philosophy. with the abstract concept. 1 hus speculative rationalism took the form of mathematical rationalism and the ideal of philosophy was confused with the ideal of exact science. This tendency is also to be found in Leonardo, who exalted " reason " alone, that is calculation, as outside of and sometimes superior to experience. Galileo expressed similar thoughts later. The Cartesian philosophy is animated with it, that is to say, the philosophy of Descartes and of his great followers, especially Spinoza and Leibnitz. Thus this is especially an intellectualist philo sophy, full of empty excogitations and rigid HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 527 divisions, developed by a mechanical or by a teleological method, which always operated by means of mechanism. It is true that even under these improper forms, philosophic thought progressed. The consciousness of the inner unity of philosophy progressed with Descartes, that of the unity of the real by means of Spinoza's concept of substance, and that of spiritual activity by means of the dynamism of Leibnitz; but Logic remained as a whole the old scholastic logic. The purity of the concept was asserted at the expense of concreteness; thus the concept, in the Logic of those writers, is always something abstract, although its reality is so far recognized that it is thought possible to think with it the most real (the God of Descartes, the substance of Spinoza, the Monad of Leibnitz). The eighteenth century, mathe matical, abstractionist, intellectualist, ratiocinative, anti-historical, illuminist, reformist, and finally Jacobin, is the legitimate issue of this Cartesian philosophy, which confuses the Logic of philo sophy with the Logic of mathematics. France, which was the country of its birth and where it became most firmly rooted and most widely disseminated, owes to it, perhaps even more than to Scholasticism, the mental imprint which 528 LOGIC PART 528 LOGIC PART it still bears and which the strong Germanic influence that has made itself felt there also in the last century has not sufficed to eradicate. It is only in our day that the country which is the type of the abstract intellect strives to become philosophically more concrete. It is now occupied with aestheticism or intuitionism, and, unless the movement is suffocated or dissipated, it may effect a true revolution in the traditional French spirit. Adversaries of The opposition to abstractionism had no Cartesianism.
vico. representatives m the seventeenth century and for a great part of the eighteenth, except among thinkers of but slight systematic powers, with whom it did not progress beyond the logical form of the presentiment and the literary form of the aphorism. In France, Blaise Pascal was one of these, with his anti-Cartesianism, his restriction of the value of mathematics, and his celebration of the reasons of the heart which reason does not know. In Germany there was Hamann, who possessed such a strong sense of tradition, of history, of language, of poetry and of myth, and finally of the truth contained in the principle of the coincidence of opposites which he had met with somewhere in Bruno. The Italian Giambattista Vico was the only great systematic HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 529 thinker to express opposition to abstractionism and Cartesianism. Prior to and more clearly than Hamann, he perceived the unity of philo sophy and history, or as he called it, of philosophy and philology. He conceived thought as an ideal history of reality, immanent in the real history which occurs in time; he abolished the distinctions of the concept as separate species and substituted the notion of degrees or moments, which (as Schelling did after him) he called ideal epochs; he considered the abstractionist and mathematical century which he saw rising before him, as a period of philosophic decad ence, and foretold the evil effects of Cartesian anti-historicism. (His presage was fulfilled.) In this way, he sketched a new Logic, very different from that of Aristotle or of Arnaud which was the most recent, a Logic in which he attempted to satisfy Plato and Bacon, Tacitus and Grotius, the idea and the fact. But if the other opponents of abstractionism had very little effect, because of their immaturity and want of system, Vico also was ineffectual, because he was born in Italy precisely at the time when Italy as a productive country was definitely issuing from the circle of European thought and was beginning passively to accept the more popular forms of foreign 530 LOGIC PART 530 LOGIC PART thought. Finally, Naples, the little country of Vico, was then becoming encyclopaedist and sensationalist, and did not really begin to know until a century later the remedy for such evils composed in anticipation by Vico. Empiricist The surpassing of the Logic of the abstract con- Logic and its dissolution— cept and the achievement of that of the concrete Locke, Berkeley and Hume.. concept or pure concept or idea, was realized in other ways, primarily by a sort of reduction to the absurd of empiricist and mathematical Logic, in the scepticism which was its result. This reduction to the absurd, this final scepticism, is to be observed in the movement of English philosophy, beginning with Locke or even with Hobbes, to Hume. Locke, starting from perception as his pre supposition, derived all ideas from experience, with the sole instrument of reflection; and rejecting innate ideas and looking upon others as more or less arbitrary, he preserved some objectivity to mathematical ideas alone, which relate to what are called primary qualities. Berkeley denies ob jectivity even to the primary qualities. All con cepts, naturalist and mathematical alike, are for him abstract concepts and to that extent without truth. The only truth is the "idea," which means here nothing but sensation or the repre sentation of the individual. His Logic is not HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 531 empiricist, because it is in no respect Logic. At the most it is an /Esthetic substituted for and given as Logic. It is true, notwithstanding his complete denial of universals — of empirical and abstract, no less than of philosophic, which he never even mentions — that he deludes himself into thinking that he has overcome scepticism; and it is true also that he laid the foundations of a spiritualist and voluntarist conception of reality, which in our opinion should be preserved and adopted by modern thought. But this proves only that his philosophy does not wholly agree with his Logic, and not that his Logic is not the complete denial of the concept and of thought. The logical consequence of Berkeley could not, then, be anything but the scepticism of David Hume, who shakes the very foundation upon which the whole of the science of nature rests, namely, the principle of causality.
As the effect of this extreme scepticism, the Exact science surpassing 01 empiricist and abstractionist Logic The concept of the category.
had to be begun with the restoration of that Logic itself (because that which does not exist cannot be surpassed), that is to say, with the demonstration, against Hume, that the exact science of nature is possible. Such is the principal task of the Critiqite of Pure Reason, 532 LOGIC PART 532 LOGIC PART which contains the Logic of the natural and mathematical sciences, thought no longer by an empiricist, but by a philosopher who has sur passed empiricism and recognized that the con cepts of experience presuppose the human intellect, which originally constructed them. Leibnitz had already travelled this road, when in a polemic against Locke he maintained that reflection to which Locke appealed, referred back to the innate ideas: for if reflection (he said) is nothing but " une attention a ce qui est en nous et les sens ne nous donnent point ce que noiis portons d£ja avec nous" how can it ever be denied " quil y est beaucoup dinnd en nous, puisque nous sommes, pour ainsi dire, innds a nous memes? Peut-on nier quil y ait en nous etre, unite, substance, durde, changement, action, perception, plaisir et mille autres objets de nos iddes inte lie ctue lies? * The New Essays, in which these and other similar themes were developed, remained for a time unedited, but appeared opportunely in 1765 to fecundate German thought, and acted upon Kant, together with English empiricism and scepticism, the latter giving the problem and the former almost an attempt at a solution. But the innate ideas of Leibnitz are profoundly trans- 1 Preface to Nouveaux Essais.
HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 533 formed in the Kantian concept of the category, which is the formal element and really exists only in the very act of judgment, which it effects. Mathematics are thus secured in their possession, no longer by means of the primary qualities of Locke, but because they arise from the a priori forms of intuition, space and time. The natural sciences are also secured, because the concepts of them are constituted by means of the categories of the intellect, on the data of experience. In other words, mathematical and natural science have value, in so far as they are a necessary product of the spirit.
But a limitation of value due also to Kant, The limits of...r r science and accompanies this theoretic reinforcement oi exact Kantian scepticism.
science. That science is necessary, because pro duced by the categories; but the categories cannot develop their activity except upon the data of experience; so that exact science is limited to experience, and whenever it makes the attempt to surpass it, it becomes involved in antinomies and paralogisms and gesticulates in the void. Science moves among phenomena and can never penetrate beyond them and attain to the " Thing in itself."
It would seem from this that Kant was bound The limits of science and to end in a renovated nominalism and mysticism, Jacobi- PART 534 LOGIC and indeed such is partly the case. Contempor aneously with him, Jacobi also observed the limit in which is enclosed the mechanical and determinist science of nature (the highest philosophic expres sion of which was then found in the Ethic of Spinoza), since it works with the principle of causation and is impotent, unless it wishes to commit suicide, to leave the finite which it describes in a causal series, and Jacobi concluded in favour of mysticism and of feeling, the organ of the Knowledge of God. Kant, like Jacobi, in his turn has recourse to the non-theoretic form of the spirit, to the practical reason and its postulates, to provide that certitude of God, of immortality, and of human freedom, which is not evident to the theoretic reason. But in Kant there are other positive elements which are not in Jacobi, and these elements, although not sufficiently elaborated by him and not harmonized with one another, confer upon his philosophy the value of a new Logic, more or less sketched. For he recognizes not only a theoretic but also a practical reason, which cannot be called simply practical, if it in any way produce (although only under the title of postulates), knowledge (and knowledge of supreme importance). He recognises also an aesthetic judgment, which, although developed HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 535 without concepts, does not belong to the sphere of practical interests; and a teleological judg ment, which is regulative and not constitutive, but not on this account arbitrary or without meaning. Finally, the very contradictions, in which the intellect becomes involved, when it wishes to apply the categories beyond experi ence, could not reasonably be considered by him to be mere errors, because they constitute serious problems, if the intellect becomes involved in them, not capriciously, but of necessity. All this presages the coming of a new Logic, which shall set in their places these scattered elements of truth and solve the contradictions.
But the Kantian philosophy also contains, in The a priori synthesis.
addition to these elements and these stimulations, the corcept of the new Logic in the a priori synthesis. This synthesis is the unity of the necessary and the contingent, of concept and intuition of thought and representation, and consequently is the pure concept, the concrete universal Kant was not aware of this; and instead of The intimate contradiction developing with a mind free from prejudice the of Kant.
J Romantic thought oi his genius, he also allowed himself to be vanquished by the abstractionism of his time and out of the logical and philosophical a priori and classical execution.
536 LOGIC PART synthesis he made the more or less arbitrary a priori synthesis of the sciences. In this way, the apriority of the intuition led him, not to art, but to mathematics (transcendental ^Esthetic) l the apriority of the intellect led him, not to Philo sophy, but to Physics (abstract intellect): hence the impotence which afflicted that synthesis, when confronted with philosophic problems. When he discovered the a priori synthesis, Kant had laid his hand upon a profoundly romantic concept; but his treatment of it became afterwards classicist and intellectualist. The synthesis is the palpitat ing reality which makes itself and knows itself in the making: the Kantian philosophy makes it rigid again in the concepts of the sciences; and it is a philosophy in which the sense of life, of imagination, of individuality, of history, is almost as completely absent as in the great systems of the Cartesian period. Whoever is not iware of this intimate drama and fails to understand this contradiction; whoever, when confronted with the work of Kant, is not seized with the ne^d, either of going forward or of going backwarc, has not reached the heart of that soul, the centre of that mind. The old philosophers who condemned 1 See what is said on this point in my & Esthetic 3, Part II. Chap. VIII.
HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 537 Kant as sceptical and as a corrupter of philosophy, and who confined themselves strictly to Wolfian- ism and to scholasticism, and the new who greeted him as a precursor and made of him a stepping- stone on which to mount higher, — these alone came truly into contact with Kant's philosophy. For in his case there are but two alternatives: ab horrence or attraction, loathing or love. In the midst of a battle one must flee or fight: to sit still and take one's ease is the attitude of the unconscious and the mad. Certainly it is better to fight than to flee, but it is better to flee than to sit inactive. He who flees, saves at least his own skin, or, to abandon metaphor, saves the old philosophy, which is still something; but the inactive man loses both life and glory, the old philosophy and the new.
The new philosophy was that of the three Advance upon Kant: great post-Kantians, Fichte, Schellingr and Hegel. Fichte, Schelling, With Fichte, all trace of the thing in itself has Hesel- disappeared and the dominating concept is that of the Ego, that is, of the Spirit, which creates the world by means of the transcendental imagination and recreates it in thought. In Schelling is found the concept of the Absolute, the unity of subject and object, which has, as its instrument, intellectual intuition. In Hegel, 538 LOGIC PART there is this same concept, but it has itself as instrument, that is to say, it is truly logical. All three are Kantians, but all three (and especially the last two) are not simply Kantian. They employed elements which Kant ignored or em ployed timidly, and in particular the mystical tradition and the new tendencies of aesthetic and historical thought. Thus they pass beyond the abstractionism and intellectualism of the Kantian period, and inaugurate the nineteenth century. They are connected ideally with Vico (Hamann was the little German Vico), and they enrich him with the thoughts of Kant.
The Logic Neglecting the particular differences between The concrete these thinkers and the genetic process by which concept or idea. We pass from one to the other, and taking the result of that speculative movement in its most mature form, which is the philosophy of Hegel, we see in it (like a new, securely established society after the frequent changes of a revolution) the establishment of the new doctrine of the con cept. Kant's unconsciousness of the conse quences of the a priori synthesis had been such that he had not hesitated to affirm that Logic, since the time of Aristotle, had possessed so just and secure a form as not to need to take one single step backward, and to be unable to take HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 539 one forward.1 But Hegel insisted that this was rather a sign that that science demanded complete re-elaboration, since an application of two thousand years should have endowed the spirit with a more lofty consciousness of its own thought and of its own essential nature.2 What was the concept for Hegel? It was not that of the empirical sciences, which consists in a simple general repre sentation and therefore always in something finite; it is barbaric to give the name concepts to intellectual formations, like "blue/' "house," or "animal." Nor was it the mathematical concept, which is an arbitrary construction. All the logical rationality that there is in mathematics is what is called irrational. These so-called con cepts are the products of the abstract intellect; the true concept is the product of the concrete intellect, or reason. It has therefore nothing to do with the immediate knowledge of the senti mentalists and of the mystics, and with the intuition of the aestheticists; such formulae as these express the necessity for the concept, but give only a negative determination of it. They assert what it is not in relation to the empirical sciences and then misstate what it is in philosophy. For the PART 540 LOGIC rest, the shortcomings of the abstract intellect, generating the pure void or thing in itself (which far from being, as Kant believed, unknowable, is indeed the best known thing of all, the abstrac tion from everything and from thought itself) prepare the environment for the phantasms and caprices of mysticism and intuitionism. The true concept is the idea, and the idea is the absolute unity of the concept and of its objectivity. This identity definition has sometimes seemed whimsical, someofthe.
Hegelian idea times most obscure; yet it presents nothing but with the Kantian the elaboration in a more rigorous form of the a priori synthesis. Kantian a priori synthesis, so that these two terms could without further difficulty be regarded as equivalent; the a priori logical synthesis is the Idea and the Idea is the a priori logical synthesis. If Hegel has not been understood, that is due to the fact that Kant himself has not been under stood. Those who assert that they understand what Kant meant to say, but not what Hegel meant to say, deceive themselves. For Kant and Hegel say the same thing, though the latter says it with greater consciousness and clearness, that is to say, better.1 1 Kuno Fischer in his Logic, when expounding the thought of Hegel, clearly distinguishes the empirical concepts from the pure concepts, and notes that those which are pure or philosophical, are, in the spirit, the basis and pre supposition of the others. " These others, the empirical, are formed from HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 541 The idea, the concrete universal, the pure The idea and concept, rebels against the mechanical divisions employed for the empirical concepts. For it has its own division, its own proper and intimate rhythm, by means of which it divides and unifies, and unifies itself when dividing and divides itself when unifying. The concept thinks reality, which is not immobile but in motion, not abstract being, but becoming; and therefore in it dis tinctions are generated one from another and oppositions reconciled. Hegel not only gives the true meaning of the Kantian a priori syn thesis, recognizing it as the concrete concept, but replaces the antinomies in its bosom. The contradiction is not due to the limitation of thought before a non-contradictory reality, which thought is unable to attain; it is the character single representations or intuitions, by uniting homogeneous characteristics and separating them from the heterogeneous; and thus arise general repre sentations, concepts of classes ": empirical, because of their empirical origin, and representative, because they represent entire classes of single objects, that is, are generalized representations. But at the base of each of these are found judgments or syntheses, which contain non-empirical and non-representable elements, elements which are a priori and only thinkable. These are the true concepts, the first thoughts in the ideal order, without which nothing can be thought (Logtkz, i. sect. i. § 3). The difference be tween these pure concepts or categories and empirical concepts or cate gories is not quantitative, but qualitative: the pure concepts are not the most general, the broadest classes; they do not represent phenomena, but connections and relations; they can be compared to the signs ( +, -, x,:, <\/, etc.) of arithmetical operations; they are not obtainable by abstraction, indeed it is by means of them that all abstractions are affected 542 LOGIC PART 542 LOGIC PART of reality itself, which contradicts itself in itself, and is opposition, coincidentia oppositorimt, the synthesis of opposites, or dialectic. A new doctrine of opposites and the outlines of a new doctrine of distinction accompanies the new doctrine of the pure concept. In this philosophy is truly summarized all the previous history of thought. The concept of Socrates has acquired the reality of the idea of Plato, the concreteness of the substance of Aristotle, the unity - in- opposition of Cusanus and Bruno, the Vichian reconciliation of philosophy and philology, the unity -in-distinction of the Kantian synthesis and the aesthetic suppleness of Schelling's intellectual intuition.
The lacuna Nevertheless, the history of thought does not of the stop at Hegel. In Hegel himself are found the Hegelian Logic.
Their con- points to which later history must attach itself; sequences, the lacunae which he left and the errors into which he fell. The fundamental error was the abuse of the dialectic method, which originated for the philosophic solution of the problem of opposites, but was extended by Hegel to the distinct concepts, so that he interpreted even the Kantian synthesis itself as nothing but the unity of opposites. Hence arises his incapacity to attribute their true value and function to the HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 543 alogical forms of the spirit, such as art, and to the atheoretic, such as the natural sciences and mathematics; and even to logical thought itself, which, violating the laws of the synthesis, ended by imposing itself upon history and the natural sciences, attempting to resolve them into itself by dialectizing them, as the philosophy of history and the philosophy of nature. To this, therefore, is due the philosophism or panlogism which is characteristic of the system. This error was assisted by Hegel's want of clearness as to the nature of the empirical sciences. For him as for Kant, these remained sciences, that is to say, knowledge of truth, although imperfect knowledge of it. They therefore constituted even for him the material or the first step in philosophy. It is true that he also had other more acute and profound thoughts upon this subject. Amid a number of incidental observations, he emphasized the arbitrariness ( Willkurlichkeit\ with which those forms are affected; and this is tanta mount to declaring their practical and atheoretic character. But instead of respecting this character, he decided upon surpassing it by means of a philosophic transformation of those sciences, which was not so much their death as pretended philosophies (a most true conclusion), 544 LOGIC PART as their elevation to the rank of particular philosophies by means of a mixture of empirical concepts and pure concepts, of abstract intellect and of reason. The erroneous tendency found nourishment and took concrete form in the idea of a Philosophy of nature, which Schelling had obtained, partly from Kant himself and partly had found in his own at first latent and then manifest theosophism. In this way, the system of Hegel became divided into three parts, a Logic -metaphysic, a Philosophy of nature and a Philosophy of Spirit, whereas it should on the contrary have unified Logic and the Philosophy of Spirit, and expelled the Philosophy of nature. By its internal dialectic, panlogism or philo- sophism was converted, even in Hegel himself, and still more among his disciples, into mytho- logism, and from the system of the Idea and of absolute immanence, because of the imperfections which they contained, there reappeared theism and transcendence (the Hegelian right wing).1 contemporaries It would be vain to seek the correction of of Hegel: Herbart, Hegel among those thinkers that were his con- Schleiermacher, and others. temporaries, for they were all, though in various degrees, inferior to him. None of them had 1 See my essay, What is Living and what is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel, for the criticism here briefly summarized.
IV HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 545