A glance at the tables of categories that have appeared in the course of the history of philo sophy, from that of Aristotle, which is the first, at least among the conspicuous, to that of Stuart Mill, or if it be preferred, to the Kategorienlehre of E. von Hartmann, which is the last, or among the last, shows at once that the other categories, which have been described as logical categories, can be reduced to verbal variants of this unique one of the pure concept, or belong to other aspects of the spirit and of reality, as distinct from that of logical thought. For if in the Aristotelian table the ovo-ia and the TTOIOV, substance and quality, to some extent denote the subject and the predicate of the judgment, that is to say, the abstract elements of the a priori synthesis: the TTOO-OV, on the other hand, appeals to the processes of enumeration and of measurement, the TTOV and the Trore to the determination of space and time, the 'Trouelv and the Traa-^iv to the principles of practical activity, and so on. The Kantian table seems to refer, or to mean to refer, THE PURE CONCEPT 235 to logical thought; but that does not prevent the appearance in it of traces of the principles of mathematical, naturalistic, heuristic, and other processes. Furthermore, in the Kantian philo sophy, the whole system of the categories is to be deduced, not from the transcendental Logic alone, but also from the transcendental ^Esthetic (space and time), and from the Critique of Practical Reason and Judgment, which all lead to functions or forms, operating as spiritual syntheses and reappearing as categories in judgments. Finally, we must not neglect the Kantian meta physical categories of Physics.
All this becomes clearer in the doctrine of The Hegelian system of the Hegel, where the categories are not only those categories and other later of logical thought or subjective thought, concept, systems- judgment, syllogism; but also those of quality, quantity and measure, essence, phenomenon and reality, with their subforms and transitions, and those of the objective concept, mechanism, chemism, and teleology, and those of the Idea, life, knowing, and the absolute Idea. The Hegelian, Kuno Fischer, makes certain declara tions in his Logic to which it is expedient to give heed. Following the example of the master, he was induced to include knowing and willing among the categories; "It may at first sight 236 LOGIC PART 236 LOGIC PART seem strange (he says), that knowing and willing should appear here as logico- metaphysical con cepts, as categories. Knowledge has need of categories; but is knowledge itself a category? Willing belongs to Psychology and Morality, not to Logic and Metaphysic. It seems, then, that the categories lose themselves now in Physics or Physiology, by means of concepts such as those of mechanism and organism, now in Psycho logy and Ethics, with the concepts of knowing and of willing. Objections of this sort have often been made. We have shown that the concept must be thought as object, and that the concept of object demands that of mechanism: the justification of the thing resides in this proof. Willing and knowing are indeed cate gories. If the test, by which we recognize the categories, consists in that they are valid, not only for certain objects, but for all, and in that they should express the universal nature of things, it is not difficult to see in what a pro foundly significant way knowing and willing emerge triumphantly from such a test. They belong not only to what are called the faculties of the human spirit, but in truth to the very conditions of the world. If the world must be understood as end it must also be understood as THE PURE CONCEPT 237 willing; for the end without the willing is nothing...If knowing and willing were only a small human province of the world, they would certainly not be categories. Their concept would belong not to metaphysic, but to the anthropological sciences. Since they are, on the contrary, both of them cosmic principles, universal concepts, without which the concept of objects and of the world cannot be thoroughly thought and known, for that reason they necessarily have the value of categories. And since, in truth, they compose the concept of the world, they are the supreme categories." l This argument amounts to saying, that whenever a concept is truly universal (not restricted to this or that class of manifestations of reality and therefore empirical), whenever a concept is a pure concept, it is always a category. This thesis is most exact, but it amounts to excluding such a search from pure Logic, which does not give the concepts or concept of reality, but only the concept of the concept. The attempt of Hegel to embrace the totality of the categories was not understood and was abandoned at a later date, and a return was made in some sort to the categories of the theoretic and practical- theoretic spirit alone — (von Hartmann gives them 238 LOGIC PART 238 LOGIC PART in his fundamental tripartition of the categories into sensibility, reflective thought and speculative thought). But the tendency to totality reap peared, in an elementary form, in Stuart Mill, who opposed to the Aristotelian table his own, divided into the three classes of sentiments (sensa tions, thoughts, emotions, volitions), of substances (bodies and spirits), and of attributes (quality, relation, quantity): a vertiginous regression to an infantile conception, which yet sought to embrace in its own way the whole of reality. The logical The doctrine of the categories has been inpredicates or troduced and retained in Logic, not only because categories.
of the confusion between the thought of thought and thought in general, which has just been explained, but also because of another confusion, \J which must now be explained, as it has far deeper c roots and far greater importance. It has been and may be argued in this way. It is true that the categories are nothing but simply the con cepts of reality; but these concepts, acting as predicates, are presented in logic in a necessary order, which it is the task of logical Science to deduce. In determining reality by means of thought, we begin with a first predicate, for in stance being, judging that reality is. This judg ment immediately shows itself insufficient, whence , THE PURE CONCEPT 239 it becomes necessary to determine it with a second predicate and to judge that reality both is and is not, or is becoming. This predicate of becoming appears in its turn vague and abstract, and it becomes necessary to determine reality as quality, then as quantity, measure, essence, existence, mechanism, teleology, life, reflexion, will, idea, in short with all the predicates that exhaust the concept of reality.
But we know that this order, this supposed illusion as to the logical succession, is illusory and is simply the product reality of this order.
of abstract analysis. In the predicate to which verbal prominence is given, there is concentrated or understood every predicate, because in every judgment complete reality * is predicated of the subject. Moreover this is shown just by the observation, which reveals the insufficiency of an isolated and abstract predicate, and requires for sufficiency nothing less than the totality of the predicates, the full concept of the Real, of the Spirit or of the Idea. The concept of Reality, of Spirit or the Idea, can without doubt be de veloped, in its unity and in its distinctions; but (let us yet again repeat) logical Science has for its object, not the effective unity and distinction of ^ the Real, but the concept of unity and distinction.
1 See above Sect. II. Chap. V.
LOGIC PART 71ie necessity of the order of the predicates, not founded in Logic in particular, but in the whole of Philosophy.
The ordering of the variety of the predicates, their gradation according to their greater or less adequacy to reality, arises from the fact that disputes as to reality show themselves as one sided affirmations of this or that predicate or group of predicates, coupled with the neglect or negation of others, which are not less in dispensable. When, therefore, we attack such one-sidedness and affirm the complete indivisi bility of the predicates, the single predicates, the objects of the one-sided affirmations, are scrutinized one after the other, in order to demonstrate their insufficiency, and for this very reason a certain order is given to them. This order is, without doubt, necessary, because the possibility of errors, or of one-sided thoughts, is a consequence of the distinctions, in which the unity of the Real lives, and which are necessary to it. But for this very reason the order must be sought, not in logical Science, but in the total conception of Reality. For instance, in researches concerning the ethical concept, only he who thinks, not the concept of the concept (logical science), but the concept of ethical activity (ethical science), will be able to deter mine what one-sided concepts are there possible and what is their order. Only he who thinks THE PURE CONCEPT 241 a whole philosophy will be able to determine how many and what and how connected are the one-sided and erroneous modes of philosophy. This cannot be found in the concept of the concept; or rather only those erroneous modes are there found which derive from a one-sided thinking of the concept of the concept. This we shall see in its place. The order of the categories in the sense indicated is certainly not subjective and arbitrary, as a didactic ordering of them would be, a irporepov TT^O? T?//^?; it is a Trporepov <j)vo-ei,. But since this first by nature is identical with the whole concept of Reality, it is not wholly contained in the concept of Logic.
If the confusion between Logic and the Doc- False distinction of trine of the Categories, or between the think- philosophy into two spheres, ing of the logical category and the thinking of MetapkysUand } Philosophy, the other categories, had produced no other effect rational philosophy and than that of introducing into books' of Logic a method of treatment that exceeds their bounds, the evil wpuld not be great. It would chiefly affect literary harmony and clarity of didactic exposition. But from that confusion there has originated a genuinely philosophic error — the unfolding of the unity of philosophic science into a duality of grades, which are variously formu lated, sometimes as Metaphysic and Philosophy, R 242 LOGIC PART R 242 LOGIC PART sometimes as rational Philosophy and real Philo sophy, sometimes as Gnoseology and Anthropology (or Cosmology], sometimes as Logic and System of Philosophy, and so on. The conception of Reality is thus twice described: once as part of Logic (the Doctrine of the Categories, Ontology, etc.); and again as effective or applied Philosophy. Philosophy is divided into a Prologue to Philo sophy and Philosophy, or into Philosophy and a Conclusion to Philosophy. But Philosophy, although it is distinguishable into philosophies (for example, Esthetic, Logic, Economic and Ethic), is this distinction itself, or the unity immanent in it. It never gives rise to a duality of grades. It is never prologue, development and conclusion, being, at its every point, pro logue, development and conclusion. As from empirical and formalist Logic arose the idea of a Logic which should not be philosophy, but an organ or instrument or rule or law for the rest of philosophy; so from the confusion of Logic with the Doctrine of the Categories has arisen the idea of a Logic, or Metaphysic, or general Philosophy, or whatever else it may be called, which should be opposed to or above the rest of philosophy. But the Science of thought, Logic, is at once thought THE PUKfe CONCEPT 243 and effective philosophy; it is thought itself which in thinking the Real, thinks itself and places itself, as logical Science, in the place which belongs to it in] the system of the Real.
It may seem that in this way thought and Philosophy and pure logic: reality are again divided and a metaphysical overcoming dualism created. But the exact opposite is the truth. When Philosophy is distinguished into • general and particular, into rational and real, into pure and applied, into Logic-metaphysic and into Philosophy of nature and of man, an irre parable breach is made, which can only be con cealed or attenuated in a more or less ingenious manner. But when that doubleness of degree is destroyed (and thought thinking the real thereby thinks itself), and in the construction of Philosophy, the Philosophy of philosophy, namely Logic, is constructed, the dualism is for ever overcome. This thought is the thinking / of the distinctions, which the real presents; but ' to think distinctions and to think unity is, as has been already demonstrated, the same thing.
SECOND PART PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY AND THE NATURAL AND MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES THE FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE DIVISIONS OF KNOWLEDGE THE result of the preceding enquiries into the summary of results as to constitution of the cognitive spirit can be resumed, the forms of acquaintance, for mnemonic purposes, by saying that ( there are two pure theoretic forms, the intuition and the concept, the second of which is subdivided into judgment of definition and individual judgment, and that there are two modes of practical elabo ration of knowledge, or of formation of pseudo- concepts, the empirical concept and the abstract concept, from which are derived the two subforms of judgment of classification and of judgment of enumeration. ) If the methods in use in the mediaeval schools or in those of Port-Royal (which were not without their utility) were still in vogue, we should be able to embody these results in a few mnemonic verses, which would render the distinctions we have made easy to impart.
248 LOGIC PART Easy to impart, but not understood, or worse, ill understood; because, as we know, both the scheme of classification here adopted and the arithmetical determination of two or more forms are not truly logical thoughts adequate to the representation of the process of the real and of thought. Our grouping constructed to help the memory must therefore be interpreted with the aid of the developments offered above, and not only corrected, but altogether resolved in them. In these developments, the intuition and the concept have appeared as two forms, not capable of co-ordination, but both distinct and united. The judgment of definition and the individual judgment have appeared as logically identical, divisible only from an external or literary point of view, that is to say, by the greater or less importance attached either to the predicate or to the subject. Further, the formation of the pseudoconcepts is outside theory, although founded upon theoretic elements; it belongs essentially, not to the cognitive spirit, but to the practical spirit. And if their sub division into empirical and abstract concepts is necessary, the necessity is founded upon the fact, that only in these two modes can the concept be practically developed, when its synthetic unity PHILOSOPHY 249 PHILOSOPHY 249 is arbitrarily split up into two one-sided forms. Finally, the two fundamental forms of the spirit themselves, the theoretic and the practical, are not co-ordinate with one another, nor capable of arithmetical enumeration. The one is in the other, the one is correlative to the other, because the one presupposes the other.
No other cognitive or practical -cognitive Non-existence of technical forms, or other subforms, beyond those which forms, and of composite we have defined, are conceivable. The technical f°rms- knowledge, which is discussed in some treatises on Logic, is nothing but knowledge itself, which is always and entirely technical, preceding and conditioning the action and practice of life. The same may be said of normative knowledge, by which, as with technical, it is especially meant in ordinary language to designate the whole of the pseudoconcepts. But this is erroneous, when we consider that such knowledge constitutes the true immediate precedent condition of action. The pseudoconcepts must be retranslated into individual judgments, in order that they may be able to form the basis of action, for which, as is justly remarked, we require direct and concrete perceptions of actual situations. Formulae and abstractions aid perception only in an indirect and subsidiary manner.
LOGIC PART Identity of cognitive forms and forms of knowledge. Objections to it.
The so-called combined or composite forms in which two or more original forms are brought together, must also be rejected, for the reason already given, that composite concepts do not exist in pure Logical thought, and consequently cannot exist in the Science of Logic, which is the science of that thought. The composite form, then, is an empirical arid arbitrary deter mination, as may be observed, for instance, in the case in which we speak of an empirico- philosophic concept, that is, of the union (which is a successive enunciation) of an empirical concept and a philosophic concept.
The cognitive forms having thus been estab lished, we pass on to the question, what and how many and of what kind are the forms of knowledge. The reply must be that the forms of knowledge (for example, History and the natural Sciences) cannot be anything but identical with the cognitive forms, and of the same kind and same number as they. The first of these statements finds itself at once at issue with common thought, in which a profound distinction is drawn between the ordinary and the scientific man, the profane and the philosopher, the poet and the non-poet, the ignorant and the learned, layman and clergy; and again, between converii PHILOSOPHY 251 sation and science, effusion of the soul and art, collection of facts and history, good sense and philosophy. It is thought that acquaintance belongs to all: every one communicates his sentiments, narrates his experiences and those of others, reasons, classifies and calculates. /But art, philosophy, history and science are believed to belong to the few. That alone deserves those solemn names, which is the result of exceptional moments, when man is more than man, or at least when he is no longer one of the crowd, but belongs to an aristocracy.
And, certainly, these distinctions are useful, Empirical distinctions and therefore necessary in practice. We all feel and their limits.
the need of creating an aristocracy of men and things; of distinguishing the word that a sergeant whispers in the ear of a maid-servant from a sonnet or a symphony; the proverbs of Sancho Panza from a treatise on Ethics; and the report of a police -agent from the history of Rome or of England. We distinguish the classification of the glasses and bowls in use at home from that of Mineralogy or of Zoology; the reckoning of our daily expenses from the calculation of the 'astronomer; and, finally, Tom, Dick and Harry from Aeschylus, Plato, Thucydides, Hippocrates and Euclid. The odi profanum vulgus is a motto 252 LOGIC PART that should be appropriated by whosoever labours to promote the life of thought and of art, yet not without adding to it Ariosto's post script: " Nor do I wish to absolve any from the name of vulgar, save the prudent."
But, admitting all this, we must recognize not less energetically that these distinctions, imposed by the necessities of life, have in philosophy no value at all, and that their introduction there, if it has some excuse in professional custom, is nevertheless the way to shut off from us for ever all understanding both of the forms of knowledge and of those of acquaintance. Man is complete man at every instant and in every man; the spirit is always whole in every individuation of itself. The philosopher in the highest sense (in the philosopher worthy of the name) could be defined as one who raises doubts, collects difficulties, and formulates problems, intent upon clearing up doubts, upon levelling difficulties, and upon solving problems; the artist as a man who limits himself to looking and to recording the significance of what he has seen. In this case, the ordinary man would be he who en counters no theoretic difficulties and is unaware of spectacles worthy of contemplation. But in reality the ordinary man also sets himself problems ir PHILOSOPHY 253 and solves them, contemplates and expresses the spectacle of the real. The distinction has value, therefore, only in descriptive Psychology, which passes in review types of reality and the perfected organs, so to speak, which reality creates for itself in great philosophers and great poets. But what empiricism always divides, philosophy must always unite. To be scandalized when some one speaks of the poetry, philosophy, science, mathe matics, which are in every one's mouth; to mock those who unify and identify; to appeal to good sense and to threaten the madhouse, are things that reveal much pedantry but no humanity, or, at most, very little. It is foolish to fear that such an identification as we propose will lessen the importance of the forms of knowledge and render trivial divine Poetry, lofty Philosophy, severe History, serious Science and ingenious Mathematics. As the hero is not outside humanity, but is he in whom the soul of the people is concentrated and made powerful, so poetry, philosophy, science and history, aristo cratically circumscribed, are the most conspicuous manifestations attained by the elementary forms of acquaintance themselves. Such they could not be, were they not all one with them, just as the mountains could not be, were it not for the earth 254 LOGIC PART upon which they are raised and of which they are constituted.
It might be said that the forms of knowledge are rich and complex manifestations of the human spirit, if this statement did not open the way to another common prejudice, to the belief that to each of those forms (for instance, to Art, History and Philosophy) several spiritual activities contribute. Were this so, we should have before us a mixture, not a product of an unique and original character, such as we find, as a matter of fact, in a work of Art, a philo sophic theory, a narrative, and a theorem. By the law of the unity of the spirit all the forms of the spirit are implicit in one another; and the results, previously obtained from the various forms, condition each one of them. But each one of them is, explicitly, itself and not the others; it absorbs and transforms the results of the others; it does not leave them within itself as extraneous elements, and it therefore makes of them its own results. The strength of each one of those forms of knowledge lies precisely in this purity, which persists in the greatest complexity. A great poem is as homo geneous as the shortest lyric or as a verse; a philosophic system as homogeneous as a defini- PHILOSOPHY 255 PHILOSOPHY 255 tion; the most complicated calculations as the addition of " two and two make four."
If the forms of acquaintance and the forms Enumeration of knowledge be identical, it is proved thereby determination of the forms that the second are as many and of the same of knowing, corresponding sort as the first; and the existence of combined to the f°r™s °f acquaintance.
or composite forms is also excluded from the forms of knowledge. Thus we are henceforth freed from the obligation of enquiring into the particular nature of the various forms of know ledge, a task that we have already fulfilled when enquiring into the forms of acquaintance. It is sufficient to name them (in correspondence) with the names already given to the forms of acquaintance, for thus they will be clearly dis tinguished and completely enumerated. The method of denomination itself will not be new and surprising, because it has been, as it were, anticipated, and foreseen from the examples of which we have availed ourselves above, and also from some terminological references. We have now only to make it manifest, to declare it, so to speak, in clear tones.
Pure intuition is the theoretic form of Art (or of Poetry, if we wish to extend to the whole of aesthetic production the name given to a group of works of art); and art cannot be otherwise 256 LOGIC PART defined than as pure intuition. The thinking of the pure concept, of the concept as itself, of the universal that is truly universal and not mere generality or abstraction, is Philosophy, and Philosophy cannot be otherwise defined than as the thinking, or the conceiving of the pure con cept. And since the pure concept can be ex pressed either in the form of definition or in that of individual judgment, there corresponds to this duplication the distinction of the two forms of knowing, Philosophy in the strict sense, and History. The method of treatment called empirical Science or natural Science, or most commonly in our time, Science, is composed of those pseudoconcepts known as representative or empirical or classificatory. The mathematical Sciences are composed of abstract, enumerative and mensurative pseudoconcepts, and the appli cation of the second of these, by means of the first, to individual judgments, is nothing else than what is called the mathematical Science of nature.
critique of It is usual for the treatment of the forms of knowledge to be presented in the majority of the forms of treatises as a special or applied Logic; following knowledge, general or pure Logic, which has for its object the specific forms of acquaintance alone, or as PHILOSOPHY 257 it is significantly expressed, the elementary forms of acquaintance. But we cannot admit the exist ence of such a Logic, for the reasons already given. The elementary or fundamental forms are the only forms philosophically conceivable and really existing, and the whole of logical Science is exhausted in them. There is no duality of grades for logical Science any more than for Philosophy in general. And as no special ^Esthetic exists independent of general Esthetic, no special Ethic and Economic in dependent of general Economic, so there is not a general Logic alongside of a special Logic.
Special Logic is also inadmissible, when it and as doctrine is presented as doctrine of methods, and especi- of methods. ally of demonstrative or intrinsic methods. The method of a form of knowledge and in general of a form of the spirit, is not something different or even distinguishable from this form itself. The method of poetry is poetry, the method of philosophy is philosophy, the method of mathematics is mathematics, and so on. Only by means of empirical abstraction is the method separated from the activity itself; and when this duality has been created, we are led to add to it a third term, which is called the object of that form. But since the method is the form itself, S LOGIC PART Nature of our treatise in respect to the forms of knowledge.
so form and method are the object itself. Cer tainly, all the forms of the spirit have a common object, which is Reality; but this is not because reality is separated from them, but because they are reality: they therefore have not, but are this object. Thus the forms of knowledge have not a theoretic object, but create it: they them selves are that object. Philosophy has the pure concept for method and object; art has intuition; science the empirical concept, and so on. If we wished to treat of methods in a special Logic, we could not do otherwise than repeat what we have already said in respect to the character of each form.