BENEDETTO CROCE (continued 2)

Critique of the end as flan or as fixed design.

The idea that we generally have of finality is to be eliminated, owing to the continual changeability of the means, that is, of the actual situation, which would posit the end as something fixed, as a plan to be carried out. The difference between the finality of man and that of nature has recently been made to reside in nature: which has seemed to act upon a plan which she changes, remakes, and accommodates at every moment, according to contingencies, so that the point of arrival is not for her predetermined or predeterminable. But the same can be said of the human will and of its finality. The will too changes at every moment, as the movement of a swimmer or of an athlete changes at every moment, according to the motion of the sea or of the rival athlete, and according to the varying measure or quality of his own strength in the course of the volitional process. Man acts, case for case and from instant to instant, realizing his will of every instant, not that abstract conception which is called a plan. Hence also arises the confirmation of the belief that there do not exist fixed types and models of actions. He who seeks and awaits such models and types does not know how to will. He is without that initiative, that creativeness, that genius, which is not less indispensable to the practical activity than to art and philosophy.

The will and the unknown.

It will seem that the will thus becomes will of the unknown and is at variance in too paradoxical a manner with the sayings, so clearly evident, that voluntas quae non fertur in incognitum and ignoti nulla cupido. But those sayings are true only so far as they confirm the fact that without the precedence of the theoretical act, the practical act does not take place. Apart from this signification, it should rather be maintained that noti nulla cupido and that voluntas non fertur in cognitum. What is known exists, and it is not possible to will the existence of what exists: the past is not a content of volition. The will is the will of the unknown, that is to say, is itself, which, in so far as it wills, does not know itself, and knows itself only when it has ceased to will. Our surprise when we come to understand the actions that we have accomplished, is often not small; we realize that we have not done what we thought we had done, and have on the contrary done what we had not foreseen. Hence also the fallacy of the explanations that present volitional man as surrounded with things that he does or does not will; whereas things, or rather facts are the mere object of knowledge and cannot be willed or not willed, as it is unthinkable to will that Alexander the Great had not existed, or that Babylon had not been conquered. That which is willed is not things but changes in things, that is to say, the volitions themselves. This fallacious conception also arises from the substitution of abstractions and classes of volitions for the real will.

Critique of the concept of practical sciences and of a practical philosophy.

It is to be observed, finally, that the erroneous concept of a form of science called the practical or normative has its roots in the concept of the end, of the good, of concepts and judgments of value as original facts. When practical concepts and judgments, as a special category of concepts and judgments, have been destroyed, the idea of a practical and normative science has also been destroyed. For this reason, the Philosophy of the practical cannot be practical philosophy, and if it has appeared to constitute an exception among all philosophies and that above all others it should preserve a practical and normative function, this has arisen from a verbal misunderstanding that is most ingenuous and most destructive. For our part we have striven to dissipate it, even in the title of our treatise, which, contrary to the usual custom, we have-entitled not practical, but of the practical.

IV

INSEPARABILITY OF ACTION FROM ITS REAL BASE AND PRACTICAL NATURE OF THE THEORETICAL ERROR

Coincidence of intention and volition.

The connection between the actual situation and will, means and end having been made clear, no distinction that it may be desired to establish between general and concrete volition, ideal and real volition, that is to say between intention and volition, is acceptable. Intention and volition coincide completely, and that distinction, generally suggested with the object of justifying the unjustifiable, is altogether arbitrary in both the forms that it assumes.

Volition in the abstract and in the concrete: critique.

The first form is that of the distinction between abstract and concrete, or better, between general and particular. It is maintained, that we can will the good in the abstract and yet be unable to will it in the concrete, that we may have good intentions and yet behave badly. But by our reduction of the thing willed to the volition, to will the abstract is tantamount to willing abstractly. And to will abstractly is tantamount to not willing, if volition imply a situation historically determined, from which it arises as an act equally determined and concrete. Hence, of the two terms of the pretended distinction, the first, volition of the abstract, disappears, and the second, concrete volition, which is the true and real volition and intention, alone remains.

Thought volition and real volition: critique.

The second form abandons, it is true, the abstract for the concrete, but assumes two different volitional acts in the same concrete: the one real, arising from the actual situation, the other, thought or imagined, side by side with the former: this would be the volition, that the intention. According to such a theory, it is always possible to direct the intention, that is, the real volition can always join with the volitional act imagined and produce a nexus, in which the volition exists in one way, the intention in another; the first bad and the second good, or the first good and the second bad. Thus the honourable man approved by the Jesuit, of whom Pascal speaks, although he desire the death of him from whom he expects an inheritance and rejoice when it takes place, yet endows his desire with a special character, believing that what he wishes to attain is the prosperity of his affairs, not the death of his fellow-creature. Or the same man may kill the man who has given him a blow; but in so doing he will fix his thought upon the defence of his honour, not upon the homicide. Since he is not able to abstain from the action, he at least (they say) purines the intention. The worst of this is that the real situation, the only one of which we can take account, is the historical, not the imaginary situation. In the reality of the consequent volition, it is not a question of his own prosperity and nothing more, but of his own prosperity coupled with the death of another, or of false prosperity. It is not a question of his own honour and nothing more, but of his own honour in conjunction with the violation of the life of another, that is, of false honour. Thus the asserted fact of prosperity and honour is changed into two qualified bad actions, and what was honourable in the imaginary case, becomes dishonourable in the real case, which is indeed the only one of which it is question. It is of no use to imagine a situation that differs from reality, because it is to the real situation that the intention is directed, not to the other, and therefore it is not possible to direct, that is to say, to change the intention, if the actual situation do not change.

The antipathy that has been shown for good-hearted and well-intentioned men in recent centuries, and for practical doctrines with intention as their principle (the morality of intention, etc.), arises from the sophisms that we have here criticized. But since it is henceforward clear to us that those so-called well-intentioned and good-hearted people have neither good hearts nor good intentions and are nothing but hypocrites, and because we do not admit any distinction between intention and will, we are without fear or antipathy in respect to the use of the word "intention," understanding it as a synonym for "volition."

Critique of volition with base either unknown or imperfectly known.

But it will be said that we have here considered the case, in which, while the real situation is known, there is a hypocritical pretence of not knowing it, in order to deceive others and maybe oneself, and that we have justly here declared that in such a case the will and the intention were inseparable. But there is another case, in which, though the situation of affairs be not known, yet it is necessary both to will and to act at once. Here the concrete will is separated at the beginning from the intention: the will is what it can be, the intention is as the action would wish to be.

But this instance is equally or even more inconceivable than the preceding. It has been clearly established that if we do not know, we cannot will. Before arriving at a resolution, man tries to see clearly in and about him, and so long as the search continues, so long as the doubt is not dissipated, the will remains in suspense. Nothing can make him resolve, where the elements for coming to a resolution are wanting; nothing can make him say to himself "I know," when he does not know; nothing can make him say "it will be as if I knew," because that "as if I knew" would introduce the arbitrary method into the whole of knowledge, and would cause universal doubt to take the place of doubt circumscribed. This would disturb the function of knowledge itself, against which an act of real felony would be committed. From nothing nothing is born.

Illusions among the cases that are cited.

There are no exceptions to this law, and those that are adduced can be only apparent. A man is cautiously descending the dangerous side of a mountain, covered with ice: will he or will he not place his foot on that surface, of which he does not and cannot know the resistance? However, there is no time to be lost: he must go on and take the risk. It seems evident that in a case like this he wills and operates without complete knowledge. But the case is not indeed unique or of a special order: every act of life implies risk of the unknown, and if there were not in us (as they say) potestas voluntatem nostram extra limites intellectus nostri extendendi, it would be impossible to move a step, to lift an arm, or to put into one's mouth a morsel of bread, since omnia incerta ac periculis sunt plena. What must be known in order to form the volition is not that which we should know if we were in a situation different from that in which we are (in which case, also, the volition would be different), but that which we can know in the situation in which we really find ourselves. The man on the glacier has neither time nor means to verify the resistance of the surface of the ice; but since he is obliged to proceed further, he does not act in a rash, but in a very prudent manner, in putting his foot trustfully on the ice that may be unfaithful to him. He would be acting rashly if, having the means and the time, he failed to investigate its resistance, that is to say, if he were in another and imaginary situation, not in that real and present situation, in which he finds himself. If I knew the cards of my adversary, as the cheat knows them, I should play differently, but it cannot be argued that because, as an honest player, I know only my own, I am therefore playing inconsiderately: I am playing as I ought, with the knowledge that I possess, that is, with full knowledge of the real situation in which I find myself.

With this very simple observation is also solved an old puzzle of the theory of volition. How does it happen that a man can choose between two dishes of food at an equal distance and moving in the same manner,[1] or between two objects altogether identical, offered for sale to him at the same time, at the same price, by the same individual? First, we must correct the hypothesis, for as two identical things do not exist in nature, so the two objects in question and the two possible actions of the example are not identical.

Indeed the refined connoisseur always discovers some difference between two objects, which to the ignorant, the absent-minded, and the hasty seem to be the same. The question, then, is not of identical objects and actions, but of those as in which there is neither time nor mode (majora premunt) of recognizing the difference. For this reason, therefore, we take no account of this difference, or, as is said, they are looked upon as equal in this respect. But the adiophora, the indifferent, do not exist, and owing to that abstraction, we do not take account of other differences that always exist in the real situation, owing to which my volition becomes concrete in a movement that causes me to take the object on my right, because (let us suppose) I am wont to turn to the right, or because, owing to a superstition that is not less a matter of habit, I prefer the right to the left, or because, through sympathy due to dignity, I prefer the object that is offered to me with the right hand to a similar object offered with the left, which, if only for this reason, is, strictly speaking, not the same, but different, and so on. These minute circumstances are absent from consciousness and are not felt by the will, not because they escape as a rule reflection. If we neglect them in analysis as non-existent, this always occurs, because we substitute for the real situation another unreal situation imagined by ourselves. Thus it has also been remarked, as a proof of the irrationality believed to exist in our volitions and to be the cause of our acting without precise knowledge, that no reason nor any theoretic precedent can be adduced as to why, when fixing legal punishments, or in the application of sentences, we give forty and not forty-one days' imprisonment, a hundred lire fine instead of a hundred and one. But here, too, it is clear that the detailed facts are not wanting, the knowledge of which causes us to will the punishment to be so and so. This knowledge is to be found in traditions, in the sympathy that we have for certain numbers, in the ease with which they can be remembered or calculated, and so on.—To sum up, man forms the volitional act, not because he possesses some portentous faculty of extending his will outside the limits of the intellect, but, on the contrary, because he possesses the faculty of circumscribing himself within the limits of his intellect on each occasion and of willing on that basis and within those limits. That he wills, knowing some things and ignorant of infinite other things, is indubitable. But this means that he is man and not God, that he is a finite and not an infinite being, and that the sum of his historical knowledge is on each occasion human and finite, as is on each occasion the act of will which he forms upon it. Psychologists would say that this arises from narrowness of consciousness, but Goethe, on the contrary, remarked with metaphor more apt and thought more profound, that the true artist is revealed in knowing how to limit himself. God himself, as it seems, cannot act, save by limiting himself in finite beings.

Impossibility of volition with a false theoretic base.

If the intention cannot be separated from the volition, because this belongs to the real and not to the imaginary, and proceeds from the known and never from the unknown, there yet remains a third possibility, which is, that the will results differently from the intention, owing to a theoretical error; as when we are said to err in good faith as to the actual situation, that is, we do not indeed substitute the unknown for the known, nor do we substitute the imaginary for the known, but we simply make a mistake in enunciating the historical judgment to ourselves: intending to perform one action, we perform on the contrary another.

This third possibility is also an impossibility, because it contradicts the nature of the theoretical error, which, precisely because it is a question of error and not of truth, cannot be in its turn theoretical and must be and is practical, conformably to a theory of error of which many great thinkers have seen or caught sight and which it is now fitting to restore and to make clear.

Forms of the theoretical error and problem concerning its nature.

We have elsewhere amply demonstrated how theoretical errors arise from the undue transference of one theoretical form to another, or of one theoretical product into another distinct from it. Thus, the artist who substitutes for the representation of the affections, reasoning on the affections, mingling art and philosophy, or he who in the composition of a work, fills the voids that his fancy has left in the composition, with unsuitable elements taken from other works, commits the artistic error, ugliness. Thus too, the philosopher, who solves a philosophical problem in a fantastic way, as would an artist, or, instead of a philosopheme, employs the historical, naturalistic or mathematical method, and so produces a myth, or a contingent fact universalized, or an abstraction in place of concreteness, that is to say, a philosophical error. It is also a philosophical error to transport philosophical concepts from one order to another and to treat art as though it were philosophy or morality as though it were economy. This also happens in an analogous manner with the historian, the natural scientist, and the mathematician, all of whom are wrong, if they interweave extraneous methods with those that are their own, and with the views, conceptions, and classification of one order, those of another.—But if this be the way in which particular errors and general forms of theoretical error arise, what is the origin of the theoretical error in universal? We have not asked this question explicitly elsewhere, because only now can it receive the most effective reply.

Distinction between ignorance and error: practical genesis of the latter.

Error is not ignorance, lack of knowledge, obscurity or doubt. An error of which we are altogether without consciousness is not error at all, but that inexhaustible field which the spiritual activity continues to fill to infinity. True and proper error is the affirmation of knowing what we do not know, the substitution of a representation for that which we do not possess, an extraneous conception for the one that is wanting. Now affirmation is thought itself, it is truth itself. When an inquiry has been completed, a process of cogitation closed, the result is the affirmation that a man makes to himself, not with a new act added to the foregoing, but with the act itself of thought that has thought. It is therefore impossible that in the circle of the pure theoretical spirit error should ever arise. Man has in himself the fountain of truth. If it be true that on the death-bed there is no lying, because man transcends the finite and communicates with the infinite, then man who thinks is always on his bed of death, the death-bed of the finite, in contact with the infinite. We may know that we are ignorant, but this consciousness of ignorance is the cogitative process in its fieri, not yet having attained to its end, certainly not (as has been said) error. Before this last can appear, before we can affirm that we have reached a result, which the testimony of the conscience says has not been reached, something extraneous to the theoretical spirit must intervene, that is to say, a practical act which simulates the theoretical. And it simulates it, not indeed intrinsically (one does not lie with the depth of oneself or on one's death-bed), but in taking hold of the external means of communication, of the word or expression as sound and physical fact, and diverting it to mean what, in the given circumstances, it could not mean. The erroneous affirmation has been rendered possible, because something else has followed the true affirmation, which is purely theoretical, something that is improperly called affirmation in the practical sense, whereas it is only communication, which can be substituted in a greater or less degree for the truth and falsely represent it. Thus the theoretical error in general arises, as do its particular forms and manifestations, from the substitution for, or the illegitimate mating of two forms of the spirit. These cannot be both theoretical here, but must be the theoretical and the practical forms, precisely because we are here in the field of the spirit in general and of the fundamental forms of its activity. We are ignorant, then, because it is necessary to be ignorant and to feel oneself ignorant, in order to attain to truth; but we err only because we wish to err.

Proofs and confirmation.

Like all true doctrines, this of the practical nature of the theoretical error, which at first sight seems most strange (especially to professed philosophers), is yet found to be constantly confirmed in ordinary thought. For all know and all continually repeat that (immoderate) passions and (illegitimate) interests lead insidiously into error, that we err, to be quick and finish or to obtain for ourselves undeserved repose, that we err by acquiescence in old ideas, that is to say, in order not to allow ourselves to be disturbed in our repose that has been unduly prolonged, and so on. We do not mention those cases in which it is a question of solemn and evident lies, the brazen-faced manifestation of interests openly illegitimate. Let us limit ourselves to the modest forms of error, to the venial sins, because if these be proved to be the result of will, by so much the more will this be proved of the shameless forms, the deadly sins. It is also said that we err in deafening ourselves and others with words, with the verse that sounds and does not create, with the brush that charms but does not express, with the formulæ that seem to contain a thought but contain the void. In this way we come to recognize that will has been rendered possible, owing to the communication being a practical fact, of which a bad use can be made by means of a volitional act. For the rest, if this were not so, what guarantee would truth ever possess? If it were possible to err even once in perfect good faith and that the mind should confuse true and false, embracing the false as true, how could we any longer distinguish the one from the other? Thought would be radically corrupt, whereas it is incorrupt and incorruptible.

It is vain, therefore, to except the existence or the possibility of errors of good faith, because truth alone is of good faith, and error is always in a greater or less or least degree, of bad faith. Were this not so, it would be incorrigible, whereas it is by definition corrigible. Consequently, the last attempt to differentiate intention from volition fails, since it posits an intention that is frustrated in the volition, as the effect of a theoretical error, a good intention that becomes, through no fault of its own, a bad volition. The intention, being volition, takes possession of the whole volitional man, causing the intellect to be attentive and indefatigable in the search for truth, the soul ready to accept it, whatever it be, pure of every passion that is not the passion for truth itself, and eliminates the possibility, or assumes the responsibility of error.

A proof of this is afforded by the fact that to exquisite and delicate souls, to consciences pure and dignified, even what are called their theoretical errors are a biting bitterness, and they blame themselves with them. On the other hand, in the presence of the foolish and the wicked, one is often in doubt as to whether their folly and wickedness come from the head or from the heart, whether it be madness rather than set purpose. The truth is that all this evil, which seems to arise from defective vision, comes really from the heart, for they have themselves forged those false views with their sophisms, their illegitimate internal affirmations and suggestions, that they may be more free in their evil inclinations, thus obtaining for themselves and for others a false moral alibi. We must applaud the former and exhort them to continue to persevere in their scruple, the condition of theoretical and practical health: we must inculcate to the second a return to themselves and the removal of the mask that they have assumed' as a disguise from themselves, before assuming it towards others.

Justification of the practical repression of error.

A consequence of the principle established is the justification of the use of practical measures to induce those who err theoretically to correct themselves, castigating them, when this is of assistance, for admonition and example. It will be replied that these are measures of other times, and that we are now in an epoch of liberty, when their use is no longer permissible, and that we should now employ only the persuasive power of truth. But those who say this are without eyes to look within upon themselves. The Holy Inquisition is truly holy and lives for that reason in its eternal idea. The Inquisition that is dead was nothing but one of its contingent historical incarnations. And the Inquisition must have been justified and beneficial, if whole peoples invoked and defended it, if men of the loftiest souls founded and created it severely and impartially, and its very adversaries applied it on their own account, pyre answering to pyre. Thus Christian Rome persecuted heretics as Imperial Rome had persecuted Christians, and Protestants burned Catholics as Catholics had burned Protestants. If certain ferocious practices are now abandoned (are they definitely abandoned, or do they not persist in a different form?), we do not for that reason cease from practically oppressing those who promulgate errors. No society can dispense with this discipline, although the mode of its application is subject to practical, utilitarian and moral deliberation. We begin with man as a child, whose mental education is at once and above all practical and moral education, education for work and for sincerity (and no one has ever been seriously educated who has not received at the least a provident slap or two or had his ears pulled). This education is continued with the punishments for culpable negligence and ignorance threatened in the laws, and so on until we reach the spontaneous discipline of society, by means of which the artist who produces the ugly and the man of science who teaches the false are rebuked by the intelligent, or fall into discredit with them. Such illegitimate and transitory applause as they may sometimes obtain at the hands of the unintelligent and of the multitude is but a poor and precarious recompense for them. Literary and artistic criticism always has of necessity, and the more so the better it understands its office, a practical and moral aspect reconcilable with the purest æstheticity and theoreticity in the intrinsic examination of works.

Empirical distinctions of errors and philosophical distinctions.

We certainly have good empirical reasons for distinguishing between errors of bad faith and errors of good faith, errors that are avoidable and errors that are unavoidable, pardonable and unpardonable, mortal and venial. No one would wish to deny that there is a wide difference between a slight distraction that leads to a wide erroneous affirmation, and such malice as gives rise to a small and almost imperceptible error, to a lie, which, externally considered, is almost harmless. We should be as indulgent in respect to the former as we are severe in respect to the latter. And from the empirical standpoint we should recommend in certain cases tolerance and indulgence in respect to the theoretical error, which should be looked upon rather as ignorance than as sin. We cannot but take count of all those affirmations, which, while they do not represent the firm security of the true, are yet offered as points of support, or as provisional affirmations, like those tibicines, props or stakes, those bad verses that Virgil allowed to remain in the Aeneid, with the intention of returning to them again. But it was needful to record the true bases of the theory of error against the illusions arising from empiricism, the more so since the general tendency of our times (for reasons that we need not here inquire into) has led to their not being recognized. Those bases are in the practical spirit, and the practical theory of error is one of the justified forms of pragmatism, although perhaps it be that very truth against which the pragmatists sin.

V

IDENTITY OF VOLITION AND ACTION AND DISTINCTION BETWEEN VOLITION AND EVENT

Volition and action: intuition and expression.

Such are the relations between the practical activity and the theoretical, which precedes and conditions it.

Asking ourselves now, what are the relations of this same activity with that which seems to follow it and to be outside the spirit, in company with corporeality, naturality, physic and matter (or however else it may be called)? we find ourselves face to face with a problem which we have already treated and solved in another part of the system of the spirit, and which we shall solve here in an analogous manner. What we may now designate as the problem of the relation between volition and action, formerly appeared in the theoretical philosophy as the problem of the relation between intuition and expression.—Are then volitions and actions two distinct terms that may appear now together, now separate? Can volition remain for its part isolated from action, whereas action is not able to separate itself from volition, or is the opposite true?—We reply, as we did on the former occasion, by denying the problem itself and by identifying intuition with expression, in such a manner that effective intuition became at the same time expression, and it was declared that a so-called expression, which was not at the same time intuition, was declared to be non-existent.—We reply in like manner on this occasion, that volition and action are one, and that volition without action or action without volition is inconceivable.

Spirit and nature.

Indeed, the relation between spirit and nature (which is a general relation, including the other particulars between intuition and expression, or between volition and action), understood in the way that it is here, is a relation, not between two entities, but only between two different methods of elaborating one unique reality, which is spiritual reality: thus it is not truly a relation. Nor are the two modes of elaboration two co-ordinated modes of knowledge, for that would lead back to a duplicity of objects, but the first is cognoscitive elaboration and true science, or philosophy, in which reality is revealed as activity and spirituality, while the other is an abstract elaboration for practical convenience, without cognoscitive character. When this has been posited, the spiritual act of volition has not another reality face to face with it, with which it must join or combine, in order to become concrete, but is itself full reality. That which is called matter, movement, and material modification from the naturalistic point of view, is already included in the volitional spiritual act, of which it might be said without difficulty (as was once said amid much scandal of the Ego) that it is heavy, round, square, white, red, sonorous, and, therefore, physically determinable. The volition is not followed by a movement of the legs or arms; it is those movements themselves that are material for the physical, spiritual for the philosopher, extrinsic for the former, at once intrinsic and extrinsic for the latter, or better, neither extrinsic nor intrinsic (an arbitrary division). As poetry lives in speech and painting in colours, so the will lives in actions, not because the one is in the other as in an envelope, but because the one is the other and without the other would be mutilated and indeed inconceivable.

Inexistence of volitions without actions and vice versa.

We cannot affirm the distinction between volition and action, save in force and as a proof of a dualistic metaphysical view, of an abstract spiritualism, with matter as being and substance for correlative term. But this point of view is eliminated by the idealist view, which recognizes only one unique substance, and that as spirituality and subjectivity. Without, however, now basing ourselves upon such considerations, and according to the order that we follow, applying ourselves to the examination of the facts of consciousness, we affirm that it would be impossible to adduce one volitional fact that should not be also a movement called physical. Those volitional acts, which according to some philosophers are consumed within the will and are in that way distinguished from external facts, are a phantasm. Every volition, be it never so small, sets the organism in motion and produces what are called external facts. The purpose is already an effectuation, a beginning of combat; indeed, simple desire is not without effects, if it be possible to destroy oneself with desires, as is in effect maintained On the other hand, it is not possible to indicate actions without volitions. Instinctive or habitual acts that have become instinctive are adduced; but these too are not set in motion, save by the will, not one by one, in their particulars, but as a whole, in the same way as a single hand sets in motion a most complicated machine which a thousand hands have previously constructed. There cannot then be volition without action, nor action without volition, as there cannot be intuition without expression or expression without intuition.

Illusions as to the distinction between these terms.

It is well, however, to indicate one among the many sources from which is derived the illusion of this distinction and separation, effectively inexistent. A volitional act, which is a process of some duration, may be interrupted and substituted for other volitional acts; it may declare itself again and again begin its work (although this will always be more or less modified), and this may give occasion to new interruptions and new beginnings. It seems that in this way the will stands on one side, as something formed and definite, and that on the other execution pursues its way and is subject to the most varied accidents. But volition and execution proceed with equal and indeed with one single step. What we will we execute; the volition changes as the execution changes. In the same way, when we are engaged upon a work of art, on a long poem for instance, the illusion arises of an abstract conception or plan, which the poet carries out as he versifies. But every poet knows that a poem is not created from an abstract plan, that the initial poetical image is not without rhythm and verse, and that it does not need rhythm and verse applied to it afterwards. He knows that it is in reality a primitive intuition-expression, in which all is determined and nothing is determined, and what has been already intuified is already expressed, and what will afterwards be expressed will only afterwards be intuified. The initial intuition is certainly not an abstract plan, but a living and vital germ; and so is the volitional act.

Distinction between action and succession or event.

When, therefore, it is affirmed that a volition is truly such, only when it produces effects, or that a volition is to be judged by its results, it is impossible not to assent, as we assent that an unexpressed expression or an unversified verse is neither an expression nor a verse. But in this signification only, because those propositions have sometimes assumed another, which on the contrary it is needful resolutely to reject. This is that in them action (will-action) has been confused with succession or event. Now, if volition coincide with action, it does not and cannot coincide with event.

Volition and event.

It cannot coincide, because what is action and what is event? Action is the act of the one; event, is the act of the whole: will is of man, event of God. Or, to put this proposition in a less imaginary form, the volition of the individual is as it were the contribution that he brings to the volitions of all the other beings in the universe, event the aggregate of all the wills and the answer to all the questions. In this answer is included and absorbed the will itself of the individual, which we have taken and contemplated alone. If, then, we wished to make the volition depend upon event, action upon succession, we should be undertaking to make one fact depend upon another fact, of which the first is a constituent part, placing among the antecedents of action what is its consequence, among things given those to be created, the unknown with the known, the future in the past.

Successful and unsuccessful actions: criticism.

The concepts of actions that are successful and of those that are unsuccessful, of actions that become fully concrete in the fact, and of those that become concrete only in part or not at all, are therefore inexact. No action (not even those that are empirically said to be most successful, not even the most obvious and ordinary) succeeds fully, in the sense that it alone constitutes the fact: every action diverges by necessity and by definition from succession or happening. If I return home every day by the usual road, my return home is every day new and different from that which might have been, imagined. This often amounts to a diversity of particulars which we may call of least importance, but which yet are not for that reason the less real. On the other hand, no action, however vain it be held (if it be action and not velleity of action and intrinsic contradiction, or by as much as it is action and not imagination and contradiction), passes without trace and without result.

If any action could be rendered altogether vain, this same rendering vain would invade all other actions and no fact would happen.

Action and foresight: critique.

The current proposition that we cannot act without foreseeing is also incorrect. Since the conception of foreseeing is contradictory, and since we cannot know a fact if it be not first a fact, that is, if it have not happened; if the contradictory hypothesis held, it would be impossible to act. But the truth is that what is called foreseeing is nothing but seeing; it is to know the given facts and to reason upon them with the universals. That is to say, it is the invariable theoretical base of action, already illustrated. When we will and act, what we will and do is our own action itself, not that of others or of all the others, and so is the resulting event. Voluntas fertur in incognitum, but the all intent upon itself does not take count of the unknown, which is in this case relatively unknowable and, therefore, relatively non-existent. The individual is aware that when he acts, he does not aim at anything but the placing of new elements in universal reality. He takes care that they shall be energetic and vital, without nourishing the foolish illusion that they must be the only ones, or that they alone produce reality. A popular little tale tells how God, who had at first granted to men to know their future lives and the day of their death, afterwards withdrew this knowledge from them altogether, because He perceived from experience that such knowledge made them lazy and inert. The new ignorance, on the other hand, revived and impelled them to vie with one another in activity, as though it had been granted them to obtain and to enjoy everything.[1] How can we doubt that our good and energetic work can ever be rendered nugatory in the event? That is unthinkable, and the saying fiat justitia et pereat mundus is rectified by that other saying: fiat justitia ne pereat mundus. Bad is not born from good, nor inaction from action. Every volitional man, every man active in goodness, is a contradiction to that one-sided attitude in which the will is suppressed to give place to happening, a world unmade is believed to be already made, arms are crossed or the field deserted. But it also contradicts the fatuous security that the future world will conform to the ends of our individual actions taken in isolation; saying with the good sense of the Florentine statesman, that we ourselves control one half of our actions, or little less, Fortune the other half. Hence our trust in our own strength; hence, too, our apprehension of the pitfalls of Fortune, continually arising and continually to be conquered. This constitutes the interior drama of true men of action, of the political geniuses who have guided the destinies of man. While the unfit is all anxiety, or bewilderment and depression, the fatuous is all over-confidence or expectation of the impossible, also losing himself in bewilderment when he finally discovers that the reality is not what he imagined. Hence also the serenity of the sage, who knows that whatever happen there will always be opportunity for good conduct. Si fractus illabatur orbis, there will always be a better world to construct. Hope and fear are related to action itself in its becoming, not to its result and succession.

Confirmation of the inderivability of the value of action from its success.

We can illustrate the fact that no one seriously thinks of valuing an action according to its success, but that all value it at its intrinsic value as action, from the circumstance that no one recognizes any merit to the action of a marks-man who hits the bull's-eye, when shooting at the target with closed eyes; whereas no little merit is recognized to him who, after having taken careful aim, does not hit the mark but goes very near it. We are certainly often deceived in our practical judgments, and fortunate men are continually praised to the skies as men of great practical capacity, while the unfortunate are hurled into the mire as incompetent; for we do not distinguish exactly between action and success. This is not only so as to judgments of the present life: it is also true of the life of the past, of the pages of history, where imbeciles are made heroes and heroes calumniated; to the worst of leaders is attributed the honour of victories, ridiculous statesmen credited with ability. On the other hand, the sins of madmen are attributed to the wise, or they are accused of faults that are nobody's fault, but the result of circumstances. In vain will the Pericleses of all time ask, as did the ancient Pericles of the people of Athens, that the unforeseen misfortunes of the Peloponnesian war should be attributed to him, provided that by way of compensation he might have praise for all the fortunate things that should also happen παρὰ λόγον.[2] All this depends upon an imperfect knowledge of facts more than upon anything else: hence the necessity of criticism. Just as the work of the poet and of the painter is not materially to be laid hold of in the poem or in the picture, but requires a re-evocation that is often very difficult, so the work of the man of action, which is in part fused in events and partly contained in them, as a bud that will open in the future, asks a keen eye and the greatest care in valuation. The history of men of action and of their deeds is easily changed into legend, and legends are never altogether eliminable, because misunderstanding or error is never altogether eliminable.

Explanation of apparently conflicting facts.

On the other hand, certain commonplaces seem to be in opposition to the criterion itself: for example, that men are judged by success and that it matters little what we have willed and done, when the result is not satisfactory. There are also certain popular customs that make individuals responsible for what happens outside their own spheres of action, not to mention the well-known historical examples of unfortunate leaders crucified at Carthage and guillotined at Paris, for no other cause in reality than that of not having won the victory. And there is also the insistence of certain thinkers upon the necessity of never distinguishing the judgment of the act from that of the fact. But such insistence is nothing but a new aspect of the implacable struggle that it has been necessary to conduct against the morality of the mere intention and against the sophisms and the subterfuges that arise from it; an insistence that has expressed itself in paradoxical formulæ, as are also paradoxical the trivial remarks of ordinary life that have been mentioned. As to the customs and condemnations narrated by history, these were without doubt extraordinary expedients in desperate cases, in which people had placed themselves in such a position that it was impossible or most difficult to verify intentions and actions, and to distinguish misfortunes from betrayals; and as all expedients born of like situations sometimes hit the mark, that is to say, punish bad faith, so will others increase with irrationality the evil that they would have wished to diminish, since in those cases there has not been any bad faith to punish and to correct.

VI

THE PRACTICAL JUDGMENT, THE HISTORY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE PRACTICAL

With these last considerations, we are conducted to the theory of practical judgments, that is, to those judgments of which we have demonstrated the impossibility, when their precedence to the volitional act was asserted; but their conceivability as following it, indeed their necessity, is clear, by the intrinsic law of the Spirit; which consists in always preserving or in continually attaining to full possession of itself.

Practical taste and judgment.

But we must not confound the practical judgment with what has been called practical taste, or the immediate consciousness of value, or the feeling of the value of the volitional act. None can doubt that such a taste, consciousness, or feeling is a real fact. The practical act brings with it approbation and disapprobation, joy and sorrow, and like facts of consciousness that are altogether unreflective. By these we explain the immediate sympathy that certain actions afford us, and the enthusiasms that are often spread through wide circles of society, and the force of example, which is most successful in arousing imitative efforts. Thus at certain moments the soul of all seems to vibrate in unison with the soul of one, and the actions of many to be prepared and carried out, as though with one accord, without its being possible to say at those moments what is willed, what abhorred and what admired. That taste, or consciousness, or feeling is not, however, distinct from the volitional act, and is, indeed, the volitional act itself. It is that internal control of which we have already spoken, that immediate feeling of oneself, that immediate consciousness, which makes of it a spiritual act. Abstract it from the volitional act and the volitional act itself disappears from before you.

If it can take place, not only in the individual who is acting, but also in him who contemplates the action, that is because the individual who contemplates becomes unified in that moment with the individual who acts, he wills imitatively with him, with him suffers and enjoys, as the disc-thrower watches with his eye and with his whole person the disc that has been thrown, follows its rapid and direct course and the dangers in the form of obstacles that it seems to be about to strike, its turns and deviations, and seems to become himself a running turning disc. The denomination "practical taste" is very well chosen, because the analogy with the theoretic activity and with æsthetic taste is here most full. But since æsthetic taste is not æsthetic judgment, as the mere reproduction of the æsthetic act is not the criticism of it, as the listener to a poem who sings within himself with the poet, must not be confused with the critic, who analyses and understands it, any more than the contemplator of a picture, of a statue, or of a piece of architecture, who paints with the painter, sculptures with the sculptor, or ideally raises airy masses with the architect; so we must distinguish practical taste and sympathy (or antipathy) from the practical judgment. Without taste (æsthetic or practical), judgment (æsthetic or practical) is not possible; but taste is not judgment, which demands a further act of the spirit.

The practical judgment as historical judgment.

The practical judgment is, as has already been observed, a historical judgment; so that to judge practical acts and to give their history is really the same thing. What occurs here is analogous to what was demonstrated of the theoretic and æsthetic act, when we illustrated the coincidence of literary and artistic criticism with literary and artistic history. Criticism, be it practical or theoretic, cannot consist of anything but determining whether a spiritual act has taken place and what it has been. The differences between the one and the other criticism arise only from the diversity of content present in each case, asking different categories of judgment, but not of logical procedure, which is in both cases the same. Every other conception of the judgment, which should make it consist, not of a historical judgment, but of heaven knows what sort of measurement upon transcendental models, separated from the real world by a measurement of which the measure is extraneous to the measured, indeed (as though it were something of the other world) extraneous to the real itself, runs against insuperable contradictions, and makes judgment arbitrary and history grotesque; history would thus have value, not in itself, but outside itself, enjoying it as a loan from others, a gracious concession. But even these contradictions cannot appear in all their crudity, nor the opposite theory in all its unshakable truth, save from what will be seen further on, and we must here be satisfied with the enunciation.

Its logic.

In order to avoid repetition, we must refer to the analysis of the single or historical judgment already given and assume its result, namely, that it is the only judgment in which there is a true and proper distinction between subject and predicate, and that it is composed of an intuitive element (subject) and of an intellectual element (predicate). In like manner the practical judgment is not possible without a clear representation of the act to be judged and a conception not less clear of what the practical act is in its universality and in its particular forms, and so on, specifying in its various sub-forms and possibilities of individuation. The judgment is the compenetration of the two elements, the historical synthesis which establishes: Peter has accomplished a useful act in tilling a piece of land of such and such dimensions; Paul has accomplished an action that is not useful in opening a new manufactory of boots, more costly and not better than those already on the market; -Pope Leo III. acted wisely, as custodian of the universal character of the Church of Rome, in consecrating Charles the Frank emperor, thus restoring the empire of the West;—Louis XVI. acted foolishly in not deciding upon a prompt and profound change of the French political constitution, and in allowing himself to be afterwards dragged unwilling whither he had not known how to go of his own will. And so on. There are therefore two ways of sinning against the exactitude of the practical judgment: either by not having exact information as to the content of the volitional act to be judged and understood, or by not having an exact criterion of judgment. The first of these errors can be exemplified by those judgments that are so frequently pronounced, without knowledge as to the true sequence of events or without placing oneself in the precise conditions in which the person to be judged found himself. Hence it happens not less often, that when the facts are really known, the precise conditions understood, and the defence of the accused has been heard, the judgment must be altered. A cause of the second error is the substitution (likewise a very common occurrence) of one category of judgment for the other, as when a moral act is praised and admired for its cleverness, or the gestures and the felicitous utterance of a practical man are praised, as though it were a question of judging an actor or reciter. As in art, so in life, differences of judgment arise, not so much from difference of understanding, as from these oscillations and undue transpositions of judgments and concepts.

It is likewise superfluous to enter into disputes as to the absoluteness or relativity of the practical judgment, because these have been superseded by the concept of the historical judgment, which is both absolute and relative: absolute for the categories that it applies, relative for the matter, always new, to which it applies them.

Importance of the practical judgment.

The importance of the practical judgment for practical life is of the greatest, and when we are warned: nolite judicare or noli nimium judicare, what are meant are not true acts of judgment, but certain psychical conditions, which reveal slight spiritual seriousness. And the importance is of the greatest, precisely because the nature of the judgment is historical, and as we know already, historical knowledge, knowledge, that is, of actual situations, is the basis of future actions. For this reason every man who is strongly volitional is continually submitting himself and others to judgment; for this reason we feel the need of talking to others about our own actions, in order to be upheld by the spirit of others in forming a just judgment. This is the origin of such social institutions as the confessional, or of poems such as the Divina Commedia. The only judgment without meaning is that final judgment made in the valley Jehoshaphat, because what object can there be in giving oneself the trouble of judging a world looked upon as ended? We judge in order to continue to act, that is, to live, and when universal life is at an end, judgment is vain (vain praise or paradise, vain cruelty or hell).

Difference between the practical judgment and the judgment of the event.

The value of the volitional act is therefore, as has been demonstrated, in the act itself, and we must not expect and derive it from succession or event. The practical judgment always concerns the volitional act, the intention, the action (which are all one), and never the result or happening. With this distinction we annul one of the most disputed, intricate, and difficult questions: if it be possible to judge, or as they say, to try history. Since we know well that judgment and historical narrative coincide, we must reply in general, as we have replied, in the affirmative. We must in consequence deny all the absurd claims of an objectivity, which is the irrealizable aspiration to the abstention from thought and from history itself. We must also deny to the historian that frivolous privilege by which he is allowed to judge, almost tolerating in him an original sin or an incorrigible vice, provided he clearly distinguish between the serious and the facetious, between the narrative and the judgment, as though the distinction were ever possible. But the prejudice against those who make out a case against history on the ground that it should have happened in a manner different from what actually took place, and describe how this should have been, is well justified. Whoever possesses historical sense, or even simple good sense, cannot but agree to this. The question should in reality be asked differently, and in this manner: Is it correct to apply to history the categories of judgment that we apply to volitions and single acts? Is it correct to judge in a utilitarian or moral manner historical events and the whole course of history? Rectified in these terms, the question becomes clear, and requires a negative answer. When we narrate artistic or philosophical, economic or ethical history, we place ourselves at the point of view of the individual activity. As we expose æsthetic or philosophical products, useful or moral actions, we judge them at the same time æsthetically, philosophically, economically, morally, and we know in every case if the action has been such as it ought. Who would hesitate to affirm that (at least, as an affirmative method) the Africa of Petrarch was not what he wished it to be, a poetic work; or that Emmanuel Kant did not succeed in establishing from his practical postulates, according to his intention, the existence of a personal God and the immortality of the soul; or that Themistocles behaved in an undecided manner as regards Xerxes, not knowing how to resolve to sacrifice his ambitions to the safety of Greece, nor to inflict a grave loss upon his country, in order to satisfy his desire for vengeance; or that Napoleon ignored the rights of man, and behaved as one without scruples, when he ordered the arrest and shooting of the Duc d'Enghien? But what can be the advantage of asking if the arrest of the Persian expansion in Europe were a bad thing or a good? if the creation of the Roman Empire deserve blame? if the Catholic Church were wrong in concentrating Western religion in herself? if the English revolution of the seventeenth century, the French of the eighteenth, or the Italian of the nineteenth, could have been avoided? if Dante could have been born in our day and have sung the Kantian rather than the Thomist philosophy? if Michael Angelo might have painted the victories of the modern industrial world, which Manzotti has made into a ballet in his Excelsior, instead of the visions of the Last Judgment? Here we have before us, not individual spirits, whose work we examine in given circumstances, but facts that have happened, and these are the work, not of the individual, but of the Whole. They are (as has already been said) the work of God, and God is not to be judged, or rather He is to be judged, but not from the visual angle at which individual works and actions are to be judged. He is not to be judged as a poet or as a philosopher, as a statesman or a hero, as a finite being working in the infinite. The contemplation of His work is at the same time judgment. Die Weltgeschichte das Weltgericht: the history itself of the world is the judgment of the world, and in recounting the course of history, while not applying the judgment of the categories above indicated, which are inapplicable, we do, however, apply a judgment, which is that of necessity and reality. That which has been had to be; and that which is truly real is truly rational.

But we cannot give the justification of this supreme judgment, of this world-embracing judgment (we repeat the refrain), until further on. Let it suffice for the present that in discussing the practical judgment we have limited it to all that part of history which contemplates actions, that is, to individual activity, to biography and to the biographical element, which is the material of all history. In it, the practical judgment is active and energetic, but is silent before the event, and every history is like an impetuous river of individual works, which flows into a sea, where it is immediately restored to calm serene. The rush of actions and of their vicissitudes, of victory and of defeat, of wisdom and of folly, of life and of death, are set at rest in the solemn peace of the "historical event."

Progress of action and progress of Reality.

As we have distinguished the practical judgment from the judgment of the event, the historical-individual from the historical-cosmic, so we must distinguish the concept of progress, as the progress which belongs to the volitional act and that which belongs to the event. The concept of progress (according to the explanations given elsewhere) coincides with the concept of activity. There is progress whenever an activity declares itself, whenever (not to leave the circle of the practical) we pass from irresolution to resolution, from conflict to the volitional synthesis, from suspense to action. But the event, which is no longer action but result, that is to say, is action, not of the individual but of the Whole, is not to be judged with that concept of progress, and in it progress coincides with the fact. That which follows chronologically, if it be truly real, represents a progress upon what precedes. Even illness is progress, if there were a latent crisis of health, and getting over it gives rise to more vigorous health. Even apparent regression (invasion of barbarians) is progress, if it lead to the ripening of a wider civilization. What is death for the individual is life for the Whole.—Hence the insipidity of the question, often proposed and still discussed by writers of treatises, whether there be practical progress, or as is said when limiting the question, moral progress.

From the individual point of view, at every new volitional act, practicality and the relative impulse of progress are once more born, and they are extinguished with that act, to be born again in a new one, and so on in a circle of infinite changes. As to cosmic reality, we must declare, as in the previous example of the course of history, that it is itself progress (which is also confirmed by the positivist philosophy, when it declares that reality is evolved), but this is progress of reality and therefore progress without adjective, or at least without practical or moral adjective.

Precedence of the philosophy of the practical over the practical judgment.

The intellectual element, which is constitutive in the practical judgment as in every other historical judgment, can also be called the philosophical element. Hence the consequence that a philosophy of the practical activity is a necessary condition of every practical judgment. This is another thesis of paradoxical appearance, which, however, it is not difficult to make plausible with suitable reflections, plausible at least to those who do not refuse to reflect. For what is philosophy but the thinking of the concept, and in this case the concept of the practical? The conclusion, then, that a philosophy is necessary for a judgment is irrefutable. The difficulty in admitting it comes from the false association of ideas, for which the sound of the word "philosophy" suggests the disputes of the schools, the treatise, the manual, or the academic lecture whereas we should think of philosophy in all its extension and profundity, inborn in the human spirit (we have elsewhere called this ingenuous philosophy) before its more complicated forms Every man has his own philosophy, more or less developed or rudimentary, more or less defective no one is without any philosophy. The first judgment on the practical activity is already guided by the light of a philosophical concept which, if it does not give a light, gives at least a glimmer, if not straight and certain, at the least undulating and tremulous, producing therefore tremulous and undulating judgments. Ingenuous philosophy and philosophy in the specific sense are not, therefore, separable from one another, with a clear-cut distinction, and if there exist a disability in pronouncing a judgment as to many people and to many actions, that arises from difficulties consequent upon the philosophy of the time, which must first of all be solved, before passing to the effective judgment. Hence long researches into doctrine are sometimes necessary. Thus it is difficult to do justice to the work of a rebel or of a revolutionary, without first clearing away prejudices and understanding what a revolution is, and the relative value of what is called obedience to the existing order of things. Thus it would be naive to condemn as faithless the Saxon regiments which deserted Napoleon on the field of Leipzig, or Marshal Ney, who returned to the service of Napoleon from that of Louis XVIII., unless we previously make clear the meaning and the limits of the political treaty and of the military oath, which cannot be the only unconditioned things in a world where nothing is unconditioned save the world itself.

Confirmation of the philosophical incapacity of the psychological method.

From the recognized precedence of philosophy over the practical judgment arises the confirmation of the impossibility of the psychological method as the foundation of a Philosophy of the practical. Descriptive psychology is based upon practical facts historically ascertained, or upon practical judgments. Hence, by proceeding from particular to particular, it is not only incapable of exhausting the infinite and of attaining to the real universal, but by the very choice of particular examples, which should be the foundation of philosophical research relating to the practical, it is under the necessity of first possessing a concept of the practical. Hence it stands between Scylla and Charybdis, between a vicious progressus ad infinitum and a not less vicious circle.

In this way is eliminated the problem, monstrous from whatever point of view it may arise, as to the historical origin of the practical activity (economy or morality). If these activities be categories, which constitute fact and judge it reflected in the spirit, they cannot have arisen historically, as contingent facts. When we prove the historical origin of anything, with that very proof we destroy its universal value. The fears of certain moralists lest, with the indication of the historical origin of morality, its value should come to be denied, have therefore been wrongly mocked. Certainly, if morality had a historical origin, it would also have an end, like all historical formations, even the most grandiose, the Empire of the East or the Empire of the West, the Hunnish Empire of Attila or the Mongolian Empire of Gengiskhan. The fear manifested by the moralists in question was then an instinctive horror of the incorrect method of philosophical psychology, which now presupposes, now destroys the categories that it would wish to establish.

VII

THE PRACTICAL METHOD, RULES AND CASUISTRY

Justification of the psychological method and of empirical and descriptive disciplines.

In repeatedly rejecting the psychological method, as at the end of the last chapter, we have been very careful to make use of a cautious phraseology. Thus we have employed such expressions as "psycho-philosophical method," "speculative-descriptive method," and the like, in order to make it quite clear that our hostility is directed against that mixture, or rather against its introduction into Philosophy, but is not directed against Psychology itself, that is, descriptive psychology. This psychology has always been practised, since the world was world, and we all practise it at every instant, and could not propose to banish it from the spirit, save at the risk of going mad.

If indeed we know that the true and proper knowledge of theoretical philosophy is resolved into the cycle of art, philosophy, and history, and that we possess no other means of knowing the individual, both ingenuous and reflective, outside the knowledge of the universal given by philosophy, then we also know that the spirit needs to arrange and to classify the infinite intuitions and perceptions given to it by art and history, and to reduce them to classes, the better to possess and to manipulate them. We also know that the method called naturalistic or positive performs this function, and that hence arise natural disciplines or sciences. These do not, as is the popular belief, deal only with so-called inferior reality (minerals, vegetables, and animals), but with all manifestations of reality, including those most strictly termed spiritual.

Thus we can at this point reduce to a more correct meaning a claim that has been usually maintained by those who have treated of the Practical and of the Ethical in our day. They demand that a science of the practical and of morality should be preceded by a wide historical inquiry and have a great mass of facts as its foundation. If such science be understood as a Philosophy of the practical and as an Ethic, such a demand is an irrational pretension, because the true relation is exactly the opposite: from philosophy to history, not from history to philosophy. But if, on the other hand, this science be understood as a naturalistic and empirical discipline, the claim is rational, because it is not possible to construct a discipline of that sort, save with material that has been historically-verified.

Practical description and its literature.

The practical discipline that arranges in groups and classifies the spiritual facts concerning man, is Psychology. But the writer or the professor is not the only psychologist. Man himself is a psychologist; even the savage constructs in some sort of way his psychology of types and classes. And to remain within the circle of volitional acts, their psychology or description by types has always existed. A conspicuous example of this was the Comedy of Menander or the New Comedy in Greece. This partly received and gave artistic form to the results of the observations of the moralists and partly served as material for the elaboration of treatises, to such an extent that the Characters of Theophrastus have been looked upon as a repertory or summary of theatrical types. In the Rhetoric of Aristotle, a whole book is devoted to a description of affections, passions, and habits. In modern times, Descartes lamented the insufficiency of ancient treatises on the subject, and presented as quite a new thing his Traité des passions. In this treatise, six primitive passions being distinguished (admiration, love, hate, desire, joy, and sadness), he maintained that all the others were derived from them: esteem, contempt, generosity, pride, humility, baseness, veneration, disdain, hope, fear, jealousy, certainty, desperation, irresolution, courage, hardihood, emulation, cowardice, terror, remorse, mockery, piety, satisfaction, repentance, favour, gratitude, indignation, anger, glory, shame, and so on. Spinoza, following the example of Descartes and correcting his theories, devoted the third part of his Ethic to the affections or passions, considering them perinde ac si quaestio de lineis planis aut de corporibus esset. Let it suffice to mention the Anthropologia of Kant among the other most celebrated treatises upon the argument.

Extension of practical description.

But although we have recorded as examples these general treatises on the passions, it would be impossible to continue the enumeration, because descriptive psychology is carried out, so to speak, with the widest divergences and is infinitely subdivided. An ample bibliography would not suffice to catalogue all the books dealing with this discipline. These are sometimes arranged in chronological divisions (Psychology of the Renaissance, of the eighteenth century, of the Middle Ages, even including prehistoric man!). Sometimes they contain geographical divisions (Psychology of the Englishman, of the Frenchman, of the Russian, of the Japanese, and so on), with subdivisions according to regions. Sometimes they combine the two methods (Psychology of the ancient Greek, of the Roman of the Decadence), and sometimes according to their psychical content (Psychology of the priest, of the soldier, of the politician, of the poet, of the man of science), and so on. And when the treatises that bear a title of the kind above mentioned had been catalogued, it would be also necessary to trace a great mass of descriptive psychology (and of the best sort) in the books of historians, novelists, dramatists, in memoirs and confessions, in maxims and advice for the conduct of life in the sketches of satirists and caricaturists. And when all these had been catalogued (a very difficult task), it would be necessary to take account of all the other psychology, which, formed in the spirit of individuals who are not writers, is poured forth in speech. This is found, but in small part, in collections of proverbs. It would also be necessary not to neglect (an altogether desperate enterprize) everything that each one of us does and forgets and substitutes continually in life, according to his own needs and experiences. Tantae molis would be a complete account, precisely because psychological construction, having for its object actions and individuals in action, is of such common use.

Normative knowledge or rules: their nature.

There is another class of mental forms intimately connected with Psychology, and of this also we have denied the justification in the foregoing chapters, but only in the philosophical field, and not at all outside it. These are the norms, or normative knowledge and science, maxims, rules, and precepts. In truth, if philosophy, which commands and wills and judges, when its task is on the contrary to understand willing and commanding, and to make possible correct judgment—if such a philosophy be a contradiction in terms, there is yet nothing to prevent our taking the psychological classes, of which we have indicated the formation, and separating them from one another, according as they do or do not lead to certain other classes, which are called ends and are abstract ends. This is done when those classes are selected which are more efficacious for practical action. Psychological classes and rules are therefore the same, save that in the second the character possessed by knowledge as prior to action is placed in relief, that is to say, its technical character. This is proved by the easy convertibility of rules into psychological observations, and of the latter into the former. It suffices to add the imperative to the first and to remove it from the second. "Do everything so as to seem good, for that helps in many things; but since false opinions do not last, you will have difficulty in seeming good for a long period, if you are not so in reality." That is a rule of Francesco Guicciardini[1] (or rather of the father of Guicciardini, quoted by him). Now if we transfer this proposition from the imperative to the indicative mood and remove the predicate of exhortation, we have a mere psychological observation: "To seem good helps in an infinite number of things; but since false opinions do not last, it is difficult to seem good for long, unless one really be so." Here is a psychological observation of Vico upon seeming and being: "It happens naturally that man speaks of nothing but what he affects to be and is not."[2] This can be turned into a maxim: "Watch yourselves, in order that by talking too much of a given advantage, you may not let it be seen clearly that you do hot possess it." Or in relation to moral classes it can be turned thus: "Try to be that which you would like to appear to others," and so on.

Usefulness of rules.

Of rules it can be said that they do not possess absolute value. This is to be found written at the beginning of one of the best books of rules: Peu de maximes sont vraies à tous égards (Vauvenargues), and he might have said, "no maxim"; for if it were ever possible to produce one that was absolutely true, by that alone would it be demonstrated not to be a true maxim. But criticism prevails against the distortion of empirical rules into philosophical principles, or against the confusion between, the psychological and the speculative methods, to which attention has already been drawn. If this distortion be not committed, then rules are altogether innocuous. Not only are they innocuous, they are indispensable. Each of us is constantly making them for use in his own life. To live without rules would be impossible. Certainly, the man of action makes no practical rule, nor does he indicate how we should will and act in definite circumstances, nor does the poet make any rule of Poetic. Guicciardini himself, whom we have just quoted, and who formulated stupendous maxims, warns us: "These memories are rules that can be written down in books; but special cases, which, since they have a different cause, ask a different treatment, can ill be written down elsewhere than in the book of discretion." Action depends upon the quickness of the eye, upon the perception of the situation historically given, which has never occurred before, and never will occur again, precisely identical. But it is useful to possess these types of actions to encourage and of actions to avoid, in order to sharpen the attention and to find one's way in the world of action, to facilitate and to discipline the examination of the concrete fact. If, therefore, individual rules are more or less transitory, the formation of rules is immortal.

The literature of rules and its apparent decadence.

The condition of literature in recent times would seem to be in disagreement with this affirmation, since as a fact there is a great falling off in the appearance of books of rules, compared with the enormous mass that remains in our libraries as an inheritance of the past. At one time rules of conduct were compiled for everything, not only for the moral life, in the multiplication of treatises relating to vice and virtue, to merits and to sins, to things good and evil, to duties and to rights, dividing these and entering into minutiae, and again, summaries, catechisms, and various "decalogues," relating to every part of life. The literature of the Cinquecento gives rules even for the procuress and the courtesan, in most elegant little books, which bear the names of Piccolomini and of Aretino. In this same century, too, Ignatius of Loyola formulated rules for "tying up" the will, and for the reduction of the docile individual perinde ac cadaver, for the ends of "sanctity." We must further remark that all rules, including those on poetry and the arts, have at bottom a practical—character. That is to say, they are directed to the will, if only as intermediary. Thus it is necessary to add to the great mass of practical rules the unnumbered and innumerable treatises of Grammar, Rhetoric, Poetry of the figurative arts, of music, of dancing, and so on. But it is a fact that there are now hardly any treatises containing rules, either for morality, politics, or for the arts. Has the world by chance become learned on the subject, through inherited aptitude, or rather has the inutility of rules been discovered?

Neither the one nor the other. The rules still live in books and treatises; they have only changed their literary form. In literature they have reabsorbed that imperative which they used at first to display and to boast of, not only mentally but literally. That has been made possible by the already established convertibility of rules into psychological classes. Hence in modern times the literary form of the psychological observation is preferred to that of rules. This was indeed redundant, pedantic, and at the same time ingenuous, as for instance in the Italian Seicento. It is difficult to restrain a smile when reading the many books on what was called the reason of State, elaborated by the Italians of that day and imitated by foreigners, especially Spaniards and Germans. Those arcana imperii, those "secret strokes," those impostures, mysteriously inculcated on the printed page, are a true and real æsthetic contradiction. The eighteenth century therefore began to give up this form of treatise, and as it happens that men are accustomed to attribute to moral virtue that which is necessity or virtue of another kind, the writers of that century boasted of the moral progress which had set them free from the pernicious and immodest maxims of the "reason of State."

It is very amusing to assist at the acts of repulsion and of exorcism, which a man like the Abbé Galiani believes himself obliged to make in his treatise Dei doveri dei principi neutrali (1782). When, having amply discussed this matter from the point of view of morality, he goes on to discuss it from the point of view of politics and of the reason of State, he despatches it in a few pages, abhorring, as he says, that "insidious and wicked science" which formed "the delight, first of Italian and then of almost all European minds of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries." He protests at every step that he is "tired of repeating and of developing teachings of cunning and wickedness." But what the Abbot Galiani really abhorred was the robed scholastic treatment of a matter that he who was termed Machiavellino by his French friends, and declared that he did not admit in politics anything but le machiavélisme pur, sans mélange, cru, vert, dans toute son âpreté,[3] handled with very different ability and elegance in his conversations in Parisian salons and in his witty letters to Madame d'Épinay. The rules of the eighteenth century are to be sought in the speeches, essays, political opuscules, tragedies, plays dealing with the life of citizens, fiction, history, and books of memoirs. If Aretino and Piccolomini provided for the necessities of the respectable courtesans and procuresses of the Cinquecento, in the Settecento, Giacomo Casanova constructed the type of the perfect adventurer. He began with the rules to be followed as a system of life, the se laisser aller au gré du vent qui pousse, and passed to those that were more special and yet fundamental, such as that one should have no scruples de tromper des étourdis, des fripons et des sots, because they défient l'esprit and on venge l'esprit quand on trompe un sot. There should be still less scruple in deception in affairs of love, for, pour ce qui regarde les femmes, ce sont des tromperies réciproques, qu'on ne met pas en ligne de compte; car, quand l'amour s'en mêle, on est ordinairement dupe de part et d'autre.[4] Let us leave to the reader to investigate, if he please, the rules of life that are concealed beneath the most modern forms of literature; these are a continuous, if not always beneficent, guide for daily life.

Relation between the arts (collections of rules) and philosophical doctrines.

Another circumstance that has led to the belief in the disappearance of books of rules is the observation that from those books dealing with the so-called arts, there has come to be a treatment of the philosophy of their subject-matter, in which those treatises have been dissolved. Thus from Poetics and Rhetorics has come Æsthetic, from Grammatic the Philosophy of language, from the Art of teaching and of reasoning Logic and Gnoseology, from the historical Art, Historic, from the Arts of economic government, the Science of Economy, from the treatises on Natural Law, the Philosophy of Law.

When such philosophies, then, had appeared, treatises upon the Arts seemed to have become superfluous, and to this is attributed the cause of their diminution or disappearance. But although it be impossible not to recognize the historical process above described from books on the arts to books of systems, it is necessary to be careful to interpret it exactly and not to confuse it with a passing from empiria to philosophy. Thus it will be seen that the part absorbed and dissolved in philosophy has been precisely those philosophical attempts that were mingled with such collections of rules and precepts. For it was very natural that the writers who put them together and had ideas as to what should be done and what avoided, were often led to investigate the principles from which sprung the particular rules. Believing that they were strengthening, they really came to surpass them, that is, they passed unwittingly from one form of treatment to another, from Psychology to Philosophy. But not even here has empiricism been refined into philosophy (a refinement which, strictly speaking, is impossible), but a more perfect philosophy has been substituted for one less perfect. The dissolution, then, has not been of the rules, but of that imperfect philosophy, a chemical process which has left the rules in what they possess of original as residuum. Hence their persistence, and indeed the impossibility that they should not persist, side by side with the most pure and perfect of philosophies.

Casuistic: its nature and utility.

Casuistic has had the same fate as the rules, and was also at one time responsible for a very copious literary production. Now it is cultivated as literature only by a few Jesuits, who carry on the glories of Escobar and of Sanchez, read only by priests preparing themselves for the post of confessor, whose studies are based for the most part upon old books (such as the Theologia moralis of the Neapolitan Sant' Alfonso de' Liguori). At one time Casuistic was not confined only to profane or theological morality, to the casus conscientiae. There were also books of casuistry composed for all aspects of life, for politics, for the life of the courtier ("the Wise Man at Court"), for the art of love. When the literary form of rules fell into discredit, that of Casuistic fell with it. But this does not mean that it is dead; it lives and will live as long as rules live. For Casuistic is nothing but the process of reasoning by which rules are made always more precise, passing from more general cases to those more particular, so that no one will ever be able to do without them.—If we take for rule of life this maxim: to avoid scientific polemics, because they constitute a waste of time, adding little to the progress of knowledge; in what way must we behave if a polemic be such that it enables us to gain on the one hand the time it makes us lose on the other? Shall we maintain the general rule, or shall we waive it on this occasion, if for no other reason than to give variety to our occupations? And how shall we behave if not only we retrieve the time lost but avoid losing more time in the future? Shall we wish to enter upon the polemic at once? But if our future be looked upon as uncertain, if we be far advanced in years or in bad health, will it not be better to renounce the uncertain gain of the future for the certain gain of the present?—This is a very simple example of Casuistic, which a critic and writer (let us suppose that he is the writer of these pages) is obliged to propose to himself and to solve. Naturally, no Casuistic will ever furnish the concrete solution (which is the only one that counts), since, as has been said, no rule can ever furnish it. Rules and casuistry do not reach the individuality omnimodo determinata, which is the historical situation; yet if Casuistic aid my action, this will always differ from that, as concrete from abstract; or better, my action will always truly possess the form, the definiteness that abstract casuistry cannot possess. Woe to practical men who rely upon collections of maxims and casuistical reasonings, and woe to those who rely upon them. Those who argue at length upon practical matters and draw subtle distinctions, are to be avoided in the world of affairs and in the world of action. If they have not yet provoked some disaster, they are on the road to doing so now. This, at least, is a good rule; like the supreme rule (which is not a rule but philosophical truth), namely, that we must abandon rules, that is, face the individual case, which, as such, is always irregular.

Jurisprudence as casuistry.

But if a further proof be wanted of the necessity and perpetuity of maxims and of casuistry, observe how these also persist in literary form, as laws, where this form is not eliminable. Laws, as we have seen, are not simple rules, but are based upon formulæ of rules, and must of necessity make explicit in them decisions as to doing and not doing. Jurisprudence is the Casuistic of law, or all the labour of so-called interpretation, which is at bottom the excogitation of new rules. All know that not only is Jurisprudence not of itself legislative, but that it cannot even determine the volitional act of the Statesman, nor the sentence, or decision upon the particular case, a decision which the judge creates upon each occasion. But no one would seriously think of suppressing the work and the function of those casuists, or judicial experts, a function which, since it has always existed and continues to exist, cannot but answer to a social need. It is possible to predict a form of social life, less complicated and weighty, in which that function would have less scope, but whatever be the case as regards this prediction, the casuistry of judicial experts will continue so long as there are laws and rules, that is to say, always.

VIII

CRITIQUE OF THE INVASIONS BY PHILOSOPHY OF THE DOMAIN OF PRACTICAL DESCRIPTION AND OF ITS DERIVATIVES

In demonstrating the legitimacy and necessity of practical description and of its derivatives, Regolistic and Casuistic, we have not fulfilled, as it were, our whole knightly duty, which binds us to that discipline, which we have been obliged to maltreat so exceedingly, and shall further maltreat, when it has been or shall be presented as a philosophical method. It is now necessary to defend its existence against the invasion of philosophy, or rather of philosophers. We must make it obvious that if the empiricists and psychologists, who swell themselves out to philosophers, are bunglers, those too are bunglers who claim to solve empirical questions philosophically. Perhaps they are bunglers less worthy of pardon, because it is part of philosophy to know itself clearly, and consequently its own limits.

First form: tendency to generalize.

The first bad effect that philosophy has upon practical description is the tendency to change it from description and collection of particular descriptions into something that has the air of generality and comprehensiveness. Because, if practical description be closely connected with the historical conditions of definite individuals and societies and with their wants, the more specific and near to the concrete it is, the better it will be, and the more useless by as much as it goes wandering toward the general. We owe to the evil influence of philosophy those verbose treatises upon psychological classes, such as virtue, duties, things good, affections, passions, and human types, to read which nourishes less than fresh water, which at least refreshes.

Let him who wishes to be convinced compare the books of rules and observations that we owe to men of experience and to men of the world, such as the Ricordi of Guicciardini, the Maximes of Larochefoucauld, and the Oraculo Manual of Balthazar Gracian, with the Traité des passions of Descartes, with that section of the Ethica of Spinoza that relates to this matter, with the Anthropologia and the Doctrine of Virtue of Kant (we prefer to record great names). He will then see on whose side is the advantage, an advantage of originality, of importance, and even of style, which is in this case a revelation. Those books by philosophers contain for the most part definitions of vocabulary and of words which there is no need to define, because everybody knows them to such an extent that the definitions, rather than make them more clear, make them obscure. Who, for example, can resist the philosophical triviality of the Aphorisms for the Wisdom of Life of Arthur Schopenhauer? Take the trouble to open a book to learn that good things are to be divided into personal, wealth and imagination, or reputation, and that the first (such as good health and a gay temperament) are pre-eminent over the others. Do we not learn more and with greater rapidity and efficacy from such proverbs as "God helps the merry man"? It is superfluous to observe that those books, in so far as they generalize, can never attain to philosophy. They remain at bottom more or less historical.

Historical elements persisting in generalizations.

The good and generous wine of the born psychologists and precept-makers is diluted in a great deal of water, but that water, however much there be of it, never becomes pure and is always discoloured and of an unpleasant taste. Thus in classifications of ancient Ethic the idea of "virtue" or of "good" was announced as the most important, in Christian Ethic that of "duty," in the same way as in ancient Ethic the political character was dominant, in the modern the individualistic, according to the different character of the corresponding civilizations. Historical elements differentiate the Ethic of Aristotle, impregnated with sane Greek life, from that of the Stoics, in which is foretold the decadence of the antique world and the germs of the future discovered (for instance, cosmopolitanism, which precedes the Christian idea of the unity of the human race). The four Platonic virtues retain the name, but are filled with a new content, in the four cardinal virtues of the Christian Ethic; the seven deadly sins are not to be explained in all their settemplicity without the ascetic ideal of the Middle Ages.

Among the various writers of treatises, the foreground is filled, now with the idea of effort or of duty, now with that of enjoyment and satisfaction; ideas are now despotic masters, now smiling friends; the dominant idea is in turn that of justice, of benevolence, of enthusiasm, and so on. In the systems of Catholic Ethic are reflected political absolutism and semi-feudal economy; in those of Protestant Ethic, constitutionalism, liberalism, the industrial and capitalistic world; a strict probity, not indeed without utilitarianism, and a hardness of heart, not indeed without austerity. Modern Ethic is concerned with property, with the struggle of classes, with proletarianism and communism. These are all historical facts and as such most worthy of attention, but for that very reason they should be examined in all their force and value and not through the medium of the pale categories of a universal doctrine, which they disturb and falsify and by which they are very often disturbed and falsified. Whoever undertakes to write general treatises upon the passions, upon the virtues, and upon the other practical classes, will always show the signs of his time in the categories that he establishes, and the result will be at once banal and empirical, that is to say, badly empirical.

Second form: literary union of philosophy and empiria.

But hitherto the chief ill has been that useless and tiresome books are written. Matters begin to look graver when an approach is attempted between philosophical theories and empirical classifications and they are united in one treatise, as the general part and the particular part, the abstract and the concrete part, the theoretical and the historical part. We do not wish to refuse recognition to an occasionally just sense of the intimate relations between philosophy and history as among the motives that lead to such unions, the first of which flows into the second, revives it and is by it in turn revived. But the history, to which philosophy applies the torch, is all history in its palpitating reality; it is history represented by all histories that historians have written and will write, and also by those that they have not written and will not write. The history offered by these empirical descriptions is only a very small part of history and (what is worse) abstract and mutilated. This would, however, be an injury of not too grave a nature, even at this point, provided the incongruity were limited to literary unfitness; in which case, it is true, would be added to inutility the ugliness of a union capricious and artificial, but fortunately extrinsic. But by means of that extrinsic approach, the way is opened to the attempt at an intrinsic approach, and thus to the third form of the undue invasion of practical description by philosophy, which constitutes the morbus philosophico-empiricus in all its harm fulness.