there came the revival of the Aristotelian, and even of the scholastic Logic, in which there yet lived, though in erroneous forms, the idea of the universal which had been discovered by the Greek philosophers.

Eclectics. Lotze.

Other thinkers have not abandoned all contact with classical German philosophy; but, in comparison with the thoughts of Kant and of Kant's great pupils, they seem like children. They try to lift the weapons of the Titans, and either they do not move them at all or they let them fall from their hands, wounding themselves with them, but failing to grip them. The thoughts of Schelling and of Hegel indeed were discredited, but not touched; and those of Kant were touched, but ill-treated. In the most esteemed Logics of this description, such as those of Sigwart and of Wundt, the capital distinction between pure concepts and representative concepts, between universalia and generalia, has no prominence at all. Sigwart is obliged to complete the knowledge obtained from naturalistic and mathematical procedure by faith and by a gradual elevation to the idea of God. Wundt, who does not attribute to philosophy a method which is proper to it and different from that of the other forms of knowledge, conceives the final result of metaphysical thought as the position of a perpetual hypothesis. In the Logic of Lotze, who combated Hegelianism and revived transcendentalism and theism, there is just a luminous streak, a faint trace, of the idealist philosophy. Lotze understands that it is impossible to form (empirical) concepts by simply cancelling the varying parts of representations and preserving the constant parts, and recognizes that the formation of concepts presupposes the concept: the universal is made with the universal. He strives to issue from this circle by positing a primary universal, not formed by the method of the others, but such that thought finds it in itself. This primary universal has nothing particular and representative; and only by means of it is it possible to combine heterogeneous and to differentiate homogeneous elements, and to form the ideas of size, of more or less, of one and of many and such like, with which the second universals of the synthesis are afterwards constructed.[23]

New gnoseology of Science. The Economic theory of the scientific concept.

While students of philosophy, although manifesting some doubt and dissatisfaction, allowed themselves to be intimidated by naturalism (dazzled, like the public, with technical applications, or confounded by the applause of the public), a tendency has become more and more accentuated during the last decades, which seems to us to offer great assistance to Logic and philosophy in general, if it is understood how to adapt it to its true end. It has not had any single centre of diffusion, but has arisen, almost contemporaneously, in several places, becoming at once diffused everywhere, like something that has happened at the right time. Several of its founders and promoters are mathematicians, physicists, and naturalists. From the very fact of their having begun to reflect upon their activity, these men have certainly ceased to be mere specialists, notwithstanding their protests to the contrary. Yet they obtain considerable strength from their specialism, finding in it a guide and a curb to prevent their losing sight in their gnoseological enquiry of the actual procedure of naturalistic constructions, which are its origin. The formula of this tendency is the recognition of the practical or economic character of the mathematical, physical, and natural sciences.