attained, through Kant, to the height attained by Hegel. Dwelling on a lower level, they could certainly refuse to recognize him and vituperate him, but they could never collaborate with and beyond him, in the progress of truth. Herbart held those concepts to which the particular sciences give rise to be contradictory, but he claimed to surpass the contradiction by means of an elaboration of the concepts (Bearbeitung der Begriffe], conducted in the very method of the old Logic, that is, of the Logic of the empirical sciences. Schleiermacher renounced the attempt to reach the unity of the speculative and the empirical, of Ethic and Physics, that is, the realization of the pure idea of knowledge; and he substituted for that ideal, which for him was unattainable, criticism, a form of worldly wisdom> that is to say, of philosophy ( Weltweisheif) which gave access to theology and to religious feeling.1 Schopenhauer accepted the distinction between concept and idea, the first abstract and artificial, the second concrete and real; but so slight was his understanding of the idea (which he called the Platonic idea) that he confused it with the concept of natural species,2 that is to say, 1 Dialektik, ed. Halpern, pp. 203-245. 2 Werke, ed. Grisebach, ii. chap. 39.
PART precisely with one of the most artificial and arbitrary of empirical concepts. Finally, Schel- ling, who had been a precursor of Hegel in his youth and had collaborated with him, not only failed to improve his logic of the intuition in his second philosophical period, but he abandoned even this embryonic form of the concrete con cept, and gave himself over as a prey to the will and to irrationality. In his positive philosophy the old adversary of Jacobi made a bad combina tion of the alogism of Jacobi with the Hegelian idea of development and with mythologism, as in metaphysic he had anticipated the blind will of Schopenhauer.1 Later The ensuing period, both in Germany and in positivism and . the whole of Europe, had little philosophical interest. It was marked by the reappearance of a form of naturalism and of Empiricism, in part 1 The movement of Italian thought in the first decades of the nineteenth century was rather a progress of national philosophic culture than a factor in the general history of philosophy. In this last respect, the role of Italy was for the time being ended; though it did not end in the seventeenth century with Campanella and Galileo (as foreign historians and the Italians who copy them believe). It ended magnificently in the first half of the eighteenth century with Vico, the last representative of the Renaissance and the first of Romanticism. The influence of German philosophy continued to manifest itself in Italy in the nineteenth century, at first almost entirely through French literature, then directly. It can be studied in the three principal thinkers of the first half of the century, Galuppi, Rosmini, and Gioberti. The first began from the Scottish school, and while attacking Kant, he absorbed not a few of his principles. The second, also in a polemical sense and in a Catholic wrapping, can be called the Italian Kant. The third, who had always only the slightest HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 547 justified by the abuse of the dialectic, which had sometimes, in the hands of Hegel's disciples, seemed altogether mad. But this recrudescence was in every way very poor in thought and inadequate to previous history. With this Empiricism is associated the deplorable Logic of John Stuart Mill, one of those books which do least honour to the human spirit. That less than mediocre reasoner did not even succeed in pro ducing a Logic of the natural sciences. He became involved in contradictions and tautolo gies, talking, for instance, of experience, which criticises itself and imposes its own limits upon itself, and of the principle of causality, as a law which affirms the existence of a law that there shall be a law. Still less had he any notion of what it is to philosophize, maintaining that in order to make progress in the moral and philo sophical sciences it is necessary to apply to them the method of the physical sciences. Nothing is consciousness of history, assumed the same position as Schelling and Hegel. To have attained (between 1850 and 1860) to such historical consciousness is the merit of Bertrando Spaventa (see especially his book, La filosofia italiana nelle sue relazioni con la filosofia europea, new edition, by G. Gentile, Bari, Laterza, 1908), who represented Hegelianism in Italy in a very cautious and critical form. But there was no true surpass ing of Hegelianism either by his disciples or by his adversaries, and some original thought is to be found only among non-professional philosophers, particularly in Esthetic, with Francesco de Sanctis (cf. Estetica, part ii.
PART 548 LOGIC PART 548 LOGIC more puerile than his nominalism, which gives language a logical character, and then pretends that language must be logically reformed. Logical science was altogether lost in the evolutionism or physiologism of Spencer, and in the psychologism which had and still has many followers in Germany, in France, and in England, not less than in Italy. The state in which the Logic of philosophy is found in such an environment can be inferred from the fact that even mathematical Logic fared ill there, since there have not been wanting those who have dared to conceive a psychology of arithmetic. Finally, as a healthy corrective of psychologism, the danger of which to the old Logic had already been noted by Kant,1 there came the revival of the Aristotelian, and even of the scholastic Logic, in which there yet lived, though in erroneous forms, the idea of the universal which had been discovered by the Greek philosophers. Eclectics. Other thinkers have not abandoned all contact Lotze.
with classical German philosophy; but, in com parison with the thoughts of Kant and of Kant's great pupils, they seem like children. They try to lift the weapons of the Titans, and either they do not move them at all or they let them fall 1 Krit. d. rein. Vernunft, loc. cit.
HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 549 from their hands, wounding themselves with them, but failing to grip them. The thoughts of Schelling and of Hegel indeed were discredited, but not touched; and those of Kant were touched, but ill-treated. In the most esteemed Logics of this description, such as those of Sigwart and of Wundt, the capital distinction between pure con cepts and representative concepts, between uni- versalia and generalia, has no prominence at all. Sigwart is obliged to complete the knowledge obtained from naturalistic and mathematical pro cedure by faith and by a gradual elevation to the idea of God. Wundt, who does not attribute to philosophy a method which is proper to it and different from that of the other forms of know ledge, conceives the final result of metaphysical thought as the position of a perpetual hypothesis. In the Logic of Lotze, who combated Hegelian- ism and revived transcendentalism and theism, there is just a luminous streak, a faint trace, of the idealist philosophy. Lotze understands that it is impossible to form (empirical) concepts by simply cancelling the varying parts of repre sentations and preserving the constant parts, and recognizes that the formation of concepts pre supposes the concept: the universal is made with the universal. He strives to issue from 550 LOGIC PART 550 LOGIC PART this circle by positing a primary universal, not formed by the method of the others, but such that thought finds it in itself. This primary universal has nothing particular and repre sentative; and only by means of it is it possible to combine heterogeneous and to differentiate homogeneous elements, and to form the ideas of size, of more or less, of one and of many and such like, with which the second universals of the synthesis are afterwards constructed.1 New gnoseoiogy While students of philosophy, although maniof Science.
The Economic festing some doubt and dissatisfaction, allowed theory of the scientific themselves to be intimidated by naturalism concept.
(dazzled, like the public, with technical applica tions, or confounded by the applause of the public), a tendency has become more and more accentuated during the last decades, which seems to us to offer great assistance to Logic and philosophy in general, if it is understood how to adapt it to its true end. It has not had any single centre of diffusion, but has arisen, almost contemporaneously, in several places, becoming at once diffused everywhere, like something that has happened at the right time. Several of its founders and promoters are mathematicians, physicists, and naturalists. From the very fact HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 551 of their having begun to reflect upon their activity, these men have certainly ceased to be mere specialists, notwithstanding their protests to the contrary. Yet they obtain considerable strength from their specialism, finding in it a guide and a curb to prevent their losing sight in their gnoseological enquiry of the actual pro cedure of naturalistic constructions, which are its origin. The formula of this tendency is the recognition of the practical or economic char acter of the mathematical, physical, and natural sciences.
The empirocriticism of Avenarius considers Mack.
science to be a simple description of the forms of experience, and conceptual procedure to be the instrument that alters pure and primitive experience (pure intuition or pure perception) for the purpose of simplifying it. Ernest Mach has developed and popularized these views, for as a student of mechanics he had reached the same conclusions by his own path and in his own way. The physical sciences (he says), not less than zoology and botany, have as their sole foundation the description of natural facts in which there are never identical cases. Identical cases are created by means of the schematic imitation that we make of reality; and here too 552 LOGIC PART 552 LOGIC PART lies the origin of the mutual dependence that appears in the character of facts. To this there fore he restricts the significance of the principle of causality, for which (in order to avoid fanciful- ness and mythologicism) it would be opportune to substitute the concept of function. Bodies or things are abbreviated intellectual symbols of groups of sensations; symbols, that is to say, which have no existence outside our intellect. They are cards, like those which dealers attach to boxes and which have no value except in so far as there are goods of value inside the box. In this economic schematicism lies the strength, but also the weakness, of science; for in the presentation of facts science always sacrifices something of their individuality and real appear ance, and does not seek exactness in another way save when obliged to do so, by the require ments of a definite moment. Hence the incon gruity between experience and science. Since they are developed upon parallel lines, they can reduce to some extent the interval that separates them, but they can never annul it by becoming coincident with one another.1 Rickert) in his book on the Limits of the 1 See, among other books, U Analisi delle sensazioni^ Italian translation Turin, Bocca; 1903.
HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 553 Naturalistic Concepts, maintains similar ideas, though with different cultural assumptions. The concept, which is the result of the labour of the sciences, is nothing but a means to a scientific end. The world of bodies and of souls is infinite in space and time. It is not possible to repre sent it in every individual part, by reason of its variety, which is not only extensive but also intensive: intuition is inexhaustible. The naturalistic concept is directed to surpassing this infinity of intuitions. It effects this by determining its own extension and comprehen sion, and by formulating its being in a series of judgments. Thus, in order to conquer intuition altogether, the natural sciences tend to substitute for concepts of things concepts of relations free from all intuitive elements. But the ultimate concept must always of necessity be a concept of things (though of things sui generis, immutable, indivisible, perfectly equal among themselves, expressible in negative judgments); and besides, they find everywhere insuperable barriers in the historical or descriptive element, which surrounds them all and is ineliminable. This naturalistic procedure can be applied and is indeed applied, not only to the science of bodies, but also to that of souls, to psychology and sociology; and 554 LOGIC PART Rickert opportunely insists (as did Hegel in his time) upon the possibility of empirical sciences of what is called the spiritual world; or (as he says) the word " nature," as used in this connection, means not a reality, but a particular point of view from which reality is observed, in order to reach the end of conceptual simplifica tion.1 d In France, the same ideas or very similar are the new French philosophy. represented by a group of thinkers, who are called variously philosophers of contingency, of liberty, of intuition, or of action. Bergson, who is the chief of them, looks upon the concepts of the natural sciences in the same way as Mach, as symboles and Etiquettes. Besides the extremely apposite applications that he has made of this principle to the analysis of time, of duration, of space, of movement, of liberty, of evolution, he has also the great merit of having broken his country's traditions of intellectualism and abstrac tionism, of giving to France for the first time that lively consciousness of the intuition, which she has always lacked, and of shaking her excessive reliance upon clear distinctions, upon well-turned concepts, upon classes, formulae, and reasonings HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 555 that proceed in a straight line, but run upon the surface of reality.1 Le Roy, one of the followers of Bergson, has Le R0y and others.
set himself to demonstrate, with many examples, that scientific laws only become rigorous when they are changed into conventions and depend upon vicious circles. The course of events is habitual and regular (if you like to say so), but it is not at all necessary. The great security of astronomical previsions is commonly praised; but that security is not always such in actual fact (" il y a des cometes qui ne reviennent fas"), and in any case it is always approximate. The rigorous necessity of which the natural sciences boast, is not known, but is rather postulated, and this postulation has merely the practical object of dominating single facts and of communicating with our neighbours ("darter le monde"\ The law of gravity holds, but only when external forces do not disturb it. In this way it is well understood that it always holds. The conservation of energy avails only in closed systems; but closed systems are just those in which energy is conserved. A body left to itself persists in the state of repose; but this law is nothing but the definition of a body 556 LOGIC 556 LOGIC left to itself, and so on.1 Poincare boldly affirms the conventional character of the mathematical and physical sciences, as do Milhaud and several others. They have deduced it as a conse quence of the impression aroused by the theories of higher geometry, which has contributed more or less successfully towards revealing the prac tical character of mathematics, which was formerly held to be the foundation or model of truth and certainty.
All those criticisms directed against the to romantic ideas and sciences do not sound new to the ears of those advance made upon them. acquainted with the criticisms of Jacobi, of Schelling, of Novalis, and of other romantics, and particularly with Hegel's marvellous criticism of the abstract (that is, empirical and mathe matical) intellect. This runs through all his books, from the Phenomenology of the Spirit to the Science of Logic, and is enriched with examples in the observations to the paragraphs of the Philosophy of Nature. But if compared with that of Hegel, they are at the disadvantage of not being based upon powerful philosophical thought; they have, on the other hand, this superiority: that they do not present the character istics observed in the sciences as errors which 1 See his articles in the Revue de mttaphys. et de morale, vols. vii. viii. xi.
HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 557 must be corrected, but define them as physio logical, necessary, uncensurable characteristics, derived from the very function of the sciences, which is not theoretic, but practical and economic. In this way there is posited one of the premisses that are necessary for preventing the mixture of the economic method with the method of truth, of empirical and abstract concepts with pure theoretic forms, and thus for making impossible that speculative hybridism, which is expressed in philosophies of history and of nature, and which fashions an abstract reason to work out a dialectic of the naturalistic concepts, and even of the repre sentations of history. And with the prevention of this error there is also prepared a more exact idea of the relation between pseudoconcepts and concepts and a better constitution of philosophic Logic.
But in order that this result should be obtained, philosophy the idea of the philosophic universal must be experience, of intuition, reawakened and strengthened, in conformity with of action, etc.; and its its most perfect elaboration in the history of ^sufficiency. thought, at the hands of Hegel. The critics of the sciences are at present far from this mark. The term that is distinct from the empirical and abstract concepts, the knowledge of reality which is not falsified by practical ends and discovered 558 LOGIC PART 558 LOGIC PART beneath labels and formulae, is supplied, not by the pure concept, by reality thought in its con- creteness, by philosophy which is history, but by pure sensation or intuition. Both Avenarius and Mach appeal to pure and primitive experience, that is, to experience free of thought and anterior to it. Bergson, with an artistic talent that is wanting to the two Germans, but following the same path, has proclaimed a new metaphysic, which proceeds in an opposite sense to that of symbolical knowledge and of generalizing and abstracting experience. He has defined the metaphysic which he desires, as a science qui pretend se passer des symboles, and therefore as " Science de F experience integrate" This meta physic would be the opposite of the Kantian ideal, of the mathematical universal, of the Platonism of the concepts, and would be founded upon intuition, the sole organ of the Absolute: " est relative la connaissance symbolique par con cepts prd-existants qui va du fixe au mouvant, mais non pas la connaissance intuitive, qui sinstalle dans le mouvement et adopte la vie meme des ckoses. Cette intuition atteint I'absolu} The conclusion is aestheticism, and sometimes something even 1 " Introduction a la Metaphysique," in the Revue de mttaphys. et de HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 559 less than aestheticism, namely mysticism, or action substituted for the concept. The criticism of the sciences thereby comes to mean the negation of knowledge and of truth. Hence the protest of Poincare* 1 against Le Roy, justified in its motive, but ineffective, because based upon the pre suppositions of mathematics and physics. In others again, it becomes intermingled with the turbid waters of pragmatism, which is a little of everything, but, above all, chatter and emptiness.
Finally, another of the thinkers that we have The theory mentioned, Rickert (following Windelband), wishes to integrate naturalistic and abstract knowledge with the historical knowledge of individual reality. Being reasonably diffident as to the possibility of a metaphysic as an " experimental science " (such as Zeller was among the first to desire), he moves towards a general theory of values. This indeed is the form (imperfect because stained with tran scendence) by means of which many in our day are approaching a philosophy as the science of the spirit (or of immanent value). But in the hands of Windelband and Rickert it is under stood as a primacy of the practical reason, which is taken to govern the double series of the world of the sciences and the world of history. This 1 La Valeur de la science, Paris, 1904.
PART IV 560 LOGIC doubtless represents progress, as compared with empiricism and positivism; but not as compared with the Hegelian Logic of the pure concept, which included in itself what is and what ought to be.
Such, briefly stated, is the present state of logical doctrines concerning the Concept.
Ill THE THEORY OF THE INDIVIDUAL JUDGMENT THE theory of the individual judgment and secular neglect of the theory therefore of historical thought, has been the least of history. elaborated of all logical theories in the course of philosophic history. It is a very true and pro found remark that the historical sense is a modern thing, and that the nineteenth century is the first great century of historical thinking. Of course, since history has always been made and individual judgments pronounced, theoretic observations upon historical judgments have not been al together wanting in the past. The spirit is, as we know, the whole spirit at every instant, and in this respect nothing is ever new under the sun, indeed, nothing is new, either before or after the sun.1 But history, and in particular, the theory of history, did not formerly arouse interest nor attract attention, nor was its importance felt, 1 See my observations concerning the perpetuity of historical criticism in Critica, vi. pp. 383-84.
562 LOGIC PART nor was it the object of anxious and wide investiga tions to the degree witnessed in the nineteenth century and in our times, when the consciousness of immanence triumphs more and more — and immanence means history.
Transcendence, then, which has for centuries world's ideas of history. been more or less dominant, supplies the reason why the study of the individual and the theory of history were neglected. In Greek philosophy, individual judgments were either despised, as in Platonism, or superseded by and confused with logical judgments of the universal, as in Aristotle. In the Poetics^ the character of history did not escape him. Differing from science (which was directed to the universal) and from poetry (which was directed to the possible), it expresses things that have happened in their individuality, ra <yev6fjb6va (what Alcibiades did and experienced). But in the Organon, although he distinguished between the universal (ra /ca06\ov) and the indi vidual (TO, naff 6/cao-Tov), between man and Callias,2 he made no use of the distinction, and divided judgments into universal, particular and indefinite. The theory of history was not raised to the rank of philosophic treatment in antiquity, like the other forms of knowledge, and especially philo- 1 Poetics, chap. 8. 2 Anal. pr. i. chap. 27.
HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 563 sophy, mathematics and poetry. What mark the ancients have left upon the argument is limited to incidental observations, and some altogether empirical remarks here and there upon the method of writing history. They were wont to assign extrinsic ends to it, such as utility and advice upon the conduct of life. Such utterances of good common sense as that of Quintilian, to the effect that history is written ad narrandum, non ad demonstrandum, do not possess great philosophic weight. Nor had the rules of the rhetoricians philosophic value, such as that of Dionysus of Halicarnassus, that historical narrative, without becoming quite poetical, should be somewhat more elevated in tone than ordinary discourse; or that of Cicero, who demanded for historical style verba ferme poetamm, " perhaps " (wrote Vico, making the rhetorical rule profound) "in order that historians might be maintained in their most ancient possession, since, as has been demon strated in the Scienza nuova, the first historians of the nations were the first poets."1 More important, on the other hand, are the demands (as expressed especially by Polybius) of what is indispensable to history. Besides the element of fact, there is needful (Polybius observed) 1 Works, ed. Ferrari.
PART The theory of history in medicevai and modern philosophy 564 LOGIC knowledge of the nature of the things of which the happenings are portrayed, of military art for military things, of politics for things political. History is written, not from books, as is the way with compilers and men of letters, but from original documents, by visiting the places where it has occurred and by penetrating it with ex perience and with thought.1 The abstractionist and anti-historical character of the Aristotelian Logic had an injurious effect in the schools, though, on the other hand, it allied itself well with the persistent transcendentalism. Certainly, just as in the Middle Ages appeared reflections upon history, so there could be no avoiding the distinction between what was known logice and what was known historice, or, as Leib nitz afterwards ' formulated the distinction, be tween propositions de raison and propositions de fait. But these latter were always regarded with a compassionate eye, as a sort of uncertain and inferior truth. The ideal of exact science would have been to absorb truths of fact in truths of reason, and to resolve them all into a philosophy, or rather into a universal mathematics. Nor did the empiricists succeed in increasing their credit.
1 See (in particular for Polybius) E. Pais, Delia storiografa dellafilosofia della storia presso i Greet, Livorno, 1889.
IV HISTORICAL RETROSPECT 565 These certainly paid particular attention to facts (hence the polemic of the Anti-Aristotelians and the origin of the new instrument of observation and induction). But by weakening the conscious ness of the concrete universal they also weakened that of the concrete individual, and therefore presented the latter in the mutilated form of species and genera, of types and classes. Bacon, had he done nothing else, at any rate assigned a place to history in his classification of knowledge, which was divided, as we know, according to the three faculties (memory, imagination and reason), into History, Poetry and Philosophy. He passed in review the two great classes of history, natural and civil (the first of which was either narrative or inductive, the second more variously sub divided); thus he even pointed out the kinds of history that were desirable, but of which no con spicuous examples were yet extant, such as literary history.1 Hobbes, on the other hand, having distinguished the two species of cognition, one of reason and the other of fact, " altera facti, et est cognitio propria testium, cujus conscriptio est historia," and having subdivided this into natural and civil, " neutra" (he added, that is to say neither the natural nor the civil) " pertinet ad