THIRD PART (continued 3)

Avenarius, Mach.

The empirocriticism of Avenarius considers science to be a simple description of the forms of experience, and conceptual procedure to be the instrument that alters pure and primitive experience (pure intuition or pure perception) for the purpose of simplifying it. Ernest Mach has developed and popularized these views, for as a student of mechanics he had reached the same conclusions by his own path and in his own way. The physical sciences (he says), not less than zoology and botany, have as their sole foundation the description of natural facts in which there are never identical cases. Identical cases are created by means of the schematic imitation that we make of reality; and here toe lies the origin of the mutual dependence that appears in the character of facts. To this therefore he restricts the significance of the principle of causality, for which (in order to avoid fancifulness and mythologicism) it would be opportune to substitute the concept of function. Bodies or things are abbreviated intellectual symbols of groups of sensations; symbols, that is to say, which have no existence outside our intellect. They are cards, like those which dealers attach to boxes and which have no value except in so far as there are goods of value inside the box. In this economic schematicism lies the strength, but also the weakness, of science; for in the presentation of facts science always sacrifices something of their individuality and real appearance, and does not seek exactness in another way save when obliged to do so, by the requirements of a definite moment. Hence the incongruity between experience and science. Since they are developed upon parallel lines, they can reduce to some extent the interval that separates them, but they can never annul it by becoming coincident with one another.[24]

Rickert, in his book on the Limits of the Naturalistic Concepts, maintains similar ideas, though with different cultural assumptions. The concept, which is the result of the labour of the sciences, is nothing but a means to a scientific end. The world of bodies and of souls is infinite in space and time. It is not possible to represent it in every individual part, by reason of its variety, which is not only extensive but also intensive: intuition is inexhaustible. The naturalistic concept is directed to surpassing this infinity of intuitions. It effects this by determining its own extension and comprehension, and by formulating its being in a series of judgments. Thus, in order to conquer intuition altogether, the natural sciences tend to substitute for concepts of tilings concepts of relations free from all intuitive elements. But the ultimate concept must always of necessity be a concept of things (though of things sui generis, immutable, indivisible, perfectly equal among themselves, expressible in negative judgments); and besides, they find everywhere insuperable barriers in the historical or descriptive element, which surrounds them all and is ineliminable. This naturalistic procedure can be applied and is indeed applied, not only to the science of bodies, but also to that of souls, to psychology and sociology; and Rickert opportunely insists (as did Hegel in his time) upon the possibility of empirical sciences of what is called the spiritual world; or (as he says) the word "nature," as used in this connection, means not a reality, but a particular point of view from which reality is observed, in order to reach the end of conceptual simplification.[25]

Bergson and the new French philosophy.

In France, the same ideas or very similar are represented by a group of thinkers, who are called variously philosophers of contingency, of liberty, of intuition, or of action. Bergson, who is the chief of them, looks upon the concepts of the natural sciences in the same way as Mach, as symboles and étiquettes. Besides the extremely apposite applications that he has made of this principle to the analysis of time, of duration, of space, of movement, of liberty, of evolution, he has also the great merit of having broken his country's traditions of intellectualism and abstractionism, of giving to France for the first time that lively consciousness of the intuition, which she has always lacked, and of shaking her excessive reliance upon clear distinctions, upon well-turned concepts, upon classes, formulæ, and reasonings that proceed in a straight line, but run upon the surface of reality.[26]

Le Roy and others.

Le Roy, one of the followers of Bergson, has set himself to demonstrate, with many examples, that scientific laws only become rigorous when they are changed into conventions and depend upon vicious circles. The course of events is habitual and regular (if you like to say so), but it is not at all necessary. The great security of astronomical previsions is commonly praised; but that security is not always such in actual fact ("il y a des comètes qui ne reviennent pas"), and in any case it is always approximate. The rigorous necessity of which the natural sciences boast, is not known, but is rather postulated, and this postulation has merely the practical object of dominating single facts and of communicating with our neighbours ("parler le monde"). The law of gravity holds, but only when external forces do not disturb it. In this way it is well understood that it always holds. The conservation of energy avails only in closed systems; but closed systems are just those in which energy is conserved. A body left to itself persists in the state of repose; but this law is nothing but the definition of a body left to itself, and so on.[27] Poincaré boldly affirms the conventional character of the mathematical and physical sciences, as do Milhaud and several others. They have deduced it as a consequence of the impression aroused by the theories of higher geometry, which has contributed more or less successfully towards revealing the practical character of mathematics, which was formerly held to be the foundation or model of truth and certainty.

Reattachment to romantic ideas and advance made upon them.

All those criticisms directed against the sciences do not sound new to the ears of those Schelling, of Novalis, and of other romantics, and particularly with Hegel's marvellous criticism of the abstract (that is, empirical and mathematical) intellect. This runs through all his books, from the Phenomenology of the Spirit to the Science of Logic, and is enriched with examples in the observations to the paragraphs of the Philosophy of Nature. But if compared with that of Hegel, they are at the disadvantage of not being based upon powerful philosophical thought; they have, on the other hand, this superiority: that they do not present the characteristics observed in the sciences as errors which must be corrected, but define them as physiological, necessary, uncensurable characteristics, derived from the very function of the sciences, which is not theoretic, but practical and economic. In this way there is posited one of the premisses that are necessary for preventing the mixture of the economic method with the method of truth, of empirical and abstract concepts with pure theoretic forms, and thus for making impossible that speculative hybridism, which is expressed in philosophies of history and of nature, and which fashions an abstract reason to work out a dialectic of the naturalistic concepts, and even of the representations of history. And with the prevention of this error there is also prepared a more exact idea of the relation between pseudoconcepts and concepts and a better constitution of philosophic Logic.

Philosophy of pure experience, of intuition, of action, etc.; and its insufficiency.

But in order that this result should be obtained, the idea of the philosophic universal must be reawakened and strengthened, in conformity with its most perfect elaboration in the history of thought, at the hands of Hegel. The critics of the sciences are at present far from this mark. The term that is distinct from the empirical and abstract concepts, the knowledge of reality which is not falsified by practical ends and discovered beneath labels and formulae, is supplied, not by the pure concept, by reality thought in its concreteness, by philosophy which is history, but by pure sensation or intuition. Both Avenarius and Mach appeal to pure and primitive experience, that is, to experience free of thought and anterior to it. Bergson, with an artistic talent that is wanting to the two Germans, but following the same path, has proclaimed a new metaphysic, which proceeds in an opposite sense to that of symbolical knowledge and of generalizing and abstracting experience. He has defined the metaphysic which he desires, as a science qui prétend se passer des symboles, and therefore as "Science de l'expérience intégrale." This metaphysic would be the opposite of the Kantian ideal, of the mathematical universal, of the Platonism of the concepts, and would be founded upon intuition, the sole organ of the Absolute: "est relative la connaissance symbolique par concepts pré-existants qui va du fixe au mouvant, mais non pas la connaissance intuitive, qui s'installe dans le mouvement et adopte la vie même des choses. Cette intuition atteint l'absolu."[28] The conclusion is æstheticism, and sometimes something even less than æstheticism, namely mysticism, or action substituted for the concept. The criticism of the sciences thereby comes to mean the negation of knowledge and of truth. Hence the protest of Poincaré[29] against Le Roy, justified in its motive, but ineffective, because based upon the presuppositions of mathematics and physics. In others again, it becomes intermingled with the turbid waters of pragmatism, which is a little of everything, but, above all, chatter and emptiness.

The theory of values.

Finally, another of the thinkers that we have mentioned, Rickert (following Windelband), wishes to integrate naturalistic and abstract knowledge with the historical knowledge of individual reality. Being reasonably diffident as to the possibility of a metaphysic as an "experimental science" (such as Zeller was among the first to desire), he moves towards a general theory of values. This indeed is the form (imperfect because stained with transcendence) by means of which many in our day are approaching a philosophy as the science of the spirit (or of immanent value). But in the hands of Windelband and Rickert it is understood as a primacy of the practical reason, which is taken to govern the double series of the world of the sciences and the world of history. This doubtless represents progress, as compared with empiricism and positivism; but not as compared with the Hegelian Logic of the pure concept, which included in itself what is and what ought to be.

Such, briefly stated, is the present state of logical doctrines concerning the Concept.

III

THE THEORY OF THE INDIVIDUAL JUDGMENT

Secular neglect of the theory of history.

The theory of the individual judgment and therefore of historical thought, has been the least elaborated of all logical theories in the course of philosophic history. It is a very true and profound remark that the historical sense is a modern thing, and that the nineteenth century is the first great century of historical thinking. Of course, since history has always been made and individual judgments pronounced, theoretic observations upon historical judgments have not been altogether wanting in the past. The spirit is, as we know, the whole spirit at every instant, and in this respect nothing is ever new under the sun, indeed, nothing is new, either before or after the sun.[1] But history, and in particular, the theory of history, did not formerly arouse interest nor attract attention, nor was its importance felt, nor was it the object of anxious and wide investigations to the degree witnessed in the nineteenth century and in our times, when the consciousness of immanence triumphs more and more—and immanence means history.

Græco-Roman world's ideas of history.

Transcendence, then, which has for centuries been more or less dominant, supplies the reason why the study of the individual and the theory of history were neglected. In Greek philosophy, individual judgments were either despised, as in Platonism, or superseded by and confused with logical judgments of the universal, as in Aristotle. In the Poetics[2] the character of history did not escape him. Differing from science (which was directed to the universal) and from poetry (which was directed to the possible), it expresses things that have happened in their individuality, ta genomena (what Alcibiades did and experienced). But in the Organon, although he distinguished between the universal (ta katholou) and the individual (ta kath' ekastou), between man and Callias,[3] he made no use of the distinction, and divided judgments into universal, particular and indefinite. The theory of history was not raised to the rank of philosophic treatment in antiquity, like the other forms of knowledge, and especially philosophy, mathematics and poetry. What mark the ancients have left upon the argument is limited to incidental observations, and some altogether empirical remarks here and there upon the method of writing history. They were wont to assign extrinsic ends to it, such as utility and advice upon the conduct of life. Such utterances of good common sense as that of Quintilian, to the effect that history is written ad narrandum, non ad demonstrandum, do not possess great philosophic weight. Nor had the rules of the rhetoricians philosophic value, such as that of Dionysus of Halicarnassus, that historical narrative, without becoming quite poetical, should be somewhat more elevated in tone than ordinary discourse; or that of Cicero, who demanded for historical style verba ferme poëtarum, "perhaps" (wrote Vico, making the rhetorical rule profound) "in order that historians might be maintained in their most ancient possession, since, as has been demonstrated in the Scienza nuova, the first historians of the nations were the first poets."[4] More important, on the other hand, are the demands (as expressed especially by Polybius) of what is indispensable to history. Besides the element of fact, there is needful (Polybius observed) knowledge of the nature of the things of which the happenings are portrayed, of military art for military things, of politics for things political. History is written, not from books, as is the way with compilers and men of letters, but from original documents, by visiting the places where it has occurred and by penetrating it with experience and with thought.[5]

The theory of history in mediæval and modern philosophy

The abstractionist and anti-historical character of the Aristotelian Logic had an injurious effect in the schools, though, on the other hand, it allied itself well with the persistent transcendentalism. Certainly, just as in the Middle Ages appeared reflections upon history, so there could be no avoiding the distinction between what was known logice and what was known historice, or, as Leibnitz afterwards formulated the distinction, between propositions de raison and propositions de fait. But these latter were always regarded with a compassionate eye, as a sort of uncertain and inferior truth. The ideal of exact science would have been to absorb truths of fact in truths of reason, and to resolve them all into a philosophy, or rather into a universal mathematics. Nor did the empiricists succeed in increasing their credit. These certainly paid particular attention to facts (hence the polemic of the Anti-Aristotelians and the origin of the new instrument of observation and induction). But by weakening the consciousness of the concrete universal they also weakened that of the concrete individual, and therefore presented the latter in the mutilated form of species and genera, of types and classes. Bacon, had he done nothing else, at any rate assigned a place to history in his classification of knowledge, which was divided, as we know, according to the three faculties (memory, imagination and reason), into History, Poetry and Philosophy. He passed in review the two great classes of history, natural and civil (the first of which was either narrative or inductive, the second more variously subdivided); thus he even pointed out the kinds of history that were desirable, but of which no conspicuous examples were yet extant, such as literary history.[6] Hobbes, on the other hand, having distinguished the two species of cognition, one of reason and the other of fact, "altera facti, et est cognitio propria testium, cujus conscriptio est historia," and having subdivided this into natural and civil, "neutra" (he added, that is to say neither the natural nor the civil) "pertinet ad institutum nostrum" which was concerned only with the cognitio consequentiarum, that is to say, science and philosophy.[7] Locke is not less anti-historical than Descartes and Spinoza, and even Leibnitz, who was very learned, did not recognize the autonomy of historical work, and continued to consider it as directed towards utilitarian and moral ends.

Treatises on historical art in the Renaissance.

Reflections upon history, suggested rather by the professional needs of historians than by a need for systematization and a profound philosophy, continued on their way, almost apart from the philosophy of the time. From the Renaissance onwards, treatises on historical art were multiplied at the hands of Robortelli, Atanagi, Riccoboni, Foglietta, Beni, Mascardi, and of many others, even of non-Italians; but their discussions usually centred upon elocution, upon the use of ornament and of digressions, upon arguments worthy of history, and the like. Among these writers of treatises we must note (here as well as in the history of Poetics and of Rhetoric) Francesco Patrizio or Patrizzi (1560), for his ideas, sometimes acute, sometimes incoherent and extravagant. Overcoming one of the prejudices of empiricism, he justly wished that the concept of history should not be limited to military enterprises and political negotiations alone, and that it should be extended to all the doings of men. With a like superiority to empirical views, he found historical representation not only in words, but also in painting and sculpture—(our times, so fruitful of histories graphically illustrated, should admit that he was to some extent right), and he did not accept chronological limits. He also insisted upon the mode of testing historical truth and upon the degree of credibility of witnesses. But he became extravagant, when he admitted a history of the future, calling the prophets as witnesses, and incoherent, when he both denied and affirmed the moral end of history.[8]

Treatises upon method.

Another form of empiricism, certainly more important, the methodological, which dealt with the canons and criteria to be borne in mind in making historical researches, accompanied the often rhetorical empiricism of writers of treatises. The reference to the duties of the historian in one place in Cicero was repeated and commented upon by all. But this treatment became gradually more wide, as we see especially in the work of Vossius, Ars historica sive de historia et historiae natura, historiaeque scribendae praeceptis commentatio (1623). The term "Historic" dates from this book and is formed on the analogy of Logic, Poetic, Rhetoric, etc., and applied to the theory or Logic of history. Gervinus (1837) and Droysen (1858) tried to bring this term again into vogue. The methodological treatment of historical research was more widely developed in the scholastic manuals of Logic of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as the Logica seu ars ratiocinandi of Leclerc (1692).[9] With these canons arising in the field of research and historical criticism, we may opportunely compare those concerning the mode of valuing and weighing evidence, which were gradually unified in juridical literature. Methodological treatment has also progressed in our times, in manuals such as those of Droysen, of Bernheim, of Langlois-Seignobos; but the general tendency of these works (as is also evident from their apparatus in heuristic, in criticism, in comprehension and in exposition) remains and must remain altogether empirical.

The theory of history and G. B. Vico.

The first philosopher who gave to History an importance equal to Philosophy was Vico, with his already-mentioned union of philosophy and philology, of truth and certainty, and with the example that he offered of a philosophic system, which is also a history of the human race: an "eternal ideal history, upon which the histories of nations run in time." For this reason (not less than from his strong consciousness of the difference in character between the metaphysical concept and mathematical abstraction) Vico was an Anti-Cartesian. He stands between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the opposer of the past and of the future, or of the nearest past and the nearest future. Indeed, there is even in Vico a trace of that vice which arises from a too indiscriminate identification of philosophy and history, which certainly constitute an identity, but an identity which is a synthesis and therefore a distinction. Hence, when no account is taken of this, the substantial truth affirmed loses its balance in philosophism and mythologism. The real epochs of Vico are too philosophic and have in them something forced; the ideal epochs are too historical and have in them something of exuberance and of contingency. The real epochs are not exempt from philosophistic caprices; the ideal sometimes become converted into a mythology (though full of profound meanings). For this reason, it has been possible now to praise, now to blame him for having invented the Philosophy of history. There is indeed in him, here and there, some hint of a philosophy of history sensu deteriori, but above all he is the great philosopher and the great historian.

The anti-historicism of the eighteenth century and Kant.

As the eighteenth century did not really know the concept of philosophy, so was it ignorant of that of history: its anti-historicism has become proverbial. There appeared at this time some celebrated theoretic manifestations of historical scepticism, of the negation of history, which seemed, as before to Sextus Empiricus, a thing without art and without method (ἅτεχνον ... καὶ ἐκ τἥς ἀμεθόδον ὕλης τυγχράνουσαν). The book of Melchior Delfico, Pensieri sull' Istoria e sull' incertezza ed inutilità della medesima (1808), is one of the last manifestations of this sort. But all the thinkers of that time were of this opinion; even Kant, in whose wide culture were certainly two lacunæ—artistic and historical. And if in the course of elaborating his system he was led by logical necessity to meditate upon art, or rather upon beauty, he never paid serious attention to the problem of history.

Concealed historical value of the a priori synthesis.

Yet Kant is the true, though unconscious creator of the new Logic of history. To him belongs the merit, not only of having shown the importance of the historical judgment, but also of having given the formula of the identity of philosophy and history in the a priori synthesis. The logical revolution effected by Kant consists in this: that he perceives and proclaims that to know is not to think the concept abstractly, but to think the concept in the intuition, and that consequently to think is to judge. The theory of the judgment takes the place of that of the concept and is truly the theory of the concept, in so far as it becomes concrete. What does it matter that he is not aware of all this and that instead of referring the logical a priori synthesis to history, he refers it to the sciences, constituting it an instrument not of history, but of the sciences; and that instead of exhausting knowledge in the a priori synthesis, he leaves outside of it true knowledge as an unattainable, or theoretically unattainable ideal? What does it matter that when confronted with the problem of the judgment of existence, he solves it like Gaunilo and withdraws existence from thought, removing from it the character of predicate and of concept and making of it a position or an imposition ab extra? What does it matter that his history is without historical developments and wanting even in knowledge of the history of philosophy, and that in the parts of the so-called system that he has developed (for example, in the doctrine of virtue and of rights) there reigns the most squalid crowd of abstractions and of anti-historical determinations? What does it matter that we find the man of the eighteenth century on every page of his book, and that he was absolutely without sympathy for the tendencies of thought of the Hamanns and of they Herders? There always remains the fact that the a priori synthesis carried in itself even that which its discoverer ignored or denied.

The theory of history in Hegel.

It would be preferable to say that all Kant's failures in recognition and all his lacunæ are certainly of importance, just because they provided his followers with a new problem, and generated by way of contrariety the philosophy of Schelling and the historical philosophy of Hegel. Not even in Hegel is there to be found the elaboration of the doctrine of the individual judgment, nor is its identity with that of the concept explicitly recognized. But in Hegel not only do we find ourselves in the full historical atmosphere (suffice it to recall his histories of art, of religion, of philosophy and of the general development of the human race, which are still the most profound and the most stimulating writings upon history that exist); but these historical elucidations are all connected with the fundamental thought of his Logic: the concept is immanent and is divided in itself in the judgment, of which the general formula is that the individual is the universal, the subject is the predicate, every judgment is a judgment of the universal, and the universal is the dialectic of opposites. For this reason also, we find in the works of Hegel a historical method far in advance of all his predecessors and also (save in a few points) of his successors. He maintained, with much vigour, the necessity of the interpretative and rational element in history; and to those who demanded that a historian should be disinterested, in the same way as a magistrate who judges a case, he replied that since the magistrate has nevertheless his interest, that for the right, so has the historian also his interest, namely that for truth.[10]

W. von Humboldt.

Hegel's defect in relation to history (as was Vico's before him but on a larger scale) was the philosophist error, which led him to the design of a philosophy of history, rising above history properly so-called. The psychological explanations of this strange duplication, together with its philosophic motives, have already been adduced.[11] Wilhelm von Humboldt certainly alluded to Hegel and intended to oppose him in this respect in his discourse concerning the office of the historian (1820). Here the method of the writer of history was likened to that of the artist. Fancy is as necessary to the historian as to the poet, Humboldt said, not in the sense of free fancy, but as the gift of reconstruction and of association. History, like art, seeks the true form of events, the pure and concrete form of real facts. But whereas art hardly touches the fugitive manifestations of the real, in order to rise above all reality, history attaches itself to those manifestations and becomes totally immersed in them. The ideas which the historian elaborates are not introduced by him into history, but discovered in reality itself, of which they constitute the essence. They are the outcome of the fulness of events, not of an extrinsic addition, as in what is called philosophic or theological history (Philosophy of history). Certainly, universal history is not intelligible without a world-order (eine Weltregierung). But the historian possesses no instrument which enables him directly to examine this design, and every effort in which he attempts to reach it, makes him fall into empty and arbitrary teleologism. He must, on the contrary, proceed by deducing it from facts examined in their individuality; for the end of history can only be the realization of the idea, which humanity must represent from all sides and in all the different modes in which finite form can ever be united with the idea. The course of events can only be interrupted when idea and form are no longer able to interpenetrate one another.[12] The protest was justified, not indeed against the fundamental doctrine of Hegel, but rather against one of its particular aberrations. But the protest was inferior in the determinateness of its concepts to the philosophy which it opposed. Even in the healthy tendency of the Hegelian doctrine, ideas should not be introduced but discovered in history. And if it sometimes seemed that the Philosophy of history introduced them from without, this happened because in that case true ideas were not employed and the concreteness of the fact was not respected.

F. Brentano.

The theory of the individual judgment has made no progress in the Logics of the nineteenth century, save for certain timely explanations concerning the existential character of the judgment given by Brentano and his school. Brentano, who is an Anti-Kantian, considers the period inaugurated by Kant to be that of a new philosophical decadence. Yet notwithstanding his sympathy for mediæval scholasticism and for modern psychologism, he has too much philosophic acumen to remain fixed in the one or to lose himself in the other. Thus the tripartition of the forms of the spirit, maintained by him,[13] beneath the external appearance of a renovated Cartesianism, bears traces of the abhorred criticism, romanticism and idealism. The first form, the pure representation, answers to the æsthetic moment; the second, the judgment, is the primitive logical form answering to the Kantian a priori synthesis; and love and hatred, the third form, which contains will and feeling, is not without precedent among the Post-Kantians themselves. He reasonably criticizes the various more or less mechanical theories, which treat the judgment as a connection of representations or a subsumption of concepts, and defends the idiogenetic against allogenetic theories. But when he tries to prove that the judgment "A is" cannot be resolved into "A" and "is" (that is, into A and existence), because the concept of existence is found in the judgment and does not precede it, he goes beyond the mark. For the concept of existence certainly does not precede, but neither does it follow the judgment: it is contemporaneous; that is to say, it exists only in the judgment, like the category in the a priori synthesis. And he goes beyond the mark again, when he makes existentiality the character of the judgment, whereas existentiality is only one of the categories and consequently, if it be indispensable for the constitution of the judgment, it is not sufficient for any judgment, since for every judgment there is necessary the inner determination of the judgment as essence and as existence. For the rest, this is easily seen in the theories of his school, which end by establishing a double degree or form of judgment, thus creating a duality that cannot be maintained.[14] In any case, in the researches of Brentano and his followers, there is affirmed the need for a complete doctrine of the judgment and of its relation (which in our opinion is one of identity) with the doctrine of the concept. The theories of values and of judgments of values already mentioned, in their investigation of the universal or valuative element, express the same need from another point of view; although none of them discovers, by recalling the Kantian-Hegelian tradition, that values are immanent in single facts, and that consequently judgments of value, as judgments, are the same as individual judgments.

Controversies concerning the nature of history.

Enquiries concerning the character of history may assist the constitution of a theory of individual judgments. These enquiries have never enjoyed so much favour as in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Naturalism or positivism has provided the incentive to such enquiries, for it brought into being the problem: "whether history is or is not a (natural) science," by its attempt to violate and pervert history by raising it (as they said, and it must have sounded ironical) to the rank of a science, that is to say, of a naturalistic science. There were two answers to the problem: (1) that history is a science sui generis (not natural); (2) that it is, not a science, but an art, a particular form of art, the representation of the real.

Rickert; Xénopol. History as science of the individual.

The first of these answers is to be found in the work of Rickert (1896-1902), cited above, and in the almost contemporary work of Xénopol (1899).[15] Rickert's work is that of a professional philosopher, and a follower of Windelband; the other, of an intelligent historian, who is somewhat lacking in equipment as a philosopher. Rickert, after having examined the naturalistic process and demonstrated how it finds a limit in individuality, next examines historical process, which takes possession of the field that naturalism is obliged to relinquish. Xénopol upholds the same distinction, of a double series of sciences, historical and theoretical, of phénomènes successifs and of phénomènes de répétition. To both these writers (besides the merit of having revived, in opposition to naturalism, the consciousness of individuality) belongs that of having understood that the field of history extends far beyond that ordinarily assigned to it, and embraces every manifestation of the real. But merely successive phenomena or phenomena of mere repetition do not exist and are not conceivable; nor is it true that the sciences dealing with the former stop at differences of fact and neglect identities. For how could a history of political facts be written, if no attention were paid to the constant political nature of those facts? or of poetry, without paying attention to the constant poetical nature of all its historical manifestations? or of zoological species, without paying attention to the constant nature of the organism and of life? The distinction, therefore, as formulated by Xénopol, is little enough elaborated, not to say crude. Rickert, for his part, falls into a like error, owing to his failure to respect that intuitive and individual element, which he had previously admitted. Hence the serious contradictions, in which he becomes involved in the second part of his book. After having defined the concept as peculiar to the naturalistic method, he eventually claims to find also a species of concept in the procedure of history, which he had distinguished from and opposed to the former: a historical concept, which is obtained by cutting out, in the extensive and intensive infinity of facts, certain groups, which are placed in relation by means of practical criteria of importance and of value. It is true (he writes) that the concept has been defined by us as something of universal content; but now we wish precisely to surpass this one-sidedness, and therefore in the interest of logic it is justifiable to give the name concepts also to the thoughts which express the historical essence of reality.[16] It is worse still when he attempts to explain the ineradicable intuitive and æsthetic element of historical narration; for holding art to be without truth and of use only in producing some sort of artistic (hedonistic?) effect, he recognizes that element as a means of endowing narration with liveliness and of exciting the fancy.[17] A consequence of this lack of understanding of the æsthetic function has been the laborious and vain attempt which Rickert is obliged to make, to determine to what personages and facts we are to attribute objective historical value.

History as art.

The second answer, that history is an art (that is to say, a special form of art, which is distinguished from the rest, in that it represents, not the possible but the real), avoids the above-mentioned difficulties. It distinguishes clearly between the natural sciences and history; it explains the ineliminability and the function of the intuitive element in history, and does not lose itself in the vain search for the distinctive criterion between historical facts and non-historical facts, because it declares that all facts are historical.[18] But it must in any case be corrected and completed with the conclusion that the representation of the real is no longer simple representation or simple art, but the interpenetration of thought and representation, that is to say, philosophy-history.[19]

Other controversies concerning history.

All the other controversies recently engaged upon, relate to the criteria of interpretation, or the system of ideas, which serves as the basis of any sort of historical narration. Thus there have been disputes as to the precise meaning and the greater or less importance in history of climate, of race, of economic factors, of individuality, of collectivity, of culture, of morality, and of intelligence; and also as to how teleology, immanence, providence, and so on, are to be understood in history. In these disputes there recur constantly the names of Buckle, of Taine, of Spencer, of Ranke, of Marx, of Lamprecht and of others. It is evident that those controversies concern, not only the gnoseological nature of historical writing, but the system of the spirit and of the real, the conception of the world itself. The materialist and the spiritualist, the theist and the pantheist, will solve them differently. To write their history here would be to go beyond the boundaries of Logic and of the particular history of Logic, that we have set ourselves.

IV

THEORIES OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THOUGHT AND WORD AND FORMALIST LOGIC

Relation between the history of Logic and that of the Philosophy of language.

The history of Logic depends very closely upon the history of the Philosophy of language, or of Æsthetic, understood as the philosophy of language and of expression in general. Every discovery concerning language throws new light upon the function of thought, which, surpassing language, employs it as an instrument, and therefore unites itself with language both negatively and positively. It belongs to the progress of the Philosophy of language, not less than to that of Logic, to have determined in a more exact manner the relations between thought and expression, as also to have dissipated or begun the dissipation of empirical and formalist Logic. This Logic, deluding itself with the belief that it was analysing thought, presents a series of mutilated and empty linguistic forms.

Logical formalism. Indian Logic free of it.

This error, which appeared very early in our western world, has spread during the centuries and yet dominates many minds; so true is this that "Logic" is usually understood to mean just illogic or formalist Logic. We say our western world, because if Greece created and passed on the doctrine of logical forms, which was a mixture of thoughts materialized in words and of words become rigid in thoughts, another Logic is known, which, as it seems, developed outside the influence of Greek thought, and remained immune from the formalist error. This is Indian Logic, which is notably antiverbalist, though very inferior to that of Greece and of Europe in wealth and depth of concepts, and limited almost exclusively to the examination of the empirical concept or reasoning, of naturalistic induction or expectatio casuum similium. Indian Logic studies the naturalistic syllogism in itself, as internal thought, distinguishing it from the syllogism for others, that is to say, from the more or less usual, but always extrinsic and accidental forms of communication and dispute. It has not even a suspicion of the extravagant idea (which still vitiates our treatises) of a truth which is merely syllogistic and formalist, and which may be false in fact. It takes no account of the judgment, or rather it considers what is called judgment, and what is really the proposition, as a verbal clothing of knowledge; it does not make the verbal distinctions of subject, copula and predicate; it does not admit classes of categorical and hypothetical, of affirmative and of negative judgments. All these are extraneous to Logic, whose object is the constant: knowledge considered in itself.[1]

Aristotelian Logic and formalism.

It was a subject of enquiry and of disagreement, especially during the second half of last century, whether formalist Logic, the Logic of the schools, could legitimately be called Aristotelian. Some, among whom were Trendelenburg and Prantl, absolutely denied this, and wished to restore the genuine thought of Aristotle, opposing it to post-Aristotelian and mediæval Logic. But they themselves were so enmeshed in logical formalism, that they were not capable of determining its peculiar character. The contrast between those two Logics, so far as it struck them, concerned secondary points. If the proper character of formalism consists in the confusion between thought and word, how are we to deny that Aristotle fell into this error, or that at any rate he set his foot upon the perilous way? Certainly he did not proceed to the exaggerations and ineptitudes of later logicians. He was ingenuous, not pedantic. And his books (and in particular the Analytics) are rich in acute and original observations. He was a philosopher, and his successors were very often manual labourers. But Aristotle (probably influenced by the mathematical disciplines) conceived the idea of a theory of apodeictic, which, from simple judgments, through syllogisms and demonstrations, reached completeness in the definition as its last term. The concept was the first term, as the loose concept or name, the last term was the concept defined. He was not ignorant that not everything can thus be demonstrated, that in the case of the supreme principles such a demonstration cannot be given, and it is vain to look for it, and that there is alongside the apodeictic a science of anapodeictic. But that did not induce him to abandon the study of verbal forms for a close study of the concepts or of the category, which is the demonstration of itself. In his divisions of judgments he was very discreet; but yet he distinguished them verbally, as universal, particular and indefinite, negative and affirmative. In the syllogism he distinguished only three figures, and affirmed that of those the first is the truly scientific (ἐπιστημὀνικον), because it determines what is, whereas the second does not give a categorical judgment and affirmative knowledge, and the third does not give universal knowledge; but these restrictions did not suffice to correct the false step made in positing the idea of figures and moods of the syllogism. When we examine the various doctrines of Aristotle and compare them with the forms and developments which they assumed later, it can be maintained that no logician was less Aristotelian than Aristotle. But even he was Aristotelian, and the impulse to seek logic in words had been begun in so masterly a manner that for centuries it weighed upon the mind like a fate.

Later formalism.

Why, then, should we rage, like many modern critics, against the later manipulations and amplifications to which Aristotelian Logic was submitted by Peripatetics and Stoics, by commentators and rhetoricians, by doctors of the Church and masters of the University, by Neolatins and Byzantines, by Arabs and Germans? We certainly harbour no tenderness for the hypothetical and disjunctive syllogism, or for the fourth figure of the syllogism, as elaborated from Theophrastus to Galen, or for the five predicables of Porphyry, or for subtleties upon the conversions of judgments, or for the mnemonic verses of Michael Psellus and of Peter Hispanus, or for the geometric symbols of the concepts and syllogisms invented by Christian Weiss in the seventeenth century ("to direct blockheads aright,"[2] as Prantl permits himself to say), or for the calculations upon the moods of the syllogism made by John Hispanianus, which he found to be no less than five hundred and sixty in number, thirty-six of which are conclusive. We also willingly admit that errors have been made in the traditional interpretation of certain doctrines of Aristotle (for example, in the doctrine of the enthymeme).[3] But setting aside these errors, we can say that for those excogitations and distinctions support was already found in the Organon of Aristotle, and that they were derived from principles there laid down. Certainly, with their crude roughness and their evident absurdity, they shock good sense in a way in which the distinctions of Aristotle did not, for these were in some sort of relation with the empirical description of the usual mode of scientific discussions. But the error nestled in themselves; and it was well that it should be intensified, so that it might leap to the eyes of all, just as it is sometimes well that there should be scandals in practical life.

Rebellions against Aristotelian Logic. The opposition of the humanists and their motives.

The rebellions which the school (in the wide sense of the word, from the Peripatetic to the modern) continued to arouse in regard to these doctrines might seem to be of greater interest than this labour of embroidering and carving. But since there has been a time during which every protest, and indeed, every insult levelled against the philosopher of Stagira seemed a sign of original thought, of spiritual freedom and of secure progress, it is well to repeat that an indispensable condition for surpassing the Aristotelian Logic was a new Philosophy of language. Such a condition was altogether wanting in the past and is partly wanting now. It is therefore not surprising that when those rebellions are closely examined, we discover in the midst of secondary and superficial disagreement something quite different from what was expected; not the radical negation, but the substantial acceptance, explicit or understood, of the principles of formalist Logic.

Such is the case with the rebellions of the humanists, Ciceronians and rhetoricians, which took place in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, of Lorenzo Valla, of Rudolph Agricola, of Luigi Vives, of Mario Nizolio, of Peter Ramus. The motive power with all of them was abhorrence for the heavy scholastic armour. Culture, leaving the cloisters, spread itself abroad in life; philosophy began to be written in the common tongue, and for this reason men sought forms of exposition that were rapid, easy and clear or eloquent and oratorical. But under these new forms the direction of logical thought remained unchanged. Ramus, for example, who applied to Aristotle the elegant terms of fatuus impostor, chamæleon somnians et stertens, and so forth, ended by claiming that he alone had understood his true thought, and showed by the reforms of it that he proposed (among which was the suggestion that the third figure of the syllogism should pass to the first place) that he, too, was still revolving in the narrow circle of formalism.[4]

The opposition of naturalism.

Even the opposition of naturalism to the Aristotelian Logic did not strike it to the heart, but wished to replace and more often to accompany one form of empiricism with another: the rules of the syllogism with the precepts of induction, the sophistical refutations with the determination of the four idols that preoccupy men's minds. Bacon never dreamed of denying to syllogistic the value of true doctrine. He believed, however, that it had already been sufficiently studied and developed, that it lacked nothing, and even possessed something superfluous, whereas there was still wanting a criterion of invention and of induction, which was of fundamental importance for syllogistic itself. In making the inventory of knowledge (he writes) it is to be observed that we find ourselves almost in the conditions of a man who inherits an estate, in the inventory of which there is noted: "ready money, none" ("numeratae pecuniae, nihil").[5] Hence he raised his voice against the abuse of disputations and of reasoning as to matters of fact; the subtlety of the syllogism is always conquered by that of nature.[6] The syllogism consists of propositions, propositions of words, and words are the counters of concepts; but if the concepts are confused or wrongly abstracted, the syllogistic consequences deduced from them are without any sort of security. Hence the necessity of beginning with induction: "spes est una in inciuctione vera."[7] Bacon's position (which was therefore not anti-formalist, but only an addition or complement to formalism) has been renewed, word for word, in all inductive Logics, up to that of the English school of the nineteenth century, and to ours of to-day. Stuart Mill's book expresses the combination of the two empiricisms, syllogistic and inductive, in its very title: "A system of Logic, ratiocinative and inductive, being a connected view of the principles of evidence and the methods of Scientific investigation."

Labour of simplification in the eighteenth century. Kant.

In the eighteenth century, while Leibnitz sought an amplification and perfecting of syllogistic in the logical calculus, and some followed him who did not, however, attain to true effectiveness in the history of culture,[8] formalist Logic fell always more and more into discredit, not only as Logica utens, but also as docens, that is to say, as theory.

Hence the moderate tendency, to which Kant adhered, which consists of preserving that Logic, while seeking to correct, and, in particular, to simplify it. For example, Kant undertook to demonstrate the "false subtlety of the four figures of the syllogism," and at the same time rendered traditional Logic yet more formalist by withdrawing from it all examination of the synthesis and the categories, which he referred to his new transcendental Logic. Traditional Logic, which he respected and held to be substantially perfect, constituted (he said) a canon of the intellect and of reason, but only in the formal aspect of their employment, whatever be the content to which it is applied. Its only criterion is the agreement or non-agreement of any knowledge with the general and formal laws of the intellect and of reason; a conditio sine qua non of every truth, but a conditio which is only negative.[9]

Refutation of formalist Logic. Hegel; Schleiermacher.

Hegel, on the contrary, opposed tradition. He understood the character of formalist Logic marvellously well: this "empirical Logic, a bizarre science, which is an irrational knowledge of the rational, and sets the bad example of not following its own doctrines. Indeed it assumes the licence of doing the opposite of what its rules prescribe, when it neglects to deduce the concepts and to demonstrate its affirmations."[10] In so far as it was empirical it was intellectualist, and presented the determinations of reason in an abstract and atomic manner in combining them mechanically. The new concept of the concept, originated by Hegel, creates from itself its own theories and allows the old formalist theories to disappear as dead and dry remains. The forms of thought are henceforth the very forms of the real; the Idea is the unity of concept and representation, because it is the universal itself, big with the individual. Things are realized judgments, and the syllogism is the Idea which identifies itself with its own reality. This at bottom amounts to saying that thought fully dominates reality, because it is not an extrinsic addition or an interposed means, but Reality itself, which makes itself thought, because it is thought. Other philosophers, too, contemporaries and adversaries of Hegel, rejected formalist Logic, and among these was Schleiermacher.[11] He made the logical forms of the concept and of the judgment correspond to the two forms of reality, being and doing, finding corresponding analogies in space, a dividing of being, and in time, a dividing of doing. The concept and the judgment mutually presuppose one another, and give rise to a circle, which is so only when considered temporally; since at the point of indifference, of fusion, of indistinction the two make one.[12] Schleiermacher differed from Hegel (who attains in thought the unity of the real) in being obliged to withdraw the syllogism from the number of the essential forms of thought, because (he says), "if the syllogism were a true form, a being of its own should correspond to it, and this is not found to be the case."[13]

Its partial persistence owing to insufficient ideas as to language.

But if with the Hegelian criticism formalist Logic was surpassed by a truly philosophical Logic, and thereupon lost all its importance, it cannot be said that it was definitely dissolved. In Hegel himself there remain traces of it in certain divisions of the forms of judgment and of syllogism, which he either accepts and corrects or creates anew. Definitive criticism demanded that in any case the error peculiar to this empiricism should be recognized. This error consists in confusing language and thought, taking thought as language, and therefore also language as thought. Hegel could not effect this criticism, for he was logistic as regards the theory of language, conceiving it to be a complex of logical and universal elements.[14] Hence the coincidence between the forms of language and those of thought did not seem to him irrational, provided that both were taken in their true connection. The revival of the Philosophy of language, begun by Vico and carried on by Hamann and by Herder, and then again by Humboldt, remained unknown to him or had no influence upon him. Nor, to tell the truth, has it influenced even later Logic, for had it acquired this knowledge, it would have been freed for ever from formalism or verbalism and have possessed a method and a power of application to the nature of the problems that belong to it. Just a trace of serious discussion (but made rather in the interest of the Philosophy of language than in that of Logic) appears in the polemic between Steinthal and Becker concerning the relations between Logic and Grammar.[15]

Formalist Logic in Herbart, in Schopenhauer, in Hamilton.

For this reason, formalist Logic has continued to exist (with difficulty if you will, but yet to exist) in the nineteenth century. From Kant it had received with the name formal a new baptism and a new legitimization. Among post-Kantians Herbart clung closely to it, though he somewhat simplified it, and hostile as he was to all transcendental Logic, he continued to conceive it as the sole instrument of thought. Schopenhauer held logical forms to be a good parallel to rhetorical forms, and limited himself to proposing some slight remodelling of the former: for example, to consider judgments as always universal (both those called by that name and particular and singular judgments as well), and to explain hypothetical and disjunctive judgments as pronounced upon the comparison of two or more categorical judgments. From the syllogism, which he defined as "a judgment drawn from two other judgments, without the intervention of new conditions," he dropped the fourth figure, but he proclaimed the first three to be "ectypes" of three real and essentially different operations of thought.[16] Kant's teaching was followed in England by Hamilton. Hamilton insisted upon the purely hypothetical character of logical reasonings; he excluded from Logic discussions of possibility and impossibility and of the modalities, and declared that the intrusion into that science of the concepts of perfect or imperfect induction, which refer to material differences and are therefore extralogical,[17] was a fundamental error. In this way he reacted against inductive Logic, which, in his country especially, had prevailed against formalist Logic or had strangely accompanied it. He persuaded himself that he could perfect the latter, by simplifying the doctrine of the judgment, by means of what is called the quantification of the predicate.[18]

More recent theories.

Later logicians continued to employ these partial and superficial modifications. Trendelenburg, as has been mentioned, believed that he could make progress by referring the thing to its beginning, that is, by turning from Aristotelianism to Aristotle, and owing to the curious influence of a thought of Hegel, he assigned to logic and reality a common foundation which, for him, was not the Idea, but Movement. Lotze reduced the forms of judgments to three only, according to the variations of the copula: categorical, hypothetical and disjunctive judgments; and he made impersonal judgments precede categorical. By this last class he vainly sought to satisfy the desire for a theoretic form which is presupposed in properly logical thought, and it is yet to seek. Lotze always had at bottom an intellectualistic concept of language: poetry and art seemed to him to be directed, not to contemplation and expression, but to emotion and to feelings of pleasure and pain. He could not therefore recognize the primitive theoretic form in art, in intuition, in pure expressiveness. Drobisch, the Herbartian, revealed formalism in all its crudity, beginning with the affirmation that "there are certainly necessary judgments and syllogisms, but no necessary concepts." Sigwart reformed the classification of judgments (of denomination, of property and activity, impersonal, of relation, abstract, narrative and explicative), and retouched that of syllogisms. Wundt, accepting the old tripartition of logical forms, also attempts new sub-divisions, distinguishing judgments for example, according to their subject, into indeterminate, singular and plural; according to their predicate, into narrative, descriptive and explicative; according to their relation, into judgments of identity, superordination, subordination, co-ordination and dependence; and into negative predications and negative oppositions. Brentano's reform does not in general abandon the formalist circle; hence, having assigned the quantity of judgments to their matter, he limits himself to dividing them into affirmative and negative; among immediate inferences he accepts only the inference ad contradictoriam; among the laws of the syllogism he denies the law ex mere negativis, maintaining indeed that ex mere affirmativis nil sequitur; he defends, as the law of all syllogisms, that of quaternio terminorum, which used to pass for the sign of the sophism; and he further abolishes the vain distinctions of figures and moods.

Mathematical Logic.

Opposed as radical innovators to these logicians, who work more or less with traditional formulas, are the mathematical logicians, who follow, not philosophy, but certain fictions of the Leibnitzian philosophy. George Bentham, De Morgan, Boole, Jevons, Grassman and now several in England, in France, in Germany and in Italy (Peano), have been and are representative of this tendency. They are innovators only in a manner of speaking, for they are ultra-reactionaries, far more formalist than the formalist Aristotle. They are dissatisfied with the divisions made by him, not because they are toe numerous and arbitrary, but because they are toe few and still bear some traces of rationality They strive to the uttermost to provide a theory of thought, from which all thought is absent This kind of Logic has been well defined by Windelband as "Logic of the green cloth."[19]

Inexact idea of language among mathematical logicians and intuitionists.

These logicians have naturally inherited the other fiction of Leibnitz, namely that of the possibility of a constant and universal language,[20] thus revealing another reason for their aberration, and the usual support of the whole formalist error—ignorance of the alogical nature of language. The nature of language remains obscure from another point of view, even to the modern intuitionists (Bergson). They continue to regard as language, not language in its simplicity, but the intellectualist procedure (classificatory and abstractive) which falsifies the continuous in the discontinuous, breaks up duration, and builds a fictitious world upon the real world. They are therefore ultimately led to attribute the value of a pure expression of reality to music, as though music were not language, and true language (not the intellectualist discourse which they accept in place of it) were not essentially music, that is to say, poetry. For the intellectualists also, a Logic (were they to resolve upon constructing one) would be nothing but formalist.

V

CONCERNING THIS LOGIC

Traditional character of this Logic and its connection with the Logic of the philosophic concept.

The Logic which we have expounded in this treatise is also in a certain sense traditional Logic. But it should be connected, not with the tradition of formalism, but rather with that of the Hegelian Logic, of Kantian transcendental Logic, and so of the loftiest Hellenic speculative thought. In other words, its affinity should be sought in the logical sections of the Critique of Pure Reason of Kant, or in the Metaphysic of Aristotle, and not in the Lessons in Logic or in the Analytics of the same authors. This traditional character endows it with confidence, because man has always thought the true, and it is to be doubted if he who fails to discover the truth in the past, possesses the truth of the present and of the future, of which in his proud isolation he thinks himself secure.

Its innovations.

But to be truly attached to tradition means to carry it on and to collaborate with it. Contact with thought is always dynamic and propulsive and urges us to go forward, since it is impossible to stop or to turn back. For this reason, this Logic presents some novelties, of which the fundamental and principal can be thus enumerated:

I. Exclusion of empirical and abstract concepts.

I. Accepting the doctrine, which culminates in the last great modern philosophy of the pure Concept, as the only doctrine of logical truth, this Logic excludes empirical and abstract concepts, declaring them to be irreducible to the pure concept.

II. Non-theoretic character of the second and autonomy of the empirical and mathematical sciences.

II. Accepting for these last the economic theory of the empirical and abstract sciences and considering them as having a practical character and therefore as non-concepts (pseudoconcepts), this Logic denies that they exhaust logical thought, indeed it altogether denies that they belong to it and demonstrates that their very existence presupposes the reality of the pure concept. Hence, it connects the two doctrines with one another and asserts the autonomy of philosophy, at the same time respecting the relative autonomy of the empirical and mathematical sciences thus rendered atheoretical.

III. The concept as unity of distinctions.

III. In the doctrine concerning the organism of the pure concept, it accepts the dialectic view or the unity of opposites, but denies its immediate validity for the distinctions of the concept; the unity of which is organized as a unity of distinctions in the theory of degrees of reality. In this way, the autonomy of the forms of reality or of the spirit is also respected and the practical nature of error established.

IV. Identity of the concept with the individual judgment and of philosophy with history.

IV. The richness of reality, of facts, of experience, which seemed to be withdrawn from the pure concept and so from philosophy by the separation of it from the empirical sciences, is on the contrary restored to and recognized in philosophy, not in the diminished and improper form which is that of empirical science, but in a total and integral manner. This is effected by means of the connection, which is a unity, between Philosophy and History—a unity obtained by making clear and profoundly studying the nature of the concept and the logical a priori synthesis.

V. Impossibility of defining thought by means of verbal forms, and refutation of formalists Logic.

V. Finally, the doctrines and the presuppositions of formalist Logic are refuted in a precise manner. The autonomy of the logical form is asserted and consequently the effort to contain its determinations in words or expressive forms is declared to be vain. These are certainly necessary, but obey, not the law of logic, but that of the æsthetic spirit.

Conclusion.

Such, summarily indicated, is the progress upon previous thought, which this Logic would wish to represent. To gain this end, it has availed itself, not only of the help afforded by ancient and modern Logic, concentrated in the Hegelian Logic, but also of those others that have come into being since Hegel, and especially of æsthetic, of the theory of historical writing and of the gnoseology of the sciences. It has striven to avail itself of all scattered truths, but of none in an eclectic manner, that is to say, by making arbitrary collections or merely aggregations, for it has been conscious that scattered truths become truly truths when they are no longer scattered but fused, not many, but one.

THE END