Part 23

"He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow" is a false saying, because the increase of knowledge is the overcoming of sorrow. But it is true, in so far as it means that the increase of knowledge does not eliminate the sorrows of practical life. It does not eliminate, but elevates them; and to adopt the fine expression of a contemporary Italian writer, superiority is "nothing but the right to suffer on a higher plane." On a higher plane, but neither more nor less than others, who are at a lower level of knowledge,--to suffer on a higher plane, in order to act upon a higher plane.

FOURTH PART

HISTORICAL RETROSPECT

THE HISTORY OF LOGIC AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

The three terms, Reality, Thought and Logic, and their relations, could be represented by a system of three circles, the one included in the other, and by marking at will as the first term that which includes all, or that which is included in all: R T L or L T R. Limiting ourselves to the first method, the first circle would be Reality, which Thought (the second circle) would think, in the same way that it would in its turn be thought in the third circle, formed by Logic, the Thought of thought, or the Philosophy of philosophy. This graphic symbol is probably destined to some fortune; but the reader must not seek it in our pages, because knowing how much inadequacy, clumsiness and danger it contains, we share the repugnance, almost instinctively felt at such materializations, which seem to be and are of slight value.

The vice of that spatial figuration is that it divides into three circles what is three, but three in one, and should consequently be expressed as a triple circle which should also be a single circle, in which all the three coincide; which is geometrically unrepresentable. The relation of Reality, Thought of Reality and Thought of Thought, divided into three circles, legitimately gives rise to the question: Why should there not be a fourth, a fifth, a sixth circle (and so on to infinity) which should include respectively the third, the fourth, the fifth (and so on to infinity)? Why should not a Logic of Logic, or a thought of the thought of thought, and so on, follow the thought of thought, which is Logic? For us, this question raises no objection that need bring us to a halt for a single instant, just because we have never divided the one reality into two or more different realities (matter and spirit, nature and idea, and so on), nor into a series of different realities, the one following the other; but we have conceived it as a system of relations and of correlations, constituting a unity, indeed the only unity concretely thinkable. There is no progress to infinity, when the terms are coincident and correlative; hence to think the thought of thought would not be a new act, but equivalent to thinking thought. The mental act will be new (and any mental act is new) for the individual who accomplishes it in conditions that are always new; but its spiritual form will always be that of Logic, which thinks thought and contains within itself, on its side, the process of reality. Further, the indifference exhibited by the symbol of the triple circle as to the determination of the first as last and the last as first, confirms for us the non-existence of a first that is only first and of a last that is only last; confirms, that is to say, the coincidence of unity in relation that is first and last. Reality is not only thought by thought, but is also thought; and thought is not only thought by Logic, but is also Logic. Those who wish to expound philosophy and history, proceeding from the centre of the logos or Logic, and those who wish to expound them, proceeding from the periphery of facts, are both right and wrong, because the centre is periphery and the periphery centre.

By adopting this view, which affirms the most complete immanence, it has never happened that in any part of the Real we have discovered a division between idea and fact, between general and particular, between primary and secondary reality and the like, but we have found, in every part, relation and correlation, unity and distinction in unity. There is no general philosophy opposed to, or consequent on, or alongside particular philosophies; particular philosophy is general, and the general is the particular; nor is there a general history, which is not also particular history, and vice versa. History is always the history of man as artist, thinker, economic producer, and moral agent, and in distinguishing these various aspects, it gives their unity, which does not transcend these various aspects, but is these various aspects themselves.

In like manner, the History of thought, or the History of Philosophy, which is one of these determinate aspects, is distinguished in the histories of particular philosophic concepts, as the history of Æsthetic, of Logic, of Economics and of Ethics; but it is also unified in them and consists in nothing but them, completely resolving itself into them. There is no general History of Philosophy, in the sense of a history of general Philosophy, or of Metaphysics, or whatever else it may be called, outside particular histories (which are unity in particularity).

One of the errors which in our opinion vitiates the writing of the history of philosophy, appears to be just the prejudice in favour of a treatment of the general part of this history, in which, for instance, speculations concerning practice enter only incidentally, a great part of logical doctrine is excluded as not belonging to it, and the doctrines of Æsthetic are hardly referred to at all. The prejudice is derived, in the last analysis, from the old idea of an Ontology or Metaphysic, as the science of an ideal world, of which nature and man are the more or less imperfect actualizations; hence the relegation of a great part of true and proper philosophy to what is called the human and natural world, and the looking upon this as a special philosophy, distinguished from general philosophy and consequently lying outside the true and proper history of philosophy. That prejudice, amounting almost to a survival, persists even in those who have more or less surpassed such a conception, and determines the curious configuration of a general history of philosophy, outside the special histories. Such a scheme, when closely examined, shows itself to be a complex of historical elucidations of some problems of Logic, and of some of the philosophy of the practical (individuality, liberty, the supreme good, etc.), and of some arising from their relations (knowing and being, spirit and nature, infinite and finite, etc.). These are all without doubt arguments of philosophical history; but they must be united with the others, from which they have been wrenched, and without which they prove but little intelligible. Philosophy is present in the Poetics and the Rhetoric of Aristotle as much as in the Metaphysics; not less in the Critique of Pure Judgment of Kant, than in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is never outside those treatises concerning what are called the special parts of philosophy. The present-day historians of philosophy who have overcome so many forms of transcendence and re-established immanence, must also overcome the residue of transcendence, which, so to speak, they still retain in their own house.

Certainly, the reality of the distinctions between the various aspects of the real and between the various particular philosophies renders possible literary divisions, through which there are composed special treatises upon Ethics and so upon the history of Ethic; upon Logic and so upon the history of Logic; upon Æsthetic and so upon the history of Æsthetic; but it is not possible by a like method of division to construct a treatise upon general Philosophy and a corresponding History of general philosophy. It is not possible, because this literary division presupposes a distinction of concepts; and a general philosophy is not conceptually distinguishable. When the attempt to distinguish it is made, we have, as we saw, a mass of historical fragments taken from the various philosophic sciences; that is to say, not the coherent historical treatment of problems relating to a definite aspect of the real, but a more or less arbitrary aggregate.

With these considerations, we have answered the question concerning the relation between the History of Logic and the History of Philosophy. This relation is the same as that between Logic and Philosophy,--terms which are capable neither of distinction nor of opposition. The history of Logic is not outside the history of Philosophy, but is an integral part of this history itself. To make it the object of special treatment always means to compose a complete history of philosophy, in which, from the literary point of view, prominence and priority are given to the problems of Logic, the others being thrown, not outside the picture, but into the background. The same may be said of the History of Æsthetic or of Ethic or of any other particular discipline, which is never held to be distinguishable.

Logic being more or less profoundly renovated (as we have sought to do in this book), it is natural that the histories of Logic hitherto available can no longer be completely satisfactory. For they are written from points of view that have been surpassed, such as Aristotelian formalism or Hegelian panlogism, and therefore either do not interpret facts with exactitude, or they give prominence and exaggerated importance to certain orders of facts, neglecting others far more worthy of mention and of examination.

Of the special books bearing the title of the History of Logic, there is really only one--that of Charles Prantl--which, based upon wide researches, is truly remarkable for its doctrine and for lucid and animated exposition. Unfortunately this does not go further than the fifteenth century and omits the whole movement of modern philosophy. But even the period exhaustively treated by him (Antiquity and the Middle Ages) is looked at from the narrow angle of an Aristotelian and formal temperament. Other works bearing the same title are not worthy of attention. On the other hand, the better histories of Logic must not be sought under this title, but especially in the better Histories of Philosophy, beginning with that of Hegel, which, for the most part, is precisely a history of Logic.

In inaugurating a new treatment, governed by the principles which we have defended, we shall confine ourselves, in the following pages, to a sketch of the history of some of the principal parts of logical doctrine, without any claim to even approximate completeness, and with a view to giving simple illustrations of the things that were said in the theoretical part. In this theoretical part, in virtue of the identity of philosophy and history which we have explained, history may be said to be already contained and projected, even though names and dates are mostly omitted and left to be understood.

THE THEORY OF THE CONCEPT

Just as whenever in Æsthetic any one sought the "father" of the science Plato was usually named, so whenever a like enquiry has been proposed for Logic that honourable title has been almost unanimously bestowed upon Aristotle. But even if we admit (as we must) in a somewhat empirical and expedient sense, the propriety of these searches for "discoverers" and "fathers," Aristotle could not in our eyes occupy that position. For if Logic is the science of the concept, such a science was evidently begun before him. Further, Aristotle himself claimed the distinction only of having reduced and treated the theory of reasoning and recognized elsewhere that to Socrates belonged the merit of having directed attention to the examination and definition of the concept (τούς τ' ἐπακτικοὺς λόγους καὶ τὸ όρίζεσθαι), that is to say, to the very principle of logical Science, the rigorous form of truth.

In this affirmation of the consistency and absoluteness of knowledge and of truth (sustained in him by a vivid religious and moral consciousness) lies the significance of Socrates as opposed to the Sophists; as indeed in the same thing lies the importance of Hellenic Logic of the truly classical period. This Logic elaborated the idea of conceptual knowledge, of science or of philosophy, and transmitted it to the modern world with a terminology, which is in great part that which we ourselves employ. We too reject in almost the same words as the Greek philosophers the renascent sophism, the perennial Protagoreanism, and the sensationalism which denies truth, and (like the ancient Gorgias), by declaring it incommunicable by the individual, individualizes and reduces it to practical utility. In Plato, the affirmation and glorification of conceptual knowledge was accompanied by contempt for the knowledge of the individual, and in comparison with the immortal world of ideas, the world of sensations was for him so dark and obscure as to disappear in his eyes like phantoms before the sun. But Aristotle, although he held firmly that there is no science of the accidental and individual, and of sensation, which is bound to space and time, to the where and the when, and that the object of science is the universal, the essence, which is being, was less exclusive than he; and as he saved the world of poetry from the condemnation of Plato, so, in all his philosophy and in all his work as physicist, politician and historian, he affirmed the world of experience and of history.

On the other hand, there was in Socrates only the consciousness of the universal still indefinite and vague; in Plato there appeared for the first time the consciousness of the true character of the universal, and so of its distinction from empirical universals; and in Aristotle this enquiry gave important results. The problem of the nature of the concept became, then and afterwards, interwoven with that other problem of the transcendence or immanence of the concepts; but since, notwithstanding many points of contact, the two problems cannot be completely identified, they must not be confounded. Indeed, the problem of the transcendence or immanence of the universals is reducible to the more general problem of the relation between values and facts, the ideal and the real, what ought to be and what is; whereas the other, concerning the nature of the universals, centres upon the distinction between universals that are truly logical, and pseudological universals, and upon the greater or less admissibility of one or the other or of both, and so upon their mode of relation. The point of contact between the two problems lies in this, that where pure and real universals are denied and only arbitrary and nominal universals allowed to subsist, the question of the immanence or transcendence of the universals also disappears. And as to the first problem and the polemic of Aristotle against Plato concerning the ideas, it has appeared to some critics (to Zeller and others) that Aristotle misunderstood his master and invented an error that Plato had never maintained, or attacked merely certain gross expositions of doctrine which were current in some Platonic school. To others again (to Lotze, for instance), it has seemed that Aristotle thought this problem, at bottom, in the same way as Plato, who by placing the ideas in a hyper-Uranian space, in a super-world or a super-heaven, thus came to refuse to them that reality which Aristotle himself refused to them and to consider them as values, not as beings; although Greek linguistic usage prevented Plato from expressing the difference, just as it prevented Aristotle from expressing the same thing, when it led him to describe genera as "second substances" (δεύτεραι οὺσίαι). However, as regards the first interpretation, it certainly seems to us that it is impossible to raise doubts about such a document as the testimony of Aristotle by means of such frequently uncertain documents as the Platonic dialogues. And as regards the second interpretation, it seems to us that it does not so much purge Plato of the vice of transcendence as convict his adversary also of sharing that vice. On this point the opposition of Aristotle to his predecessor does not coincide with that of modern nominalism and empiricism to philosophic idealism, for the former sets in question the truth of the concept itself. Aristotle denied this truth as little as Plato; indeed he expressly asserted that his predecessor was right, and approved his definite accusation of the sophists that they were occupied not with the universal but with the accidental, that is to say, with not-being.

The beginning of the enquiry as to the nature of universals or of ideas is to be seen, on the other hand, in Plato's embarrassments before the questions as to whether there are ideas of everything, of artificial as well as of natural things, of noble things and vile things alike, of things only or also of properties and relations; of good things or also of bad things (καλὸν καὶ αἰσχρόν, ἀγαθὸν καὶ κακόν) He does not escape from the embarrassments, save occasionally, by making strange admissions, by accepting ideas of all the preceding, only to fall immediately afterwards into contradictions, through which however we see the outlines of the problems of to-day. Are the ideas representative concepts (of things) or are they not rather categories (ideas of relation)? Arc opposites particular kinds of ideas (if there exist ideas of base and ugly things, as well as of beautiful and good things)? Is it possible to distinguish, from the point of view of the Ideas, between the natural world and the human world (between natural things and artificial)? Plato himself refers to mathematical knowledge as distinct from philosophic knowledge.

In Aristotle, the determination of the rigorous philosophic concept and its distinction from empirical and abstract concepts make great progress, although this does not amount to a solution of those Platonic embarrassments. Aristotle accurately traces the limits between Philosophy (and so the philosophic concept) and the physical and mathematical sciences. Philosophy, the science of God or theology (as he also calls it), treats of being in its absoluteness, and so not of particular beings or of the matter that forms part of their composition. The non-philosophical sciences, on the other hand, always treat of particular beings (περὶ ὄν τι καὶ γένος τι). They take their objects from sense or assume them by hypotheses, giving now more, now less accurate demonstrations of them. All the physical sciences have need of some definite material (ὕλη) because they are always concerned with noses, eyes, flesh, bones, animals, plants, roots, bark, in short with material things, subject to movement. There even arises a physical science that is concerned with the soul, or rather, with a sort of soul (περὶ ψυχῆς ἐνίας), in so far as this is not without matter. Mathematics, like philosophy, studies, not things subject to movement, but motionless being; but it differs from philosophy in not excluding the matter in which their objects are as it were incorporated (ὡς ἐν ὔλῃi): the suppression of matter is obtained in them by aphairesis or abstraction.

This divergence between philosophic and physical or mathematical procedure is the point upon which empiricism and mathematicism rely; but these, inferior here to Aristotle, deny the science of absolute being (περὶ ὅντος άπλῶς) and leave in existence only the second order of sciences, which deal with the particular and abstract. There is another important distinction in Aristotle, but to tell the truth it is impossible to say how far he connected it with the preceding distinction between philosophy and physics, with which it is substantially one. Aristotle knew two forms of universal: the universal of the always (τοῡ ἀεί) and that of the for the most part (τοῡ ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ). He was well aware of the difference between the first, which is truly universal, and the second, which is so only in an approximate and improper manner; and he even asked himself if the for the most part alone existed and not also the always; but his interest was directed not so much to the comparative differences of the two series, as to the common character of universality which both of them asserted as against the individual and accidental. Science (he said) is occupied, not with the accidental, but with the universal, whether it be eternal and necessary (ἀναγκαῖον) or only approximately universal (ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ). Philosophy, physics and mathematics felt at this period that they had a common enemy in sensationalism and sophism, and they formed an alliance against this common enemy, rather than as happened later, dissipate their energies in intestinal welfare.

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

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

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

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

By another school of this period, on the other hand, the pure concept was wrongly identified with the abstract concept. Thus speculative rationalism took the form of mathematical rationalism and the ideal of philosophy was confused with the ideal of exact science. This tendency is also to be found in Leonardo, who exalted "reason" alone, that is calculation, as outside of and sometimes superior to experience. Galileo expressed similar thoughts later. The Cartesian philosophy is animated with it, that is to say, the philosophy of Descartes and of his great followers, especially Spinoza and Leibnitz. Thus this is especially an intellectualist philosophy, full of empty excogitations and rigid divisions, developed by a mechanical or by a teleological method, which always operated by means of mechanism. It is true that even under these improper forms, philosophic thought progressed. The consciousness of the inner unity of philosophy progressed with Descartes, that of the unity of the real by means of Spinoza's concept of substance, and that of spiritual activity by means of the dynamism of Leibnitz; but Logic remained as a whole the old scholastic logic. The purity of the concept was asserted at the expense of concreteness; thus the concept, in the Logic of those writers, is always something abstract, although its reality is so far recognized that it is thought possible to think with it the most real (the God of Descartes, the substance of Spinoza, the Monad of Leibnitz). The eighteenth century, mathematical, abstractionist, intellectualist ratiocinative, anti-historical, illuminist, reformist, and finally Jacobin, is the legitimate issue of this Cartesian philosophy, which confuses the Logic of philosophy with the Logic of mathematics. France, which was the country of its birth and where it became most firmly rooted and most widely disseminated, owes to it, perhaps even more than to Scholasticism, the mental imprint which it still bears and which the strong Germanic influence that has made itself felt there also in the last century has not sufficed to eradicate. It is only in our day that the country which is the type of the abstract intellect strives to become philosophically more concrete. It is now occupied with æstheticism or intuitionism, and, unless the movement is suffocated or dissipated, it may effect a true revolution in the traditional French spirit.

The opposition to abstractionism had no representatives in the seventeenth century and for a great part of the eighteenth, except among thinkers of but slight systematic powers, with whom it did not progress beyond the logical form of the presentiment and the literary form of the aphorism. In France, Blaise Pascal was one of these, with his anti-Cartesianism, his restriction of the value of mathematics, and his celebration of the reasons of the heart which reason does not know. In Germany there was Hamann, who possessed such a strong sense of tradition, of history, of language, of poetry and of myth, and finally of the truth contained in the principle of the coincidence of opposites which he had met with somewhere in Bruno. The Italian Giambattista Vico was the only great systematic thinker to express opposition to abstractionism and Cartesianism. Prior to and more clearly than Hamann, he perceived the unity of philosophy and history, or as he called it, of philosophy and philology. He conceived thought as an ideal history of reality, immanent in the real history which occurs in time; he abolished the distinctions of the concept as separate species and substituted the notion of degrees or moments, which (as Schelling did after him) he called ideal epochs; he considered the abstractionist and mathematical century which he saw rising before him, as a period of philosophic decadence, and foretold the evil effects of Cartesian anti-historicism. (His presage was fulfilled.) In this way, he sketched a new Logic, very different from that of Aristotle or of Arnaud which was the most recent, a Logic in which he attempted to satisfy Plato and Bacon, Tacitus and Grotius, the idea and the fact. But if the other opponents of abstractionism had very little effect, because of their immaturity and want of system, Vico also was ineffectual, because he was born in Italy precisely at the time when Italy as a productive country was definitely issuing from the circle of European thought and was beginning passively to accept the more popular forms of foreign thought. Finally, Naples, the little country of Vico, was then becoming encyclopædist and sensationalist, and did not really begin to know until a century later the remedy for such evils composed in anticipation by Vico.

The surpassing of the Logic of the abstract concept and the achievement of that of the concrete concept or pure concept or idea, was realized in other ways, primarily by a sort of reduction to the absurd of empiricist and mathematical Logic, in the scepticism which was its result. This reduction to the absurd, this final scepticism, is to be observed in the movement of English philosophy, beginning with Locke or even with Hobbes, to Hume. Locke, starting from perception as his presupposition, derived all ideas from experience, with the sole instrument of reflection; and rejecting innate ideas and looking upon others as more or less arbitrary, he preserved some objectivity to mathematical ideas alone, which relate to what are called primary qualities. Berkeley denies objectivity even to the primary qualities. All concepts, naturalist and mathematical alike, are for him abstract concepts and to that extent without truth. The only truth is the "idea," which means here nothing but sensation or the representation of the individual. His Logic is not empiricist, because it is in no respect Logic. At the most it is an Æsthetic substituted for and given as Logic. It is true, notwithstanding his complete denial of universals--of empirical and abstract, no less than of philosophic, which he never even mentions--that he deludes himself into thinking that he has overcome scepticism; and it is true also that he laid the foundations of a spiritualist and voluntarist conception of reality, which in our opinion should be preserved and adopted by modern thought. But this proves only that his philosophy does not wholly agree with his Logic, and not that his Logic is not the complete denial of the concept and of thought. The logical consequence of Berkeley could not, then, be anything but the scepticism of David Hume, who shakes the very foundation upon which the whole of the science of nature rests, namely, the principle of causality.