Part 24

As the effect of this extreme scepticism, the surpassing of empiricist and abstractionist Logic had to be begun with the restoration of that Logic itself (because that which does not exist cannot be surpassed), that is to say, with the demonstration, against Hume, that the exact science of nature is possible. Such is the principal task of the Critique of Pure Reason, which contains the Logic of the natural and mathematical sciences, thought no longer by an empiricist, but by a philosopher who has surpassed empiricism and recognized that the concepts of experience presuppose the human intellect, which originally constructed them. Leibnitz had already travelled this road, when in a polemic against Locke he maintained that reflection to which Locke appealed, referred back to the innate ideas: for if reflection (he said) is nothing but "une attention à ce qui est en nous et les sens ne nous donnent point ce que nous portons déjà avec nous," how can it ever be denied "qu'il y est beaucoup d'inné en nous, puisque nous sommes, pour ainsi dire, innés à nous mêmes? Peut-on nier qu'il y ait eu nous être, unité, substance, durée, changement, action, perception, plaisir et mille autres objets de nos idées intellectuelles?" The New Essays, in which theses and other similar themes were developed, remained for a time unedited, but appeared opportunely in 1765 to fecundate German thought, and acted upon Kant, together with English empiricism and scepticism, the latter giving the problem and the former almost an attempt at a solution. But the innate ideas of Leibnitz are profoundly transformed in the Kantian concept of the category, which is the formal element and really exists only in the very act of judgment, which it effects. Mathematics are thus secured in their possession, no longer by means of the primary qualities of Locke, but because they arise from the a priori forms of intuition, space and time. The natural sciences are also secured, because the concepts of them are constituted by means of the categories of the intellect, on the data of experience. In other words, mathematical and natural science have value, in so far as they are a necessary product of the spirit.

But a limitation of value due also to Kant, accompanies this theoretic reinforcement of exact science. That science is necessary, because produced by the categories; but the categories cannot develop their activity except upon the data of experience; so that exact science is limited to experience, and whenever it makes the attempt to surpass it, it becomes involved in antinomies and paralogisms and gesticulates in the void. Science moves among phenomena and can never penetrate beyond them and attain to the "Thing in itself."

It would seem from this that Kant was bound to end in a renovated nominalism and mysticism, and indeed such is partly the case. Contemporaneously with him, Jacobi also observed the limit in which is enclosed the mechanical and determinist science of nature (the highest philosophic expression of which was then found in the Ethic of Spinoza), since it works with the principle of causation and is impotent, unless it wishes to commit suicide, to leave the finite which it describes in a causal series, and Jacobi concluded in favour of mysticism and of feeling, the organ of the Knowledge of God. Kant, like Jacobi, in his turn has recourse to the non-theoretic form of the spirit, to the practical reason and its postulates, to provide that certitude of God, of immortality, and of human freedom, which is not evident to the theoretic reason. But in Kant there are other positive elements which are not in Jacobi, and these elements, although not sufficiently elaborated by him and not harmonized with one another, confer upon his philosophy the value of a new Logic, more or less sketched. For he recognizes not only a theoretic but also a practical reason, which cannot be called simply practical, if it in any way produce (although only under the title of postulates), knowledge (and knowledge of supreme importance). He recognises also an æsthetic judgment, which, although developed without concepts, does not belong to the sphere of practical interests; and a teleological judgment, which is regulative and not constitutive, but not on this account arbitrary or without meaning. Finally, the very contradictions, in which the intellect becomes involved, when it wishes to apply the categories beyond experience, could not reasonably be considered by him to be mere errors, because they constitute serious problems, if the intellect becomes involved in them, not capriciously, but of necessity. All this presages the coming of a new Logic, which shall set in their places these scattered elements of truth and solve the contradictions.

But the Kantian philosophy also contains, in addition to these elements and these stimulations, the concept of the new Logic in the a priori synthesis. This synthesis is the unity of the necessary and the contingent, of concept and intuition, of thought and representation, and consequently is the pure concept, the concrete universal.

Kant was not aware of this; and instead of developing with a mind free from prejudice the thought of his genius, he also allowed himself to be vanquished by the abstractionism of his time and out of the logical and philosophical a priori synthesis he made the more or less arbitrary a priori synthesis of the sciences. In this way, the apriority of the intuition led him, not to art, but to mathematics (transcendental Æsthetic) the apriority of the intellect led him, not to Philosophy, but to Physics (abstract intellect): hence the impotence which afflicted that synthesis, when confronted with philosophic problems. When he discovered the a priori synthesis, Kant had laid his hand upon a profoundly romantic concept; but his treatment of it became afterwards classicist and intellectualist. The synthesis is the palpitating reality which makes itself and knows itself in the making: the Kantian philosophy makes it rigid again in the concepts of the sciences; and it is a philosophy in which the sense of life, of imagination, of individuality, of history, is almost as completely absent as in the great systems of the Cartesian period. Whoever is not aware of this intimate drama and fails to understand this contradiction; whoever, when confronted with the work of Kant, is not seized with the need, either of going forward or of going backward, has not reached the heart of that soul, the centre of that mind. The old philosophers who condemned Kant as sceptical and as a corrupter of philosophy, and who confined themselves strictly to Wolfianism and to scholasticism, and the new who greeted him as a precursor and made of him a stepping-stone on which to mount higher,--these alone came truly into contact with Kant's philosophy. For in his case there are but two alternatives: abhorrence or attraction, loathing or love. In the midst of a battle one must flee or fight: to sit still and take one's ease is the attitude of the unconscious and the mad. Certainly it is better to fight than to flee, but it is better to flee than to sit inactive. He who flees, saves at least his own skin, or, to abandon metaphor, saves the old philosophy, which is still something; but the inactive man loses both life and glory, the old philosophy and the new.

The new philosophy was that of the three great post-Kantians, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. With Fichte, all trace of the thing in itself has disappeared and the dominating concept is that of the Ego, that is, of the Spirit, which creates the world by means of the transcendental imagination and recreates it in thought. In Schelling is found the concept of the Absolute, the unity of subject and object, which has, as its instrument, intellectual intuition. In Hegel, there is this same concept, but it has itself as instrument, that is to say, it is truly logical. All three are Kantians, but all three (and especially the last two) are not simply Kantian. They employed elements which Kant ignored or employed timidly, and in particular the mystical tradition and the new tendencies of æsthetic and historical thought. Thus they pass beyond the abstractionism and intellectualism of the Kantian period, and inaugurate the nineteenth century. They are connected ideally with Vico (Hamann was the little German Vico), and they enrich him with the thoughts of Kant.

Neglecting the particular differences between these thinkers and the genetic process by which we pass from one to the other, and taking the result of that speculative movement in its most mature form, which is the philosophy of Hegel, we see in it (like a new, securely established society after the frequent changes of a revolution) the establishment of the new doctrine of the concept. Kant's unconsciousness of the consequences of the a priori synthesis had been such that he had not hesitated to affirm that Logic, since the time of Aristotle, had possessed so just and secure a form as not to need to take one single step backward, and to be unable to take one forward. But Hegel insisted that this was rather a sign that that science demanded complete re-elaboration, since an application of two thousand years should have endowed the spirit with a more lofty consciousness of its own thought and of its own essential nature. What was the concept for Hegel? It was not that of the empirical sciences, which consists in a simple general representation and therefore always in something finite; it is barbaric to give the name concepts to intellectual formations, like "blue," "house," or "animal." Nor was it the mathematical concept, which is an arbitrary construction. All the logical rationality that there is in mathematics is what is called irrational. These so-called concepts are the products of the abstract intellect; the true concept is the product of the concrete intellect, or reason. It has therefore nothing to do with the immediate knowledge of the sentimentalists and of the mystics, and with the intuition of the æstheticists; such formulae as these express the necessity for the concept, but give only a negative determination of it. They assert what it is not in relation to the empirical sciences and then misstate what it is in philosophy. For the rest, the shortcomings of the abstract intellect, generating the pure void or thing in itself(which far from being, as Kant believed, unknowable, is indeed the best known thing of all, the abstraction from everything and from thought itself) prepare the environment for the phantasms and caprices of mysticism and intuitionism. The true concept is the idea, and the idea is the absolute unity of the concept and of its objectivity.

This definition has sometimes seemed whimsical, sometimes most obscure; yet it presents nothing but the elaboration in a more rigorous form of the Kantian a priori synthesis, so that these two terms could without further difficulty be regarded as equivalent; the a priori logical synthesis is the Idea and the Idea is the a priori logical synthesis. If Hegel has not been understood, that is due to the fact that Kant himself has not been understood. Those who assert that they understand what Kant meant to say, but not what Hegel meant to say, deceive themselves. For Kant and Hegel say the same thing, though the latter says it with greater consciousness and clearness, that is to say, better.

The idea, the concrete universal, the pure concept, rebels against the mechanical divisions employed for the empirical concepts. For it has its own division, its own proper and intimate rhythm, by means of which it divides and unifies, and unifies itself when dividing and divides itself when unifying. The concept thinks reality, which is not immobile but in motion, not abstract being, but becoming; and therefore in it distinctions are generated one from another and oppositions reconciled. Hegel not only gives the true meaning of the Kantian a priori synthesis, recognizing it as the concrete concept, but replaces the antinomies in its bosom. The contradiction is not due to the limitation of thought before a non-contradictory reality, which thought is unable to attain; it is the character of reality itself, which contradicts itself in itself, and is opposition, coincidentia oppositorum, the synthesis of opposites, or dialectic. A new doctrine of opposites and the outlines of a new doctrine of distinction accompanies the new doctrine of the pure concept. In this philosophy is truly summarized all the previous history of thought. The concept of Socrates has acquired the reality of the idea of Plato, the concreteness of the substance of Aristotle, the unity-in-opposition of Cusanus and Bruno, the Vichian reconciliation of philosophy and philology, the unity-in-distinction of the Kantian synthesis and the æsthetic suppleness of Schelling's intellectual intuition.

Nevertheless, the history of thought does not stop at Hegel. In Hegel himself are found the points to which later history must attach itself; the lacunæ which he left and the errors into which he fell. The fundamental error was the abuse of the dialectic method, which originated for the philosophic solution of the problem of opposites, but was extended by Hegel to the distinct concepts, so that he interpreted even the Kantian synthesis itself as nothing but the unity of opposites. Hence arises his incapacity to attribute their true value and function to the alogical forms of the spirit, such as art, and to the atheoretic, such as the natural sciences and mathematics; and even to logical thought itself, which, violating the laws of the synthesis, ended by imposing itself upon history and the natural sciences, attempting to resolve them into itself by dialectizing them, as the philosophy of history and the philosophy of nature. To this, therefore, is due the philosophism or panlogism which is characteristic of the system. This error was assisted by Hegel's want of clearness as to the nature of the empirical sciences. For him as for Kant, these remained sciences, that is to say, knowledge of truth, although imperfect knowledge of it. They therefore constituted even for him the material or the first step in philosophy. It is true that he also had other more acute and profound thoughts upon this subject. Amid a number of incidental observations, he emphasized the arbitrariness (Willkurlichkeit), with which those forms are affected; and this is tantamount to declaring their practical and atheoretic character. But instead of respecting this character, he decided upon surpassing it by means of a philosophic transformation of those sciences, which was not so much their death as pretended philosophies (a most true conclusion), as their elevation to the rank of particular philosophies by means of a mixture of empirical concepts and pure concepts, of abstract intellect and of reason. The erroneous tendency found nourishment and took concrete form in the idea of a Philosophy of nature, which Schelling had obtained, partly from Kant himself and partly had found in his own at first latent and then manifest theosophism. In this way, the system of Hegel became divided into three parts, a Logic-metaphysic, a Philosophy of nature and a Philosophy of Spirit, whereas it should on the contrary have unified Logic and the Philosophy of Spirit, and expelled the Philosophy of nature. By its internal dialectic, panlogism or philosophism was converted, even in Hegel himself, and still more among his disciples, into mythologism, and from the system of the Idea and of absolute immanence, because of the imperfections which they contained, there reappeared theism and transcendence (the Hegelian right wing).

It would be vain to seek the correction of Hegel among those thinkers that were his contemporaries, for they were all, though in various degrees, inferior to him. None of them had attained, through Kant, to the height attained by Hegel. Dwelling on a lower level, they could certainly refuse to recognize him and vituperate him, but they could never collaborate with and beyond him, in the progress of truth. Herbart held those concepts to which the particular sciences give rise to be contradictory, but he claimed to surpass the contradiction by means of an elaboration of the concepts (Bearbeitung der Begriffe), conducted in the very method of the old Logic, that is, of the Logic of the empirical sciences. Schleiermacher renounced the attempt to reach the unity of the speculative and the empirical, of Ethic and Physics, that is, the realization of the pure idea of knowledge; and he substituted for that ideal, which for him was unattainable, criticism, a form of worldly wisdom; that is to say, of philosophy (Weltweisheit) which gave access to theology and to religious feeling. Schopenhauer accepted the distinction between concept and idea, the first abstract and artificial, the second concrete and real; but so slight was his understanding of the idea (which he called the Platonic idea) that he confused it with the concept of natural species, that is to say, precisely with one of the most artificial and arbitrary of empirical concepts. Finally, Schelling, who had been a precursor of Hegel in his youth and had collaborated with him, not only failed to improve his logic of the intuition in his second philosophical period, but he abandoned even this embryonic form of the concrete concept, and gave himself over as a prey to the will and to irrationality. In his positive philosophy the old adversary of Jacobi made a bad combination of the alogism of Jacobi with the Hegelian idea of development and with mythologism, as in metaphysic he had anticipated the blind will of Schopenhauer.

The ensuing period, both in Germany and in the whole of Europe, had little philosophical interest. It was marked by the reappearance of a form of naturalism and of Empiricism, in part justified by the abuse of the dialectic, which had sometimes, in the hands of Hegel's disciples, seemed altogether mad. But this recrudescence was in every way very poor in thought and inadequate to previous history. With this Empiricism is associated the deplorable Logic of John Stuart Mill, one of those books which do least honour to the human spirit. That less than mediocre reasoner did not even succeed in producing a Logic of the natural sciences. He became involved in contradictions and tautologies, talking, for instance, of experience, which criticises itself and imposes its own limits upon itself, and of the principle of causality, as a law which affirms the existence of a law that there shall be a law. Still less had he any notion of what it is to philosophize, maintaining that in order to make progress in the moral and philosophical sciences it is necessary to apply to them the method of the physical sciences. Nothing is more puerile than his nominalism, which gives language a logical character, and then pretends that language must be logically reformed. Logical science was altogether lost in the evolutionism or physiologism of Spencer, and in the psychologism which had and still has many followers in Germany, in France, and in England, not less than in Italy. The state in which the Logic of philosophy is found in such an environment can be inferred from the fact that even mathematical Logic fared ill there, since there have not been wanting those who have dared to conceive a psychology of arithmetic. Finally, as a healthy corrective of psychologism, the danger of which to the old Logic had already been noted by Kant, there came the revival of the Aristotelian, and even of the scholastic Logic, in which there yet lived, though in erroneous forms, the idea of the universal which had been discovered by the Greek philosophers.

Other thinkers have not abandoned all contact with classical German philosophy; but, in comparison with the thoughts of Kant and of Kant's great pupils, they seem like children. They try to lift the weapons of the Titans, and either they do not move them at all or they let them fall from their hands, wounding themselves with them, but failing to grip them. The thoughts of Schelling and of Hegel indeed were discredited, but not touched; and those of Kant were touched, but ill-treated. In the most esteemed Logics of this description, such as those of Sigwart and of Wundt, the capital distinction between pure concepts and representative concepts, between universalia and generalia, has no prominence at all. Sigwart is obliged to complete the knowledge obtained from naturalistic and mathematical procedure by faith and by a gradual elevation to the idea of God. Wundt, who does not attribute to philosophy a method which is proper to it and different from that of the other forms of knowledge, conceives the final result of metaphysical thought as the position of a perpetual hypothesis. In the Logic of Lotze, who combated Hegelianism and revived transcendentalism and theism, there is just a luminous streak, a faint trace, of the idealist philosophy. Lotze understands that it is impossible to form (empirical) concepts by simply cancelling the varying parts of representations and preserving the constant parts, and recognizes that the formation of concepts presupposes the concept: the universal is made with the universal. He strives to issue from this circle by positing a primary universal, not formed by the method of the others, but such that thought finds it in itself. This primary universal has nothing particular and representative; and only by means of it is it possible to combine heterogeneous and to differentiate homogeneous elements, and to form the ideas of size, of more or less, of one and of many and such like, with which the second universals of the synthesis are afterwards constructed.

While students of philosophy, although manifesting some doubt and dissatisfaction, allowed themselves to be intimidated by naturalism (dazzled, like the public, with technical applications, or confounded by the applause of the public), a tendency has become more and more accentuated during the last decades, which seems to us to offer great assistance to Logic and philosophy in general, if it is understood how to adapt it to its true end. It has not had any single centre of diffusion, but has arisen, almost contemporaneously, in several places, becoming at once diffused everywhere, like something that has happened at the right time. Several of its founders and promoters are mathematicians, physicists, and naturalists. From the very fact of their having begun to reflect upon their activity, these men have certainly ceased to be mere specialists, notwithstanding their protests to the contrary. Yet they obtain considerable strength from their specialism, finding in it a guide and a curb to prevent their losing sight in their gnoseological enquiry of the actual procedure of naturalistic constructions, which are its origin. The formula of this tendency is the recognition of the practical or economic character of the mathematical, physical, and natural sciences.

The empirocriticism of Avenarius considers science to be a simple description of the forms of experience, and conceptual procedure to be the instrument that alters pure and primitive experience (pure intuition or pure perception) for the purpose of simplifying it. Ernest Mach has developed and popularized these views, for as a student of mechanics he had reached the same conclusions by his own path and in his own way. The physical sciences (he says), not less than zoology and botany, have as their sole foundation the description of natural facts in which there are never identical cases. Identical cases are created by means of the schematic imitation that we make of reality; and here toe lies the origin of the mutual dependence that appears in the character of facts. To this therefore he restricts the significance of the principle of causality, for which (in order to avoid fancifulness and mythologicism) it would be opportune to substitute the concept of function. Bodies or things are abbreviated intellectual symbols of groups of sensations; symbols, that is to say, which have no existence outside our intellect. They are cards, like those which dealers attach to boxes and which have no value except in so far as there are goods of value inside the box. In this economic schematicism lies the strength, but also the weakness, of science; for in the presentation of facts science always sacrifices something of their individuality and real appearance, and does not seek exactness in another way save when obliged to do so, by the requirements of a definite moment. Hence the incongruity between experience and science. Since they are developed upon parallel lines, they can reduce to some extent the interval that separates them, but they can never annul it by becoming coincident with one another.

Rickert, in his book on the Limits of the Naturalistic Concepts, maintains similar ideas, though with different cultural assumptions. The concept, which is the result of the labour of the sciences, is nothing but a means to a scientific end. The world of bodies and of souls is infinite in space and time. It is not possible to represent it in every individual part, by reason of its variety, which is not only extensive but also intensive: intuition is inexhaustible. The naturalistic concept is directed to surpassing this infinity of intuitions. It effects this by determining its own extension and comprehension, and by formulating its being in a series of judgments. Thus, in order to conquer intuition altogether, the natural sciences tend to substitute for concepts of tilings concepts of relations free from all intuitive elements. But the ultimate concept must always of necessity be a concept of things (though of things sui generis, immutable, indivisible, perfectly equal among themselves, expressible in negative judgments); and besides, they find everywhere insuperable barriers in the historical or descriptive element, which surrounds them all and is ineliminable. This naturalistic procedure can be applied and is indeed applied, not only to the science of bodies, but also to that of souls, to psychology and sociology; and Rickert opportunely insists (as did Hegel in his time) upon the possibility of empirical sciences of what is called the spiritual world; or (as he says) the word "nature," as used in this connection, means not a reality, but a particular point of view from which reality is observed, in order to reach the end of conceptual simplification.

In France, the same ideas or very similar are represented by a group of thinkers, who are called variously philosophers of contingency, of liberty, of intuition, or of action. Bergson, who is the chief of them, looks upon the concepts of the natural sciences in the same way as Mach, as symboles and étiquettes. Besides the extremely apposite applications that he has made of this principle to the analysis of time, of duration, of space, of movement, of liberty, of evolution, he has also the great merit of having broken his country's traditions of intellectualism and abstractionism, of giving to France for the first time that lively consciousness of the intuition, which she has always lacked, and of shaking her excessive reliance upon clear distinctions, upon well-turned concepts, upon classes, formulæ, and reasonings that proceed in a straight line, but run upon the surface of reality.

Le Roy, one of the followers of Bergson, has set himself to demonstrate, with many examples, that scientific laws only become rigorous when they are changed into conventions and depend upon vicious circles. The course of events is habitual and regular (if you like to say so), but it is not at all necessary. The great security of astronomical previsions is commonly praised; but that security is not always such in actual fact ("il y a des comètes qui ne reviennent pas"), and in any case it is always approximate. The rigorous necessity of which the natural sciences boast, is not known, but is rather postulated, and this postulation has merely the practical object of dominating single facts and of communicating with our neighbours ("parler le monde"). The law of gravity holds, but only when external forces do not disturb it. In this way it is well understood that it always holds. The conservation of energy avails only in closed systems; but closed systems are just those in which energy is conserved. A body left to itself persists in the state of repose; but this law is nothing but the definition of a body left to itself, and so on. Poincaré boldly affirms the conventional character of the mathematical and physical sciences, as do Milhaud and several others. They have deduced it as a consequence of the impression aroused by the theories of higher geometry, which has contributed more or less successfully towards revealing the practical character of mathematics, which was formerly held to be the foundation or model of truth and certainty.

All those criticisms directed against the sciences do not sound new to the ears of those Schelling, of Novalis, and of other romantics, and particularly with Hegel's marvellous criticism of the abstract (that is, empirical and mathematical) intellect. This runs through all his books, from the Phenomenology of the Spirit to the Science of Logic, and is enriched with examples in the observations to the paragraphs of the Philosophy of Nature. But if compared with that of Hegel, they are at the disadvantage of not being based upon powerful philosophical thought; they have, on the other hand, this superiority: that they do not present the characteristics observed in the sciences as errors which must be corrected, but define them as physiological, necessary, uncensurable characteristics, derived from the very function of the sciences, which is not theoretic, but practical and economic. In this way there is posited one of the premisses that are necessary for preventing the mixture of the economic method with the method of truth, of empirical and abstract concepts with pure theoretic forms, and thus for making impossible that speculative hybridism, which is expressed in philosophies of history and of nature, and which fashions an abstract reason to work out a dialectic of the naturalistic concepts, and even of the representations of history. And with the prevention of this error there is also prepared a more exact idea of the relation between pseudoconcepts and concepts and a better constitution of philosophic Logic.

But in order that this result should be obtained, the idea of the philosophic universal must be reawakened and strengthened, in conformity with its most perfect elaboration in the history of thought, at the hands of Hegel. The critics of the sciences are at present far from this mark. The term that is distinct from the empirical and abstract concepts, the knowledge of reality which is not falsified by practical ends and discovered beneath labels and formulae, is supplied, not by the pure concept, by reality thought in its concreteness, by philosophy which is history, but by pure sensation or intuition. Both Avenarius and Mach appeal to pure and primitive experience, that is, to experience free of thought and anterior to it. Bergson, with an artistic talent that is wanting to the two Germans, but following the same path, has proclaimed a new metaphysic, which proceeds in an opposite sense to that of symbolical knowledge and of generalizing and abstracting experience. He has defined the metaphysic which he desires, as a science qui prétend se passer des symboles, and therefore as "Science de l'expérience intégrale." This metaphysic would be the opposite of the Kantian ideal, of the mathematical universal, of the Platonism of the concepts, and would be founded upon intuition, the sole organ of the Absolute: "est relative la connaissance symbolique par concepts pré-existants qui va du fixe au mouvant, mais non pas la connaissance intuitive, qui s'installe dans le mouvement et adopte la vie même des choses. Cette intuition atteint l'absolu." The conclusion is æstheticism, and sometimes something even less than æstheticism, namely mysticism, or action substituted for the concept. The criticism of the sciences thereby comes to mean the negation of knowledge and of truth. Hence the protest of Poincaré against Le Roy, justified in its motive, but ineffective, because based upon the presuppositions of mathematics and physics. In others again, it becomes intermingled with the turbid waters of pragmatism, which is a little of everything, but, above all, chatter and emptiness.

Finally, another of the thinkers that we have mentioned, Rickert (following Windelband), wishes to integrate naturalistic and abstract knowledge with the historical knowledge of individual reality. Being reasonably diffident as to the possibility of a metaphysic as an "experimental science" (such as Zeller was among the first to desire), he moves towards a general theory of values. This indeed is the form (imperfect because stained with transcendence) by means of which many in our day are approaching a philosophy as the science of the spirit (or of immanent value). But in the hands of Windelband and Rickert it is understood as a primacy of the practical reason, which is taken to govern the double series of the world of the sciences and the world of history. This doubtless represents progress, as compared with empiricism and positivism; but not as compared with the Hegelian Logic of the pure concept, which included in itself what is and what ought to be.

Such, briefly stated, is the present state of logical doctrines concerning the Concept.

III

THE THEORY OF THE INDIVIDUAL JUDGMENT

The theory of the individual judgment and therefore of historical thought, has been the least elaborated of all logical theories in the course of philosophic history. It is a very true and profound remark that the historical sense is a modern thing, and that the nineteenth century is the first great century of historical thinking. Of course, since history has always been made and individual judgments pronounced, theoretic observations upon historical judgments have not been altogether wanting in the past. The spirit is, as we know, the whole spirit at every instant, and in this respect nothing is ever new under the sun, indeed, nothing is new, either before or after the sun. But history, and in particular, the theory of history, did not formerly arouse interest nor attract attention, nor was its importance felt, nor was it the object of anxious and wide investigations to the degree witnessed in the nineteenth century and in our times, when the consciousness of immanence triumphs more and more--and immanence means history.

Transcendence, then, which has for centuries been more or less dominant, supplies the reason why the study of the individual and the theory of history were neglected. In Greek philosophy, individual judgments were either despised, as in Platonism, or superseded by and confused with logical judgments of the universal, as in Aristotle. In the Poetics the character of history did not escape him. Differing from science (which was directed to the universal) and from poetry (which was directed to the possible), it expresses things that have happened in their individuality, ta genomena (what Alcibiades did and experienced). But in the Organon, although he distinguished between the universal (ta katholou) and the individual (ta kath' ekastou), between man and Callias, he made no use of the distinction, and divided judgments into universal, particular and indefinite. The theory of history was not raised to the rank of philosophic treatment in antiquity, like the other forms of knowledge, and especially philosophy, mathematics and poetry. What mark the ancients have left upon the argument is limited to incidental observations, and some altogether empirical remarks here and there upon the method of writing history. They were wont to assign extrinsic ends to it, such as utility and advice upon the conduct of life. Such utterances of good common sense as that of Quintilian, to the effect that history is written ad narrandum, non ad demonstrandum, do not possess great philosophic weight. Nor had the rules of the rhetoricians philosophic value, such as that of Dionysus of Halicarnassus, that historical narrative, without becoming quite poetical, should be somewhat more elevated in tone than ordinary discourse; or that of Cicero, who demanded for historical style verba ferme poëtarum, "perhaps" (wrote Vico, making the rhetorical rule profound) "in order that historians might be maintained in their most ancient possession, since, as has been demonstrated in the Scienza nuova, the first historians of the nations were the first poets." More important, on the other hand, are the demands (as expressed especially by Polybius) of what is indispensable to history. Besides the element of fact, there is needful (Polybius observed) knowledge of the nature of the things of which the happenings are portrayed, of military art for military things, of politics for things political. History is written, not from books, as is the way with compilers and men of letters, but from original documents, by visiting the places where it has occurred and by penetrating it with experience and with thought.

The abstractionist and anti-historical character of the Aristotelian Logic had an injurious effect in the schools, though, on the other hand, it allied itself well with the persistent transcendentalism. Certainly, just as in the Middle Ages appeared reflections upon history, so there could be no avoiding the distinction between what was known logice and what was known historice, or, as Leibnitz afterwards formulated the distinction, between propositions de raison and propositions de fait. But these latter were always regarded with a compassionate eye, as a sort of uncertain and inferior truth. The ideal of exact science would have been to absorb truths of fact in truths of reason, and to resolve them all into a philosophy, or rather into a universal mathematics. Nor did the empiricists succeed in increasing their credit. These certainly paid particular attention to facts (hence the polemic of the Anti-Aristotelians and the origin of the new instrument of observation and induction). But by weakening the consciousness of the concrete universal they also weakened that of the concrete individual, and therefore presented the latter in the mutilated form of species and genera, of types and classes. Bacon, had he done nothing else, at any rate assigned a place to history in his classification of knowledge, which was divided, as we know, according to the three faculties (memory, imagination and reason), into History, Poetry and Philosophy. He passed in review the two great classes of history, natural and civil (the first of which was either narrative or inductive, the second more variously subdivided); thus he even pointed out the kinds of history that were desirable, but of which no conspicuous examples were yet extant, such as literary history. Hobbes, on the other hand, having distinguished the two species of cognition, one of reason and the other of fact, "altera facti, et est cognitio propria testium, cujus conscriptio est historia," and having subdivided this into natural and civil, "neutra" (he added, that is to say neither the natural nor the civil) "pertinet ad institutum nostrum" which was concerned only with the cognitio consequentiarum, that is to say, science and philosophy. Locke is not less anti-historical than Descartes and Spinoza, and even Leibnitz, who was very learned, did not recognize the autonomy of historical work, and continued to consider it as directed towards utilitarian and moral ends.

Reflections upon history, suggested rather by the professional needs of historians than by a need for systematization and a profound philosophy, continued on their way, almost apart from the philosophy of the time. From the Renaissance onwards, treatises on historical art were multiplied at the hands of Robortelli, Atanagi, Riccoboni, Foglietta, Beni, Mascardi, and of many others, even of non-Italians; but their discussions usually centred upon elocution, upon the use of ornament and of digressions, upon arguments worthy of history, and the like. Among these writers of treatises we must note (here as well as in the history of Poetics and of Rhetoric) Francesco Patrizio or Patrizzi (1560), for his ideas, sometimes acute, sometimes incoherent and extravagant. Overcoming one of the prejudices of empiricism, he justly wished that the concept of history should not be limited to military enterprises and political negotiations alone, and that it should be extended to all the doings of men. With a like superiority to empirical views, he found historical representation not only in words, but also in painting and sculpture--(our times, so fruitful of histories graphically illustrated, should admit that he was to some extent right), and he did not accept chronological limits. He also insisted upon the mode of testing historical truth and upon the degree of credibility of witnesses. But he became extravagant, when he admitted a history of the future, calling the prophets as witnesses, and incoherent, when he both denied and affirmed the moral end of history.