Part 4

Having made clear, by means of these examples, the character of concepts and of fictional concepts, we are prepared to solve the question as to whether the second are legitimate or illegitimate products, and if they merit the reproach which seems to attach to their name. And certainly, a view which has had and still has force does not hesitate to consider those fictions as nothing but _erroneous concepts,_ and declares a war of extermination against them, in the name of rigorous thought and of truth. If it follows from what we have said, that the cat or the house or the rose are not concepts, and that the geometrical triangle or free motion are not so either, the conclusion seems inevitable that we must free ourselves from these errors or misconceptions, and affirm that there is neither the cat nor the rose nor the house, but a reality all compact (although it is continuously changing) which develops and is new at every instant; nor is there either the triangle or free motion, but the eternal forms of this reality, which cannot be abstracted and fixed by themselves, and deprived of the conditions which are an integral part of them. But a single fact suffices to invalidate this conclusion and to confute the premiss upon which it rests, that conceptual fictions are erroneous concepts. An error once discovered cannot reappear, at least until the discovery is forgotten, and there is a falling back into the conditions of mental obscurity similar to those antecedent to the discovery. When, for example, the position has been attained that morality is not a phenomenon of egoism and that it has value in itself, or one has become certain that Hannibal was ignorant of the disaster that befell his brother Hasdrubal on the Metaurus, it is impossible to continue believing that morality is egoism, or that Hannibal has been informed of the arrival of Hasdrubal and had voluntarily allowed him to be surprised by the two Consuls. But with conceptual fictions similar to those in the example the case is otherwise. Even when we are persuaded that the triangle and free motion correspond to nothing real, and that the rose, the cat, and the house have nothing precise and universal in them, we must yet continue to make use of the fictions of triangles, of free motion; of houses, cats, and roses. We can criticise them, and we cannot renounce them; therefore, it is not true that they are, at least altogether and in every sense, errors.

[Sidenote: _or imperfect concepts preparatory to perfect concepts._]

This indispensability of conceptual fictions to the life of the spirit, finds acknowledgment in a more temperate form of the doctrine which considers them as erroneous concepts; that is, in the thesis that they are erroneous, but at the same time preparatory to, and almost a first step towards, the formation of true and proper concepts. The spirit does not issue all at once from representations and attain to the universal; it issues from them little by little, and prior to the rigorous universal, it constructs others less rigorous, which have the advantage of replacing the infinite representations with their infinite shades, through which reality presents itself in æsthetic contemplation. Conceptual fictions, then, would be sketches of concepts, and therefore, like all sketches, capable of revision and annulment, but useful. Thus it would be explained how they are errors, and errors made for a good reason. But this moderate theory also clashes noisily with the most evident facts. Above all, it is not true that the spirit issues little by little from the representations, passing through a series of grades; the procedure of the spirit, in this regard, is altogether different, and when philosophers have wanted to find a comparison for it, they have been obliged to come back to that very 'leap' which they wanted to avoid: "Spirit (said Schelling, for example,) is an _eternal island,_ which is not to be reached from matter, without a leap, whatever turns and twists be made." And, for this very reason, conceptual fictions are not good passages to rigorous concepts: to think rigorously, we must plunge ourselves again into the flood of representations and think immediate 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 _outside and after these._

[Sidenote: _Posteriority of conceptual fictions to true and proper concepts._]

In short, we have to abandon entirely the idea that conceptual fictions are errors, or sketches and aids, and that they precede rigorous concepts. Quite the opposite is true: conceptual fictions do not precede rigorous concepts, 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 imitate. To falsify means to have knowledge of 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 instruments 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 depending 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 witchcraft are no longer constructed; and since the destruction of the belief in the direct influence of the stars upon human destinies, the astrological 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 anticipating 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 constitutes 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 instrument 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 constructed, toward the construction of which, therefore, they cannot serve; whereas that truth has served them, for they would not otherwise have been able to arise. They are, therefore, intrinsically neither obstacles nor aids to truth, but something else, that is, themselves; and what they are in themselves it is still necessary to determine.

[Sidenote: _Practical character of conceptual fictions._]

For this purpose it is needful to direct our attention to the moment of their formation, 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 intervene 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 knowledge, not previously attained, must be resolutely excluded: the practical spirit is such, precisely because it is non-cognitive; as regards knowledge it is altogether sterile. If, then, it accomplishes 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 manipulations and fictions in order to place obstacles in the way of knowledge and to simulate its products, so that it leads astray the seeker for truth? If this were so, the "practical spirit" would be synonymous with the spirit of confusion; 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; 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.

[Sidenote: _The practical end and mnemonic utility._]

In this case the practical end in view can be but one. We know in order to act; and he 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 preserved 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 recall from the bosom of the cosmos or from the apparently unconscious and forgotten. For this 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 approximately indicates what form of operation must be resorted to, in order that certain representations may be recovered. The cat of the appropriate conceptual fiction does not enable us to know any single cat, as a painter or a historian 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 proceed 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; 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.

[Sidenote: _Persistence of conceptual fictions side by side with concepts._]

This is the real reason why, however perfect rigorous concepts become, conceptual fictions remain ineliminable, and indeed obtain from these fresh nourishment. They cannot be criticized and resolved by means of rigorous concepts, because they are of a different order from them: they cannot act as inferior degrees of the rigorous concept, because they presuppose 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 contrariety, but simply of diversity.

[Sidenote: _Pure concepts and pseudoconcepts._]

The terminological question remains, and this, as always, has but slight importance. "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 _pseudoconcepts,_ and for the sake of clearness we shall call the true and proper concepts _pure 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 pseudoconcepts, 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 contingencies; 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 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?

[Footnote 1: These relations are examined in the _Philosophy of the Practical,_ first part.]

III

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.

[Sidenote: _Expressivity._]

The concept has the character of _expressivity;_ that is to say, it is a cognitive product, and, therefore, 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 ideas; or that he has a presentiment of the profound 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 meditative 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 expressible.

[Sidenote: _Universality._]

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 concept which has been proved not universal, is, by that very fact, confuted as a concept. Our philosophical confutations do not proceed otherwise. Sociology, for instance, asserts the concept 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 concept 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 external 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 is also action. Thus, too, it was held that expression 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.

[Sidenote: _Concreteness._]

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 representations, the concept, if it were not in the representations, 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 nec cubat 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; it does not possess _concreteness._ In this way, for example, has been confuted the concept of spirit as different from nature (abstract spiritualism); or of the good, as a model placed above the real world; or of atoms, as the components 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.

[Sidenote: _The concrete universal, and the formation of the pseudoconcepts._]

Expressivity, universality, concreteness, are then the three characteristics of the concept derived from the foregoing discussion. Expressivity 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 æstheticists, or a group of 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 maintained in a special part of the doctrine of the arbitrarists. But this last point needs explanation, which leads us to enunciate explicitly an important division of the pseudoconcepts, which has hitherto been mentioned as apparently incidental.

[Sidenote: _Empirical pseudoconcepts and abstract pseudoconcepts._]