others call it, a table of values, should be con structed, which should serve as foundation for historical narrative in general. The demand is exactly similar to that of the man who, observ ing that electricians or metal-founders employ physical forces, demands the construction of a physical theory to serve as the basis of industry; as if Physics did not exist and supply the basis for industry; or as if the sciences changed their nature, according to the men who employ them. The theory of historical factors, or the table of values, exists, and is called Philosophy, whose precise business it is to define universals, which are factors and not facts, and to give the table of values, which are categories. At the most this demand might be taken to suggest the recom mendation of a popular philosophy, for the use of professional historians; but this too exists and is natural good sense. A historian who entertains doubts as to the deliverances of good sense begins to philosophize (in the restricted and professional sense of the word), and once he has done this, what is called popular philosophy no longer suffices him, or serves only to make his mental condition worse, with its insufficient nourishment. Books on the teaching of history which abound in our literature of to - day are proof of this.
HISTORY 299 Disquisitions as to the predominance or the fundamental character of this or that historical factor belong to this popular and more or less dilettante literature. In strict philosophy, such problems do not arise, or are promptly dissolved, because it is known that, since every fact of reality depends upon another fact, so also every factor, or every constitutive element of the spirit and of reality, is such only in union with other factors and elements. None of them pre dominates, because measures of greater or less are not used in philosophy, and none is funda mental, because all are fundamental.
The representative and conceptual elements impossibility of dividing in historical judgment are not separable or even, history according to strictly, distinguishable unless it is intended to its intuitive ' ' and reflective dissolve the historical narrative in order to return elements- to pure intuition. This too is a corollary of what has been said on the individual judgment. For this reason, every division of history, based upon the presence or absence of one or other of these elements, must be held to be without truth. Of this kind is the once popular division \V\\JQ pictur esque and reflective or thinking history. But this division designates not two kinds of history, but rather, on the one hand, the return to indis criminate intuition, and on the other, true history, LOGIC PART Rmpirical nature of the division of the historical process into four stages.
which is intuition thought or reflected. The same false division is sometimes expressed in the terms chronicle and history, or narrative and philosophic history.
Outside the individual judgment, there is neither subject nor predicate. Outside the narra tive, which synthesizes representation and con cept, and by representing gives existence and judgment, there is no history. Technical manuals usually divide the process of historical composi tion into four stages. The first is heuristic, con sisting of the collection of historical material; the second criticism or separation of it; the third is interpretation or comprehension, the fourth exposition or narrative. These distinctions portray the professional historian's method of work. First, he examines archives and libraries, then he verifies the authenticity of the documents found, then he seeks to understand them, and finally he puts his thoughts on paper and pays attention to the beauty of form of the exposition. These are doubtless useful didactic distinctions. But it must be observed that so long as we do not have a historical source before us (the first stage) the very condition of the birth of history is wanting. Hence the first stage does not belong to historical work, but to the practical HISTORY 301 HISTORY 301 stage of him who goes in search of a material object. The second stage is already a complete historical work in itself, since it consists in estab lishing, whether a given fact, called sincere evidence, has really taken place. The third coincides logically with the second, since it is the same thing to ascertain the value of a piece of evidence and to pronounce on the reality and quality of the facts to which it witnesses. The fourth coincides with the second and third, be cause it is impossible to think a narrative without speaking it, that is, without giving to it expres sive or verbal form.
If history be not divisible on the basis of the Divisions r n founded presence or absence of the reflective or represen- upon the historical tative element, it may well be divided by taking object. as basis, either the concept that determines the particular historical composition, or the repre sentative material that enters into it.
The first mode of distinction is rigorous, be- Logical cause founded upon the character of unity-in-dis- according to the forms tinction, proper to the pure concept. Thus, the of the spirit. human mind cannot think history as a whole, save by distinguishing it at the same time into the history of doing and the history of knowing, into the history of the practical activity and the history of aesthetic production, of philosophic PART 302 LOGIC PART 302 LOGIC thought, and so on. In like manner, it cannot think any one of these distinctions, save by placing it in relation with the others, or with the whole, and thinking it in complete history. Naturally, this intimate, logical unity and distinction has nothing to do with the books which are called histories of the practical, philosophic, artistic activities, and the like. There the correspond ence with the division of which we speak is only approximate, owing to the operation of what we called practical or economic motives. But every historical proposition, like every individual judgment, qualifies the real according to one aspect of the concept, and excludes another, or it qualifies it indeed according to all its aspects, but distinguishes them, and therefore prevents the one from intruding upon the other. The literary division of books into books of practical, philosophic, and artistic history, and so on, gets its importance from this fundamental distinction, according to which are also divided the different points of view of historians and. the various interests of their readers. Empirical The second mode is, of necessity, empirical, division of i • i representative and cannot be carried out without the introducmatenal.
tion of empirical concepts. For otherwise it would not be possible to keep the representa- HISTORY 303 HISTORY 303 tions of reality separate, since they constitute a continuous and compact series. By means of empirical concepts, history is divided into the history of the State, of the Church, of society, of the family, of religion (as distinct from philo sophy), or of philosophy (as distinct from re ligion). Or, as the history of philosophy, it is divided into the history of idealism, of materialism, of scepticism; or as the history of art, into the history of painting, of poetry, of the drama, of fiction. Or again, as the history of civilization, it is divided into oriental history — history of Greece, of Rome, of the Middle Ages, of the Renaissance, of the Reformation, and so on. Even these last mentioned criteria (Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, etc.) are empirical concepts and not representations, because, as we know,1 the representation is individual, and when it is made constant and general it is changed into a concept of the individual, the summary and symbol of several representations, in fact, the empirical concept. Each one of these divisions is valid in so far as it is useful; and equally valid, under a like condition, are all the divisions that have been conceived, and the infinite number that are conceivable.
1 See above, Part I. Sect. I. Chap. IV.
PART Empirical concepts in history and the false theory as to the function that they have there.
304 LOGIC 304 LOGIC But the failure to understand that the true function of the introduction of empirical concepts is to divide the mass of historical facts and to regroup them conveniently for mnemonic pur poses, has greatly interfered with the ideas of logicians as to the writing of history. Just as the individual judgment presupposes neither the empirical concept, nor the judgment of classifica tion, nor the abstract concept, nor the judgment of enumeration, whereas all these forms pre suppose just the individual judgment; so history does not presuppose classifications conducted from the practical point of view, or enumerations and statistics, whereas on the other hand all of these do presuppose history, and without it could not appear. We should not be deceived by finding them fused in historical works (which continually have recourse to such aids to memory), nor allow ourselves to forget that their function is sub servient, not constitutive. There can be no abstract idea of the Greek, unless we have first known the individual life of the men called Pericles and Alcibiades. Nor can there be any enumeration of the Three Hundred of Ther mopylae or of the Three Hundred of Cremera, except in so far as each was known in his in dividual features, and then classified as a citizen HISTORY 305 HISTORY 305 of Sparta or a Roman of the Fabian gens. To avail oneself of these simplifications is not to narrate history, which is already present to the spirit, but to fix it in the memory and to com municate it to others in an easier way. Those others, if they have not the capacity to recover the individual fact beneath those concepts of class and of number, will understand nothing of history, thus simplified and reduced to a skeleton for the purposes of communication.
The positivist fiction that history can be re- Hence comes . r also the <flaim duced to a science (natural science is of course to reduce history to a meant) arises from the false interpretation of the natural science: subsidiary character of the pseudoconcepts in history and from making them a constitutive part of it. History, on this view, would be rendered a perfect example of what it has hitherto been only in imperfect outline, a classification and statistical table of reality.- The many practical attempts at such a reduction have damaged con temporary historical writing not a little, by substituting colourless formulae and empty ab stractions which are applicable to several epochs at once or to all times, for the narration of in dividual reality. The same tendency appears in what is called sociologism, and in its polemic against what it calls psychological or individual PART 306 LOGIC history, and in favour of institutional or social history. Against these materialistic reductions of history, the doctrines of accident or of little causes which upset the effects of great causes, are efficacious and valuable, for these and suchlike absurdities have the merit of reducing that false reduction to absurdity. and the thesis By reason of the same erroneous interpretaof the practical of the practical character of tion there has come from philosophers who are history.
not positivists, the theory that history is rendered possible only by the intervention of the practical spirit. On this view, the practical spirit, after establishing practical values, arranges beneath them the formless material and shapes it into historical narrative. But the practical spirit is impotent to produce anything in the field of knowledge; it can act only as the custodian and administrator of what has already been produced. For this reason, the theory here referred to, by appealing to the practical spirit, resolves itself into a complete negation of the value of history as knowledge. And this negation, though it was certainly not foreseen or desired by those who maintain the theory, yet is unavoidable.
In this connection, there has also been maintained the importance of the distinction between historical events and events not worthy HISTORY 307 of history, between historical and non-historical, Distinction between or between teleological and ateleological per- historical facts and facts that sonages. Such a distinction, it has been affirmed, are not historical, and is afforded by the practical spirit. This is true, but for the reason already given, it amounts to removing all theoretical importance from the distinction, by emptying it of all cognitive content. In reality, for the practical economy of social work, for selecting subjects for books, or for being easily understood in our own speech, it is necessary to speak of a definite event or of a definite individual as a thing and person alto gether common and unworthy of history. But it asks the brain of a pedant to imagine that the individual or the event has thereby been suppressed, we do not say from the field of reality (which would be too manifestly absurd), but from that of the narrative of reality, or from history. What is understood forms part of what is said; and if we did not always imply a mental reference to the -men we call commonplace, and to insignificant facts, which are more or less excluded from our words, great men and significant events would also lose all meaning. Such implications are so little eliminated or eliminable, that they break out and are even verbally expressed, according to the various 308 LOGIC PART interests that determine books on history at various times. Thus we have seen domestic and social life, neglected by the old historians, not only gradually assume importance, but throw wars and diplomatic negotiations into the shade. We have seen the so-called masses, neglected in favour of the individual genius, in their turn conquer, and almost eclipse, the heroes (which does not mean that these latter will not have their revenge). We have seen names, once hardly mentioned, become attractive and popular, and others, at one time celebrated, lose their colour and disappear from view. Even Italian histories of the most recent events afford instances of such fluctuations. For instance, in the period of the Risorgimento, the prevailing interest regarded as supremely important and historical, the formation of Italian nationality, the constitution of the middle class and of the commune, and popular rebellions against foreigners or against tyrants. Now it is the social problem and the socialist movement that dominate, and preference is given to histories of economic facts, of class struggles and of movements of the proletariat.
Practical preoccupations are so strong with any one engaged in a given trade, even though it is that of a maker of books of history, as to HISTORY 309 suggest almost inevitably the strange doctrine Professional prejudice and of the practical character of history, or the non- the theory of the practical theoretic character of that form, which is the Character of history.
crowning result of the theoretic spirit, and which alone gives full truth — if truth is the Knowledge of Reality, and if Reality is history.
- Necessity of the historical element in philosophy.
IV IDENTITY OF PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY THE necessity of philosophy as a condition of history has been made evident from the preceding considerations. It is now necessary to affirm with no less clearness the necessity of history for philosophy. If history is impossible without the logical, that is, the philosophical, element, philosophy is not possible without the intuitive, or historical element.
( For a philosophic proposition, or definition, or system (as we have called it), appears in the soul of a definite individual at a definite point of time and space and in definite conditions. It is therefore historically conditioned. Without the historical conditions that demand it, the system would not be what it is. ) The Kantian philosophy was impossible at the time of Pericles, because it presupposes, for instance, exact natural science, which developed from the Renaissance onward. And this presupposes geographical PART ii PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY 311 discoveries, industry, capitalist or civil society, and so on. It presupposes the scepticism of David Hume, which in its turn presupposes the deism of the beginning of the eighteenth century, which in its turn is connected with the religious struggles in England and in all Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and so on. On the other hand, if Kant were to live again in our time, he could not write the Critique of Pure Reason without modifications so profound as to make of it, not only a new book, but an altogether new philosophy, though containing within itself his old philosophy. Stiff with old age, he was even capable of ignoring the in terpretations and developments of Fichte, and of ignoring Schelling. But to-day he could not ignore either of these, nor Hegel, nor Herbart, nor Schopenhauer. He could not even ignore the representatives of the mediaeval philosophy, which followed the classical period of modern philosophy; the authors of positivist myths, Kantian and Hegelian scholastics, the new combinations of Platonism and Aristotelianism, that is, of pre - Kantian with post - Kantian philosophy, the new sophists and sceptics, the new Plotinians and Mystics, nor the states of soul and the facts, which condition all these PART 3i2 LOGIC PART 3i2 LOGIC things. For the rest, Kant truly lives again in our days, with a different name (and what is individuality, countersigned with the name, save a juxtaposition of syllables?) He is the philo sopher of our times, in whom is continued that philosophic thought, which once took, among others, the Scoto-German name of Kant. And the philosopher of our day, whether he will it or no, cannot abandon the historical conditions in which he lives, or so act as to make that not to have happened which happened before his time. Those events are in his bones, in his flesh and blood, and it is impossible to drive them out. He must therefore take account of them, that is, know them historically. The breadth of his philosophy will depend upon the breadth of his historical knowledge. If he did not know them, but merely carried them in him as facts of life, his condition would not differ from that of any animal (or of ourselves in so far as we are animals or beings that are, or rather seem to be, completely immersed in will and practice). For the animal is precisely conditioned by the whole of nature and the whole of history, but does not know it. The meaning of the demand must therefore be understood that a truthful answer may be obtained. History ii PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY 313 must be known in order to obtain the truth of philosophy.
This demand is usually expressed in the Historical.
quality of formula that the philosopher must be cultured, the culture required in though it is not clear what is the quality of this the philosopher. culture that is said to be requisite. Some, especially in our own days, would wish the philosopher to be a physiologist, a physicist, a mathematician, that is, that his brain should be full of abstractions, which are certainly not useless (everything is worth knowing, even the triviality of^girls, for even that is a part of life and of reality), but which are in no direct relation to that form of knowledge which must be the condition of philosophy. This form of know ledge is, on the contrary, history; or, as it is said (with an a potiori intention), the history of philosophy, which of necessity as the history of a moment of the spirit, includes all history in itself, as we have shown above, when criticizing the divisions of history. That is to say, it is necessary to know the meaning of the problems of our own time, and this implies knowing also those of the past, in order not to take the former for the latter and so cause inextricable confusion. And to the extent that they can be of use according to the requirements of the problem, 314 LOGIC PART 314 LOGIC PART we must know also the natural, physical, and mathematical sciences. But we must not know them as such and develop them as such, but rather as historical knowledge concerning the state of the natural sciences, of physics, and of mathematics, in order to understand the problems that they help to raise for philosophy. Apparent It is vain to set against this the example of objections.
objections.
great philosophers without historical culture, as it is vain in the case of the necessity of historical knowledge for aesthetic criticism to bring forward instances of those who, although without any historical knowledge, have yet given far more true and more profound judgments upon art than the historically learned. If those judgments are true, then the critic supposed to be ignorant of history is not ignorant of it. He has somehow absorbed, scented in the air, divined with rapid perception those actual facts that were applicable to the given case. And, on the other hand, the so - called learned man will not be cultured, because his erudition is not lively and synthetic. The same happens in the case of those acute philosophers, who are said to be ignorant of the world and of history and of the thoughts of other philosophers. It cannot be denied that much or little history may be learned outside ri PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY 315 the usual course of teaching' by manuals and by orderly mnemonic methods. But here, too, the exceptional mode of learning confirms the rule and does not obviate the usefulness for the majority of the customary modes of learning. On the other hand, if he who is said empirically to be without historical knowledge, but is not so in a given instance, should nevertheless prove really ignorant in other instances, where his unusual way of learning is not open to him, his philosophy also suffers. For this reason, those philosophers who are ignorant of history exhibit deficiencies that have often been deplored. They burst open doors already opened, they do not avail themselves of important results, they ignore grave difficulties and objections, they fail to probe certain problems sufficiently deeply, and show themselves too insecure and too superficial in others, and so on. Thus is the customary learning of history avenged upon them: and Herbert Spencer, who would never read Plato or Kant, is rejected, while Schelling and Hegel are again in the hands of students.
Philosophy also changes with the change of communica tion of history, and since history changes at every history as changing moment, philosophy at every moment is new. <>/****&?• This can be observed even in the fact of the 316 LOGIC PART 316 LOGIC PART communication of philosophy from one individual to another by means of speech or writing. Change at once takes place in that transmission. When we have simply created again in ourselves the thought of a philosopher, we are in the same condition as he who has enjoyed a sonnet or a melody, by suiting his spirit to that of the poet or composer. But this does not suffice in philo sophy. We may attain to ecstasy by the recita tion of a poem or the execution of a piece of music, just as it is, without altering it anywhere. But it does not seem possible to possess a philo sophic proposition, save when we have translated it, as we say, into our own language, when in reality, relying upon its results, we formulate new philosophic propositions and solve new problems that have presented themselves in our souls. For this reason no book ever completely satisfies us. Every book quenches one thirst, only to give us a new one. So true is this, that when we have finished reading or are in course of reading, we often regret that it is impossible to speak with the author. We are led to say, like Socrates in the Phaedrus? that written discourses are like pictures and do not answer questions, but always repeat what has already 1 PhaedruS) 275.
PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY 317 been said. Or we lose patience, like that Paduan professor of the fifteenth century, who, comment ing on the jurist Paolo, and annoyed at the difficulties, exclaimed at a certain point: " Iste maledictus Paulus tam obscure loquitur ut, si haberem eum in manibus, eum per capillos inter- rogarem / " But if instead of the dumb book, we had before us a living man, a Paolo obliged to be clear, the process would still be the same: his speech would be translated into our speech, his problem would arouse in our spirit our own problem.
The author of a philosophic work is, however, The perpetuity of change.
always dissatisfied, for he feels that his book or treatise hardly suffices for an instant, but immediately reveals itself as more or less insufficient. For this reason, to any philosopher, as to any poet, the only works of his own that bring true satisfaction are those that he has still to do. Thus every philosopher and every true artist dies unsatisfied, like Karl Marx, who, when asked in the last year of his life to prepare a complete edition of his works, replied that he had yet to write them. He alone is satisfied who at a certain moment ceases to think and takes to admiring himself, that is to say, the corpse of himself as a thinker, and is careful, 3i8 LOGIC PART