Part 31

Without dwelling upon the later scepticism, mysticism and mythologism, which represented the dissolution of ancient philosophy and the germ of a new life (especially in Christian mythologism, which had absorbed elements of ancient philosophy and was accompanied by a very developed theology), we must pass on to note the progress which the logical problem made in the schools of the Middle Ages. To look upon mediæval philosophy (as many do) as a negligible episode, a mere detritus of ancient culture quite unconnected with the later spiritual activity, is now no longer possible. Certainly in the disputes of the nominalists and realists, the problem of transcendence and of immanence was neglected. It could not be solved on the presumptions of a philosophy which had at its side a theology, of which it constituted itself the handmaiden. The Platonic transcendence was incurable in Christianity, and those who even to-day seek to purify Christianity from survivals of Greek thought, do not perceive that, in this purification effected by their philosophies of action and of immanence, they are destroying Christianity itself.[9]

[Sidenote: _Nominalism and realism._]

But in those disputes, besides the question of the place that belongs to science in relation to religious faith, or to mundane science in relation to revealed and divine science, the question of the nature of the concept was also raised; that is to say, they continued the Platonic-Aristotelian enquiry into the doctrine of the concept in the second of the meanings that we have distinguished. But no true conclusion was reached in this enquiry. The conciliatory formula of the Arabic interpreters of Aristotle, accepted by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, in which the universals were affirmed as existing _ante, in_ and _post rem,_ in so far as it is possible to confer upon it an exact meaning, was understood in a superficial manner, and therefore it has not unreasonably seemed too easy and too expeditious.[10] A dispute of this sort cannot be solved by summarizing discordant opinions, as in the formula we have mentioned, or by fixing a mean, as in conceptualism. But the realists, bravely maintaining the truth of the philosophic universal, maintained the rights of rational thought and of philosophy; and the nominalists, on their part, asserting in contradiction to the former, the nominalist universal, prepared the modern theories of natural science. Realism produced philosophic thought of high importance, as in the so-called ontological argument of Anselm of Aosta, which (though through the myth of a personal God) asserts the unity of Essence and Existence, the reality of what is truly conceivable and conceived. Gaunilo, who confuted and satirized that concept, by employing the example of a "most perfect island," thinkable yet non-existent, seems an anticipation of Kant; at least of the Kant who employed the example of the hundred dollars to illustrate the same case--if it is not more accurate to say that Kant was, in that case, a late Gaunilo. Anselm replied (as Hegel did to Kant) that it was not a question of an island (or of a hundred dollars of something imaginable that is not at all a concept), but of the being than which it is impossible to think a greater and a more perfect (the true and proper concept). On the other hand, the nominalists, who like Roscellinus maintained that the _universelles substantiae_ were _nonnisi flatus vocis,_ performed the useful office of preventing the sciences of experience from being absorbed and lost in philosophy. In Roger Bacon we see clearly the connection of nominalism with naturalism. He considered individual facts, so-called external experience, in its immediacy, as the true and proper object of science. Concepts were for him a simple expedient, directed towards the mastery of the immense richness of the individual. "_Intellectus est debilis_ (he said); _propter eam debilitatem magis conformatur rei debili, quae est universale, qitam rei quae habet multum de esse, ut singulare._"

[Sidenote: _Nominalism, mysticism and coincidence of opposites._]

But the nominalists, _dialecticae haeretici_ (as Anselm called them), were heretics only in the circle of the dialectic. The truth remained for them something beyond; the concept, the _secunda intentio,_ was certainly something arbitrary and _ad placitum instituta_; it was "_forma artificialis tantum, quae per violentiam habet esse,_" but beyond it were always faith and revelation. God is the truth, and in God the ideas are real; hence Roger Bacon gave to inner light (as the positivists or neocritics of to-day give to feeling) a place beside sensible experience. Mysticism, being developed from mediæval philosophy, both from one-sided realism and from one-sided nominalism, extends its hand at the dawn of the new Era to the philosophy of Cusanus, to scepticism, to _docta ignorantia._ This was not a mere negation; so much so that in it (though in a negative form and mixed with religion) there appears in outline nothing less than the theory of the _coincidence of opposites,_ that is to say, the cradle of that modern logical movement, which was destined definitely to conquer transcendence. The coincidence of opposites is the germ of the dialectic, which unifies value and fact, ideal and real, what ought to be and what is. This important thought reappears in German mysticism; and (significantly for its future destinies) rings out upon the lips of Martin Luther, who declared that virtue coexists with its contrary, vice, hope with anxiety, faith with vacillation, indeed with temptation, gentleness with disdain, chastity with desire, pardon with sin; as in nature, heat coexists with cold, white with black, riches with poverty, health with disease; and that _peccatum manet et non manet, tollitur et non tollitur,_ and that at the moment a man ceases to make himself better, he ceases to be good.[11] And before it became dominant in Jacob Böhme it was stripped of its religious form and eloquently defended in Italy by Giordano Bruno.[12]

[Sidenote: _The Renaissance and naturalism. Bacon._]

This realist, mystical and dialectical current of thought was destined to yield its best fruits some centuries later. For the time being, in the seventeenth century, and yet more in the century that followed, the victory seemed to rest with nominalism, that is to say, with naturalism. In Italy, Leonardo da Vinci laughed at theological and speculative disputes and celebrated, not the mind, but the _eye_ of man, that is, the science of observation. The same tendency appeared in the anti-Aristotelians and naturalists, who placed the natural sciences above scholasticism. In England, the other Bacon, however slight his importance both as philosopher and naturalist, yet has much importance as the symptom and spokesman of the self-assertion of naturalism. In the _Novum Organum,_ the universal of the _for the most part_ claims its rights as against the universal of the necessary and eternal. He does not wish, however, to do away with the latter, but rather to complete it; the syllogism is insufficient, induction also is needed. Philosophy and theology are well where they are, but a science of physics is also needed; philosophic induction, which goes at a leap to first causes, must be accompanied by a gradual induction (the only one that interests the naturalist), which connects particular facts by means of laws more and more general; final causes must be banished from the study of nature, and only efficient causes admitted. _Anticipationes naturae,_ that is to say, the invasions of philosophism into the natural sciences, are to be prohibited. These utterances are far more discreet than those that have so often since been heard.

[Sidenote: _The ideal of exact science and the Cartesian philosophy._]

By another school of this period, on the other hand, the pure concept was wrongly identified with the abstract concept. Thus 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 philosophy, full of empty excogitations and rigid 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, mathematical, abstractionist, intellectualist ratiocinative, anti-historical, illuminist, reformist, and finally Jacobin, is the legitimate issue of this Cartesian philosophy, which confuses the Logic of philosophy 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 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 æstheticism or intuitionism, and, unless the movement is suffocated or dissipated, it may effect a true revolution in the traditional French spirit.

[Sidenote: _Adversaries of Cartesianism. Vico._]

The opposition to abstractionism had no representatives in 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 thinker to express opposition to abstractionism and Cartesianism. Prior to and more clearly than Hamann, he perceived the unity of philosophy 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 decadence, 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 thought. Finally, Naples, the little country of Vico, was then becoming encyclopædist and sensationalist, and did not really begin to know until a century later the remedy for such evils composed in anticipation by Vico.

[Sidenote: _Empiricist Logic and its dissolution--Locke, Berkeley and Hume._]

The surpassing of the Logic of the abstract concept and the achievement of that of the concrete 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 presupposition, 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 objectivity even to the primary qualities. All concepts, 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 representation of the individual. His Logic is not empiricist, because it is in no respect Logic. At the most it is an Æsthetic 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.

[Sidenote: _Exact science and Kant. The concept of the category._]

As the effect of this extreme scepticism, the surpassing of empiricist and abstractionist Logic 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 _Critique of Pure Reason_, which contains the Logic of the natural and mathematical sciences, thought no longer by an empiricist, but by a philosopher who has surpassed empiricism and recognized that the concepts 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 à ce qui est en nous et les sens ne nous donnent point ce que nous portons déjà avec nous,_" how can it ever be denied "_qu'il y est beaucoup d'inné en nous, puisque nous sommes, pour ainsi dire, innés à nous mêmes? Peut-on nier qu'il y ait eu nous être, unité, substance, durée, changement, action, perception, plaisir et mille autres objets de nos idées intellectuelles?_"[13] The _New Essays,_ in which theses 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 transformed 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.

[Sidenote: _The limits of science and Kantian scepticism._]

But a limitation of value due also to Kant, accompanies this theoretic reinforcement of exact science. That science is necessary, because produced 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."

[Sidenote: _The limits cf science and Jacobi._]

It would seem from this that Kant was bound to end in a renovated nominalism and mysticism, and indeed such is partly the case. Contemporaneously with him, Jacobi also observed the limit in which is enclosed the mechanical and determinist science of nature (the highest philosophic expression 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 æsthetic judgment, which, although developed without concepts, does not belong to the sphere of practical interests; and a teleological judgment, 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 experience, 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.

[Sidenote: _The a priori synthesis._]

But the Kantian philosophy also contains, in addition to these elements and these stimulations, the concept 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.

[Sidenote: _The intimate contradiction of Kant. Romantic principle and classical execution._]

Kant was not aware of this; and instead of developing with a mind free from prejudice the thought of his genius, he also allowed himself to be vanquished by the abstractionism of his time and out of the logical and philosophical _a priori_ 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 Æsthetic)[14] the apriority of the intellect led him, not to Philosophy, 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 palpitating 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 aware of this intimate drama and fails to understand this contradiction; whoever, when confronted with the work of Kant, is not seized with the need, either of going forward or of going backward, has not reached the heart of that soul, the centre of that mind. The old philosophers who condemned Kant as sceptical and as a corrupter of philosophy, and who confined themselves strictly to Wolfianism 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: abhorrence 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.

[Sidenote: _Advance upon Kant: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel._]

The new philosophy was that of the three great post-Kantians, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. With Fichte, all trace of the thing in itself has 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, 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 employed timidly, and in particular the mystical tradition and the new tendencies of æsthetic 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.

[Sidenote: _The Logic of Hegel. The concrete concept or Idea._]