Logic As the Science of the Pure Concept

Part 1

LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF THE PURE CONCEPT

TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN OF

BENEDETTO CROCE

DOUGLAS AINSLIE

B.A. (OXON.), M.R.A.S.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1917

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

The publication of this third volume of the Philosophy of the Spirit offers a complete view of the Crocean philosophy to the English-speaking world.

I have striven in every way to render the Logic the equal of its predecessors in accuracy and elegance of translation, and have taken the opinion of critical friends on many occasions, though more frequently I have preferred to retain my own. The vocabulary will be found to resemble those of the Æsthetic and the Philosophy of the Practical, thereby enabling readers to follow the thought of the author more easily than if I had made alterations in it. Thus the word "fancy" will be found here as elsewhere, the equivalent of the Italian "fantasia" and "imagination" of "immaginazione"; this rendering makes the meaning far more clear than the use of the words in the opposite sense that they occasionally bear in English; this is particularly so in respect of the important distinction of the activities in the early part of the Æsthetic. I have also retained the word "gnoseology" and its derivatives, as saving the circumlocutions entailed by the use of any paraphrase, especially when adjectival forms are employed.

I think that this Logic will come to be recognized as a masterpiece, in the sense that it supplants and supersedes all Logics that have gone before, especially those known as formal Logics, of which the average layman has so profound and justifiable mistrust, for the very good reason that, as Croce says, they are not Logic at all, but illogic--his healthy love of life leads him to fight shy of what he feels would lead to disaster if applied to the problems that he has to face in the conduct of life. It is shown in the following pages that the prestige of Aristotle is not wholly to blame for the survival of formal Logic and for the class of mind that denying thought dwells ever in the ipse dixit. Indeed, one of the chief boons conferred by this book will be the freeing of the student from that confusion of thought and word that is the essence of the old formal Logic--of thought that rises upon the wings of words, like an aviator upon his falcon of wood and metal to spy out the entrenchments of the enemy.

One of the most stimulating portions of the book will, I think, be found in Croce's theory of error and proof of its necessity in the progress of truth. This may certainly be credited to Croce as a discovery. That this theory of the uses of error has a great future, I have no doubt, from its appearance at certain debates on Logic that have taken place at the Aristotelian Society within the last year or two, though strangely enough the name of the philosopher to whom it was due was not mentioned. A like mysterious aposiopesis characterized Professor J. A. Smith's communication to the same Society as to the development of the ethical from the economic activity (degrees of the Spirit) some years after the publication of the Philosophy of the Practical.

It is my hope that this original work, appearing as it does in the midst of the great struggle with the Teutonic powers, may serve to point out to the Anglo-Saxon world where the future of the world's civilization lies, namely in the ancient line of Latin culture, which includes in itself the loftiest Hellenic thought. It is sad to think that the Germans have relapsed to barbarism from the veneer of cultivation that they once possessed, particularly sad when one comes upon the German names that must always abound in any treatise on the development of thought. Their creative moment, however, was very brief, and the really important names can be numbered on the fingers of one hand, that of Emmanuel Kant being corrupted from the Scots Cant. Of recent years the German contribution has been singularly small and unimportant, such writers as Eucken being mere compilers of the work of earlier philosophers, and without originality. The foul-souled Teuton will need a long period of re-education before he can be readmitted to the comity of nations upon equal terms--his bestiality will ask a potent purge.

In conclusion, I can only hope that the fact of this work having been put into the hands of readers a decade earlier than would in all probability have been the case, had I not been fortunate enough to make a certain journey to Naples, will be duly taken advantage of by students, and that it will serve for many as a solid foundation for their thought about thought, and so of their thought about the whole of life and reality in the new world that will succeed the War.

DOUGLAS AINSLIE.

THE ATHENAEUM, PALL MALL,

March 1917.

ADVERTISEMENT

This volume is, and is not, the memoir entitled Outlines of Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept, which I presented to the Accademia Pontiana at the sessions of April 10 and May 1, 1904, and April 2, 1905, and which was inserted in volume xxxv. of the Transactions (printed as an extract from them by Giannini, Naples, 1905, in quarto, pp. 140).

I might have republished that memoir, and made in it certain corrections, great and small, and especially I might have enriched it with very numerous developments. But partial corrections and copious additions, while they would have injured the arrangement of the first work, would not have allowed me to attain to that more secure and fuller exposition of logical doctrine which, after four years' study and reflection, it now seems to be in my power to offer. I have therefore resolved to rewrite the work from the beginning on a larger scale, with a new arrangement and new diction regarding its predecessor as a sketch, which in a literary sense stands by itself, and only making use of a page, or group of pages, here and there, as suited the natural order of exposition.

Owing to this connection between the present volume with the above-mentioned academic memoir, it will be seen in what sense it may be called, and is called, a "second edition." It is a second edition of my thought rather than of my book.

B. C.

NAPLES,

November 1908.

PREFACE TO THIRD ITALIAN EDITION OF THE LOGIC

On reprinting the present volume, after an interval of seven years, I have reread it with attention to its literary form, but have made no substantial changes or additions to it; because the further development of that part which deals with the logic of Historiography has been collected in a special volume, forming as it were an appendix. This is now the fourth volume of the Philosophy of the Spirit.

It seemed to many, upon the first publication of this volume, that it chiefly consisted of a very keen attack upon Science. Few, above all, discovered what it was: a vindication of the seriousness of logical thought, not only in respect to empiricism and abstract thought, but also to intuitionist, mystical and pragmatistic doctrines, and to all the others then very vigorous, which, including justly combated positivism, distorted every form of logicity.

Part 2

Nor, in truth, did its criticism of Science favour what is known as a philosophy "detesting facts": indeed, the chief preoccupation of that criticism was meticulous respect of facts, which was neither observed nor observable in empirical and abstract constructions and in the analogous mythologies of naturalism. The character of this Logic might equally be described as affirmation of the concrete universal and affirmation of the concrete individual, as proof of the Aristotelian Scientia est de universalibus and proof of Campanula's Scientia est de singularibus. In this manner those empty generalizations and fictitious riches which are removed from philosophy in the course of treatment, there appear more than amply, infinitely compensated for by the restitution to it of its own riches, of the whole of history, both that known as human and that known as history of nature. Henceforward it can live there as in its own dominion, or rather its own body, which is co-extensive with and indivisible from it. The separation there effected by philosophy from science is not separation from what is true knowledge in science, that is from the historical and real elements of science. It is only separation from the schematic form in which those elements are compressed, mutilated and altered. Thus it may also be described as a reconnection of it with what of living, concrete and progressive exists in those sciences. If the destruction of anything be aimed at in it, that can clearly be nothing but abstract and anti-historical philosophy. This Logic must thus be looked upon as a liquidation of philosophy rather than of science, if abstract science be posited as true philosophy.

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