Part 9

The concept does not exist outside its verbal expression, but the relation between logical thought and language, because of the purely æsthetic or intuitive nature of language, is not of the rigorous character which is postulated by the Aristotelian logician, and, in more recent times, by the student of symbolic logic, who both assume language to be an essentially logical function. It would be impossible for Croce to fall into that extreme of idealism which is the common vice of the verbal realist, for whom propositions, judgments, or syllogisms have a kind of absolute reality of their own, independent of the mind that thinks them. It may seem paradoxical to assert that nowhere is Croce's realism more apparent than in his treatment of the verbal forms of the concept; and yet his criticism of the old logical principles and forms, running parallel to that of the rhetorical categories and genres in the field of æsthetics, allows him to reach the actual workings of the logical activity with much greater intimacy than is possible through any kind of formalistic logic.

The logical judgment, or concept, appears in two main forms: the definition, and the individual judgment. In the definition, the subject is one with the predicate, both being universal; in the individual judgment, the subject is an individual, the predicate a universal. "The intuition is the æsthetic form of the spirit," is a definition; "The Divine Comedy is poetry," is an individual judgment. The individual judgment is one with the perception, or perceptive judgment, with the historical judgment, and, for the reason given before, with the positive judgment of value; it is the last and most perfect form of knowledge. But the distinction between the definition and the individual judgment is not an ultimate and irreducible one. The concrete logical act is always an individual judgment, that is, the affirmation of the unity of the individual and the universal in relation to a particular subject; and every definition is an individual judgment inasmuch as it cannot be but the solution of a particular problem, individually and historically determined. The particular problem, the group of facts, from which a particular definition arises, is the individual subject of which the definition predicates the concept. This identification of the definition and the individual judgment disposes of the familiar distinctions of formal and material truths, of truths of reason and of fact, and of analytical and synthetical judgments; which all are reduced to mere abstractions, partial aspects of the only logical act, consisting in the thinking of the pure concept, as a concrete universal.

The practical imitations of the concept, or pseudo-concepts, also may appear in the double form of definitions and individual judgments. From the empirical concepts we can form empirical judgments, which consist in the inclusion of an individual subject within a class or type, and therefore can also be called classificatory judgments. From the abstract concepts, the passage to the individual subject cannot be effected without the intervention of an empirical concept, that is, without a previous reduction of the individual subjects to classes and types: this reduction enables us to form empirico-abstract judgments, or judgments of numeration and mensuration. The function of these judgments is, as that of the concepts with which they are related, not theoretical, but practical: to classify or to enumerate is not the same as to understand, though they are both essential operations of the human mind. The corresponding judgments are therefore called by Croce pseudo-judgments, or practical imitations of the individual judgment.

The reduction of the pure concept to the individual judgment is the fundamental innovation of Croce's logic. It entirely disposes of any form of transcendental thought, of an Absolute or a Universal as some beyond and above reality, and therefore of the last remnants of metaphysics in philosophy. It means, translated into terms of common language, that there is no thought outside the thinking of individual minds, individually, that is, historically determined; and, conversely, that there is no reality outside the reality of thought, since the postulation of an external reality is nothing but one more act of thought. In the light of this doctrine, the relation between the intuition and the concept, between æsthetic and logical knowledge, can be restated by saying that while the intuition is the autonomous, creative mental act, by which the individual is known as individual, the concept is the autonomous, creative mental act, by which the individual is known as universal, that is, not simply known, but understood. Since Kant, an autonomous creative act of the human mind has received in modern philosophy the name of a priori synthesis, a synthesis which cannot be resolved into its components, or material elements, because its form, and therefore its true being, cannot be traced in them, but is imposed on them by the mind. Croce's intuition is an æsthetic a priori synthesis, through which the obscure psychic material rises to the light of consciousness; his concept, a logical a priori synthesis, in which the intuition is no longer form, but matter, subject to a new form which is judgment and reason. The a priori synthesis is thus employed by Croce as the peculiar dialectic process of the distinctions of the concept, the rigorous logical form of the double-grade relation between the individual and the universal, between intuition and concept, between knowledge and action, and, as we shall see in his philosophy of the practical, between the economic and the ethical will. It is, however, not a mere logical form, or rather, it is a logical form, because it is the actual process of the spirit, which cannot either know or act except by forming a priori syntheses (æsthetic or logical, economic or ethical), that is, by constantly re-creating itself and its own reality and values.

VI. THE FORMS OF KNOWLEDGE

The elementary forms of knowledge--Philosophy as the pure concept-- Development of Croce's theory of history--The identity of history and philosophy--Subjectivity and objectivity--Distinctions and divisions of history--The historical determination of philosophy--The economic theory of science--The natural sciences--History and science--The naturalistic method and the concept of nature--Mathematical processes.

The result of Croce's inquiry into the forms of man's theoretical activity can be summed up by saying that there are two pure theoretical forms, the intuition and the concept, of which the second can be subdivided for convenience' sake into the definition and the individual judgment; and two modes of the practical elaboration of knowledge, the empirical concept and the abstract concept, from which are derived the classificatory judgment and the judgment of numeration. Already in æsthetics we have found no rigorous criterion of distinction between the general intuitive activity of man, as it manifests itself in language, and those empirically constituted bodies of particular intuitions, which we call Poetry and the Arts: every man is a poet and an artist, though we reserve these names only for those among ourselves in whom the æsthetic activity manifests itself in a higher degree, dominates the whole life of the individual spirit. The concept and the pseudo-concepts are also elementary, fundamental forms of knowledge, of which all men partake: every man, as he is a poet, is also a philosopher and an historian, a scientist and a mathematician: but, again, we reserve these names only for the most conspicuous manifestations of those common spiritual activities, and form the empirical concepts of Philosophy and History, of Science and Mathematics. We may speak of vulgar knowledge and of pure or scientific knowledge, but only by approximation and without forgetting that the only claim to rationality and intelligibility on the part of pure knowledge lies in its relationship with the elementary forms, in the same way as Poetry owes its power and beauty to the language in which it spreads its roots. A particular treatment of these higher degrees of knowledge is not, therefore, logically justified; the problems that they present are the same that have been met with in the general discussion of the theoretical activity, and all they will have to offer will be but a confirmation, and in some points a clarification, of what has already been said.

As Art is intuition, so Philosophy is the pure concept: it is easy to see that all the formal definitions of Philosophy that have ever been given, as science of the first principles, of the ultimate causes, of the origins of things, of norms, of values, of categories, are mere verbal variants of the pure concept. Even the most materialistic and realistic philosophies, since matter itself or nature or reality are assumed by them as principles of universal validity, as concepts or ideas, fall within the limits of this definition. In this sense there is no philosophy which is not idealistic: the differences between one philosophy and another are nothing but differences in the elaboration of the pure concept. What follows from this identification cation of philosophy with the pure concept is that all philosophies are, of necessity, systematic, inasmuch as it is impossible to think the pure concept as a singular or particular one, outside its relations with the whole. This systematic character belongs to every philosophical proposition, and not only to the actual systems of philosophy: the solution of every particular philosophical problem implies a vision of that problem in its universality, that is, in the system. We are constantly reminded of this exigency by the fact that a new and original elaboration of particular problems does actually react on the whole of our thought; and that we are often compelled to revise our fundamental opinions by the discovery of a difficulty which at first presents itself in one sphere of thought only.

Of such a process, the whole of Croce's philosophy is a continuous exemplification, but nowhere so clearly apparent as in the progress of his conception of history. His first step had been that of reducing history to the general concept of art, thereby emphasizing the concreteness and individuality of history, as opposed to the abstractness of the natural sciences, the concepts of which, in that early stage, he could not yet distinguish from those of philosophy. In the Estetica the conception is still practically the same, history resulting from the intersection of art and philosophy through the application of the predicate of existence to the intuitive material. In his first Lineamenti di Logica, history appears as the ultimate product of the theoretical spirit, "the sea to which the river of art flowed, swollen by the waters of the river of philosophy." But in the same Lineamenti he had not yet arrived at the identification of the definition and the individual judgment, which in his second Logica constitutes the final form of the pure concept, Croce's original interpretation of Kant's a priori synthesis. Between the first and the second Logica, Croce wrote his Filosofia della pratica, in which he denied the duality of intention and action, as in the Estetica he had denied the duality of intuition and expression: an intention which was not also an action appeared to him, as we shall see, inconceivable. It was by analogy with his treatment of this duality, that he solved the duality between the concept (in the sense of definition) and the individual judgment, which was also a duality of philosophy as antecedent and history as consequent, as he perceived that a concept which is not at the same time a judgment of the particular is as unreal as an intention which is not at the same time an action.

These are the successive steps by which Croce reached his doctrine of the identity of history and philosophy, one of the most discussed and of the least understood among his theories. We shall come back to it later. But a few more hints on its meaning can already be given here. It is clear that by introducing the predicate of existence as essential to history Croce had already abandoned the conception of history as pure, that is, non-logical, non-intellectualized intuition: but the predicate of existence is insufficient to form a judgment, without the addition of the other predicates, that is, of the whole concept. The predicate of existence can only tell us that something exists, but not what it is, that exists: the determination of the singular, in its relations with the particular and the universal, is implicit in the historical judgment, even when it is not openly enunciated. Such judgments as: This thing is, or has been, seem to present the proper form of the historical judgment; no other predicates than that of existence are here visible, but my talking of this thing implies that I know what this thing is; the other predicates are concealed in the subject. Every historical statement is, therefore, a perfect individual judgment. Its concrete and individual character, which Croce had asserted in his early theory, is here maintained by the presence of the subject, though the subject itself, in history, is seen not in its intuitive purity, as in poetry, but as a concrete determination of the concept. The identification of philosophy and history is not so much the effect of a more intellectualized view of the historical processes, as of the progressive consciousness acquired by Croce of the inherent concreteness and individuality of the universal--of that realistic view of the concept as expressed by his elaboration of the logical a priori synthesis.

The old distinction between a subjective and an objective treatment of history receives a new light from the foregoing considerations. It is impossible to make history without judgment, and, therefore, history is in a sense irreducibly subjective. But the subjectivity of history is not the arbitrary and capricious subjectivity of the individual historian, who introduces his own passions and tendencies into the historical narrative: it is the subjectivity of thought, of the earnest and dispassionate research of truth, which coincides with the only conceivable objectivity. What we call objective truth is not reached by renouncing thought, but only by making our thought deeper and truer. The historian who permeates with his thought his recreation of the past (and if he did not, he would be recreating the past as poetry, and imagination, not as history) needs not add a judgment of value to his statements of fact: the identity of value and fact presents itself once more to us in the intrinsic structure of the historical judgment. Whatever the aspect of reality to which we turn our attention, true history and true criticism coincide.

A consequence of this identification of history and philosophy is that the only legitimate divisions of history are those that correspond to the distinctions of the concept,--history of knowledge and of action, of art, of thought, of the practical activity of man; and that the relation among the different branches of history is similar to that of the distinctions of the concept within the concept itself: that is, the history of one particular form of human activity is nothing but the history of the whole spirit of man as it realizes itself under one of its aspects, a statement that we have already illustrated when speaking of the history of art and poetry. Other divisions of history are possible and useful, deduced from empirical concepts (such as the state, the church, the drama, the novel, society, religion, etc.), but they are divisions of practical convenience, mnemonic and didascalie expedients, and not rigorous distinctions. Empirical concepts are, in fact, in constant use in history, but as instruments, not as constituents of historical thought. History is of the individual sub specie universalis, and not of the practical generalizations. This peculiar function of the empirical concept in history marks the distinction between history and the natural sciences, the final irreducibility of history to sociology.

As history is reduced to philosophy through the identification of the historical with the individual judgment, so philosophy is reduced to history through the identification of the definition with the individual judgment. Since every philosophical proposition is an answer to a given question, and every question or problem is individually and historically determined, the whole course of the history of philosophy is in constant function of the general course of history. This is the truth contained in Hegel's formula of the identity of philosophy and history of philosophy, which had been revived in Italy, when Croce was meditating on these problems, by his friend Gentile: a formula which he finally accepted and transformed into that of the identity of history and philosophy, in accordance with his view of philosophy as a moment or grade of the spirit of man. The a priori synthesis which constitutes the reality both of the definition and of the individual judgment is, at the same time, the reality of both philosophy and history. The distinction between the two is a purely didactic one: in the first the emphasis is laid on the definition and the system, in the second on the individual judgment and the narrative. But because the narrative includes the concept, every narrative clarifies and solves philosophical problems, and, on the other hand, every system of concepts throws light on the facts which are present to the mind. The confirmation of the soundness of the system is in the power it displays to interpret and narrate history; the touchstone of philosophy is history. The concept, in affirming itself, conquers the whole of reality, which becomes one with it.

We shall deal more briefly with Croce's treatment of the organization of the empirical and abstract concepts in the natural and mathematical sciences because his views coincide in their general lines with the economic theory of science, which is the view of scientific method elaborated by the scientists themselves in the last decades, and differ from it only in so far as they are comprehended in a vaster system of thought. Croce's polemic against pseudo-scientific philosophy, which was amply justified at the beginning of his career, has now lost a good deal of its actuality, since the ambitious attempts to organize the concepts of science into a system of ultimate truth have finally collapsed under the blows inflicted on their authors by science itself, and are now relegated into a few academic and journalistic backwaters. On the other hand, there is no doubt that his discussion of scientific methods, though sufficient for his purposes, is far from being as exhaustive as his discussion of either art or philosophy.

The natural sciences are systems of empirical concepts, that is, of practical elaborations of knowledge, and, therefore, they do not belong to the sphere of theoretical, but to that of practical activity. This proposition must not be understood as referring to the practical ends, or applications, of science: action requires a knowledge of the individual fact with which we are to deal, and, therefore, the true antecedent of action is not science, but an individual (or historical) judgment. The natural sciences are not subservient to action, but they are actions in the service of knowledge. Because of the empirical and pragmatic character of their concepts, it is impossible either to unify them in a single concept, or to divide them according to rigorous distinctions. The natural laws which they evolve are the same empirical concepts, which give rise to the creation of classes and types, expressed in a different form; their empirical character is confirmed by what Boutroux called their contingency, which is nothing but the reflex of their arbitrary formation. Even the most general of those laws, that of the constancy and uniformity of nature, assumed as the foundation of so much pseudo-scientific thought in the nineteenth century, is a mere postulate of practical opportunity, without which it would be hardly possible to construct any science: it is the first economic principle of scientific method, not an attribute of objective reality.

The truth of the natural sciences, that truth of which they and their empirical concepts are an abbreviated transcription, is the historical datum, the knowledge of actual individual happenings. History is the hot and fluid mass which the naturalist solidifies in the schematic moulds of classes and types. The naturalistic discoverer is, therefore, an historical discoverer and the revolutions of the natural sciences are steps in the progress of historical knowledge. The difference in method between history and the natural sciences is not due to the supposed difference between a higher and a lower reality (spirit and nature), or to the fact that nature has no history; nature is perpetual activity and change, that is, history, as much as the spirit, but the progress of nature is less clearly perceptible and less interesting to us than that of the human reality, and, therefore, an abbreviated transcription is more apt to satisfy our needs in relation to the knowledge of what we call nature than to that of the spirit. The nature that has no history, and which is opposed in dualistic systems of philosophy to the spirit of man, is not the actual, historical reality of nature, but the empirical concepts of the natural sciences, their classes, types and laws, conceived as an objective reality and substituted for that reality. In this sense, nature is not a special object, but only a method of treatment, as is proved by the fact that that same method, applied to the so-called higher and spiritual reality, by such sciences as psychology, sociology, or comparative philology, creates the same kind of naturalistic categories in the domain of the spirit. It is of nature in this sense that the idealist denies the real existence, since the time when Bishop Berkeley repudiated matter as a mere abstraction. And here again, the scientist comes to the support of the idealist with his keen awareness of the pragmatic character of his hypotheses on the ultimate physical constituents of reality.

It is through this theory of the natural sciences that Croce succeeded in eliminating naturalistic transcendence from his thought, and, singularly enough, his first impulse in this direction came to him from his æsthetic studies, through his criticism of literary genres, of grammars, of the particular arts and of rhetorical forms. He saw how through them "nature" introduces itself, as a construction of the human spirit, in the pure spiritual world of art; and having denied its reality in art, he proceeded to discover it everywhere not as reality, but as an product of abstracting processes. This must not be interpreted as meaning that the naturalistic method is an illegitimate hybrid: it has its uses in its proper place, and not less in the study of mind than in the study of nature. It is only by mistaking its constructions or fictions for realities, that we can be tempted to deduce from the natural sciences a philosophy of nature, or from the applications of the naturalistic method to art and to the history of man, an æsthetics or a philosophy of history. But the natural sciences themselves are not responsible for the errors of philosophical naturalism. That such errors should not be limited exclusively to philosophers, but very often appear within the body of sciences like biology or psychology or sociology, is easily explained by the fact that no scientist is a pure scientist: but poor philosophy does not become science simply because it finds place in scientific books. The quarrel between vitalists and mechanicists, for one instance, is a philosophical (or historical), not a scientific dispute: and it reveals itself, ultimately, as the opposition not of conceivable realities, but merely of different methods in the elaboration of the historical datum. The coherent and clear-minded biologist is to-day a mechanicist, not because mechanism is the essence of reality, but because it is the postulate of his research. The vitalist, on the other hand, is inevitably brought by the trend of his thought to abandon science and to become more or less deliberately a philosopher. It is enough to mention in this connection such names as Driesch or Bergson.

The fictitious or conventional character of mathematics is still more apparent than that of the natural sciences; and we shall not add anything to what we have said in the preceding chapter about the abstract concept, the non-concrete universal, which is the distinctive process of mathematical thought. The application of the mathematical processes, through the empirical concepts, to the historical datum, gives origin to what we have called the judgment of numeration (and mensuration), and to the mathematical sciences of nature. All that has been observed of the natural sciences in general is valid for these also. Their truth is still only the truth of the intuitive, historical datum of which the empirical concepts are practical elaborations; the addition of a further practical elaboration, the abstract concept, can add to their mnemonic or, as it is more often called, technical efficiency, but not to the value of their original content. This process, as the purely naturalistic one, can be applied to the human as well as to the natural reality, but it is evident that its usefulness decreases in the passage from the one to the other, following the same standards that apply to the natural sciences in general, those of the relative perceptibility and importance of the individual happening. It is at its highest in physics or astronomy, less notable in biology or economics; practically inexistent in psychology or sociology, the two sciences that suffer not less from the delusions of misapplied statistics than from the invasions of cheap philosophy. Croce's theory of science, as we have already remarked, differs from the generally accepted methodology of modern science only in its context, which is usually agnostic in, the pure scientist, while, in Croce, it consists in the affirmation of the pure concept, or of the autonomy of philosophy: a proposition with which the scientist qua scientist has no reason to quarrel. In both cases, the autonomy of scientific thought is only relative, and the difference of context is a difference in the determination of its limits. In both cases, scientific thought is recognised as thoroughly legitimate only within limits. The cry of the bankruptcy of science, of which we heard so much a few years ago, is as meaningless for Croce as for the pure scientist; science cannot become bankrupt except by over-stepping its logical limits, that is, by first ceasing to be science and becoming the ape of philosophy.

VII. THE THEORY OF ERROR

The practical origin of theoretical error--Confirmations of this doctrine--The forms of error--Æstheticism and empiricism; mathematicism--Philosophism: the philosophy of history and the philosophy of nature--Mythologism: philosophy and religion--Dualism, scepticism, mysticism--The conversion to truth--The function of error.

One of the most original developments of Croce's thought--a doctrine that does not owe its validity only to its connection with the system, since we can find it adumbrated already in such widely divergent philosophies as those of Socrates and Thomas Aquinas, of Descartes and Rosmini, but which in Croce's system acquires a new and wider meaning--is the theory of the practical origin of theoretical error, which we shall briefly discuss in this chapter.

From a strictly logical standpoint, every error is mere privation or negativity, the opposite of the logical value which is truth, and therefore inexistent outside the moment of opposition. As there are not two values in æsthetics, the beautiful and the ugly, but one only, beauty or expression, of which ugliness or non-expression is merely the negative aspect, so in logic also there is but one value, thought or truth, and error is non-thought, that which logically has no being or reality. There is no thought which is not a thinking of truth.

Let us pause for one instant to consider this last proposition, which at first sight undoubtedly has a somewhat paradoxical air. And yet it is impossible not to accept it, unless we are willing to fall into the most radical scepticism, which would imply a renunciation not only of every form of thought, but even, since there is no action which is not founded on knowledge, of every kind of action. If we believed that it were possible for our thought to think that which is not true, no external criterion or standard of truth could even be substituted for that which thought intrinsically would lack, since the apprehension of such external standards would in itself be an act of thought, and therefore suffer from the indetermination and uncertainty of thought itself. This belief in the validity of human thought is in fact, however disguised or even openly denied, present in every thinking and acting being: every thought, every action of man is an implicit declaration of this faith. And once we have consciously acquired it, as an inalienable, intrinsic characteristic of our whole spiritual activity, it is evident that it leaves no place for faith as such, for an obscure, independent faculty, a mystical intuition, different from and superior to our human thought, and which could mysteriously endow thought itself with the gratuitous gift of truth.

And yet, after we have denied the logical existence of error, we are still confronted with the mass of positive errors which we can more or less easily identify in the course of history and in our daily experience. Positive errors, that is, affirmations of knowing that which we do not know, are real products of our activity: but since the theoretical value, truth, is absent from them, they cannot be products of the theoretical activity. They must therefore be products of the only other form of spiritual activity, the practical. Ignorance or obscurity or doubt are not errors; they are the inexhaustible matter to which the spirit of man is perpetually giving form and reality. To be aware of one's ignorance is in fact the first stage in the research of truth, the initìum sapientæ. Thought and truth are affirmation; the positive error is an affirmation also, which simulates truth. We cannot think an error, but we can pass from thought to action, by making a false affirmation, a purely practical affirmation, which consists in the act of producing sounds to which no thought corresponds, or, which amounts to the same, only a thought without value, without coherence, without truth. What we have qualified in its negative aspect as a theoretical error manifests itself in its positive aspect as an act of will, directed to a certain end, a practical act, and, as such, having its own rationality, which is neither logical, nor moral, but purely economic, consisting in the adequacy of that particular affirmation to the individual purpose by which it has been prompted. Morality requires that the thinking spirit should realize itself as truth; and therefore the economic act which is error, though logically unreal, though economically useful, finds inevitably its ultimate sanction in a moral condemnation.

Though this doctrine may appear unfamiliar to the logician, yet we all constantly depend on it in our analysis of error. We know that error is due to the passions or interests of men, which cloud the intellect, and the more an error is foreign to our own ways of thinking, the easier it is for us to discover the practical motives which help us to explain it away. That category of errors which goes under the name of national prejudices, for instance, is transparent in its origins to every man belonging to a nation other than the one in which a particular set of such prejudices is commonly accepted. And other categories of errors, social, professional, religious, and so on, are of the same kind, affecting only certain classes of men, because of the passions or interests or traditions which belong to them by reason of their peculiar practical associations. In the field of politics, or in any kind of heated discussion, this research of the practical motive is even pushed to the extreme, and the bad faith of the adversary becomes an obvious axiom. In such cases, the same passions being active on both sides, the research of the practical motive is evidently not pure and disinterested, but is itself moved by a practical motive, and therefore likely to produce a new error, rather than a clear judgment. Therefore, though rigorously speaking there is no difference between the error which is a deliberate lie and that which is due to a more or less justifiable weakness, and there is no error which is not in bad faith, which is not due to a deliberate act of will, yet, from an empirical standpoint we may distinguish between errors in bad and in good faith, and recommend tolerance and indulgence for the latter kind. But tolerance is not indifference. Croce went so far, in drawing the consequences of his doctrine, as to justify the Holy Inquisition; and in fact all our modern advocates of religious and political tolerance have really shaken our faith in its methods, but not in its principle, which is that of the moral responsibility of error. The Holy Inquisition moreover was bound to clash with the freedom, which is not the freedom of error but the freedom of truth, because it placed its faith in a static, extrahuman truth, as against the veritas filia temporis, the truth which is engendered and conditioned by history, by the peculiar problems and intellectual climate of the age, and which is the object of our modern faith; and therefore defeated its own end by striking at the roots of the value for the upholding of which it had been established.

Passing from the problem of the nature of error to that of the forms actually assumed by philosophic error, Croce accepts Vico's definition of error, as an improper combination of ideas, and therefore defines such forms, by deducing the number of possible improper combinations from his own conception of the legitimate forms of theoretical activity. This phenomenology of error is one of the main tasks of logic, while the refutation of particular philosophical errors is the task of philosophy as a whole. We shall rapidly survey these general forms, in which it will be easy for the reader to recognize the logical (or illogical) structure of many particular errors criticised in the preceding chapters.

The pure concept can be improperly combined with, or exchanged for, the pure intuition (art), or the empirical and abstract concept (the natural and mathematical sciences); or it can be improperly split in its unity of intuition and concept (a priori synthesis), and arbitrarily put together again, either as a concept which simulates an intuition or as an intuition which simulates a concept. Hence the five fundamental forms of error: æstheticism, empiricism, mathematicism, philosophism, and historicism or mythologism. To these must be added other forms originated from combinations of the preceding ones: dualism, scepticism, and mysticism.

We have dealt elsewhere with both æstheticism and empiricism. Of the first, the most recent form is that which pretends to build a philosophy of pure intuition or of pure experience, that is, of an experience which, not being touched by any intellectual category, is also pure intuition. Empiricism is practically all the current philosophy of our times, from the positivism of Comte and Spencer to the more modern types of the so-called philosophic elaboration of scientific knowledge. Mathematicism is a rarer and more aristocratic form of error: it does not consist in the application of the mathematical method to the exposition of philosophical concepts, which is a mere didactic expedient, more or less convenient, but insufficient to characterize the quality of the concepts themselves; its true exponents are those philosophers or mathematicians who take mathematical fictions, such as the dimensions of space, for realities, and proceed to speculate on such a foundation. The near future seems to promise a great extension of this kind of philosophy, through the prevailing interest in the theory of relativity, which is fondly supposed to contain the germs of a revolution in thought. Both empiricism and mathematicism lead to a dualistic conception of reality, by opposing either the facts of scientific and historical knowledge, that is, a collection of facts limited in space and time, to an infinite reality beyond that knowledge, or our actual world of space and time, to worlds, spaces and times mathematically conceivable, but of which we have no experience. The passage from this dualism to spiritualism and other kinds of superstition, which in our times seem to be so closely associated with certain forms of pseudo-scientific thought, is of the easiest. The naturalistic experiments by which we attempt to peer into the mystery of the so-called unknown or unknowable, hoping to detect the spirit itself as matter, however subtle or light, and such theories as that of the identity of the spiritual world with the four-dimensional space, are evidences of this immediate connection between superstition and science, for which, obviously, not science is responsible, and not ignorance even, but a chain of more or less deliberate errors in each case reducible to definite practical motives. From the point of view of the ethics of intellect, there is no difference between the frank impostor who is moved to speculate on other people's feelings only by greed, and the scientist who makes his science minister to his own private feelings, and is hardly, if at all, conscious of his fraud.