Part 18

VI. We have discussed elsewhere Hegel's concept of development, and his thought as synthesis of opposites, which essentially belongs to the Hegelian philosophy and has been superficially treated and adopted by other philosophical schools, and this is not the place either to retrace their history or to demonstrate into what errors Hegel fell through abusing the truth that he had discovered. Among the errors of that philosophy (as for that matter of all contemporary philosophies and of those that have followed one another down to our own day), is to be noted the persistence of the concept of Nature as a mode of reality opposed to the mode of the Spirit, whence came a dualism that was not effectually surpassed, save in appearance. The doctrine of development by opposites is to be understood as accepted and maintained here, with the correction of the concept of nature, and also the doctrine of the synthesis of opposites, free from the use or abuse of it by Hegel for distinct concepts (and worse still, for empirical concepts). As for the concept of Providence, which is neither Fate nor Fortune, nor the work of a transcendent God, this, in its modern form, goes back to the Scienza nuova of Vico and is not to be confounded with the personal religious beliefs that Vico held and kept distinct from his philosophical concept as to immanent Providence. The same concept reappears in the Hegelian philosophy under the form of the Idea, or of the astuteness of Reason, which avails itself of men as its instruments and managers of business. Finally, the conception of cosmic progress was extraneous to the oriental world, to the Græco-Roman, and to the Christian worlds, prevailing in turn in the latter that of decadence from an original state of perfection and of circles or returns. In its modern form it takes its origin from thinkers free of these religious views, who merge in the philosophies of becoming and of evolution. But the concept of progress destroyed itself in many of these rationalistic philosophies, the "disappearance of evil" being posited as possible (Spencer), and a definite state of perfection conceived (though transferred from the past into the future), that is to say a Reality that should be Reality, indeed, perfect Reality having ceased to be development, that is to say, itself.

Kr. d. prakt. Vern. p. 119.

Phil. d. Rechtes, §§ 4, 15.

Lotze, Grundzüge der Ethik (Leipzig, 1884), pp. 26, 30-31; Wundt, Ethik² (Stuttgart, 1892), pp. 463-464.

Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris, 1898).

Tract, theol.-pol. vi. c. 6; Ethica, p. iv. intr.; Epist.36 (Opera, pp. 208, 378, 597).

Kr. d. pr. Vernf. p. 79.

System der Sittenlehre, in Werke, iv. pp. 198-205.

See my study: Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto della filosofia di Hegel (Bari, 1907).

Médit. iv.

For example, Compendio di Etica (Roma, 1907), p. 56.

Mentor, iv. c. 2, § 19 sqq.

Hippias minor, 375.

Pascal, Provine, i, iv.; Hegel, Phil. d. Rechtes, § 40.

Enc.§ 248.

Allg. prakt. Phil. pp. 121-122; Einl. i. d. Phil. (trad, ital.), pp. 118, 171, 224.

Ethic, iv. prop. 54, p. 480.

Gesch. d. Phil. ii. 240-241; Vorles. üb. Aesth. ii. 162-163.

Eth. Nicom. Bk. iii. cc. 2-3, 1111-1113.

Scienza nuova seconda, degn. 5.

Phän. d. Geistes, pp. 484-486; Encycl. § 474; Phil. d. Rechtes, § 124; Phil. d. Gesch. pp. 39-41.

Traité des passions, iii. § 211.

Maximes, n. 182 (Ed. Garnier, p. 43).

Woldemar, pp. 112-113.

Monologen, in Werke, i. 366-368, 372.

See the study of Hegel mentioned.

THIRD SECTION

UNITY OF THE THEORETICAL AND THE PRACTICAL