PART I (continued 3)

If history is based upon distinction (unity) and coincides with philosophy, the high importance that research into the autonomy of one or the other special history attains in historiographical development is perfectly comprehensible, but this is merely the reflection of philosophical research, and is often troubled and lacking in precision. All know what a powerful stimulus the new conception of imagination and art gave to the conception of history, and therefore also to mythology and religion, which were being developed with slowness and difficulty during the eighteenth to triumph at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This is set down to the creation of the history of poetry and myth in the works of Vico in the first place and then of Herder and others, and of the history of the figurative arts in the works of Winckelmann and others. And to the clearer conception of philosophy, law, customs, and language is due their renewal in the respective historiographical fields, at the hands of Hegel, Savigny, and Humboldt, and other creators and improvers of history, celebrated on this account. This also explains why there has been so much dispute as to whether history should be described as history of the state or as history of culture, and as to whether the history of culture represents an original aspect beyond that of the state or greater than it, as to whether the progress narrated in history is only intellectual or also practical and moral, and so on. These discussions must be referred to the fundamental philosophical inquiry into the forms of the spirit, their distinction and relation, and to the precise mode of relation of each one to the other.[1]

But although history distinguishes and unifies, it never divides—that is to say, separates; and the divisions of history which have been and are made do not originate otherwise than as the result of the same practical and abstractive process that we have seen break up the actuality of living history to collect and arrange the inert materials in the temporal scheme, rendered extrinsic. Histories already produced, and as such past, receive in this way titles (every thought is 'without title' in its actuality—that is to say, it has only itself for title), and each one is separated from the other, and all of them, thus separated, are classified under more or less general empirical conceptions, by means of classifications that more or less cross one another. We may admire copious lists of this sort in the books of methodologists, all of them proceeding, as is inevitable, according to one or the other of these general criteria: the criterion of the quality of the objects (histories of religions, customs, ideas, institutions, etc., etc.), and that of temporal-spatial arrangement (European, Asiatic, American, ancient, medieval, of modern times, of ancient Greece, of ancient Rome, of modern Greece, of the Rome of the Middle Ages, etc.); in conformity with the abstract procedure which, when dividing the concept, is led to posit on the one hand abstract forms of the spirit (objects) and on the other abstract intuitions (space and time). I shall not say that those titles and divisions are useless, nor even those tables, but shall limit myself to the' remark that the history of philosophy, of art, or of any other ideally distinct history, when understood as a definite book or discourse, becomes empirical for the reason already given, that true distinction is ideal, and a discourse or a book in its concreteness contains not only distinction but unity and totality, and to look upon either as incorporating only one side of the real is arbitrary. And I shall also observe that as there are histories of philosophy and of art in the empirical sense, so also nothing forbids our talking in the same sense of a general history, separate from special histories, indeed even of a history of progress and one of decadence, of good and evil, of truth and error.

The confusion between division and distinction—that is to say, between the empirical consideration that breaks up history into special histories and the philosophical consideration which always unifies and distinguishes as it unifies—is the cause of errors analogous to those that we have seen to result from such a process. To this are due above all the many disquisitions on the 'problem' and on the 'limits' of this or that history or group of special histories empirically constituted. The problem does not exist, and the limits are impossible to assign because they are conventional, as is finally recognized with much trouble, and as could be recognized with much less trouble if a start were made, not from the periphery, but from the centre—that is to say, from gnoseological analysis. A graver error is the creation of an infinity of entia imaginationis, taken for metaphysical entities and forms of the spirit, and the pretension that arises from this of developing the history of abstractions as though they were so many forms of the spirit with independent lives of their own, whereas the spirit is one. Hence the innumerable otiose problems with fantastic solutions met with in historical books, which it is here unnecessary to record. Every one is now able to draw these obvious consequences for himself and to make appropriate reflections concerning them. It is further obvious that the entia imaginations, in the same way as the 'choice' of facts, and the chronological schematization or dating of them, enter as a subsidiary element into any concrete exposition of historical thought, because the distinction of thinking and abstraction is an ideal distinction, which operates only in the unity of the spirit.

IX

THE 'HISTORY OF NATURE' AND HISTORY

We must cease the process of classifying referred to just now, and also that of the illusion of naturalism connected with it, by means of which imaginary entities created by abstraction are changed into historical facts and classificatory schemes into history, if we wish to understand the difference between history that is history and that due to what are called the natural sciences. This is also called history—'history of nature'—but is so only in name. Some few years ago a lively protest was made[1] against the confusion of these two forms of mental labour, one of which offers us genuine history, such as might, for instance, be that of the Peloponnesian War or of Hannibal's wars or of ancient Egyptian civilization, and the other a spurious history, such as that known as the history of animal organisms, of the earth's structure or geology, of the formation of the solar system or cosmogony. It was observed with reason that in many treatises the one has been wrongly connected with the other—that is to say, history of civilization with history of nature, as though the former follows the latter historically. The bottomless abyss between the two was pointed out. This has been observed, however, in a confused way by all, and better by historians of purely historical temperament, who have an instinctive repugnance for natural history and hold themselves carefully aloof from it. It was remembered with reason that the history of historians has always the individually determinate as its object, and proceeds by internal reconstruction, whereas that of the naturalists depends upon types and abstractions and proceeds by analogies. Finally, this so-called history or quasi-history was very accurately defined as an apparently chronological arrangement of things spatially distinct, and it was proposed to describe it with a new and proper name, that of Metastoria.

Indeed, constructions of this sort are really nothing but classificatory schemes, from the more simple to the more complex. Their terms are obtained by abstract analyses and generalization, and their series appears to the imagination as a history of the successive development of the more complex from the more simple. Their right to exist as classificatory schemes is incontestable, and their utility is also incontestable, for they avail themselves of imagination to assist learning and to aid the memory.

This only becomes contestable when they are estranged from themselves, lose their real nature, lay claim to illegitimate functions, and take their imaginary historicity too seriously. We find this in the metaphysic of naturalism, especially in evolutionism, which has been its most recent form. This is due, not so much to the men of science (who are as a rule cautious and possess a more or less clear consciousness of the limits of those schemes and series) as to the dilettante scientists and dilettante philosophers to whom we owe the many books that undertake to narrate the origin of the world, and which, aided by the acrisia of their authors, run on without meeting any obstacle, from the cell, indeed from the nebula, to the French Revolution, and even to the socialist movements of the nineteenth century. 'Universal histories,' and therefore cosmological romances (as we have already remarked in relation to universal histories), are composed, not of pure thought, which is criticism, but of thought mingled with imagination, which finds its outlet in myths. It is useless to prove in detail that the evolutionists of to-day are creators of myths, and that they weary themselves with attempts to write the first chapters of Genesis in modern style (their description is more elaborate, but they confuse such description with history in a manner by no means inferior to that of Babylonian or Israelitish priests), because this becomes evident as soon as such works are placed in their proper position. Their logical origin will at once make clear their true character.

But setting aside these scientific monstrosities, already condemned by the constant attitude of restraint and scepsis toward them on the part of all scientifically trained minds—condemned, too, by the very fact that they have had to seek and have found their fortune at the hands of the crowd or 'great public,' and have fallen to the rank of popular propaganda—we must here determine more precisely how these classificatory schemes of historiographical appearance are formed and how they operate. With this object, it is well to observe that classificatory schemes and apparent histories do not appear to be confined to the field of what are called the natural sciences or sub-human world, but appear also in that of the moral sciences or sciences of the human world. And to adduce simple and perspicuous examples, it often happens that in the abstract analysis of language and the positing of the types of the parts of speech, noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, and so on, or in the analysis of the word into syllables and sounds, or of style into proper or metaphorical words and into various classes of metaphors, we construct classes that go from the more simple to the more complex. This gives rise to the illusion of history of language, exposed as the successive acquisition of the various parts of speech or as the passage from the single sound to the syllable (monosyllabic languages), from the syllable to the aggregate of syllables (plurisyllabic languages), from words to propositions, metres, rhymes, and so on. These are imaginary histories that have never been developed elsewhere than in the studies of scientists. In like manner, literary styles that have been abstractly distinguished and arranged in series of increasing complexity (for example, lyric, epic, drama) have given rise and continue to give rise to the thought of a schematic arrangement of poetry, which, for example, should appear during a first period as lyric, a second as epic, a third as drama.

The same has happened with regard to the classifications of abstract political, economic, philosophical forms, and so on, all of which have been followed by their shadows in the shape of imaginative history. The repugnance that historians experience in attaching their narratives to naturalistic-mythological prologues—that is to say, in linking together in matrimony a living being and a corpse—is also proved by their reluctance to admit scraps of abstract history into concrete history, for they at once reveal their heterogeneity in regard to one another by their mere appearance. De Sanctis has often been reproached for not having begun his History of Italian Literature with an account of the origins of the Italian language and of its relations with Latin, and even with the linguistic family of Indo-European languages, and of the races that inhabit the various parts of Italy. An attempt has even been made to correct the design of that classic work by supplying, with a complete lack of historical sense, the introductions and additions that are not needed. But de Sanctis, who took great pains to select the best point of departure for the narrative of the history of Italian literature, and finally decided to begin with a brief sketch of the state of culture at the Suabian court and of the Sicilian poetical school, did not hesitate a moment in rejecting all abstractions of languages and races which to his true historical sense did not appear to be reconcilable with the tenzone of Ciullo, with the rhythms of Friar Jacob, or with the ballades of Guido Cavalcanti, which are quite concrete things.

We must also remember that plans for classification and pseudo-historical arrangements of their analogies are created not only upon the bodies of histories that are living and really reproducible and rethinkable, but also upon those that are dead—that is to say, upon news items, documents, and monuments. This observation makes more complete the identification of imaginary histories arising from the natural sciences with those which have their source in the moral sciences. The foundation of both is therefore very often not historical intelligence, but, on the contrary, the lack of it, and their end not only that of aiding living history and keeping it alive, but also the mediate end of assisting in the prompt handling of the remains and the cinders of the vanished world, the inert residues of history.

The efficacy of this enlargement of the concept of abstract history, which is analogical or naturalizing in respect to the field known as 'spiritual' (and thus separated from that empirically known as 'natural'), cannot be doubted by one who knows and remembers the great consequences that philosophy draws from the resolution of the realistic concept of 'nature' in the idealistic conception of 'construction,' which the human spirit makes of reality, looking upon it as nature. Kant worked upon the solution of this problem indefatigably and with subtlety; he gave to it the direction that it has followed down to our own days. And the consequence that we draw from it, in respect to the problem that now occupies us, is that an error was committed when, moved by the legitimate desire of distinguishing abstract from concrete history, naturalizing history from thinking history, genuine from fictitious history, a sort of agnosticism was reached, as a final result, by means of limiting history to the field of humanity, which was said to be cognoscible, and declaring all the rest to be the object of metastoria and the limit of human knowledge. This conclusion would lead again to a sort of dualism, though in a lofty sphere. But if metastoria also appears, as we have seen, in the human field, it is clear that the distinction as formulated stands in need of correction; and the agnosticism founded upon it vacillates and falls. There is not a double object before thought, man and nature, the one capable of treatment in one way, the other in another way, the first cognizable, and the second uncognizable and capable only of being constructed abstractly; but thought always thinks history, the history of reality that is one, and beyond thought there is nothing, for the natural object becomes a myth when it is affirmed as object, and shows itself in its true reality as nothing else but the human spirit itself, which schematized history that has been lived and thought, or the materials of the history that has already been lived and thought. The saying that nature has no history is to be understood in the sense that nature as a rational being capable of thought has not history, because it is not—or, let us say, it is nothing that is real. The opposite saying, that nature is also formative and possesses historical life, is to be taken in the other sense that reality, the sole reality (comprehending man and nature in itself, which are only empirically and abstractly separate), is all development and life.

What substantial difference can ever be discovered on the one hand between geological stratifications and the remains of vegetables and animals, of which it is possible to construct a prospective and indeed a serial arrangement, but which it is never possible to rethink in the living dialectic of their genesis, and on the other hand the relics of what is called human history, and not only that called prehistorical, but even the historical documents of our history of yesterday, which we have forgotten and no longer understand, and which we can certainly classify and arrange in a series, and build castles in the air about or allow our fancies to wander among, but which it is no longer possible really to think again? Both cases, which have been arbitrarily distinguished, are reducible to one single case. Even in what is called 'human history' there exists a 'natural history,' and what is called 'natural history' also was once 'human' history—that is to say, spiritual, although to us who have left it so far behind it seems to be almost foreign, so mummified and mechanicized has it become, if we glance at it but summarily and from the outside. Do you wish to understand the true history of a Ligurian or Sicilian neolithic man? First of all, try if it be possible to make yourself mentally into a Ligurian or Sicilian neolithic man; and if it be not possible, or you do not care to do this, content yourself with describing and classifying and arranging in a series the skulls, the utensils, and the inscriptions belonging to those neolithic peoples. Do you wish to understand the history of a blade of grass? First and foremost, try to make yourself into a blade of grass, and if you do not succeed, content yourself with analysing the parts and even with disposing them in a kind of imaginative history. This leads to the idea from which I started in making these observations about historiography, as to history being contemporary history and chronicle being past history. We take advantage of the idea and at the same time confirm that truth by solving with its aid the antithesis between a history that is 'history' and a 'history of nature,' which, although it is history, was supposed to obey laws strangely at variance with those of the only history. It solves this antithesis by placing the second in the lower rank of pseudo-history.

APPENDIX I

ATTESTED EVIDENCE

If true history is that of which an interior verification is possible, and is therefore history ideally contemporary and present, and if history by witnesses is lacking in truth and is not even false, but just neither false nor true (not a hoc est but a fertur), a legitimate question arises as to the origin and function of those innumerable propositions resumed from evidence critically thrashed out and 'held to be true,' although not verified, and perhaps never to be verified, but nevertheless employed even in most serious historical treatment. When we are writing the history of the doctrine known as the coincidentia oppositorum, or of the poem called I sepolcri, the Latin of the Cardinal di Cusa and the verse of Foscolo obviously belong to us, both as to the thoughts and the actual words, pronounced by ourselves to ourselves, and the certainty of those historical facts is at the same time logical truth. But that the De docta ignorantia was written between the end of 1439 and the early part of 1440, and Foscolo's poem on the return of the poet to Italy after his long military service in France, is evidence founded upon proofs, as to which we can only say that they are to be considered valid, because they have been to some extent attested, but we cannot claim them to be true. No amount of acute mental labour upon them can prevent another document or the better reading of an old document destroying them. Nevertheless, no one will treat of the works of the Cusan or of Foscolo without availing himself of the biographical details as to their authors which have been preserved.

An esteemed methodologist of our day has been tempted to found the faith placed in this order of evidence upon a sort of telepathy of the past, an almost spiritualistic revival. But there is nothing so mysterious in the genesis of that belief as to need a risky and fantastic explanation, to which even Horace's Jew would not give credence. On the contrary, it is a question of something that we can observe in process of formation in our private life of every day. We are noting down in our diary, for instance, certain of our acts, or striking the balance of our account. After a certain interval has elapsed those facts fade from memory and the only way of affirming to ourselves that they have happened and must be considered true is the evidence of our notes: the document bears witness; trust the book. We behave in a similar way in respect to the statements of others on the authority of their diaries or account-books. We presume that if the thing has been written down it answers to the truth. Doubtless this assumption, like every assumption, may turn out to be false in fact, owing to the note having been made in a moment of distraction or of hallucination, or too late, when the memory of the fact was already imprecise and lacking in certainty, or because it was capriciously made or made with the object of deceiving others. But just for this reason, written evidence is not usually accepted with closed eyes; its verisimilitude is examined and we confront it with other written evidence, we investigate the probity and accuracy of the writer or witness. It is just for this reason that the penal code threatens with pains and penalties those who alter or falsify documents. And although these and other subtle and severe precautions do not in certain cases prevent fraud, deception, and error (in the same way that the tribunals established for the purpose of condemning the guilty often send away the guilty unpunished and sometimes condemn the innocent), yet the use of documents and evidence works out on the whole in accordance with the truth; it is held to be useful and worthy of support and encouragement, because the injuries that it is liable to cause are greatly inferior to those that it prevents.

Now what men do with regard to their private affairs in daily life may be said to be done on a large scale by the human race when it delivers itself of the load of innumerable facts and fixes them externally where they are recoverable in a weakened form as unverifiable documentary evidence, yet are nevertheless such that as a whole we are justified in looking upon them end treating them as true. Historical faith then is not the result of telepathy or spiritualism, but of a wise economic provision, which the spirit continues to realize. In this way we understand historical work directed toward the prevention of alterations and deformations, and its acceptation of certain testimony, as 'what must be held to be true in the present state of science,' and its graduation of the rest as uncertain, probable, and most probable to be sometimes accepted in the expectation of ulterior inquiries. Finally, it explains the dislike of 'hypercriticism' when, not content with a constant refinement of criticism, hypercriticism contests the value of the most ingenuous and authoritative testimony. The reason is that it thus breaks the rules of the game that is being played sub regula, and only serves at the most to remind those apt to forget it that history by evidence is at bottom an altogether external history, never fundamental, true history, which is contemporary and present.

This genesis or nature of 'attested' evidence already contains the answer to the other question as to its function. It is clear that this cannot be to posit true history or to take its place, but to supply it with those secondary particulars which it would not be worth while to make the effort of keeping alive and complete in the mind, for this effort would result in damaging what is most important to us. Finally, whether the De docta ignorantia were written some time earlier or later is something that may quite well be determined by a different interpretation of this or that thought of Cusanus, but it does not affect the function that the doctrine of the coincidence of opposites exercises in the formation of logical science. Again, whether the Sepolcri was composed or planned prior to Foscolo's visit to France would without doubt change to some extent our representation of the gradual development of the soul and genius of the poet, but it would hardly at all change our mode of interpreting his great ode. Those who despair of historical truth, owing to the lack of a verifiable certainty of some particulars, or to the uncertainty and dubiety that surrounds it, resemble him who, having forgotten the chronicle of his life in this or that year, should think that he did not know himself in his present condition, which is both the recapitulation of his past and carries with it his past in all that it really concerns him to know. But, on the other hand, attested evidence that has been field to be true is a stimulus to us to search ourselves more closely, an enrichment of what we have found by means of analysis and meditation and a confirmation or proof of our thoughts, which are not to be neglected, especially when true evidence and attested evidence agree with one another. To refuse the assistance and the facilities afforded by attested evidence, owing to the fear that some of it may prove false, or because all of it possesses an external and somewhat general and vague character, would be to refuse the authority of the human race, and so to commit the sin of Descartes and of Malebranche. This great refusal does not concern or assist the understanding of history. All that does matter and does assist is that authority—including the authority of the human race—should never be allowed to take the place of the thought of humanity, to which, in any case, belongs the first place.

APPENDIX II

ANALOGY AND ANOMALY OF SPECIAL HISTORIES

In the course of the preceding theoretical explanations we have denied both the idea of a universal history (in time and space)[1] and that of a general history (of the spirit in its indiscriminate generality or unity),[2] and have insisted instead upon the opposite view with its two clauses: that history is always particular and always special, and that these two determinations constitute precisely concrete and effective universality and concrete and effective unity. What has been declared impossible, then, does not represent in any way a loss, for it is on the one hand fictitious universality or the universality of fancy, and on the other abstract universality, or, if it be preferred, confused universality. So-called universal histories have therefore shown themselves to be particular histories, which have assumed that title for purposes of literary notoriety, or as collections, views, and chroniclistical compilations of particular histories, or, finally, as romances. In like manner, general inclusive histories are either so only in name, or set different histories side by side, or they are metaphysical and metaphorical playthings.

As a result of this double but converging negation, it is also advisable to refute a common and deeply rooted belief (which we ourselves at one time shared to some extent)[3] that we should arrive at the re-establishment of the universality of the fancy: or that there are some among the special histories, constituted according to the various forms of the spirit (general and individual only in so far as every form of the spirit is the whole spirit in that form), which require universal treatment and others only treatment as monographs. The typical instance generally adduced is that of the difference between the history of philosophy and the history of poetry or of art. The subject of the former is supposed to be the one great philosophical problem that interests all men, of the latter the sentimental or imaginative problems of particular moments, or at the most of particular artists. Thus the former is supposed to be continuous, the latter discontinuous, the former capable of complete universal vision, the second only of a sequence of particular visions. But a more 'realistic' conception of philosophy deprives it of this privilege as compared with the history of art and poetry or of any other special history; for, appearances notwithstanding, it is not true that men have concentrated upon one philosophical problem only, whose successive solutions, less and less inadequate, compose a single line of progress, the universal history of the human spirit, affording support and unification to all other histories. The opposite is the truth: the philosophical problems that men have treated of and will treat of are infinite, and each one of them is always particularly and individually determined. The illusion as to the uniqueness of the problem is due to logical misapprehension, increased by historical contingencies, whence a problem which owing to religious motives seemed supreme has been looked upon as unique or fundamental, and groupings and generalizations made for practical ends have been held to be real identity and unity.[4] 'Universal' histories of philosophy, too, like the others, when we examine them with a good magnifying glass, are revealed as either particular histories of the problem that engages the philosopher-historian, or arbitrary artificial constructions, or tables and collections of many different historical sequences, in the manner of a manual or encyclopædia of philosophical history. Certainly nothing forbids the composition of abridgments of philosophical histories, containing classifications of particular problems and representing the principal thinkers of all peoples and of all times as occupied with one or another class of problem. This, however, is always a chroniclistical and naturalistic method of treating the history of philosophy, which only really lives when a new thinker connects the problems already set in the past and its intrinsic antecedents with the definite problem that occupies his attention. He provisionally sets aside others with a different connexion, though without for that reason suppressing them, intending rather to recall them when another problem makes their presence necessary. It is for this reason that even in those abridgments that seem to be the most complete and 'objective' (that is to say, 'material') a certain selection does appear, due to the theoretical interest of the writer, who never altogether ceases to be a historiographer-philosopher. The procedure is in fact just that of the history of art and poetry, where what is really historical treatment, living and complete, is the thought or criticism of individual poetical personalities, and the rest a table of criticisms, an abridgment due to contiguity of time or place, affinity of matter or similarity of temperament, or to degrees of artistic excellence. Nor must we say that every philosophic problem is linked to all the others and is always a problem of the whole of philosophy, thus differing from the cases of poetry and art, for there is no diversity here either, and the whole of history and the entire universe are immanent in every single work of art.

Now that we have likewise reduced philosophies of history to the rank of particular histories, it is scarcely necessary to demonstrate that the demand being made in several quarters for a 'universal' or 'general' history of science is without foundation. For such a history would be impossible to write, even if we were able to identify or compare the history of science with chat of philosophy. But it is doubly impossible both because there are comprised under the name of 'science' such diverse forms as sciences of observation and mathematical sciences, and also because in each of these classes themselves the several disciplines remain separate, owing to the irreducible variety of data and postulates from which they spring. If, as we have pointed out, every particular philosophical problem links and places itself in harmony with all other philosophical problems, every scientific problem tends, on the contrary, to shut itself up in itself, and there is no more destructive tendency in science than that of 'explaining' all the facts by means of a 'single principle,' substituting, that is to say, an unfruitful metaphysic for fruitful science, allowing an empty word to act as a magic wand, and by 'explaining everything' to 'explain' nothing at all. The unity admitted by the history of the sciences is not that which connects one theory with another and one science with another in an imaginary general history of science, but that which connects each science and each theory with the intellectual and social complex of the moment in which it appeared. But even here too we must utter the warning that in thus explaining their true nature we do not wish to contest the right to existence of tables and encyclopædias of the history of science, far less to throw discredit upon the present direction of studies, by means of which, at the call of the history of the sciences, useful Research is stimulated in directions that have been long neglected. Nor do we intend to move any objection to histories of science in the form of tables and encyclopædias on the ground that it is impossible for the same student to be equally competent as to problems of quite different nature, such as are those of the various sciences; for it is inconceivable that a philosopher exists with a capacity equal to the understanding of each and every philosophical problem (indeed, the mind of the best solver of certain problems is usually the more closed to others); or that a critic and historian of poetry and art exists who tastes and enjoys equally all forms of poetry and art, however versatile he be. Each one has his sphere marked out more or less narrowly, and each is universal only by means of his particularity.

Finally, we shall not repeat the same demonstration for political history and ethics, where the claim to represent the whole of history in a single line of development has had less occasion to manifest itself. It is usually more readily admitted there that every history is particular—that is to say, determined by the political and ethical problem or problems with which history is concerned in time and place, and which every history therefore occasionally rethinks from the beginning. The analogy, then, between different kinds of special history is to be considered perfect, and the anomaly between them excluded, for they all obey the principle of particularity, that is, particular universality (whatever be the appearance to the contrary). But if, as histories, they all proceed according to the nature of what we have explained as historiography, in so far as they are special each one conforms to the concept of its speciality. It is in this sense alone that each one is anomalous in respect to the others, preserving, that is to say, its own peculiar nature. We have explained that the claim to treat the history of poetry and of art in the same way as philosophy is erroneous, not only because it misconceives the true concept of history, but also because it misrepresents the nature of art, conceiving it as philosophy and dissipating it in a dialectic of concepts, or because it leaves out, in the history of art, just that by reason of which art is art, looking upon it as something secondary, or at best giving it a place beside the social or conceptual activities. This error is precisely analogous to that of those who from time to time suggest what they term the 'psychological' reform of philosophy—that is to say, they would like to treat it as dependent upon the psychology of philosophers and of the social environment, thus placing it on a level, sometimes with the history of the sentiments, at others with that of fancies and Utopias, or with what is not the history of philosophizing. Such persons lack the knowledge of what philosophy is, as the others lack the knowledge of poetry and art. Anyone desirous of arriving at a rapid knowledge of the difference between the history of philosophy and the history of poetry should observe how the one, owing to the nature of its object, is led to examine theories in so far as they are the work of pure mind, and therefore to develop a history in which thoughts represent the dramatis personæ, while the other is led by the nature of its object to examine works of art in so far as they are works of imagination, which gives expression to movements of feeling, and therefore to develop a history of imaginative and sensitive points of view. The former, therefore, though it does not neglect actions, events, and imagination, regards them as the humus of pure thought and takes the form of a history of concepts without persons, either real or imaginary, while the latter, which also does not neglect actions, events, and thoughts in its turn regards them as the humus of imaginary creations and takes the form of a history of ideal or imaginary personalities, which have divested themselves of the ballast of practical interests and of the curb of concepts. The plans, too, which they draw up and with which they cannot dispense, any more than can any human dialectic, answer to these different tendencies—that is to say, with the one they are schemes or general types of modes of thinking, with the other schemes containing ideal personalities.

If the history of philosophy has several times tried to devour the history of poetry and art, it may also be said to have several times tried to devour the history of practice, that of politics and ethics, or 'social history,' as people prefer to call it in our day. It has also been asserted that such history should be set free from the chroniclism in which it had become involved and assume a scientific and rigorous form. To do this, it was heedful to reduce it to a history of 'ideas,' which are the true and essential practical acts, because they generate them—that is to say, the error which we noted above in respect to poetry and art has here been repeated. What is peculiar to practical acts has been neglected, and only the 'ideas,' which are their antecedents and consequents, have been retained. But on other occasions the 'ideas' to which it was claimed to reduce practical acts were not really ideas or intellectual formations, but truly practical acts, sentiments, dispositions, customs, institutions. The originality of political and ethical history was thus unconsciously confirmed. Its object is just what can be designated with the single word institutions, taking the word in its widest signification—that is to say, understanding by it all practical arrangements of human individuals and societies, from the most recondite sentiments to the most obvious modes of life (which, too, are always will in action). All are equally historical productions, the sole effective historical productions perceivable according to the practical form of the spirit. If the patrimony of judgments, as the capital with and upon which our modern thought works, is the result of a long history, of which we become conscious from time to time, illustrating now one and now another of its particular aspects at the solicitation of new needs, so also what we can now practically do, all our sentiments as so-called civilized men—courage, honour, dignity, love, modesty, and the like—all our institutions in the strict sense of the term (which are themselves due to attitudes of the spirit, utilitarian or moral)—the family, the state, commerce, industry, military affairs, and so on—have a long history; and according as one or other of those sentiments or institutions enters upon a crisis, as the result of new wants, we attempt to ascertain its true 'nature'—that is to say, its historical genesis. Anyone who has followed the developments of modern social historiography with care and attention has been able to see clearly that its aim is precisely to arrange the chroniclistic chaos of disaggregated notes of events in ordered series of histories of social values, and that its field of research is the history of the human soul in its practical aspect; either when it produces general histories of civilization (always due to particular motives and limited by them), or when it presents histories of classes, peoples, social currents, sentiments, institutions, and so forth.

Biography, too (only when not limited to a mere chroniclistic collection of the experiences of an individual or to a poetical portrait, improperly regarded as a historical work), is the history of an 'institution' in the philosophical acceptation of the word and forms part of the history of practice: because the individual, in the same way as a people or a social class, is the formation of a character, or complex of specific attitudes and actions consequent upon them; and it is of this that historical biography consists, not of the individual looked upon as external or private or physical, or whatever it be called.

We might be expected to indicate the place or function of the history of science and of religion, in order to render to a certain extent complete this rapid review of special histories, in which general history realizes itself in turn—it never exists outside of them. But if science differs from philosophy in being partly theoretical and partly practical, and religion is an attempt to explain reality by means of myth and to direct the work of man according to an ideal, it is evident that the history of science enters to some extent into the history of philosophical thought and to some extent forms part of that of needs and institutions; indeed, since the moment which sets science to work and endows it with its peculiar character is the practical or suitable moment, it really belongs to the history of institutions in the very wide sense described; and the history of religion forms to some extent part of the history of institutions and to some extent part of the history of philosophy; indeed, since the dominating moment is here mythical conception or philosophical effort, the history of religion is substantially that of philosophy. Other more particular disquisitions in connexion with this argument would be out of place in the present treatise, which is not especially concerned with the theory and methodology of particular special histories (coincident with the treatment of the various spheres of philosophy, æsthetics, logic, etc.), and aims only at indicating the directions in which they must necessarily develop.[5]

APPENDIX III

PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY

Having established the unity of philosophy and historiography, and shown that the division between the two has but a literary and didactic value, because it is founded upon the possibility of placing in the foreground of verbal exposition now one and now the other of the two dialectical elements of that unity, it is well to make quite clear what is the true object of the treatises bearing the traditional title of philosophic 'theory' or 'system': to what (in a word) philosophy can be reduced.

Philosophy, in consequence of the new relation in which it has been placed, cannot of necessity be anything but the methodological moment of historiography: a dilucidation of the categories constitutive of historical judgments, or of the concepts that direct historical interpretation. And since historiography has for content the concrete life of the spirit, and this life is life of imagination and of thought, of action and of morality (or of something else, if anything else can be thought of), and in this variety of its forms remains always one, the dilucidation moves in distinguishing between æsthetic and logic, between economic and ethic, uniting and dissolving them all in the philosophy of the spirit. If a philosophical problem shows itself to be altogether sterile for the historical judgment, we have there the proof that such problem is otiose, badly stated, and in reality does not exist. If the solution of a problem—that is to say, of a philosophical proposition—instead of making history more intelligible, leaves it obscure or confounds it with others, or leaps over it and lightly condemns or negates it, we have there the proof that such proposition and the philosophy with which it is connected are arbitrary, though it may preserve interest in other respects, as a manifestation of sentiment or of imagination.

The definition of philosophy as 'methodology' is not at first exempt from doubts, even on the part of one ready to accept in general the tendency that it represents; because philosophy and methodology are terms often contrasted, and a philosophy that leads to a methodology is apt to be tainted with empiricism. But certainly the methodology of which we are here speaking is not at all empirical; indeed, it appears just for the purpose of correcting and taking the place of the empirical methodology of professional historians and of other such specialists in all that greater part of it where it is a true and proper, though defective, attempt toward the philosophical solution of the theoretical problems raised by the study of history, or toward philosophical methodology and philosophy as methodology.

If, however, the above-mentioned dispute is settled as soon as stated, this cannot be said of another, where our position finds itself opposed to a widely diffused and ancient conception of philosophy as the solver of the mystery of the universe, knowledge of ultimate reality, revelation of the world of noumena, which is held to be beyond the world of phenomena, in which we move in ordinary life and in which history also moves. This is not the place to give the history of that idea; but we must at least say this, that its origin is religious or mythological, and that it persisted even among those philosophers who were most successful in directing thought toward our earth as the sole reality, and initiated the new philosophy as methodology of the judgment or of historical knowledge. It persisted in Kant, who admitted it as the limit of his criticism; it persisted in Hegel, who framed his subtle researches in logic and philosophy of the spirit in a sort of mythology of the Idea.

Nevertheless, the diversity of the two conceptions manifested itself in an ever-increasing ratio, finding expression in various formulas of the nineteenth century, such as psychology against metaphysic, a philosophy of experience and immanence, aprioristic against transcendental philosophy, positivism against idealism; and although the polemic was as a rule ill conducted, going beyond the mark and ending by unconsciously embracing that very metaphysic, transcendency, and apriority, that very abstract idealism, which it had set out to combat, the sentiment that inspired it was legitimate. And the philosophy of methodology has made it its own, has combated the same adversary with better arms, has certainly insisted upon a psychological view, but a speculative psychological view, immanent in history, but dialectically immanent, differing in this from positivism, that while the latter made necessary the contingent, it made the contingent necessary, thus affirming the right of thought to the hegemony. Such a philosophy is just philosophy as history (and so history as philosophy), and the determination of the philosophical moment in the purely categorical and methodological moment.

The greater vigour of this conception in respect to the opposite, the superiority of philosophy as methodology over philosophy as metaphysic, is shown by the capacity of the former to solve the problems of the latter by criticizing them and pointing out their origin. Metaphysic, on the other hand, is incapable of solving not only the problems of methodology, but even its own problems, without having recourse to the fantastic and arbitrary. Thus questions as to the reality of the external world, of soul-substance, of the unknowable, of dualisms and of antitheses, and so forth, have disappeared in gnoseological doctrines, which have substituted better conceptions for those which we formerly possessed concerning the logic of the sciences, explaining those questions as eternally renascent aspects of the dialectic or phenomenology of knowledge.

The view of philosophy as metaphysic is, however, so inveterate and so tenacious that it is not surprising that it should still give some sign of life in the minds of those who have set themselves free of it in general, but have not applied themselves to eradicating it in all its particulars, nor closed all the doors by which it may return in a more or less unexpected manner. And if we rarely find it openly and directly displayed now, we may yet discern or suspect it in one or other of its aspects or attitudes, persisting like kinks of the mind, or unconscious preconceptions, which threaten to drive philosophy as methodology back into the wrong path, and to prepare the return, though but for a brief period, of the metaphysic that has been superseded.

It seems to me opportune to provide here a clear statement of some of these preconceptions, tendencies, and habits, pointing out the errors which they contain and entail.

First of all the survivals of the past that are still common comes the view of philosophy as having a fundamental problem to solve. Now the conception of a fundamental problem is intrinsically at variance with that of philosophy as history, and with the treatment of philosophy as methodology of history, which posits, and cannot do otherwise than posit, the infinity of philosophical problems, all certainly connected with one another, but not one of which can be considered fundamental, for just the same reason that no single part of an organism is the foundation of all the others, but each one is in its turn foundation and founded. If, indeed, methodology take the substance of its problems from history, history in its most modest but concrete form of history of ourselves, of each one of us as an individual, this shows us that we pass on from one to another particular philosophical problem at the promptings of our life as it is lived, and that one or the other group or class of problems holds the field or has especial interest for us, according to the epochs of our life. And we find the same to be the case if we look at the wider but less definite spectacle afforded by the already mentioned general history of philosophy—that is to say, that according to times and peoples, philosophical problems relating sometimes to morality, sometimes to politics, to religion, or to the natural sciences and mathematics, have in turn the upper hand. Every particular philosophical problem has been a problem of the whole of philosophy, either openly or by inference, but we never meet with a general problem of philosophy, owing to the contradiction thereby implied. And if there does seem to be one (and it certainly does seem so), it is really a question of appearances, due to the fact that modern philosophy, which comes to us from the Middle Ages and was elaborated during the religious struggles of the Renaissance, has preserved a strong imprint of theology in its didactic form, not less than in the psychological disposition of the greater part of those addicted to it. Hence arises the fundamental and almost unique importance usurped by the problem of thought and being, which after all was nothing more than the old problem of this world and the next, of earth and heaven, in a critical and gnoseological form. But those who destroyed or who initiated the destruction of heaven and of the other world and of transcendental philosophy by immanent philosophy began at the same moment to corrode the conception of a fundamental problem, although they were not fully aware of this (for we have said above that they remained trammelled in the philosophy of the Thing in Itself or in the Mythology of the Idea). That problem was rightly fundamental for religious spirits, who held that the whole intellectual and practical dominion of the world was nothing, unless they had saved their own souls or their own thought in another world, in the knowledge of a world of noumena and reality. But such it was not destined to remain for the philosophers, henceforth restricted to the world alone or to nature, which has no skin and no kernel and is all of a piece. What would happen were we to resume belief in a fundamental problem, dominating all others? The other problems would either have to be considered as all dependent upon it and therefore solved with it, or as problems no longer philosophical but empirical. That is to say, all the problems appearing every day anew in science and life would lose their value, either becoming a tautology of the fundamental solution or being committed to empirical treatment. Thus the distinction between philosophy and methodology, between metaphysic and philosophy of the spirit, would reappear, the first transcendental as regards the second, the second aphilosophical as regards the first.

Another view, arising from the old metaphysical conception of the function of philosophy, leads to the rejection of distinction in favour of unity, thus conforming to the theological conception that all distinctions are unified by absorption in God, and to the religious point of view, which forgets the world and its necessities in the vision of God. From this ensues a disposition which may be described as something between indifferent, accommodating, or weak, in respect of particular problems, and the pernicious doctrine of the double faculty is almost tacitly renewed, that is, of intellectual intuition or other superior cognoscitive faculty, peculiar to the philosopher and leading to the vision of true reality, and of criticism or thought prone to interest itself in the contingent and thus greatly inferior in degree and free to proceed with a lack of speculative rigour not permissible in the other. Such a disposition led to the worst possible consequences in the philosophical treatises of the Hegelian school, where the disciples (differing from the master) generally gave evidence of having meditated but little or not at all upon the problems of the various spiritual forms, freely accepting vulgar opinions concerning them, or engaging in them with the indifference of men sure of the essential, and therefore cutting and mutilating them without pity, in order to force them into their pre-established schemes with all haste, thus getting rid of difficulties by means of this illusory arrangement. Hence the emptiness and tiresomeness of their philosophies, from which the historian, or the man whose attention is directed to the understanding of the particular and the concrete, failed to learn anything that could be of use to him in the direction of his own studies and in the clearer formulation of his own judgments. And since the mythology of the idea reappeared in positivism as mythology of evolution, here too particular problems (which are indeed the only philosophical problems) received merely schematic and empty treatment and did not progress at all. Philosophy as history and methodology of history restores honour to the virtue of acuteness or discernment, which the theological unitarianism of metaphysic tended to depreciate: discernment, which is prosaic but severe, hard and laborious but prolific, which sometimes assumes the unsympathetic aspect of scholasticism and pedantry, but is also of use in this aspect, like every discipline, and holds that the neglect of distinction for unity is also intimately opposed to the conception of philosophy as history.

A third tendency (I beg to be allowed to proceed by enumeration of the various sides of the same mental attitude for reasons of convenience), a third tendency also seeks the definitive philosophy, untaught by the historical fact that no philosophy has ever been definitive or has set a limit to thought, or has ever been thoroughly convinced that the perpetual changing of philosophy with the world which perpetually changes is not by any means a defect, but is the nature itself of thought and reality. Or, rather, such teaching, and the proposition that follows it, do not fail altogether of acceptance, and they are led to believe that the spirit, ever growing upon itself, produces thoughts and systems that are ever new. But since they have retained the presupposition of a fundamental problem which (as we have said) substantially consists of the ancient problem of religion alone, and each problem well determined implies a single solution, the solution given of the 'fundamental problem' naturally claims to be the definitive solution of the problem of philosophy itself. A new solution could not appear without a new problem (owing to the logical unity of problem and solution); but that problem, which is superior to all the others, is on the contrary the only one. Thus a definitive philosophy, assumed in the conception of the fundamental problem, is at variance with historical experience, and more irreconcilably, because in a more evidently logical manner, with philosophy as history, which, admitting infinite problems, denies the claim for and the expectation of a definitive philosophy. Every philosophy is definitive for the problem which it solves, but not for the one that appears immediately afterward, at the foot of the first, nor for the other problems which will arise from the solution of this. To close the series would be to turn from philosophy to religion and to rest in God.

Indeed, the fourth preconception, which we now proceed to state, and which links itself with the preceding, and, together with all the preceding, to the theological nature of the old metaphysic, concerns the figure of the philosopher, as Buddha or the Awakened One, who posits himself as superior to others (and to himself in the moments when he is not a philosopher), because he holds himself to be free from human passions, illusions, and agitations by means of philosophy. This is the case with the believer, who fixes his mind upon God and shakes off earthly cares, like the lover, who feels himself blessed in the possession of the beloved and defies the whole world. But the world soon takes its revenge both upon the believer and the lover, and does not fail to insist upon its rights. Such an illusion is impossible for the philosophical historian, who differs from the other in feeling himself irresistibly involved in the course of history, as at once both subject and object, and who is therefore led to negate felicity or beatitude, as he negates every other abstraction (because, as has been well said, le bonheur est le contraire de la sensation de vivre), and to accept life as it is, as joy that overcomes sorrow and perpetually produces new sorrows and new unstable joys. And history, which he thinks as the only truth, is the work of tireless thought, which conditions practical work, as practical work conditions the new work of thought. Thus the primacy formerly attributed to the contemplative life is now transferred not to active life, but to life in its integrity, which is at once thought and action. And every man is a philosopher (in his circle, however wide or narrow it may appear), and every philosopher is a man, indissolubly linked to the conditions of human life, which it is not given to anyone to transcend. The mystical or apocalyptic philosopher of the Græco-Roman decadence was well able to separate himself from the world: the great thinkers, like Hegel, who inaugurated the epoch of modern philosophy, although they denied the primacy of the abstract contemplative life, were liable to fall back into the error of belief in this supremacy and to conceive a sphere of absolute spirit, a process of liberation through art, religion, and philosophy, as a means of reaching it; but the once sublime figure of the philosopher blessed in the absolute, when we try to revive it in this modern world of ours, becomes tinged with the comic. It is true that satire has now but little material upon which to exercise itself, and is reduced to aiming its shafts at the 'professors of philosophy' (according to the type of philosopher that has been created by modern universities, which is partly the heir of the 'master of theology' of the Middle Ages): against the professors, that is to say, to the extent that they continue to repeat mechanically abstract general propositions, and seem to be unmoved by the passions and the problems that press upon them from all sides and vainly ask for more concrete and actual treatment. But the function and the social figure of the philosopher have profoundly changed, and we have not said that the manner of being of the 'professors of philosophy' will not also change in its turn—that is to say, that the way of teaching philosophy in the universities and schools is not on the verge of experiencing a crisis, which will eliminate the last remains of the medieval fashion of formalistic philosophizing. A strong advance in philosophical culture should lead to this result: that all students of human affairs, jurists, economists, moralists, men of letters—in other words, all students of historical matters—should become conscious and disciplined philosophers, and that thus the philosopher in general, the purus philosophus, should find no place left for him among the professional specifications of knowledge. With the disappearance of the philosopher 'in general' would also disappear the last social vestige of the teleologist or metaphysician, and of the Buddha or Awakened One.

There is also a prejudice which to some extent inquinates the manner of culture of students of philosophy. They are accustomed to have recourse almost exclusively to the books of philosophers, indeed of philosophers 'in general,' of the metaphysical system-makers, in the same way as the student of theology formed himself upon the sacred texts. This method of culture, which is perfectly consequent when a start is made from the presupposition of a fundamental or single problem, of which it is necessary to know the different diverging and progressive solutions which have been attempted, is altogether inconsequent and inadequate in the case of a historical and immanent philosophy, which draws its material from all the most varied impressions of life and from all intuitions and reflections upon life. That form of culture is the reason for the aridity of the treatment of certain particular problems, for which is necessary a continued contact with daily experience (art and art criticism for æsthetic, politics, economy, judicial trials for the philosophy of rights, positive and mathematical sciences for the gnoseology of the sciences, and so on). To it is also due the aridity of treatment of those parts of philosophy themselves which are traditionally considered to constitute 'general philosophy,' for they too had their origin in life, and we must refer them back to life if we are to give a satisfactory interpretation of their propositions; we must plunge them into life again to develop them and to find in them new aspects. The whole of history is the foundation of philosophy as history, and to limit its foundation to the history of philosophy alone, and of 'general' or 'metaphysical' philosophy, is impossible, save by unconsciously adhering to the old idea of philosophy, not as methodology but as metaphysic, which is the fifth of the prejudices that we are enumerating.

This enumeration can be both lengthened and ended with the mention of a sixth preconception, relating to philosophical exposition. Owing to this, philosophy is expected to have either an architectural form, as though it were a temple consecrated to the Eternal, or a warm poetical form, as though it were a hymn to the Eternal. But these forms were part of the old content, and that form is now changed. Philosophy shows itself to be a dilucidation of the categories of historical interpretation rather than the grandiose architecture of a temple or a sacred hymn running on conventional lines. Philosophy is discussion, polemic, rigorous didactic exposition, which is certainly coloured with the sentiments of the writer, like every other literary form, able also at times to raise its voice (or on the other hand to become slight and playful, according to circumstances), but not constrained to observe rules which appear to be proper to a theological or religious content. Philosophy treated as methodology has, so to speak, caused philosophical exposition to descend from poetry to prose.

All the preconceptions, habits, and tendencies which I have briefly described should in my opinion be carefully sought out and eliminated, for it is they that impede philosophy from taking the form and proceeding in the mode suitable and adequate to the consciousness of the unity with history which it has reached. If we look merely at the enormous amount of psychological observations and moral doubts accumulated in the course of the nineteenth century by poetry, fiction, and drama, those voices of our society, and consider that in great part it remains without critical treatment, some idea can be formed of the immense amount of work that falls to philosophy to accomplish. And if on the other hand we observe the multitude of anxious questions that the great European War has everywhere raised—as to the state, as to history, as to rights, as to the functions of the different peoples, as to civilization, culture, and barbarism, as to science, art, religion, as to the end and ideal of life, and so on—we realize the duty of philosophers to issue forth from the theologico-metaphysical circle in which they remain confined even when they refuse to hear of theology and metaphysic. For notwithstanding their protests, and notwithstanding the new conception accepted and professed by them, they really remain intellectually and spiritually attached to the old ideas.

Even the history itself of philosophy has hitherto been renewed only to a small extent, in conformity with the new conception of philosophy. This new conception invites us to direct our attention to thoughts and thinkers, long neglected or placed in the second rank and not considered to be truly philosophers because they did not treat directly the 'fundamental problem' of philosophy or the great peut-être, but were occupied with 'particular problems.' These particular problems, how-ever, were destined to produce eventually a change of view as regards the 'general problem,' which emerged itself reduced to the rank of a 'particular' problem. It is simply the result of prejudice to look upon a Machiavelli, who posited the conception of the modern state, a Baltasar Gracian, who examined the question of acuteness in practical matters, a Pascal, who criticized the spirit of Jesuitry, a Vico, who renewed all the sciences of the spirit, or a Hamann, with his keen sense of the value of tradition, as minor philosophers, I do not say in comparison with some metaphysician of little originality, but even when compared with a Descartes or a Spinoza, who dealt with other but not superior problems. A schematic and bloodless history of philosophy corresponded, in fact, with the philosophy of the 'fundamental problem.' A far richer, more varied and pliant philosophy should correspond with philosophy as methodology, which holds to be philosophy not only what appertains to the problems of immanency, of transcendency, of this world and the next, but everything that has been of avail in increasing the patrimony of guiding conceptions, the understanding of actual history, and the formation of the reality of thought in which we live.