think rigorously, we must plunge ourselves again 30 LOGIC PART into the flood of representations and think im mediate reality, clearing away the obstacles that proceed from conceptual fictions. And always for the same reason, rigorous concepts, when they find themselves confronted with conceptual fictions as rivals in the same problem, do not claim their assistance, nor correct, nor refine upon them, in order partially to preserve them, but combat and destroy them. What the rigorous concepts are unable to do, is to prevent the others from reappearing; because the spirit, as has been seen, preserves, without correcting them, although it has recognized their falsity: it preserves them, that is to say, not fused and rendered true in the rigorous concepts, but out side and after these. Posteriority In short, we have to abandon entirely the of conceptual fictions to true idea that conceptual fictions are errors, or and proper concepts. sketches and aids, and that they precede rigorous concepts. Quite the opposite is true: conceptual fictions do not precede rigorous con cepts, but follow them, and presuppose them as their own foundation. Were this not so, of what could they ever be fictions? To counterfeit or imitate something implies first knowledge of the thing which it is desired to counterfeit or to imi tate. To falsify means to have knowledge of THE PURE CONCEPT 31 THE PURE CONCEPT 31 the genuine model: false money implies good money, not vice versa. It is possible to think that man, from being the ingenuous poet that he first was, raised himself, immediately, to the thought of the eternal; but it is not possible to think that he constructed the smallest conceptual fiction, without having previously imagined and thought. The house, the rose, the cat, the triangle, free motion presuppose quantity, quality, existence, and we know not how many other rigorous concepts: they are made with iron in struments great and small, which logical thought has created, and which come to be used with such rapidity and naturalness that we usually end by believing that we have proceeded without them. Whoever makes conceptual fictions, has already taken his logical bearings in the world: he knows what he is doing and reasons about it; progress with his conceptual fictions depend ing upon progress with his rigorous concepts, and being continuously remade, according to the new needs and the new conditions which are formed. Now that the concept of miracle or witchcraft has been destroyed, the conceptual fictions relating to the various classes and modes of miraculous facts and acts of witch craft are no longer constructed; and since the 32 LOGIC PART 32 LOGIC PART destruction of the belief in the direct influence of the stars upon human destinies, the astro logical and mathematical fictions, which arose upon those conceptual presuppositions, have also disappeared.
Those who have seen errors or sketches of truth in conceptual fictions have certainly seen something: because (without incidentally antici pating at this point the theory of errors, or that of sketches or aids to the search for truth) it may at once be admitted, that conceptual fictions also sometimes become both errors and obstacles, and suggestions and aids to truth. But because a given spiritual product is adopted for an end different from that which rightly belongs to it (thereby becoming itself different and giving rise to a new spiritual product), we must not omit to search for the intrinsic end, which con stitutes the genuine nature of this product. The portrait of a fair lady, white as milk and red as blood, which the prince of the story finds beneath a cushion by the help of the fairy, may serve as an incentive to make him undertake the journey round the world in search of the woman in flesh and blood, who is like the portrait and whom he will make his wife; but that portrait, before it is an in- THE PURE CONCEPT 33 THE PURE CONCEPT 33 strument in the hands of the fairy, is a picture, that is to say, a work of art, which has come from the hands, or rather from the fancy, of the painter; and must be appreciated as such. Thus conceptual fictions, before they are transmuted into errors or into expedients, into obstacles or into aids to the search for truth, have, before them, a truth already con structed, toward the construction of which, there fore, they cannot serve; whereas that truth has served them, for they would not otherwise have been able to arise. They are, therefore, intrinsi cally neither obstacles nor aids to truth, but something else, that is, themselves; and what they are in themselves it is still necessary to determine.
For this purpose it is needful to direct our Practical character of attention to the moment of their formation, conceptual fictions.
which, as has been said, is not at all theoretical, but practical; and to ask ourselves in what way and with what end the practical spirit can inter vene in representations and concepts previously produced, manipulate them and make of them conceptual fictions. The view that the work of the practical spirit can give rise to new know ledge, not previously attained, must be resolutely excluded: the practical spirit is such, precisely PART 34 LOGIC because it is non-cognitive; as regards know ledge it is altogether sterile. If, then, it accom plishes those manipulations, and says to a cat: " You will represent for me all cats "; or to a rose: " See, I draw you in my treatise on botany, and you will represent all roses "; and to the triangle: "It is true I cannot think you, nor represent you; but I suppose that you are the same as what I draw with rule and compass, and I make use of you to measure the approximate triangles of reality "; — in so doing, it 'recognizes that it does not accomplish any act of knowledge. But does it, in that case, accomplish an act of anti- knowledge? that is, does it make these manipula tions and fictions in order to place obstacles in the way of knowledge and to simulate its pro ducts, so that it leads astray the seeker for truth? If this were so, the " practical spirit" would be synonymous with the spirit of con fusion; and the contriver of conceptual fictions would deserve the reprobation that attaches to forgers of documents, sophists, rhetoricians, and charlatans; whereas, on the contrary, he receives the applause and gratitude of every one. Each one of us, at every instant, would be guilty of a plot against the truth, because at every instant each of us forms and employs those fictions; , THE PURE CONCEPT 35 • whereas the moral consciousness, delicate and intolerant though it be, makes no reproof, but indeed offers encouragement. Therefore, the act of forming intellectual fictions is an act neither of knowledge nor of anti-knowledge; it is not logically rational, but neither is it logically irrational; it is rational, indeed, but practically rational.
In this case the practical end in view can be The practical end and but one. We know in order to act; and he mnemonic utility.
who acts is interested only in that knowledge, which is the necessary precedent of his doing. But since our knowledge is all destined to be recalled as occasion serves for action, or to aid us in the search for new knowledge (which in this case is a form of acting), the practical spirit is impelled to provide for the preservation of the patrimony of acquired knowledge. Without doubt, speaking absolutely, everything is pre served in reality, and nothing that has once been done or thought, disappears from the bosom of the cosmos. But the preservation of which we speak, is properly the making easily available to memory, knowledge that has once been possessed, and providing for its ready re call from the bosom of the cosmos or from the apparently unconscious and forgotten. For this PART 36 LOGIC purpose there are constructed those instruments, which are conceptual fictions, by means of which armies of representations are evoked with a single word, or by which a single word approxi mately indicates what form of operation must be resorted to, in order that certain representa tions may be recovered. The cat of the ap propriate conceptual- fiction does not enable us to know any single cat, as a painter or a his torian of cats makes us know it; but by means of it, many images of animals, which would have remained separate before the memory, or each one dispersed and fused in the complete picture in which it had been imagined and perceived, are arranged in a series and recorded as a whole. This matters little or nothing to one who dreams as a poet or who seeks absolute truth; but it matters a great deal to one whose house is infested by rats, and who must employ some one to obtain a cat; and it matters not less to the seeker for the cat, in that he has to study a new animal, and that he must pro ceed in that study with some order, though it be artificial, and though he reject the artifice in the final synthesis. Again, the geometrical triangle is of no service either to imagination or to thought, which are developed without it; THE PURE CONCEPT 37 but it is indispensable to any one measuring a field, in the same way as it may possibly be of service to a painter in his preparatory studies for a picture, or to a historian, who wishes to know well the configuration of a piece of ground. where a battle was fought.
This is the real reason why, however perfect persistence of conceptual rigorous concepts become, conceptual fictions fictions side by side -with remain ineliminable, and indeed obtain from concepts. these fresh nourishment. They cannot be criti cized and resolved by means of rigorous con cepts, because they are of a different order from them: they cannot act as inferior degrees of the rigorous concept, because they presup pose it. The reason, which we were pledged to give, is given; and henceforward there can no longer arise any misunderstanding as to the relation of the concept to conceptual fictions. It is a relation not of identity, nor of contra riety, but simply of diversity.
The terminological question remains, and Pure concepts and pseudothis, as always, has but slight importance, concepts. " Conceptual fictions " is a manner of speech; and no one would wish to combat manners of speech. For brevity's sake we shall call them pseudo concepts, and for the sake of clearness we shall call the true and proper concepts pure 38 LOGIC PART 38 LOGIC PART concepts. This term seems to us more suitable than that of ideas (pure concepts), as opposed to logical concepts (pseudoconcepts), as they were at one time called in the schools. It must further be noted, that the pseudocon cepts, although the word "concept" forms part of their name, are not concepts, they do not form a species of, nor do they compete with, concepts (save when forcibly made to do so); and that the pure concepts have not got the impure concepts at their side, for these are not truly concepts. Every word offers, in some degree, a hold for misunderstanding, because it circulates in this base world, which is full of snares; the search for words which should absolutely prevent misunderstandings is vain, for it would be necessary first of all to clip the wings of the human spirit. We may prefer one word to another, according to historical contin gencies; and for our part we prefer the words pseudoconcept and pure concept, if for no other reason than to remind the makers of fictional concepts to be modest, and to flash above their heads the light of the only true form of concept, which is logical nature itself in its universality and in its severity. How can we fail to think that the choice has been well made if this title THE PURE CONCEPT 39 THE PURE CONCEPT 39 of pure concept please the few, but terrify the many and irritate the most, more than the red cloth shaken before the eyes of the bull; and if, like every efficacious medicine, it provoke a reaction in the organism of the patient?
N Ill THE CHARACTERISTICS AND THE CHARACTER OF THE CONCEPT THE characteristics of the pure concept, or simply, concept, may be gathered from what has previously been said.
The concept has the character of expressivity; that is to say, it is a cognitive product, and, there fore, expressed or spoken, not a mute act of the spirit, as is a practical act. If we wish to submit the effective possession of a concept to a first test, we can employ the experiment which was advised on a previous occasion: — whoever asserts that he possesses a concept, should be invited to expound it in words, and with other means of expression (graphic symbols and the like). If he refuse to do so, and say that his concept is so profound that words cannot avail to render it, we can be sure, either that he is under the illusion of possessing a concept, when he possesses only turbid fancies and morsels of 40 PARTI THE PURE CONCEPT 41 ideas; or that he has a presentiment of the pro found concept, that it is in process of formation, and will be, but is not yet, possessed. Each of us knows that when he finds himself in the medi tative depth of the internal battle, of that true agony (because it is the death of one life and the birth of another), which is the discovery of a concept, he can certainly talk of the state of his soul, of his hopes and fears, of the rays that enlighten and of the shadows that invade him; but he cannot yet communicate his concept, which is not as yet, because it is not yet ex pressible.
If this character of expressivity be common to the concept and to the representation, its universality is peculiar to the concept; that is to say, its transcendence in relation to the single representations, so that no single representation and no number of them can be equivalent to the concept. There is no middle term between the individual and the universal: either there is the single or there is the whole, into which that single enters with all the singles. A con cept which has been proved not universal, is, by that very fact, confuted as a concept. Our philosophical confutations do not proceed other wise. Sociology, for instance, asserts the con- 42 LOGIC PART cept of Society, as a rigorous concept and principle of science; and the criticism of Sociology proves that the concept of society is not universal, but individual, and is related to the groupings of certain beings which representation has placed before the sociologist, and which he has arbitrarily isolated from other complexes of beings that representation also placed or could place before him. The theory of tragedy postulates the con cept of the tragic, and from it deduces certain necessary essentials of tragedy; and the criticism of literary classes demonstrates that the tragic is not a concept, but a roughly defined group of artistic representations, which have certain ex ternal likenesses in common; and, therefore, that it cannot serve as foundation for any theory. On the other hand, to establish a universality, which at first was wanting, is the glory of truly scientific thought; hence we give the name of discoverers to those who bring to light connections of representations or of representative groups, or of concepts, which had previously been separate; that is to say, who universalize them. Thus, it was thought at one time that will and action were distinct concepts; and it was a step in progress to identify, them by the creation of the truly universal concept of the will, which THE PURE CONCEPT 43 is also action. Thus, too, it was held that ex pression in language was a different thing from expression in art; and it was an advance to universalize the expression of art by extending it to language; or that of language by extending it to art.
Not less proper to the concept is the other character of concreteness, which means that if the concept be universal and transcendent in relation to the single representation, it is yet immanent in the single, and therefore in all representations. The concept is the universal in relation to the representations, and is not exhausted in any one of them; but since the world of knowledge is the world of representa tions, the concept, if it were not in the represen tations, would not be anywhere: it would be in another world, which cannot be thought, and therefore is not. Its transcendence, therefore, is also immanence; like that truly literary language that Dante desired, which, in relation to the speech of the different parts of Italy, in qualibet redolet civitate nee cicbat in ulla. \ If it is proved of a concept that it is inapplicable to reality, and therefore is not concrete, it is thereby confuted as a true and proper concept. It is said to be an abstraction, it is not reality;) 44 LOGIC PART 44 LOGIC PART it does not possess concreteness. In this way, for example, has been confuted the concept of spirit as different from nature (abstract spirit ualism); or of the good, as a model placed above the real world; or of atoms, as the com ponents of reality; or of the dimensions of space, or of various quantities of pleasure and pain, and the like. All these are things not found in any part of the real, since there is neither a reality that is merely natural and external to spirit, nor an ideal world outside the real world; nor a space of one or of two dimensions; nor a pleasure or pain that is homogeneous with another, and therefore greater or less than another; and for this reason all these things do not result from concrete thinking and are not concepts. The concrete (. Expressivity, universality, concreteness, are universal, and theformation then the three characteristics of the concept of the pseudo- concepts, derived from the foregoing discussion. Ex pressivity affirms that the concept is a cognitive act, and denies that it is merely practical, as is maintained in various senses by mystics, and by arbitrarists or fictionists. Universality affirms that it is a cognitive act sui generis, the logical act, and denies that it is an intuition, as is maintained by the sestheticists, or a group of i THE PURE CONCEPT 45 intuitions, as is asserted in the doctrine of the arbitrarists or fictionists. Concreteness affirms that the universal logical act is also a thinking of reality, and denies that it can be universal and void, universal and inexistent, as is main tained in a special part of the doctrine of the arbitrarists^ But this last point needs explana tion, which leads us to enunciate explicitly an important division of the pseudoconcepts, which has hitherto been mentioned as apparently in cidental.
The pseudoconcepts, falsifying the concept, Empirical pseudoconcepts cannot imitate it scrupulously, because, if they and abstract pseudoconcepts.
did, they would not be pseudoconcepts, but concepts; not imitations, but the very reality which they imitate. An actor who, pretending on the stage to kill his rival in love, really did so, would no longer be an actor, but a practical man and an assassin. If, therefore, with regard to the representations, and when preparing to form pseudoconcepts, we should think representa tions with that universality which is also the concreteness proper to the true concept, and with that transcendence which is also immanence (and is therefore called transcendentalism], we should form true concepts. This, indeed, often happens, as we can see in certain treatises which 46 LOGIC PART 46 LOGIC PART mean to be empirical and arbitrary, and from which, cur rente rota, non urceus, sed amphora exit. Their authors, led by a profound and irrepressible philosophic sense, gradually and almost unconsciously abandon their initial purpose, and give true and proper concepts in place of the promised pseudoconcepts: they are philosophers, disguised as empiricists. In order to create pseudoconcepts, we must therefore begin by arbitrarily dividing into two the one supreme necessity of logic, immanent transcendence, or concrete universality, and form pseudoconcepts, which are concrete without being universal, or universal without being concrete. There is no other way of falsifying the concept; whoever wishes to falsify it so completely as to render the imitation unrecognizable, does not falsify, but produces it; he does not remain outside, but permits himself to be caught in its coils; he does not invent a practical attitude, but thinks. That one mode is therefore specified in two particular modes, of which examples have already been given in our analysis of the pseudoconcepts of the house, the cat, the rose, which are concrete without being universal; and of the triangle and of free motion, which are universal without being concrete. There is nothing left to do, therefore, THE PURE CONCEPT 47 but to baptize them; selecting some of the many names that are applied, and often applied, some times to the one, sometimes to the other of the two forms, or indifferently to both, and giving to each of them a particular name, which will be constant in this treatise. We shall then call the first, that is to say, those which are concrete and not universal, empirical pseudoconcepts; and the second, or those which are universal and not concrete, abstract pseudoconcepts; or, taking as understood for brevity's sake, the general denom ination (pseudo), empirical concepts and abstract concepts.
Thus, of the three characteristics of the The other...characteristics concept which we have exhibited, the second o/thepure concept.
and the third constitute, as we can now see, one only, which is stated in a double form, solely in order to deny and to combat these two one-sided forms which we have called empirical and abstract concepts. But, on the other hand, it is easy to see that the characteristics of the concept are not exhausted in the two that remain, namely, in ex pressivity or cognizability, and in transcendence or concrete universality. Others can reasonably be added, such as spirituality, utility, morality, but we shall not dwell upon these, because either they belong to the general assumption 48 LOGIC PART of Logic, that is, to the fundamental concept of Philosophy as the science of spirit, or they are more conveniently made clear in the other parts of this Philosophy. The concept has the character of spirituality and not of mechanism, because reality is spiritual, not mechanical; and for this reason we have to reject every mechani cal or associationist theory of Logic, just as we have to reject similar doctrines in Esthetic, in Economic and in Ethic. A special discussion of these views seems superfluous, because they are discussed and negated, that is to say, sur passed, in every line of our treatise. The concept has the character of utility, because, if the theoretic form of the spirit be distinct from the practical, it is not less true, by the law of the unity of the spirit, that to think is also an act of the will, and therefore, like every act of the will, it is teleological, not antiteleological; useful, not useless. And, finally, it has the character of morality, because its utility is not merely individual, but, on the contrary, is sub ordinated to and absorbed in the moral activity of the spirit; so that to think, that is, to seek and find the true, is also to collaborate in progress, in the elevation of Humanity and Reality, it is the denial and overcoming of onei THE PURE CONCEPT 49 self as a single individual, and the service of God.
Certainly, the form in which the order of our The origin of the multiplicity discourse has led us to establish the characters and unity of character of of the concept — that of enumeration, the one the concept, character, being connected with the other by means of an " also " — is, logically, a very crude form, and must be refined and corrected. Above all, if we have spoken of characters of the concept, we have done so in order to adhere to the usual mode of expression. The concept cannot have characters, in the plural, but character, that one character which is proper to it. What this is has been seen; the concept is concrete-universal: two words which designate one thing only, and can also grammatically become one: " tran scendental," or whatever other word be chosen from those already coined, or that may be coined for the occasion. The other determinations are not characters of the concept, but affirm its relations with the spiritual activity in general, of which it is a special form, and with the other special forms of this activity. In the first relation, the concept is spiritual; in relation with the aesthetic activity, it is cognitive or expressive, and enters into the general theoretic-expressive form; in relation with the practical activity, it is 50 LOGIC PART 50 LOGIC PART not, as concept, either useful or moral, but as a concrete act of the spirit it must be called useful and moral. The exposition of the characters of the concept, correctly thought, resolves itself into the compendious exposition of the whole Philosophy of spirit, in which the concept takes its place in its unique character, that is to say, in itself. objections This declaration may save us from the acrelatimr to the unreality of the cusation of having given an empirical exposition pure concept and to the of the non-empirical Concept of the concept, and impossibility of f f