analogous but opposite defect. With them, it appears, we emerge from
the difficulties of representations. The triangle and free motion are
not something which begins and ends in time and of which we are not
able to state exactly the character and limits. So long as thought,
that is to say, thinkable reality, exists, the concept of the triangle
and of free motion will have validity. The triangle is formed by the
intersection of three straight lines enclosing a space and forming
three angles, the sum of which, though they 'vary from triangle to
triangle, is equal to that of two right angles. It is impossible to
confuse the triangle with the quadrilateral or the circle. Free motion
is a motion, which we think of as taking place without obstacles of
any sort. It is impossible to confuse it with a motion to which there
is any particular obstacle. So far so good. But if those conceptual
fictions let fall the ballast of representations, they ascend to a zone
without air, where life is impossible; or, to speak without metaphor,
they gain universality by losing reality. There is no geometric
triangle in reality because in reality there are no straight lines, nor
right angles nor sums of right angles, nor sums of angles equal to that
of two right angles. There is no free motion in reality, because every
real motion takes place in definite conditions and therefore among
obstacles. A thought, which has as its object nothing real, is not
thought; and those concepts are not concepts but conceptual fictions.
[Sidenote: _Critique of the doctrine which considers them to be
erroneous concepts,_]
Having made clear, by means of these examples, the character of
concepts and of fictional concepts, we are prepared to solve the
question as to whether the second are legitimate or illegitimate
products, and if they merit the reproach which seems to attach to
their name. And certainly, a view which has had and still has force
does not hesitate to consider those fictions as nothing but _erroneous
concepts,_ and declares a war of extermination against them, in the
name of rigorous thought and of truth. If it follows from what we have
said, that the cat or the house or the rose are not concepts, and
that the geometrical triangle or free motion are not so either, the
conclusion seems inevitable that we must free ourselves from these
errors or misconceptions, and affirm that there is neither the cat
nor the rose nor the house, but a reality all compact (although it is
continuously changing) which develops and is new at every instant; nor
is there either the triangle or free motion, but the eternal forms of
this reality, which cannot be abstracted and fixed by themselves, and
deprived of the conditions which are an integral part of them. But a
single fact suffices to invalidate this conclusion and to confute the
premiss upon which it rests, that conceptual fictions are erroneous
concepts. An error once discovered cannot reappear, at least until the
discovery is forgotten, and there is a falling back into the conditions
of mental obscurity similar to those antecedent to the discovery.
When, for example, the position has been attained that morality is not
a phenomenon of egoism and that it has value in itself, or one has
become certain that Hannibal was ignorant of the disaster that befell
his brother Hasdrubal on the Metaurus, it is impossible to continue
believing that morality is egoism, or that Hannibal has been informed
of the arrival of Hasdrubal and had voluntarily allowed him to be
surprised by the two Consuls. But with conceptual fictions similar to
those in the example the case is otherwise. Even when we are persuaded
that the triangle and free motion correspond to nothing real, and that
the rose, the cat, and the house have nothing precise and universal in
them, we must yet continue to make use of the fictions of triangles, of
free motion; of houses, cats, and roses. We can criticise them, and we
cannot renounce them; therefore, it is not true that they are, at least
altogether and in every sense, errors.
[Sidenote: _or imperfect concepts preparatory to perfect concepts._]
This indispensability of conceptual fictions to the life of the spirit,
finds acknowledgment in a more temperate form of the doctrine which
considers them as erroneous concepts; that is, in the thesis that
they are erroneous, but at the same time preparatory to, and almost a
first step towards, the formation of true and proper concepts. The
spirit does not issue all at once from representations and attain to
the universal; it issues from them little by little, and prior to
the rigorous universal, it constructs others less rigorous, which
have the advantage of replacing the infinite representations with
their infinite shades, through which reality presents itself in
æsthetic contemplation. Conceptual fictions, then, would be sketches
of concepts, and therefore, like all sketches, capable of revision
and annulment, but useful. Thus it would be explained how they are
errors, and errors made for a good reason. But this moderate theory
also clashes noisily with the most evident facts. Above all, it is not
true that the spirit issues little by little from the representations,
passing through a series of grades; the procedure of the spirit, in
this regard, is altogether different, and when philosophers have wanted
to find a comparison for it, they have been obliged to come back to
that very 'leap' which they wanted to avoid: "Spirit (said Schelling,
for example,) is an _eternal island,_ which is not to be reached from
matter, without a leap, whatever turns and twists be made." And, for
this very reason, conceptual fictions are not good passages to rigorous
concepts: to think rigorously, we must plunge ourselves again into the
flood of representations and think immediate reality, clearing away the
obstacles that proceed from conceptual fictions. And always for the
same reason, rigorous concepts, when they find themselves confronted
with conceptual fictions as rivals in the same problem, do not claim
their assistance, nor correct, nor refine upon them, in order partially
to preserve them, but combat and destroy them. What the rigorous
concepts are unable to do, is to prevent the others from reappearing;
because the spirit, as has been seen, preserves, without correcting
them, although it has recognized their falsity: it preserves them, that
is to say, not fused and rendered true in the rigorous concepts, but
_outside and after these._
[Sidenote: _Posteriority of conceptual fictions to true and proper
concepts._]
In short, we have to abandon entirely the idea that conceptual fictions
are errors, or sketches and aids, and that they precede rigorous
concepts. Quite the opposite is true: conceptual fictions do not
precede rigorous concepts, but follow them, and presuppose them as
their own foundation. Were this not so, of what could they ever be
fictions? To counterfeit or imitate something implies first knowledge
of the thing which it is desired to counterfeit or to imitate. To
falsify means to have knowledge of the genuine model: false money
implies good money, not vice versa. It is possible to think that man,
from being the ingenuous poet that he first was, raised himself,
immediately, to the thought of the eternal; but it is not possible to
think that he constructed the smallest conceptual fiction, without
having previously imagined and thought. The house, the rose, the cat,
the triangle, free motion presuppose quantity, quality, existence,
and we know not how many other rigorous concepts: they are made with
iron instruments great and small, which logical thought has created,
and which come to be used with such rapidity and naturalness that we
usually end by believing that we have proceeded without them. Whoever
makes conceptual fictions, has already taken his logical bearings in
the world: he knows what he is doing and reasons about it; progress
with his conceptual fictions depending upon progress with his rigorous
concepts, and being continuously remade, according to the new needs and
the new conditions which are formed. Now that the concept of miracle
or witchcraft has been destroyed, the conceptual fictions relating
to the various classes and modes of miraculous facts and acts of
witchcraft are no longer constructed; and since the destruction of
the belief in the direct influence of the stars upon human destinies,
the astrological and mathematical fictions, which arose upon those
conceptual presuppositions, have also disappeared.
Those who have seen errors or sketches of truth in conceptual
fictions have certainly seen something: because (without incidentally
anticipating at this point the theory of errors, or that of sketches
or aids to the search for truth) it may at once be admitted, that
conceptual fictions also sometimes become both errors and obstacles,
and suggestions and aids to truth. But because a given spiritual
product is adopted for an end different from that which rightly belongs
to it (thereby becoming itself different and giving rise to a new
spiritual product), we must not omit to search for the intrinsic end,
which constitutes the genuine nature of this product. The portrait
of a fair lady, white as milk and red as blood, which the prince of
the story finds beneath a cushion by the help of the fairy, may serve
as an incentive to make him undertake the journey round the world
in search of the woman in flesh and blood, who is like the portrait
and whom he will make his wife; but that portrait, before it is an
instrument in the hands of the fairy, is a picture, that is to say, a
work of art, which has come from the hands, or rather from the fancy,
of the painter; and must be appreciated as such. Thus conceptual
fictions, before they are transmuted into errors or into expedients,
into obstacles or into aids to the search for truth, have, before
them, a truth already constructed, toward the construction of which,
therefore, they cannot serve; whereas that truth has served them, for
they would not otherwise have been able to arise. They are, therefore,
intrinsically neither obstacles nor aids to truth, but something else,
that is, themselves; and what they are in themselves it is still
necessary to determine.
[Sidenote: _Practical character of conceptual fictions._]
For this purpose it is needful to direct our attention to the moment of
their formation, which, as has been said, is not at all theoretical,
but practical; and to ask ourselves in what way and with what end
the practical spirit can intervene in representations and concepts
previously produced, manipulate them and make of them conceptual
fictions. The view that the work of the practical spirit can give
rise to new knowledge, not previously attained, must be resolutely
excluded: the practical spirit is such, precisely because it is
non-cognitive; as regards knowledge it is altogether sterile. If,
then, it accomplishes those manipulations, and says to a cat: "You
will represent for me all cats"; or to a rose: "See, I draw you in
my treatise on botany, and you will represent all roses"; and to
the triangle: "It is true I cannot think you, nor represent you;
but I suppose that you are the same as what I draw with rule and
compass, and I make use of you to measure the approximate triangles
of reality";--in so doing, it recognizes that it does not accomplish
any act of _knowledge._ But does it, in that case, accomplish an act
of _anti-knowledge_--that is, does it make these manipulations and
fictions in order to place obstacles in the way of knowledge and to
simulate its products, so that it leads astray the seeker for truth?
If this were so, the "practical spirit" would be synonymous with
the spirit of confusion; and the contriver of conceptual fictions
would deserve the reprobation that attaches to forgers of documents,
sophists, rhetoricians, and charlatans; whereas, on the contrary,
he receives the applause and gratitude of every one. Each one of
us, at every instant, would be guilty of a plot against the truth,
because at every instant each of us forms and employs those fictions;
whereas the moral consciousness, delicate and intolerant though it
be, makes no reproof, but indeed offers encouragement. Therefore, the
act of forming intellectual fictions is an act neither of knowledge
nor of anti-knowledge; it is not logically rational, but neither is
it logically irrational; it is rational, indeed, but _practically_
rational.
[Sidenote: _The practical end and mnemonic utility._]
In this case the practical end in view can be but one. We know in order
to act; and he who acts is interested only in that knowledge, which is
the necessary precedent of his doing. But since our knowledge is all
destined to be recalled as occasion serves for action, or to aid us in
the search for new knowledge (which in this case is a form of acting),
the practical spirit is impelled to provide for the preservation of the
patrimony of acquired knowledge. Without doubt, speaking absolutely,
everything is preserved in reality, and nothing that has once been
done or thought, disappears from the bosom of the cosmos. But the
preservation of which we speak, is properly the making easily available
to memory, knowledge that has once been possessed, and providing for
its ready recall from the bosom of the cosmos or from the apparently
unconscious and forgotten. For this purpose there are constructed
those instruments, which are conceptual fictions, by means of which
armies of representations are evoked with a single word, or by which
a single word approximately indicates what form of operation must be
resorted to, in order that certain representations may be recovered.
The cat of the appropriate conceptual fiction does not enable us to
know any single cat, as a painter or a historian of cats makes us
know it; but by means of it, many images of animals, which would have
remained separate before the memory, or each one dispersed and fused in
the complete picture in which it had been imagined and perceived, are
arranged in a series and recorded as a whole. This matters little or
nothing to one who dreams as a poet or who seeks absolute truth; but it
matters a great deal to one whose house is infested by rats, and who
must employ some one to obtain a cat; and it matters not less to the
seeker for the cat, in that he has to study a new animal, and that he
must proceed in that study with some order, though it be artificial,
and though he reject the artifice in the final synthesis. Again, the
geometrical triangle is of no service either to imagination or to
thought, which are developed without it; but it is indispensable to
any one measuring a field, in the same way as it may possibly be of
service to a painter in his preparatory studies for a picture, or to
a historian, who wishes to know well the configuration of a piece of
ground where a battle was fought.
[Sidenote: _Persistence of conceptual fictions side by side with
concepts._]
This is the real reason why, however perfect rigorous concepts become,
conceptual fictions remain ineliminable, and indeed obtain from these
fresh nourishment. They cannot be criticized and resolved by means of
rigorous concepts, because they are of a different order from them:
they cannot act as inferior degrees of the rigorous concept, because
they presuppose it. The reason, which we were pledged to give, is
given; and henceforward there can no longer arise any misunderstanding
as to the relation of the concept to conceptual fictions. It is a
relation not of identity, nor of contrariety, but simply of diversity.
[Sidenote: _Pure concepts and pseudoconcepts._]
The terminological question remains, and this, as always, has but
slight importance. "Conceptual fictions" is a manner of speech; and no
one would wish to combat manners of speech. For brevity's sake we shall
call them _pseudoconcepts,_ and for the sake of clearness we shall
call the true and proper concepts _pure concepts._ This term seems to
us more suitable than that of _ideas_ (pure concepts), as opposed to
_logical concepts_ (pseudoconcepts), as they were at one time called
in the schools. It must further be noted, that the pseudoconcepts,
although the word "concept" forms part of their name, are not concepts,
they do not form a species of, nor do they compete with, concepts (save
when forcibly made to do so); and that the pure concepts have not got
the impure concepts at their side, for these are not truly concepts.
Every word offers, in some degree, a hold for misunderstanding, because
it circulates in this base world, which is full of snares; the search
for words which should absolutely prevent misunderstandings is vain,
for it would be necessary first of all to clip the wings of the human
spirit. We may prefer one word to another, according to historical
contingencies; and for our part we prefer the words _pseudoconcept_
and _pure concept,_ if for no other reason than to remind the makers
of fictional concepts to be modest, and to flash above their heads the
light of the only true form of concept, which is logical nature itself
in its universality and in its severity. How can we fail to think
that the choice has been well made if this title of _pure concept_
please the few, but terrify the many and irritate the most, more than
the red cloth shaken before the eyes of the bull; and if, like every
efficacious medicine, it provoke a reaction in the organism of the
patient?
[Footnote 1: These relations are examined in the _Philosophy of the
Practical,_ first part.]
III
THE CHARACTERISTICS AND THE CHARACTER OF THE CONCEPT
The characteristics of the pure concept, or simply, concept, may be
gathered from what has previously been said.
[Sidenote: _Expressivity._]
The concept has the character of _expressivity;_ that is to say, it is
a cognitive product, and, therefore, expressed or spoken, not a mute
act of the spirit, as is a practical act. If we wish to submit the
effective possession of a concept to a first test, we can employ the
experiment which was advised on a previous occasion:--whoever asserts
that he possesses a concept, should be invited to expound it in words,
and with other means of expression (graphic symbols and the like). If
he refuse to do so, and say that his concept is so profound that words
cannot avail to render it, we can be sure, either that he is under the
illusion of possessing a concept, when he possesses only turbid fancies
and morsels of ideas; or that he has a presentiment of the profound
concept, that it is in process of formation, and will be, but is not
yet, possessed. Each of us knows that when he finds himself in the
meditative depth of the internal battle, of that true _agony_ (because
it is the death of one life and the birth of another), which is the
discovery of a concept, he can certainly talk of the state of his soul,
of his hopes and fears, of the rays that enlighten and of the shadows
that invade him; but he cannot yet communicate his concept, which is
not as yet, because it is not yet expressible.
[Sidenote: _Universality._]
If this character of expressivity be common to the concept and to the
representation, its _universality_ is peculiar to the concept; that is
to say, its transcendence in relation to the single representations, so
that no single representation and no number of them can be equivalent
to the concept. There is no middle term between the individual and
the universal: either there is the single or there is the whole, into
which that single enters with all the singles. A concept which has been
proved not universal, is, by that very fact, confuted as a concept.
Our philosophical confutations do not proceed otherwise. Sociology,
for instance, asserts the concept of _Society,_ as a rigorous concept
and principle of science; and the criticism of Sociology proves that
the concept of society is not universal, but individual, and is
related to the groupings of certain beings which representation has
placed before the sociologist, and which he has arbitrarily isolated
from other complexes of beings that representation also placed or
could place before him. The theory of tragedy postulates the concept
of the _tragic,_ and from it deduces certain necessary essentials
of tragedy; and the criticism of literary classes demonstrates that
the tragic is not a concept, but a roughly defined group of artistic
representations, which have certain external likenesses in common; and,
therefore, that it cannot serve as foundation for any theory. On the
other hand, to establish a universality, which at first was wanting,
is the glory of truly scientific thought; hence we give the name of
discoverers to those who bring to light connections of representations
or of representative groups, or of concepts, which had previously been
separate; that is to say, who universalize them. Thus, it was thought
at one time that will and action were distinct concepts; and it was
a step in progress to identify them by the creation of the truly
universal concept of the will, which is also action. Thus, too, it was
held that expression in language was a different thing from expression
in art; and it was an advance to universalize the expression of art by
extending it to language; or that of language by extending it to art.
[Sidenote: _Concreteness._]
Not less proper to the concept is the other character of
_concreteness,_ which means that if the concept be universal and
transcendent in relation to the single representation, it is yet
immanent in the single, and therefore in all representations. The
concept is the universal in relation to the representations, and is
not exhausted in any one of them; but since the world of knowledge
is the world of representations, the concept, if it were not in the
representations, would not be anywhere: it would be in _another_ world,
which cannot be thought, and therefore is not. Its transcendence,
therefore, is also immanence; like that truly literary language that
Dante desired, which, in relation to the speech of the different parts
of Italy, _in qualibet redolet civitate nec cubat in ulla._ If it is
proved of a concept that it is inapplicable to reality, and therefore
is not concrete, it is thereby confuted as a true and proper concept.
It is said to be an _abstraction,_ it is not reality; it does not
possess _concreteness._ In this way, for example, has been confuted the
concept of spirit as different from nature (abstract spiritualism); or
of the good, as a model placed above the real world; or of atoms, as
the components of reality; or of the dimensions of space, or of various
quantities of pleasure and pain, and the like. All these are things not
found in any part of the real, since there is neither a reality that is
merely natural and external to spirit, nor an ideal world outside the
real world; nor a space of one or of two dimensions; nor a pleasure or
pain that is homogeneous with another, and therefore greater or less
than another; and for this reason all these things do not result from
concrete thinking and are not concepts.
[Sidenote: _The concrete universal, and the formation of the
pseudoconcepts._]
Expressivity, universality, concreteness, are then the three
characteristics of the concept derived from the foregoing discussion.
Expressivity affirms that the concept is a cognitive act, and denies
that it is merely practical, as is maintained in various senses by
mystics, and by arbitrarists or fictionists. Universality affirms that
it is a cognitive act _sui generis,_ the logical act, and denies that
it is an intuition, as is maintained by the æstheticists, or a group
of intuitions, as is asserted in the doctrine of the arbitrarists
or fictionists. Concreteness affirms that the universal logical act
is also a thinking of reality, and denies that it can be universal
and void, universal and inexistent, as is maintained in a special
part of the doctrine of the arbitrarists. But this last point needs
explanation, which leads us to enunciate explicitly an important
division of the pseudoconcepts, which has hitherto been mentioned as
apparently incidental.
[Sidenote: _Empirical pseudoconcepts and abstract pseudoconcepts._]