In like manner, the History of thought, or the History of Philosophy, which is one of these determinate aspects, is distinguished in the histories of particular philosophic concepts, as the history of ^Esthetic, of Logic, of Economics and of Ethics; but it is also unified in them and consists in nothing but them, completely resolving itself into them. There is no general History of Philosophy, in the sense of a history of general Philosophy, or of Metaphysics, or whatever else it may be called, outside particular histories (which are unity in particularity).
One of the errors which in our opinion vitiates the writing of the history of philosophy, appears HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 507 to be just the prejudice in favour of a treatment of the general part of this history, in which, for instance, speculations concerning practice enter only incidentally, a great part of logical doctrine is excluded as not belonging to it, and the doctrines of ^Esthetic are hardly referred to at all. The prejudice is derived, in the last analysis, from the old idea of an Ontology or Metaphysic, as the science of an ideal world, of which nature and man are the more or less im perfect actualizations; hence the relegation of a great part of true and proper philosophy to what is called the human and natural world, and the looking upon this as a special philosophy, distinguished from general philosophy and conse quently lying outside the true and proper history of philosophy. That prejudice, amounting almost to a survival, persists even in those who have more or less surpassed such a conception, and determines the curious configuration of a general history of philosophy, outside the special histories. Such a scheme, when closely examined, shows itself to be a complex of historical elucidations of some problems of Logic, and of some of the philosophy of the practical (individuality, liberty, the supreme good, etc.), and of some arising from their relations (knowing and being, spirit LOGIC PART LOGIC PART Histories of particular philosophies and literary value of such division.
and nature, infinite and finite, etc.). These are all without doubt arguments of philosophical history; but they must be united with the others, from which they have been wrenched, and with out which they prove but little intelligible. Philosophy is present in the Poetics and the Rhetoric of Aristotle as much as in the Meta physics; not less in the Critiqiie of Pure Judg ment of Kant, than in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is never outside those treatises con cerning what are called the special parts of philosophy. The present - day historians of philosophy who have overcome so many forms of transcendence and re-established immanence, must also overcome the residue of transcendence, which, so to speak, they still retain in their own house.
Certainly, the reality of the distinctions between the various aspects of the real and between the various particular philosophies renders possible literary divisions, through which there are composed special treatises upon Ethics and so upon the history of Ethic; upon Logic and so upon the history of Logic; upon ^Esthetic and so upon the history of ^Esthetic; but it is not possible by a like method of division to construct a treatise upon general Philosophy HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 509 and a corresponding History of general philo sophy. It is not possible, because this literary division presupposes a distinction of concepts; and a general philosophy is not conceptually dis tinguishable. When the attempt to distinguish it is made, we have, as we saw, a mass of historical fragments taken from the various philosophic sciences; that is to say, not the coherent his torical treatment of problems relating to a definite aspect of the real, but a more or less arbitrary aggregate.
With these considerations, we have answered History of the question concerning the relation between particular sense.
the History of Logic and the History of Philo sophy. This relation is the same as that between Logic and Philosophy, — terms which are capable neither of distinction nor of opposition. The history of Logic is not outside the history of Philosophy, but is an integral part of this history itself. To make it the object of special treat ment always means to compose a complete history of philosophy, in which, from the literary point of view, prominence and priority are given to the problems of Logic, the others being thrown, not outside the picture, but into the background. The same may be said of the History of /Esthetic or of Ethic or of any other 510 LOGIC PART particular discipline, which is never held to be distinguishable.
Logic being more or less profoundly renovated (as we have sougnt to do 'm tnis book), it is natural that the histories of Logic hitherto avail able can no longer be completely satisfactory. For they are written from points of view that have been surpassed, such as Aristotelian formal ism or Hegelian panlogism, and therefore either do not interpret facts with exactitude, or they give prominence and exaggerated importance to certain orders of facts, neglecting others far more worthy of mention and of examination.
Of the special books bearing the title of the History of Logic, there is really only one — that of Charles Prantl — which, based upon wide researches, is truly remarkable for its doctrine and for lucid and animated exposition. Un fortunately this does not go further than the fifteenth century and omits the whole movement of modern philosophy.1 But even the period exhaustively treated by him (Antiquity and the Middle Ages) is looked at from the narrow angle of an Aristotelian and formal temperament.
1 Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, Leipzig, 1855-1870, 4 vols. Scattered memoirs of certain writers belonging to later times are being published by Prantl in academic journals, and it would be opportune to collect these in a volume.
HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 511 Other works bearing the same title are not worthy of attention.1 On the other hand, the better histories of Logic must not be sought under this title, but especially in the better Histories of Philosophy, beginning with that of Hegel, which, for the most part, is precisely a history of Logic.
In inaugurating a new treatment, governed by the principles which we have defended, we shall confine ourselves, in the following pages, to a sketch of the history of some of the principal parts of logical doctrine, without any claim to even approximate completeness, and with a view to giving simple illustrations of the things that were said in the theoretical part. In this theo retical part, in virtue of the identity of philosophy and history which we have explained, history may be said to be already contained and pro jected, even though names and dates are mostly omitted and left to be understood.
1 A rapid sketch, compiled in part from the work of Prantl, with a polemical addition directed against the adversaries of the Hegelian Logic, precedes the Logic2 of Kuno Fischer. The historical part of the System der Logik of Ueberweg (fifth edition, 1882, edited by J. B. Meyer) has an almost exclusively bibliographical character with excerpts, and that con tained in L. Rabus, Logik u. System der Wisscnschaften, Erlangen- Leipzig, 1895, is yet more arid. The Gesch. d. Logik of F. Harms (Berlin, 1881) is meagre in facts, verbose and vague. In recent monographs on special points, one feels the effect of what is called Logistic or new formalism, which makes the authors pursue ineptitudes and curiosities of slight value.
II Question as to who was the "father of Logic."
THE THEORY OF THE CONCEPT JUST as whenever in /Esthetic any one sought the " father " of the science Plato was usually named, so whenever a like enquiry has been proposed for Logic that honourable title has been almost unanimously bestowed upon Aristotle. But even if we admit (as we must) in 'a somewhat em pirical and expedient sense, the propriety of these searches for "discoverers" and "fathers," Aristotle could not in our eyes occupy that position. For if Logic is the science of the concept, such a science was evidently begun before him. Further, Aristotle himself claimed the distinction only of having reduced and treated the theory of reasoning1 and recognized else where that to Socrates belonged the merit of having directed attention to the examination and definition of the concept (TOU? T eTTa/cn/covs real TO opi^ecrdai,), that is to say, to the very 1 De sophist, elench. ch. 34.
PART iv HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 513 principle of logical Science,1 the rigorous form of truth.
In this affirmation of the consistency and socrates,piato, absoluteness of knowledge and of truth (sustained in him by a vivid religious and moral conscious ness) lies the significance of Socrates as opposed to the Sophists; as indeed in the same thing lies the importance of Hellenic Logic of the truly classical period. This Logic elaborated the idea of conceptual knowledge, of science or of philo sophy, and transmitted it to the modern world with a terminology, which is in great part that which we ourselves employ. We too reject in almost the same words as the Greek philosophers the renascent sophism, the perennial Prota- goreanism, and the sensationalism which denies truth, and (like the ancient Gorgias), by declar ing it incommunicable by the individual, in dividualizes and reduces it to practical utility. In Plato, the affirmation and glorification of con ceptual knowledge was accompanied by contempt for the knowledge of the individual, and in com parison with the immortal world of ideas, the world of sensations was for him so dark and obscure as to disappear in his eyes like phantoms before the sun. But Aristotle, although he held PART 5H LOGIC firmly that there is no science of the accidental and individual, and of sensation, which is bound to space and time, to the where and the when, and that the object of science is the universal, the essence, which is being, was fess exclusive than he; and as he saved the world of poetry from the condemnation of Plato, so, in all his philosophy and in all his work as physicist, politician and historian, he affirmed the world of experience and of history.1 Enquiries On the other hand, there was in Socrates only concerning the nature the consciousness of the universal still indefinite of the concept in Greece. anc[ vague \ in Plato there appeared for the first The question of transcendence time tne consciousness of the true character of ana the universal, and so of its distinction from empirical universals; and in Aristotle this enquiry gave important results. The problem of the nature of the concept became, then and afterwards, interwoven with that other problem of the transcendence or immanence of the con cepts; but since, notwithstanding many points of contact, the two problems cannot be com pletely identified, they must not be confounded. Indeed, the problem of the transcendence or immanence of the universals is reducible to the more general problem of the relation between 1 Cf. Esthetic, part ii. chap. i.
immanence.
HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 515 values and facts, the ideal and the real, what ought to be and what is; whereas the other, concerning the nature of the universals, centres upon the distinction between universals that are truly logical, and pseudological universals, and upon the greater or less admissibility of one or the other or of both, and so upon their mode of relation. The point of contact between the two problems lies in this, that where pure and real universals are denied and only arbitrary and nominal universals allowed to subsist, the question of the immanence or transcendence of the uni versals also disappears. And as to the first problem and the polemic of Aristotle against Plato concerning the ideas, it has appeared to some critics (to Zeller and others) that Aristotle misunderstood his master and invented an error that Plato had never maintained, or attacked merely certain gross expositions of doctrine which were current in some Platonic school. To others again (to Lotze, for instance), it has seemed that Aristotle thought this problem, at bottom, in the same way as Plato, who by placing the ideas in a hyper-Uranian space, in a super-world or a super-heaven, thus came to refuse to them that reality which Aristotle himself refused to them and to consider them as values, not as beings; PART 516 LOGIC PART 516 LOGIC although Greek linguistic usage prevented Plato from expressing the difference, just as it pre vented Aristotle from expressing the same thing, when it led him to describe genera as " second substances " (Sevrepai ouo-lai). However, as regards the first interpretation, it certainly seems to us that it is impossible to raise doubts about such a document as the testimony of Aristotle 1 by means of such frequently uncertain documents as the Platonic dialogues. And as regards the second interpretation, it seems to us that it does not so much purge Plato of the vice of transcend ence as convict his adversary also of sharing that vice. On this point the opposition of Aristotle to his predecessor does not coincide with that of modern nominalism and empiricism to philosophic idealism, for the former sets in question the truth of the concept itself. Aristotle denied this truth as little as Plato; indeed he expressly asserted that his predecessor was right, and approved his definite accusation of the sophists that they were occupied not with the universal but with the accidental, that is to say, with not-being.
The beginning of the enquiry as to the nature 1 See in this connection the observations of Lasson, in the preface to his recent German translation of the Metaphysic, Jena, Diederichs, HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 517 of universals or of ideas is to be seen, on the controversies as to the other hand, in Plato's embarrassments before the various forms of concept in questions as to whether there are ideas of every- Plato- thing, of artificial as well as of natural things, of noble things and vile things alike, of things only or also of properties and relations; of good things or also of bad things (icdXov KOI alo-%p6v, dyaObv teal ica/cov).1 He does not escape from the embarrassments, save occasionally, by mak ing strange admissions, by accepting ideas of all the preceding, only to fall immediately afterwards into contradictions, through which however we see the outlines of the problems of to-day. Are the ideas representative concepts (of things) or are they not rather categories (ideas of relation)? Are opposites particular kinds of ideas (if there exist ideas of base and ugly things, as well as of beautiful and good things)? Is it possible to distinguish, from the point of view of the Ideas, between the natural world and the human world (between natural things and artificial)? Plato ' himself refers to mathematical knowledge as distinct from philosophic knowledge.
In Aristotle, the determination of the rigorous philosophic concept and its distinction from em- 1 Cf. especially the Parmenides, the Theaetetus, and Book of the Republic.
LOGIC PART the empirical and abstract concepts in Aristotle. Philosophy, physics and mathematics.
The philosophic pirical and abstract concepts make great progress, concepts and concepts and although this does not amount to a solution of those Platonic embarrassments. Aristotle accurately traces the limits between Philosophy (and so the philosophic concept) and the physical and mathematical sciences. Philosophy, the science of God or theology (as he also calls it), treats of being in its absoluteness, and so not of particular beings or of the matter that forms part of their composition. The non -philosophical sciences, on the other hand, always treat of particular beings (jrepl 6V rt Kal 76^09 n). They take their objects from sense or assume them by hypotheses, giving now more, now less accurate demonstrations of them. All the physical sciences have need of some definite material (v\ri) because they are always concerned with noses, eyes, flesh, bones, animals, plants, roots, bark, in short with material things, subject to movement. There even arises a physical science that is concerned with the soul, or rather, with a sort of soul (irepl TJrvxfjs eWa?), in so far as this is not without matter. Mathematics, like philosophy, studies, not things subject to movement, but motionless being; but it differs from philosophy in not excluding the matter in which their objects are as it were incorporated (w? eV v\y): the suppression of HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 519 matter is obtained in them by aphairesis or The universal* of the abstraction.1 This divergence between philo- "at™*ys" and those of the sophic and physical or mathematical procedure is ^f,,^ most the point upon which empiricism and mathe- maticism rely; but these, inferior here to Aristotle, deny the science of absolute being (-Tre/H 6Wo? a7rX&>9) and leave in existence only the second order of sciences, which deal with the particular and abstract. There is another important dis tinction in Aristotle, but to tell the truth it is impossible to say how far he connected it with the preceding distinction between philosophy and physics, with which it is substantially one. Aristotle knew two forms of universal: the uni versal of the always (rov aa) and that of the for the most part (rov &>9 eVl TO TroXu).2 He was well aware of the difference between the first, which is truly universal, and the second, which is so only in an approximate and improper manner; and he even asked himself if the for the most part alone existed and not also the always; but his interest was directed not so much to the comparative differences of the two series, as to the common character of universality which both of them asserted as against the individual and accidental. Science (he said) is occupied, not PART Controversies concerning Logic in the Middle Ages.
520 LOGIC with the accidental, but with the universal, whether it be eternal and necessary (dvay/calov) or only approximately universal (eVt TO TroXu).1 Philosophy, physics and mathematics felt at this period that they had a common enemy in sensa tionalism and sophism, and they formed an alliance against this common enemy, rather than as happened later, dissipate their energies in intestinal welfare.
Without dwelling upon the later scepticism, mysticism and mythologism, which represented the dissolution of ancient philosophy and the germ of a new life (especially in Christian my thologism, which had absorbed elements of ancient philosophy and was accompanied by a very developed theology), we must pass on to note the progress which the logical problem made in the schools of the Middle Ages. To look upon mediaeval philosophy (as many do) as a negligible episode, a mere detritus of ancient culture quite unconnected with the later spiritual activity, is now no longer possible. Certainly in the disputes of the nominalists and realists, the problem of transcendence and of immanence was neglected. It could not be solved on the presumptions of a philosophy which had at its side a theology, of HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 521 which it constituted itself the handmaiden. The Platonic transcendence was incurable in Chris tianity, and those who even to-day seek to purify Christianity from survivals of Greek thought, do not perceive that, in this purification effected by their philosophies of action and of immanence, they are destroying Christianity itself.1 But in those disputes, besides the question of Nominalism and realism.
the place that belongs to science in relation to religious faith, or to mundane science in relation to revealed and divine science, the question of the nature of the concept was also raised; that is to say, they continued the Platonic-Aristotelian enquiry into the doctrine of the concept in the second of the meanings that we have distinguished. But no true conclusion was reached in this en quiry. The conciliatory formula of the Arabic interpreters of Aristotle, accepted by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, in which the V universals were affirmed as existing ante, in and post rem, in so far as it is possible to confer upon it an exact meaning, was understood in a super ficial manner, and therefore it has not unreasonably seemed too easy and too expeditious.2 A dispute of this sort cannot be solved by summarizing 1 See the writings of Gentile concerning De Wulf and La Berthonniere in the Critica, iii. pp. 203-21, iv. pp. 431-445.
2 Prantl, Gesch. d. Logik, iii. pp. 182-3.
522 LOGIC PART discordant opinions, as in the formula we have mentioned, or by fixing a mean, as in conceptual- ism. But the realists, bravely maintaining the truth of the philosophic universal, maintained the rights of rational thought and of philosophy; and the nominalists, on their part, asserting in con tradiction to the former, the nominalist universal, prepared the modern theories of natural science. Realism" produced philosophic thought of high importance, as in the so-called ontological argu ment of Anselm of Aosta, which (though through the myth of a personal God) asserts the unity of Essence and Existence, the reality of what is truly conceivable and conceived. Gaunilo, who confuted and satirized that concept, by employing the example of a "most perfect island," thinkable yet non-existent, seems an anticipation of Kant; at least of the Kant who employed the example of the hundred dollars to illustrate the same case —if it is not more accurate to say that Kant was, in that case, a late Gaunilo. Anselm replied (as Hegel did to Kant) that it was not a question of an island (or of a hundred dollars of something imaginable that is not at all a concept), but of the being than which it is impossible to think a greater and a more perfect (the true and proper concept). On the other hand, the nominalists, HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 523 who like Roscellinus maintained that the uni- ver sales substantiate were nonnisi flatus vocis, per formed the useful office of preventing the sciences of experience from being absorbed and lost in philosophy. In Roger Bacon we see clearly the connection of nominalism with naturalism. He considered individual facts, so-called external ex perience, in its immediacy, as the true and proper object of science. Concepts were for him a simple expedient, directed towards the mastery of the immense richness of the individual. " Intellectus est debilis (he said); propter earn debilitatem magis conformatur rei debili, quae est universale, quam rei quae habet multum de esse, ^tt singulare" But the nominalists, dialecticae haeretici (as Nominalism, mysticism and Anselm called them), were heretics only in the coincidence of oppositcs.
circle of the dialectic. The truth remained for them something beyond; the concept, the secunda intentio, was certainly something arbitrary and ad placitum instituta', it was "forma artificialis tantum, q^tae per violentiam habet esse" but beyond it were always faith and revelation. God is the truth, and in God the ideas are real; hence Roger Bacon gave to inner light (as the positivists or neocritics of to-day give to feeling) a place beside sensible experience. Mysticism, being developed from mediaeval philosophy, both from 524 LOGIC PART 524 LOGIC PART one-sided realism and from one-sided nominalism, extends its hand at the dawn of the new Era to the philosophy of Cusanus, to scepticism, to docta ignorantia. This was not a mere negation; so much so that in it (though in a negative form and mixed with religion) there appears in outline nothing less than the theory of the coincidence of opposites, that is to say, the cradle of that modern logical movement, which was destined definitely to conquer transcendence. The coincidence of opposites is the germ of the dialectic, which unifies value and fact, ideal and real, what ought to be and what is. This important thought re appears in German mysticism; and (significantly for its future destinies) rings out upon the lips of Martin Luther, who declared that virtue coexists with its contrary, vice, hope with anxiety, faith with vacillation, indeed with temptation, gentle ness with disdain, chastity with desire, pardon with sin; as in nature, heat coexists with cold, white with black, riches with poverty, health with disease; and that peccatum manet et non manet, tollitur et non tollitur, and that at the moment a man ceases to make himself better, he ceases to be good.1 And before it became dominant 1 For these references to writings of Luther, see F. J. Schmidt, Zur Wiedergeburt des Idealismus, Leipzig, 1908, pp. 44-6.
HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 525 in Jacob Bohme it was stripped of its religious form and eloquently defended in Italy by Giordano Bruno.1 This realist, mystical and dialectical current The Renaissance of thought was destined to yield its best fruits and naturalism.
some centuries later. For the time being, in Bacon- the seventeenth century, and yet more in the century that followed, the victory seemed to rest with nominalism, that is to say, with naturalism. In Italy, Leonardo da Vinci laughed at theological and speculative disputes and celebrated, not the mind, but the eye of man, that is, the science of observation. The same tendency appeared in the anti-Aristotelians and naturalists, who placed • the natural sciences above scholasticism. In England, the other Bacon, however slight his importance both as philosopher and naturalist, yet has much importance as the symptom and spokesman of the self-assertion of naturalism. In the Novum Organum, the universal of the for the most part claims its rights as against the universal of the necessary and eternal. He does not wish, however, to do away with the latter, but rather to complete it; the syllogism is insufficient, induction also is needed. Philosophy and theology are well where they are, but a 1 See my Essay upon Hegel, ch. ii.
526 LOGIC PART science of physics is also needed; philosophic induction, which goes at a leap to first causes, must be accompanied by a gradual induction (the only one that interests the naturalist), which connects particular facts by means of laws more and more general; final causes must be banished from the study of nature, and only efficient causes admitted. Anticipationes naturae, that is to say, the invasions of philosophism into the natural sciences, are to be prohibited. These utterances are far more discreet than those that have so often since been heard. The ideal of By another school of this period, on the other exact science..
and the • hand, the pure concept was wrongly identified