Part 16

If the confusion between Logic and the Doctrine of the Categories, or between the thinking of the logical category and the thinking of the other categories, had produced no other effect than that of introducing into books of Logic a method of treatment that exceeds their bounds, the evil would not be great. It would chiefly affect literary harmony and clarity of didactic exposition. But from that confusion there has sometimes as _rational Philosophy and real Philosophy,_ sometimes as _Gnoseology and Anthropology (or Cosmology,)_ sometimes as _Logic and System of Philosophy,_ and so on. The conception of Reality is thus twice described: once as part of Logic (the Doctrine of the Categories, Ontology, etc.); and again as effective or applied Philosophy. Philosophy is divided into a Prologue to Philosophy and Philosophy, or into Philosophy and a Conclusion to Philosophy. But Philosophy, although it is distinguishable into philosophies (for example, Æsthetic, Logic, Economic and Ethic), _is this distinction itself,_ or the unity immanent in it. It never gives rise to a duality of grades. It is never prologue, development and conclusion, being, at its every point, prologue, development and conclusion. As from empirical and formalist Logic arose the idea of a Logic which should not be philosophy, but an organ or instrument or rule or law for the rest of philosophy; so from the confusion of Logic with the Doctrine of the Categories has arisen the idea of a Logic, or Metaphysic, or general Philosophy, or whatever else it may be called, which should be _opposed to or above_ the rest of philosophy. But the Science of thought, Logic, is at once thought and effective philosophy; it is thought itself which in thinking the Real, thinks itself and places itself, as logical Science, in the place which belongs to it in the system of the Real.

[Sidenote: _Philosophy and pure logic: overcoming of the duality._]

It may seem that in this way thought and reality are again divided and a metaphysical dualism created. But the exact opposite is the truth. When Philosophy is distinguished into general and particular, into rational and real, into pure and applied, into Logic-metaphysic and into Philosophy of nature and of man, an irreparable breach is made, which can only be concealed or attenuated in a more or less ingenious manner. But when that doubleness of degree is destroyed (and thought thinking the real thereby thinks itself), and in the construction of Philosophy, the Philosophy of philosophy, namely Logic, is constructed, the dualism is for ever overcome. This thought is the thinking of the distinctions, which the real presents; but to think distinctions and to think unity is, as has been already demonstrated, the same thing.

[Footnote 1: _Logik,_ pp. 532-3.]

[Footnote 2: See above Sect. II. Chap. V.]

SECOND PART

PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY AND THE NATURAL AND MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES

I

THE FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE DIVISIONS OF KNOWLEDGE

[Sidenote: _Summary of results as to the forms of acquaintance._]

The result of the preceding enquiries into the constitution of the cognitive spirit can be resumed, for mnemonic purposes, by saying that there are _two pure theoretic_ forms, _the intuition_ and _the concept,_ the second of which is subdivided into _judgment of definition and individual judgment,_ and that there are two modes of _practical_ elaboration of knowledge, or of formation of pseudoconcepts, the _empirical concept and the abstract concept,_ from which are derived the two subforms of judgment of _classification_ and of judgment of _enumeration._ If the methods in use in the mediæval schools or in those of Port-Royal (which were not without their utility) were still in vogue, we should be able to embody these results in a few _mnemonic verses,_ which would render the distinctions we have made easy to impart.

Easy to impart, but not understood, or worse, ill understood; because, as we know, both the scheme of classification here adopted and the arithmetical determination of two or more forms are not truly logical thoughts adequate to the representation of the process of the real and of thought. Our grouping constructed to help the memory must therefore be interpreted with the aid of the developments offered above, and not only corrected, but altogether resolved in them. In these developments, the intuition and the concept have appeared as two forms, not capable of co-ordination, but both distinct and united. The judgment of definition and the individual judgment have appeared as logically identical, divisible only from an external or literary point of view, that is to say, by the greater or less importance attached either to the predicate or to the subject. Further, the formation of the pseudoconcepts is outside theory, although founded upon theoretic elements; it belongs essentially, not to the cognitive spirit, but to the practical spirit. And if their subdivision into empirical and abstract concepts is necessary, the necessity is founded upon the fact, that only in these two modes can the concept be practically developed, when its synthetic unity is arbitrarily split up into two one-sided forms. Finally, the two fundamental forms of the spirit themselves, the theoretic and the practical, are not co-ordinate with one another, nor capable of arithmetical enumeration. The one is in the other, the one is correlative to the other, because the one presupposes the other.

[Sidenote: _Non-existence of technical forms, and of composite forms._]

No other cognitive or practical-cognitive forms, or other subforms, beyond those which we have defined, are conceivable. The _technical knowledge,_ which is discussed in some treatises on Logic, is nothing but knowledge itself, which is always and entirely technical, preceding and conditioning the action and practice of life. The same may be said of _normative_ knowledge, by which, as with technical, it is especially meant in ordinary language to designate the whole of the pseudoconcepts. But this is erroneous, when we consider that such knowledge constitutes the true immediate precedent condition of action. The pseudoconcepts must be retranslated into individual judgments, in order that they may be able to form the basis of action, for which, as is justly remarked, we require direct and concrete perceptions of actual situations. Formulæ and abstractions aid perception only in an indirect and subsidiary manner.

The so-called combined or _composite_ forms in which two or more original forms are brought together, must also be rejected, for the reason already given, that composite concepts do not exist in pure Logical thought, and consequently cannot exist in the Science of Logic, which is the science of that thought. The composite form, then, is an empirical and arbitrary determination, as may be observed, for instance, in the case in which we speak of an empirico-philosophic concept, that is, of the union (which is a successive enunciation) of an empirical concept and a philosophic concept.

[Sidenote: _Identity of cognitive forms and forms of knowledge. Objections to it._]

The cognitive forms having thus been established, we pass on to the question, what and how many and of what kind are the _forms of knowledge._ The reply must be that the forms of knowledge (for example, History and the natural Sciences) cannot be anything but identical with the cognitive forms, and of the same kind and same number as they. The first of these statements finds itself at once at issue with common thought, in which a profound distinction is drawn between the ordinary and the scientific man, the profane and the philosopher, the poet and the non-poet, the ignorant and the learned, layman and clergy; and again, between conversation and science, effusion of the soul and art, collection of facts and history, good sense and philosophy. It is thought that acquaintance belongs to all: every one communicates his sentiments, narrates his experiences and those of others, reasons, classifies and calculates. But art, philosophy, history and science are believed to belong to the few. That alone deserves those solemn names, which is the result of exceptional moments, when man is more than man, or at least when he is no longer one of the crowd, but belongs to an aristocracy.

[Sidenote: _Empirical distinctions and their limits. _]

And, certainly, these distinctions are useful, and therefore necessary in practice. We all feel the need of creating an aristocracy of men and things; of distinguishing the word that a sergeant whispers in the ear of a maid-servant from a sonnet or a symphony; the proverbs of Sancho Panza from a treatise on Ethics; and the report of a police-agent from the history of Rome or of England. We distinguish the classification of the glasses and bowls in use at home from that of Mineralogy or of Zoology; the reckoning of our daily expenses from the calculation of the astronomer; and, finally, Tom, Dick and Harry from Aeschylus, Plato, Thucydides, Hippocrates and Euclid. The _odi profanum vulgus_ is a motto that should be appropriated by whosoever labours to promote the life of thought and of art, yet not without adding to it Ariosto's post-script: "Nor do I wish to absolve any from the name of vulgar, save the prudent."

But, admitting all this, we must recognize not less energetically that these distinctions, imposed by the necessities of life, have in philosophy no value at all, and that their introduction there, if it has some excuse in professional custom, is nevertheless the way to shut off from us for ever all understanding both of the forms of knowledge and of those of acquaintance. Man is complete man at every instant and in every man; the spirit is always whole in every individuation of itself. The philosopher in the highest sense (in the philosopher worthy of the name) could be defined as one who raises doubts, collects difficulties, and formulates problems, intent upon clearing up doubts, upon levelling difficulties, and upon solving problems; the artist as a man who limits himself to looking and to recording the significance of what he has seen. In this case, the ordinary man would be he who encounters no theoretic difficulties and is unaware of spectacles worthy of contemplation. But in reality the ordinary man also sets himself problems and solves them, contemplates and expresses the spectacle of the real. The distinction has value, therefore, only in descriptive Psychology, which passes in review types of reality and the perfected organs, so to speak, which reality creates for itself in great philosophers and great poets. But what empiricism always divides, philosophy must always unite. To be scandalized when some one speaks of the poetry, philosophy, science, mathematics, which are in every one's mouth; to mock those who unify and identify; to appeal to good sense and to threaten the madhouse, are things that reveal much pedantry but no humanity, or, at most, very little. It is foolish to fear that such an identification as we propose will lessen the importance of the forms of knowledge and render trivial divine Poetry, lofty Philosophy, severe History, serious Science and ingenious Mathematics. As the hero is not outside humanity, but is he in whom the soul of the people is concentrated and made powerful, so poetry, philosophy, science and history, aristocratically circumscribed, are the most conspicuous manifestations attained by the elementary forms of acquaintance themselves. Such they could not be, were they not all one with them, just as the mountains could not be, were it not for the earth upon which they are raised and of which they are constituted.

It might be said that the forms of knowledge are rich and complex manifestations of the human spirit, if this statement did not open the way to another common prejudice, to the belief that to each of those forms (for instance, to Art, History and Philosophy) several spiritual activities contribute. Were this so, we should have before us a mixture, not a product of an unique and original character, such as we find, as a matter of fact, in a work of Art, a philosophic theory, a narrative, and a theorem. By the law of the unity of the spirit all the forms of the spirit are implicit in one another; and the results, previously obtained from the various forms, condition each one of them. But each one of them is, explicitly, itself and not the others; it absorbs and transforms the results of the others; it does not leave them within itself as extraneous elements, and it therefore makes of them its own results. The strength of each one of those forms of knowledge lies precisely in this _purity,_ which persists in the greatest complexity. A great poem is as homogeneous as the shortest lyric or as a verse; a philosophic system as homogeneous as a definition; the most complicated calculations as the addition of "two and two make four."

[Sidenote: _Enumeration and determination of the forms of knowing, corresponding to the forms of acquaintance._]

If the forms of acquaintance and the forms of knowledge be identical, it is proved thereby that the second are as many and of the same sort as the first; and the existence of combined or composite forms is also excluded from the forms of knowledge. Thus we are henceforth freed from the obligation of enquiring into the particular nature of the various forms of knowledge, a task that we have already fulfilled when enquiring into the forms of acquaintance. It is sufficient to name them (in correspondence) with the names already given to the forms of acquaintance, for thus they will be clearly distinguished and completely enumerated. The method of denomination itself will not be new and surprising, because it has been, as it were, anticipated, and foreseen from the examples of which we have availed ourselves above, and also from some terminological references. We have now only to make it manifest, to declare it, so to speak, in clear tones.

Pure intuition is the theoretic form of Art (or of _Poetry,_ if we wish to extend to the whole of æsthetic production the name given to a group of works of art); and art cannot be otherwise defined than as pure intuition. The thinking of the pure concept, of the concept as itself, of the universal that is truly universal and not mere generality or abstraction, is _Philosophy,_ and Philosophy cannot be otherwise defined than as the thinking, or the conceiving of the pure concept. And since the pure concept can be expressed either in the form of definition or in that of individual judgment, there corresponds to this duplication the distinction of the two forms of knowing, _Philosophy in the strict sense, and History._ The method of treatment called _empirical Science or natural Science,_ or most commonly in our time, _Science,_ is composed of those pseudoconcepts known as representative or empirical or classificatory. The mathematical Sciences are composed of abstract, enumerative and mensurative pseudoconcepts, and the application of the second of these, by means of the first, to individual judgments, is nothing else than what is called the _mathematical Science of nature._

[Sidenote: _Critique of the idea of a special Logic as doctrine of the forms of knowledge,_]

It is usual for the treatment of the forms of knowledge to be presented in the majority of treatises as a _special_ or _applied Logic_; following _general_ or _pure Logic,_ which has for its object the specific forms of acquaintance alone, or as it is significantly expressed, the _elementary_ forms of acquaintance. But we cannot admit the existence of such a Logic, for the reasons already given. The elementary or fundamental forms are the only forms philosophically conceivable and really existing, and the whole of logical Science is exhausted in them. There is no duality of grades for logical Science any more than for Philosophy in general. And as no special Æsthetic exists independent of general Æsthetic, no special Ethic and Economic independent of general Economic, so there is not a _general_ Logic alongside of a _special_ Logic.

[Sidenote: _and as doctrine of methods._]

Special Logic is also inadmissible, when it is presented as doctrine of _methods,_ and especially of demonstrative or intrinsic methods. The method of a form of knowledge and in general of a form of the spirit, is not something different or even distinguishable from this form itself. The method of poetry is poetry, the method of philosophy is philosophy, the method of mathematics is mathematics, and so on. Only by means of empirical abstraction is the method separated from the activity itself; and when this duality has been created, we are led to add to it a third term, which is called the _object_ of that form. But since the method is the form itself, so form and method are the object itself. Certainly, all the forms of the spirit have a common object, which is Reality; but this is not because reality is separated from them, but because they are reality: they therefore _have_ not, but _are_ this object. Thus the forms of knowledge have not a theoretic object, but create it: they themselves are that object. Philosophy has the pure concept for method and object; art has intuition; science the empirical concept, and so on. If we wished to treat of methods in a special Logic, we could not do otherwise than repeat what we have already said in respect to the character of each form.

[Sidenote: _Nature of our treatise in respect to the forms of knowledge._]

All this amounts to saying that the things we shall discuss concerning the various forms of knowledge are not to be understood as a special Logic, although they are grouped in a second part for literary reasons. There we shall examine one by one the various forms of knowledge, in order to confirm their identity with the forms of awareness and to demonstrate how the characters adopted by them are reducible to those already explained for the others, and how the difficulties found in them are overcome by means of the same principles that we employed to overcome the difficulties presented by the others. In so doing, we shall also gain the advantage of making more clear the doctrines already laid down as to the elementary forms, by fixing our attention upon those manifestations of them which are presented on a larger scale. To those who forget or deny the existence of the pure concept or of the abstract concept, it will be of assistance, in giving the speculative deduction of those forms, to point out the masterpieces of Art, of Philosophy, or of Mathematics, and to invite an examination of their structure. It is true that in our day preference is given to another method, which is not only antiphilosophical but also antipædagogic. This method consists in altogether neglecting philosophic demonstration in the attempt to divert the attention from notable and luminous manifestations of the spirit, in order to devote it to rude and uncertain manifestations. Inscriptions of savages are preferred to the art of Michael Angelo, the philosophy that is still crudely enveloped in religion and custom to that of civilized times, something whose nature none can tell precisely, owing to lack of documents and the elements of research, to what is evidently art and philosophy. Such enquirers adopt precisely an opposite course to that followed by the sciences of observation, which have made telescopes and microscopes to enlarge the little and bring the distant near. They seek for instruments which shall diminish the great and make the near remote. Theirs is a strange empirical caricature of philosophy, which substitutes the chronologically remote for the fundamentally conceptual, and for the logically simple, the materially small, which is not, on that account, simple and is far less transparent. For our part (and we say it in passing), we believe that to furnish examples of where to fix the attention in logical enquiry, the minds of an Aristotle or of a Kant afford all we require, without there being any necessity to have recourse to the psychology of sucklings and idiots. But to study Aristotle and Kant does not suffice for knowledge of the truth of the concept. We must find in all beings of whatever grade and importance, the universal Spirit and its eternal forms.

And since we have studied the first and most ingenuous form of knowledge, Art, in a special volume, we shall here begin our examination of the second of its forms, Philosophy; and first of all, of Philosophy _in the strict sense._

II

PHILOSOPHY

[Sidenote: _Philosophy as pure concept and the various definitions of philosophy. Those which deny philosophy._]

All the definitions that have ever been given of philosophy will be found to contain the thought that philosophy is the pure concept (or to say the same thing with more words and less precision), that it has the pure concept as its directive criterion. All, be it well understood, save those which, in negating the pure concept, negate also the peculiar nature of philosophy. But such are not, properly speaking, definitions of philosophy, although even these, by contradicting themselves, imply and assume the definition of philosophy as an original form, and so as the pure concept. Such is the case with the theories already examined, of æstheticism, mysticism, and empiricism (and also of mathematicism), to which we shall return. For them, philosophy is art, sentiment, the empirical (or abstract) concept. But it is an art in some way differentiated from the rest of art, a sentiment that acquires a peculiar value, an empirical or abstract concept, which raises itself up and looks over the heads of the others. Thus it is something peculiar, a mode of reflecting _sui generis,_ and so precisely the pure concept. Empiricism especially reveals this intimate contradiction, when it advocates a philosophy consisting of a systematization or synthesis of the results of the empirical sciences. That is to say, it advocates something not given by the empirical sciences, because, were they to give it, they would already be systematized and synthesized of themselves, and the further elaboration asked for would be altogether superfluous.

[Sidenote: _Those that define it as the science of supreme principles, ultimate causes, etc.; contemplation of death, etc.;_]

All the other definitions which presuppose the peculiarity of philosophy are reducible, as is easily seen, to the single character of the pure concept. Philosophy (they say) is the science of the _supreme principles of the real,_ the science of _ultimate causes,_ of the _origin of things,_ and the like. In these propositions, the supreme principles are evidently not real things, or groups of real things, or empty formulæ, but the ideal generators of the real. Ultimate causes are not causes (for the cause is never ultimate, being always the effect of an antecedent cause), but ideal principles. The origin in question is not the historical origin of this or that single fact, but the ideal deduction of the fact from facts or from omnipresent reality. The same idea is expressed in the imaginative saying that philosophy is the _contemplation of death._ For what but the individual dies? And is not the contemplation of the death of the individual also that of the immortality of the universal? Is it not contemplation of the eternal? This remark supplies the motive for that other formula which defines philosophy as "the vision of things _sub specie aeterni._"

[Sidenote: _as elaboration of the concepts, criticism, science of norms;_]