Part 10

Of the other two forms of philosophic error, philosophism, consisting in the abuse of the purely logical element, and therefore in an usurpation on the part of philosophy against either history or science, tending to the formation of a philosophy of history and of a philosophy of nature, is less common now than in times of more active and original speculation. The most conspicuous examples are to be met with among Germany's classical thinkers; and we have already hinted at the connection between one particular logical error, the undue extension of the dialectic process to the distinctions of the concept, and to the empirical concept, which is the basis of Hegel's philosophies of history and nature. Both these sciences attempt an a priori deduction of the individual and of the empirical, a process which is in itself absurd and contradictory. They duplicate history and science with a series of concepts, which, unless they are the same which constitute history and science (in which case we have history and we have science, and not a philosophy of history or of nature), are necessarily empty of any concrete determinations. But though Croce points to philosophy of history and philosophy of nature as to the two typical instances of philosophism, yet he is ready to acknowledge that a good deal of thought that has gone under those names in the past has had a large influence in moulding many of our historical and philosophical conceptions, and, in the case of the second one, in helping us to realize the unity and spirituality of nature, and to recognize in the history of nature the same principles operating in the history of man. Croce's idealism, in fact, does not divide nature from the spirit except in the logical sense which has been made clear in the preceding chapter; it does not relegate nature in an unknowable sphere beyond the reach of human minds. It unifies spirit and nature, but a parte subjecti, and not a parte objecti, and reduces nature to the spirit, rather than the spirit to nature; which is the only process that makes such a unification intelligible and significant.

The last of the five fundamental forms of philosophic error consists in the arbitrary separation of the subject from its predicate, of history from philosophy, and in the consequent position of the subject as predicate, that is, of a mere representation as a concept. This may sound rather abstruse, but can immediately be made clear by adding that what Croce has in mind in this definition is the production of myths. This error he therefore calls either historicism (from the logical process by which it is produced), or mythologism (from the form which it commonly assumes). A myth is to him not a mere poetic or æsthetic imagination, but necessarily includes an affirmation or logical judgment. It differs also from allegory, in which the relation established between a poetic fiction and a concept is always more or less openly declared to be arbitrary, and the two terms are not confused with each other. In a myth, on the contrary, the poetic fiction assumes the actual function of the concept, transforming both philosophy and history into a fable or legend. Errors of this class are frequent in every system of philosophy, when the thinker, either consciously and deliberately, as in the case of Plato, or unwittingly, as in Kant's Ding an sich or in Schopenhauer's Will, fills the gaps of his real speculation with a mere image. But mythologism is more generally the form of religious error, since there is no religion without a logical affirmation embodied in a myth. If myth and religion coincide, as the distinction between myth and philosophy is that of error and truth, of a false and a true philosophy, we must conclude that religion as truth is one with philosophy, or, as Croce expresses it, that the true religion is philosophy; and this appears to Croce to be the conclusion of all ancient and modern thought in regard to the history of religions. Philosophies have sprung up in all times from the soil of religious thought, and more or less completely resolved in themselves, and logically clarified, the obscure substance of myth. This is Croce's clear-cut, unequivocal solution of the problem of the relations between philosophy and religion: there is no place reserved anywhere in his system for an either internal or external revelation other than that perpetual revelation of truth, which is at the same time history and philosophy.

From the possible combinations of these five fundamental forms of error, three more complex ones are derived: dualism, when two contradictory methods, one logically legitimate and the other illegitimate, or both equally false, are brought together, and considered to be both philosophically valid; scepticism, when the mind, in the presence of confusion and error, asserts the mystery of reality, which is the problem itself, but denies its own power to deal with it; and finally, mysticism, when even that last semblance of thought, by which the sceptic affirms that there is a mystery, is abandoned, and the immediate actuality of life is regarded to be the only truth. Dualism leads inevitably to the conception of a double reality, and we have already seen how the whole of Croce's speculation continually tends towards the logical unification of dualities, as with spirit and nature, value and fact. Every philosophical problem seems to present itself to his mind as involved in a dualistic difficulty; every solution becomes satisfactory to him only when the last shreds of dualism are eliminated from it. While scepticism is a logical error (the affirmation of a purely negative position), it contains within itself one of the essential moments of every progress in thought, the scepsis, or philosophical doubt, which is the negation of an error, and therefore the germ of every true affirmation. As for mysticism, we have dealt with it elsewhere as being one of the untenable aspects of logical scepticism; we may add that, if it ever obeyed the laws of internal coherence, we should not even be able to discuss it, since its only conceivable expression would be an ecstatic silence.

The same character of necessity that invests these forms of the logical error is present also in the false solutions of other philosophical problems, and we need only refer the reader to our discussion of æsthetic theories. In both cases, not only the number, but also the logical succession, of the necessary forms of error, depends on the number of possible arbitrary combinations of the spiritual forms, or concepts of reality. But infinite, on the other hand, are the individual forms of error, as infinite are the individual forms of truth: the problems are always historically conditioned and variable, and so are also the solutions and the false solutions, determined by feelings, passions, and interests.

From error to truth, there is no gradual ascent. The passage is described by Croce as a kind of spiritual conversion: the erring spirit, fleeing from the light, must convert itself in a researching spirit, eager for light; pride must yield to humility; the narrow love for one's abstract individuality, widen and lift itself to an austere love, to an utter devotion to that which is above the individual, becoming Bruno's eroico furore, Spinoza's amor Dei intellectualis. In this act of love and enthusiasm, the spirit becomes pure thought and attains the truth, or, rather, transforms itself into truth. And the possession of truth is at the same time possession of its contrary, of error transformed into truth; to possess a concept is to possess it in the fulness of its relations, and therefore to possess, in the same act, all the ways in which that concept, for instance, of the æsthetic activity, is at the same time the concept of hedonism, intellectualism, empiricism, and so on. The two kinds of knowledge, that of truth and of its contrary, are inseparable: the concept is at the same time affirmation and negation.

From this absolute possession of truth, we may distinguish a stage of research, which is not yet thought, but only the operation of the practical will creating certain conditions for thought. Seen in the light of this process, the series of errors through which a mind goes, when guided by a will to gather its materials and prepare itself to think, transforms itself into a series of attempts or hypotheses. An error is an error when there is a will to err; the hypothesis, however, into which the error is transmuted by the new will is not yet truth, and becomes truth only in the act of its verification; but it is no longer an error, because it does not affirm itself as truth, but only as a means or help for the conquest of truth.

From this double consideration of the nature of error, first, as error which is conquered and comprehended by truth, and then as attempt or hypotheses in the service of truth, Croce derives the identification of the history of error with the history of truth, or philosophy. But not in the sense in which Hegel had considered the successive apparition of the various philosophical categories and of the various forms of error, seeing in them a kind of gradual revelation of his own philosophy. To Croce such a conception of the progress of philosophy is unacceptable. Philosophy as an abstract category, as one of the forms of the spiritual activity, has no origin in time, is not limited to the men we call philosophers, but acts in every moment of the life of the spirit on the material offered by history, which it contributes to create, and does not, therefore, progress any more than the categories of art or of morality. But it progresses in its concreteness, as art and the whole of life do; because life is development, and development is progress. Every affirmation of reality is conditioned by reality and conditions a new reality, which in its turn is, in its progress, the condition of a new thought and a new philosophy. In this perpetual cycle, though individual errors are conquered, no form of error can be definitely abolished; but they constantly reappear, because of the intrinsic necessity of their structure, and when they reappear not as wilful errors, but as attempts and hypotheses, they have their appointed function in the progress of truth and reality. To this constancy of error corresponds a constancy of truth: truth is not attained once and for ever, but is true in the act of its affirmation, and in proportion to its adequacy to the particular problem, to the individual conditions of fact, which necessarily include, at every given moment, the whole history of the past. Thus, from a different angle, Croce's theory of error reaches the same conclusion as his general theory of logic, the identity of philosophy and history; and philosophy appears as a perpetual development, a history that never can repeat itself, since every affirmation of the truth transforms itself into a new element of reality, into one of the conditions determining every new problem and every new solution.

VIII. THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY

Philosophical introspection--Affirmation of the practical activity--The category of feeling--The theoretical activity as the antecedent of the practical--Identity of intention and volition--Identity of volition and action--The practical judgment: philosophy and psychology --The problem of free will: liberty and necessity--Croce's solution in the context of his philosophy--The practical value: good and evil--The unreality of evil, and the function of ideals--The sanction of evil--The volition and the passions--The empirical individuality--Development and progress.

The reality of the practical activity as distinct from the theoretical activity, of will as distinct from knowledge, can never be proved through the naturalistic method of psychology, by merely pointing to a class of facts--actions--different from another class of facts--thoughts. The so-called action manifests itself, at a closer analysis, as infinitely complex and rich in purely theoretical elements; the so-called thought, as partly at least a work of the human will. The concrete life of the spirit is always both practical and theoretical, and the distinction we are looking for is an ideal distinction, to be ascertained by the method of philosophical, not psychological, introspection; by the direct witness of consciousness, and by the deduction of its function in the concept of the spirit, or of reality, as a whole. The complete affirmation of a form, or grade, of spiritual activity is the philosophy of that form, and of its relations with the others; in this case, the philosophy of the practical, or of will. It is hardly necessary, at this stage of our exposition, to observe that the philosophy of the practical will not be practical philosophy, a collection of rules for the attainment of the useful and the good, any more than the philosophy of art is a collection of æsthetic precepts: it will be a purely formal science, a universal concept, the content of which is the infinite wealth of the individual determinations of the will, the history of the practical activity.

In the following chapter we shall deal more particularly with the two forms of the practical activity, economic and ethic, corresponding to the two forms of the theoretical, æsthetic and logic. Here we shall consider the undifferentiated practical activity, first, in its relations, and then, in its internal dialectic. The contents of this chapter are, therefore, intended as applying both to economics and ethics, to the useful and to the good.

There are two typical forms of scepticism regarding the practical activity. The first denies that it is a spiritual activity, by denying that man is conscious of his will, in the process of willing; consciousness comes only after, and is not consciousness of the will, but of our representation of the will. Therefore, the will is nature, and consciousness, or spiritual activity, is only our thought. The second does not exclude the will from consciousness, but affirms that there is no real distinction between will and thought. The first doctrine is evidently founded on a confusion between reflected and intrinsic consciousness; and maintains something that is always true of reflected consciousness, not in relation to the will only, but to every form of spiritual activity; carried to its extreme consequences, it would banish consciousness from the whole life of human mind, since every act of consciousness would always be consciousness of something else, and never of itself. Against this view, Croce insists on the concept of an intrinsic consciousness, which accompanies every act of the spirit: the consciousness of the creative artist, for instance, which is certainly other than that of the critic, but not less real. The will may be regarded as nature, only when apprehended by the theoretical activity; as every other act of the spirit becomes nature, outside its immediate actuality, when consciously reflected upon. The second form of sceptism, identifying thought and will, cannot maintain itself in its purity, because of the difficulties involved by the denial of what seems to be the immediate evidence of consciousness; it, therefore, qualifies itself by recognizing that the will is thought, but of a particular kind, thought impressing itself on nature, or realizing itself in action: which is but an indirect way of admitting the autonomy of the practical activity.

But do the theoretical and the practical activity exhaust the whole of the spirit of man? There is at least one more psychological category which clamours for admission within the precincts of philosophy, that of feeling or sentiment. For Croce, feeling as a form of spiritual activity does not exist: the corresponding psychological class covers a number of heterogeneous facts, which cannot be reduced to a single concept. Its function in philosophy has always been that of serving as a temporary term for that which philosophy had not yet hilly determined and understood; in æsthetics, for the intuitive character of art, against the fallacies of hedonism and intellectualism; in the theory of history for the individual and concrete element of history, or even for the subjective historical judgment, against positivism and sociologism; in logic, for the pure concept against the empirical and abstract. Its function in the philosophy of the practical is of the same order: feeling or sentiment are among the names by which the peculiarity of the practical activity first began to be recognized, being labels for classes of psychological facts in which the moment of will is more important than that of reason, practice more essential than theory. But the psychological facts thus classified resolve themselves ultimately either into acts of knowledge or of will; and the witness of direct consciousness does not find feeling or sentiment within itself as a distinct form of spiritual activity. Obviously, this exclusion does not imply that Croce denies the existence of the empirical groups of facts gathered in those classes; it means only that he has reduced those facts to the immediate data of consciousness of which they consist, and divested them of that mysterious halo, the halo of ignorance or of deliberate error, with which an appeal to sentimental reasons is sure to be accompanied when introduced into a philosophical discussion. When we hear, for instance, that philosophy and science belong to the sphere of reason, and religion to that of sentiment, since there is no sentiment which is not either reason or will, we at once understand that what is meant is that the speaker is willing to believe, for practical motives, what his reason tells him to be untrue; and we know also that this error contains, sometimes at least, an element of truth, which is the affirmation of a truer reason than the one employed by a certain type of philosophy, by a rationalism which treats the human spirit as a thing of abstract logic. The error consists in the putting of one's will in the place of one's reason; the germinal truth, in the attempt to make one's reason wider, more comprehensive. It is, therefore, one of those positions in which it is a sin against the spirit to acquiesce, but which are the beginning of wisdom in the man of good faith.

The practical activity presupposes the theoretical activity: no will is conceivable without knowledge, and our will is such as our knowledge is. But this presupposition is of an ideal and not of a temporal order: the mind in its concreteness, at every moment of its life, is both practical and theoretical. The a particular kind of knowledge which conditions our will is neither the purely intuitive nor the abstractly logical one, but the historical or perceptive, or concretely logical knowledge, which is at the same time a knowledge of things and of the relations of things, constantly changing with the perpetual development of the world around us, and, therefore, constantly re-creating and renovating itself as the antecedent of every particular volition. No other theoretical fact precedes the act of will: the so-called practical judgments or practical concepts, which some thinkers consider as a necessary intermediate step between the historical judgment and the volition, are nothing but classes of historical judgments relating to volitions in the past, mental formations similar to the rhetorical categories in the domain of art, and, therefore, do not really precede but follow the actual volitions. In the process of willing, the recognition of a certain action as good or useful, that is, as belonging to one of the practical categories, and, therefore, desirable, is not an act that precedes the volition, but is the volition itself. The qualification of an action as useful or good is not distinguishable from the volition except when it comes after the action, and is then a reflection on the act itself, not different in kind from any other historical judgment.

The conclusion to be drawn from these premises is that, in relation to every particular situation, intention and volition coincide; or, that what we call intention, the abstract volition, the imaginary volition, opposed to the concrete and real one, is not a moment of the will at all, and the only volition is the one that is determined by the concrete situation, the real and concrete volition. The distinction between intention and volition has in all times been the fertile ground for the growth of all kinds of hypocrisy, as it is easy to connect in one's mind a certain concrete volition, which is evil, with an imaginary intention of good; and the doctrine that justifies the means for the sake of the end is but a variety of this process. The identification of intention and volition is, therefore, not merely a matter of good logic; it is the necessary foundation of a realistic doctrine of the will, which cannot will anything but itself, and can never be abstracted from its real basis, from the actual determinations of the moment of reality by which it is conditioned.

Once the concrete character of volition has been recognized, there remains no difficulty in the way of further identifying volition and action. The relation between the two is analogous to the relation between intuition and expression in æsthetics: there is no volition which is not also an action, and vice versa. Volition and action are not two distinct phases of one process, but two different ways of looking at the same reality: the same fact which is, from the point of view of the spirit, a volition, is, naturalistically speaking, an action: we are in the presence of one more aspect of the old dualism of spirit and nature. And here again the duality vanishes when we observe that there is not a single act of will which does not manifest itself in a physical movement, however imperceptible, and that on the other hand there is no physical action, not even the so-called instinctive or habitual ones, which are not either direct or indirect products of the will. A That which is independent of the will is not the action itself, but the success of the action,--what Croce calls a happening. The volition coincides with the action, which is the work of the individual, and not with the happening, which is collaboration or contrast of wills, the work not of the individual, but of the whole. No action ever realizes itself entirely in the happening, and no action, however hindered in its realization, is ever entirely without influence on the happening. The measure of the adequacy of the historical judgment preceding the action to the particular situation is given in some degree by the relation between the action and the happening; but it is impossible, and it is in fact never done, though we may affirm our inclination to do it, to derive the value of an action, of the actual, concrete volition, from its success. When we praise a practical hero for his success, we imply that his success was not accidental, not a mere happening, but entirely due to acts of his will; if the praise is misplaced, the error is not in the theory, on which we all implicitly agree, but in our knowledge and judgment of the facts of his life. And when we rise from the consideration of purely economical to that of ethical values, the importance of success gradually diminishes, because we fix our attention more to the spiritual reality, to the quality of the individual soul, and less to the material concomitants. The great majority of mankind's moral heroes would be utter failures from the standpoint of success, granted that it should be possible to speak of such a contradiction in terms as moral success, a phrase in which a true spiritual value, morality, is applied to a mere material abstraction.

The practical judgment, which is, as we have already seen, nothing but a particular kind of historical judgment, is a reflection on the action and not on the happening; and we shall not repeat here what has been said elsewhere of the relation between fact and value: the practical value is the action itself, and cannot be deduced or derived from standards, principles, ideals, which are but combinations of preëxistent judgments. The practical judgment, economic or moral, is a philosophical judgment in the sense in which every other judgment is also philosophical. A philosophy of the practical activity, not in the technical sense in which we speak of treatises and schools of philosophy, but in that universal sense in which every man is a philosopher, as he is a poet, is therefore the necessary condition of the practical judgment. But this philosophy is fundamentally distinct from the psychological or naturalistic elaboration of the facts of the will, though at times it may have been materially connected with it. A psychologically descriptive science of the practical activity is, however, as legitimate in its own field as all other natural sciences; it constitutes a practical rhetoric which has as glorious a tradition as the rhetoric of literature, from Theophrastus to Spinoza and Descartes. It creates its classes or types of actions, the value of which is similar to that of all other empirical concepts, and by giving them a categorical form, it transforms them into maxims, rules, and precepts. As long as these types and precepts are taken for what they are, no harm can come from them; we all make similar formations as helps to our individual conduct, and find them more than helpful, necessary. But when they are taken as philosophy, then we have the usual results of this kind of logical confusion: either the empirical concepts, under a rigorous analysis, lose their consistency, and types or rules which were useful instruments for the treatment of particular problems are discarded for philosophical concepts, which are immaterial to the discussion, or they are treated as philosophical concepts, and invested with the character of universality and necessity which belongs to the latter. Of the first process, we shall give as an example the man who maintains that war is necessary and eternal; which is true, if by war we mean the perpetual conflict and struggle which is the life of reality (a philosophical concept), but which is at least a gratuitous assertion, when it is said of that particular kind of war which is waged between state and state, with arms and armies. Of the second, the moralist who identifies morality with a particular system or set of precepts, or the philosopher who turns his philosophy into a special pleading for his cause or party. Turning now from the discussion of the relations between the practical and the theoretical activity, to consider the intrinsic problems of the will, and the most complex and difficult of all, that of the freedom of the will, we shall find that Croce's solution, though reached by a totally different method, is very similar to the one offered by Bergson. Both Croce and Bergson refuse to take sides in the quarrel between free-will and determinism, but transfer it to a higher or deeper ground where the contrasting terms acquire more significant, and no longer opposite, meanings. Bergson accomplishes his abolition of the dilemma through a masterful psychological analysis of the immediate data of consciousness, Croce comes to the same result by applying to this problem his logic of the distinctions of the concept, which we have already seen so often at work. Every act of the will is determined, in the sense that it is conditioned by a given situation, and varies with the varying of the situation; it is free, inasmuch as it is something new and different, which was not given in the situation, and without which there would be no change, no growth, no development. Necessity and freedom, which so often appear as antagonistic views of the same fact, are both present, though distinct, in the volition, which is the unity of the two, being at once determined and free. The volition is thus regarded as a practical a priori synthesis, the autonomous creative act of the practical mind, as the intuition is the æsthetic, and the concept the logical a priori synthesis; the spirit never realizes itself except by acting, and it never acts except under given conditions of place and time. But as these conditions are nothing but what we have called happenings, which in their turn are complex results of single volitions, the concept of the freedom of the spirit coincides with that of its activity.

This solution is the one that we were obviously led to expect from the whole context of Croce's philosophy, a solution in keeping with his logic and with his general theory of knowledge. A similar parallelism we can observe in respect to the other solutions of the problem of the will: determinism is connected with a mechanistic materialism, as indeterminism with one form or other of mythicism. The doctrine of the double causality, which admits of a double series of facts, some subject to a mechanical necessity, others free and creative--a solution which is probably the most commonly accepted to-day--corresponds to the logical dualism of nature and spirit. This last one can be considered as an approximation to the abolition of the dilemma, as proposed by both Croce and Bergson, when we contrast it with the strictly deterministic position, though it still preserves the opposition of fact and value, of experience and philosophy, of reality and spirit. In the new conception of the will, necessity and freedom stand in the same relation as all these other dualities in Croce's system; and the emphasis is laid, as usual, on the second term, through which only we can understand the first. The agreement between Croce and Bergson in this particular instance points to a closer similarity between their respective philosophies than is apparent to a casual observer. That external reality which seems to confront the spirit as a separate existence, and which Bergson considers as the product of a purely mechanical, practical intellect, corresponds to what Croce defines as the naturalistic, not theoretical, but practical, elaboration of reality; and in Bergson's intuition and élan vital, Croce's concept of reality as spiritual activity is mythically adumbrated.

If activity is freedom, then freedom coincides with the value of activity. If we use the words good and evil, not with any special ethical connotation, but as the general terms of practical value and non-value, good and evil are activity and non-activity, freedom and absence of freedom. Evil, like all other purely negative values, is unreal. This does not mean that the actions that we call evil have no real existence, any more than the unreality of ugliness or falsehood imply the non-existence of bad poetry or of logical errors; bad poetry and logical errors have no æsthetic or logical reality, but they are products of the practical spirit, directed towards the satisfaction of practical ends; and every real action, inasmuch as it is an action, considered in itself as adequate to its particular end, is good. It is only by substituting to that end another end, that the first end may appear as evil, and the second as good; but if this substitution takes place before the action, then the action is inevitably directed towards the second end, and therefore again, it is not evil, but good. It is through a psychological delusion that we imagine ourselves in a position in which we see the good, and yet do the evil: what we do is that which appears to us as the most desirable end, and therefore as good. The intention, outside the actual volition, is, as we have seen, unreal; if it were real, it would realize itself as an action, and be one with it. The negative practical judgments, whether economic or ethic, are judgments which affirm the reality of a certain action, and therefore its value, at the same time comparing that value with a different one, which has not been realized in that particular instance. The negative moral judgment usually consists in the affirmation of a purely economic value contrasted with an ethical value which is absent from the action which is the subject of the judgment.

The doctrine of the unreality of evil has always been regarded with deep mistrust by the practical moralist; but that mistrust is utterly unjustified by the doctrine itself. For practical purposes it may be convenient to consider life as intrinsically evil, and to oppose to it a set of ideals, or abstract moral values to which we must strive to conform our actions; in fact, every one of us is constantly doing something of the kind, and finding in those ideals a help and an inspiration. But shall our ideals lose their value when we understand that they have no separate, transcendent reality? That every action carries its own value within itself, and that therefore unless we constantly realize those ideals in our concrete and individual actions, in every one of our actions, the ideals themselves will be but empty shadows? Every ideal, however high and comprehensive, is but an empirical concept derived from a class of actions in which we have recognised a moral value; moral standards have the same character as æsthetic standards, and are useful and active only as long as we understand their nature. But the creation of moral values is a constantly renovated, spontaneous, original activity, in the same sense in which art and poetry are. We can be directed, both in our activity and in our judgment, by standards and ideals; that is, standards and ideals may help us to put ourselves in a position practically favourable to the creation or judgment of æsthetic or moral values. But the actual creation, as the actual judgment, takes place, both in art and morality, so to speak, at the risk of our whole life: it is a new activity, in a situation which cannot be identical with any previous situation, and to which no rule will ever give us the key.

While on one hand our sense of responsibility is rather heightened than diminished by Croce's conception of value, if we look at the same doctrine from another angle, it tells us that there is no evil where there is no consciousness of evil; that evil becomes something positive, acquires an independent existence, only when it is reflected in a higher plane of consciousness. The only conceivable sanction of the evil that we have willed is in the will that, tending towards a better end, apprehends its former volition as inadequate and therefore evil; but until that light has shown itself to the spirit, all other sanctions are meaningless. This is the foundation of the Christian doctrine of repentance, of the uses of remorse, or grace; and the individual intimate quality of moral values was first proclaimed by the voice that said: nolite iudicare. If the Kingdom of Heaven is not within you, it is not to be found anywhere else.

We can consider the actual volition as intrinsically good, if we also approach it from the point of view of the multiplicity of possible volitions--impulses, passions, desires--striving to realize themselves at every moment of our life. Every single volition is the result of a struggle from which it emerges after having conquered all the other possible volitions. When, in this struggle, the single volition does not assert itself fully, we become the prey of that multiplicity, willing a volition which is not the one that we ought to will, and that in a way we feel we will; hence a will that is divided against itself, an action which is not positive but negative, not a true action, but a kind of passivity. When the single volition conquers the passions, when one impulse or desire becomes the will, all the other possible volitions lose their actual value, multiplicity gives way to unity, passivity to action, evil to good, death to life.

The passions can be empirically regarded as habits of the will, as inclinations towards one or another category of actions; by a further empirical elaboration, we can divide them into the various classes of virtues and vices, virtues being the passions or habits of rational actions, and vices the contrary ones. Individuality or personality, as an empirical concept, is nothing but a complex of more or less lasting habits, some natural and some acquired, or, more rigorously, the historical situation of the universal spirit in every instant of time, and therefore that complex of habits which historical conditions have produced. These habits are the material out of which we mould our life, and the first duty of every individual consists in exploring his own dispositions, in establishing what attitudes the progress of reality has deposited in him, at the moment of his birth and in the course of his individual life--to acquire a consciousness of what in religious terms we might call his vocation or mission; it is impossible for anyone to act except on the basis of his preëxisting personal habits of will. But temperament, or the empirical individuality, is not yet character, or virtue; and the respect that we owe to it, as the necessary condition of our action, must not be confused with the ultra-modern tendency which expresses itself in the cry for the rights of the individual temperament and for the free development of the passions. The individual has the duty of seeking his own self, but also that of cultivating himself in the light of reason; his empirical individuality is a mere datum, and his life is his own work. An education aiming only at the expression of individual idiosyncrasies (as so much of our modern education, at least in theory, is) is no education at all. The ideal is rather to be sought in such a perfect fulfilment of one's individual mission, however humble, that it should at the same time fulfil the universal mission of man.

The law of life is in the unity that conquers the multiplicity, in the will asserting itself above the passions. The reality is perpetual development, an infinite possibility transforming itself into an infinite actuality, gathering itself at every instant from the multiple into the one, only to disrupt itself again and produce a new unity. Multiplicity, contradiction, evil, non-being, on one side, and unity, coherence, good, being, on the other, are unthinkable outside the synthesis of life, which is activity, becoming, evolution. This concept of becoming or evolution is the one that modern thought has substituted for that of an immobile reality and of a transcendent divinity. And in Croce it becomes wide enough to embrace Hegel's speculative dialectic on one side, and the naturalistic evolutionism of the scientist on the other. The dialectic of will is the dialectic of reality, both spiritual and natural--or rather only and always spiritual, since nature cannot be distinguished from the spirit as a concrete reality of another order, but only as an abstraction of the practical intellect. What we call life in nature is consciousness in the spirit, and the history of nature is not qualitatively different from the history of man. The whole course of history cannot be regarded otherwise than as a continuous progress, a perpetual triumph of life over death; and its rationality, which we call Fate or Providence, is not the work of a transcendent Intelligence, but is a Providence realizing itself in die individual, working not outside or above, but within history itself. The mystery of which we are all conscious is not a part of reality, but only the presentment of future realizations, the infinity of evolution. The God transcendent, the empirical immortality, are mere figures and myths for the God living in nature and in the spirit of man, for the spirit of man, for the spiritual activity, which is life and death in one.

IX. ECONOMICS AND ETHICS

The distinctions of the practical activity--The autonomy of ethics: utilitarianism--The autonomy of the economic form: abstract moralism--Relations of the ethical to the economic form--Pleasure and duty, happiness and virtue--Importance of the economic principle--Philosophy and the science of economics--The ethical principle; material ethics--Ethical formalism; the universality of the principle--The object of the ethical will--Croce as a moralist.

The preceding chapter deals with the practical activity in general, with the general concept of will or action. We must now introduce in that concept a distinction analogous to that by which the theoretical activity has appeared to us first as the knowledge of die individual or intuition, then as the knowledge of the universal or concept. But here, again, we shall not employ the merely descriptive and psychological method, nor yet attempt to deduce this distinction from the analogy between the theoretical and the practical activity; we shall appeal once more to the immediate test of consciousness, which in fact reveals two distinct forms of the will, the economic and the ethic. Economic activity is the one that wills and realizes only that which relates to the conditions of fact in which the individual finds himself; ethical activity, the one that wills and realizes that which, though related to those conditions, at the same time in some way transcends them. To one correspond individual, to the other, universal ends; on one is based the judgment on the coherence of the action in itself, on its adequacy to its individual end; on the other, the judgment on its adequacy to universal ends, which transcend the individual. If we recognise only the ethical form, we perceive very soon that it implies the other one, which we intended to exclude, since our action, though universal in its meaning, must always be something concrete and individually determined. We do not realize morality in the universal, but always a given moral volition, not the abstract virtues, but the concrete works. Although a moral action is not only our individual pleasure, yet it must be that, too, or we should never be able to realize it. On the other hand, the mere economic action, the satisfaction of our immediate pleasure, though it satisfies us in relation to our individual end, yet it leaves constantly unsatisfied that which we are beside and beyond our individual determinations, our deepest and truest being. And this dissatisfaction will last until we succeed in lifting ourselves above the infinite succession of individual ends, and in inserting in them a universal value. This passage or conversion from the purely economic to the ethic, from pleasure to duty, is designed by Croce as the conquest of that peace which is not of a fabulous future, but of the present and real; in every instant is eternity, to him who knows how to reach it. Our actions will be always new, because always new problems are put before us by the course of reality; but in them, if we accomplish them with a pure heart, seeking in them what lifts them above themselves, we shall each time possess the Whole. Such is the character of the moral action; which satisfies us not as individuals but as men, and as individuals only because the individual is a man, and as men only through the medium of individual satisfaction.

The denial of the autonomy of the ethical form, the attempt to reduce the ethic to the economic, the morally good to the individually useful, is the substance of the many theories that go under the name of utilitarianism. But this reduction of the practical activity to a single principle clashes in every instant of our life against the distinction between mere pleasure and duty, between the useful and the honest action, between the things that have a price and those that have none, between actions which have a moral motive and those that have only a utilitarian one. The utilitarians themselves, unable to pass over the distinction, have tried to explain it away as a purely quantitative one, defining morality as the utility of the greater number or as the interest or egotism of the race; but it is clear that these so-called quantitative distinctions are really qualitative ones: the utility of the greater number is no longer individual utility or immediate pleasure, the egotism of the race is no longer egotism, but a value which transcends the individual. A further attempt in the same direction consists in considering morality as born from the association between certain acts which are means to a pleasure, and that pleasure itself: a savage fights to defend his personal liberty or his life, a civilized man, forgetting that the tribe, or the city, or the state, are but means to preserve his life and his property, defends them for themselves, and allows himself to be deprived of both his property and his life for love of his country. But only through stupidity is it possible to mistake the means for the end, and, therefore, this theory actually reduces morality to what is practically irrational, a product of confusion and illusion; that is, to the contrary of the practical activity, which is, in its own sphere, rationality and wisdom. The mere enunciation of this theory, if true, ought to produce the dissolution of those false associations, and, therefore, the destruction of morality; if morality subsists, this is due to its rational character, which associationism has not succeeded in disproving. The last refuge of utilitarianism is in theology and mystery: the utility of moral actions is not of this world, but derived from the conception of another world in which God punishes or rewards us for our conduct on earth. But this kind of utilitarianism puts itself outside the field of philosophy, by emptying the symbols of religion of their moral content, which is their only logical justification.