in most recent times, is the distrust of or open hostility towards
the search for _symmetry,_ the arrangement of philosophic concepts
in _dyads, triads, quatriads,_ or in other suchlike numbers, which
precisely express symmetry in the ordering of those concepts. And
such distrust will be judged reasonable by any one who recalls the
excesses caused by this love of symmetry and the puerilities to which
some even of the loftiest philosophers abandoned themselves, owing to
their excessive attachment to certain numbers. The pedantry of the
Kantian quatriads and triads is truly insupportable, nor are Hegel's
triads less artificial. These were very often reduced by his disciples
to conjuring tricks and almost to buffoonery. It was natural that
there should be a reaction towards the search for the asymmetrical and
towards the doctrine that the concepts attained cannot be arranged
in a beautiful order, for they change their order from one sphere to
another, but that nevertheless they and no others are the concepts of
reality--inelegant but honest; asymmetrical but true. The reaction
is comprehensible, the distrust justifiable; but the hostility is
certainly unjustifiable. If distinct concepts constitute a unity, they
must of necessity constitute an order or symmetry, of which certain
numbers, that can be called regular, are the expression or symbol. The
concepts of an empirical science may be thirty-seven, eighty-three,
a hundred and thirteen, or as many as you like according as they
are arranged. But the concepts of philosophy will always be dyads,
triads, quatriads and the like, that is to say, an organic unity of
distinctions and a correspondence of parts. For this reason, the human
race has always had _sacred numbers_ in religion and _philosophic
numbers_ in philosophy. Let him laugh who wills; but we do not say
that he laughs well. The criterion of symmetry must not become a
_prejudice._ It must, however, act as a control upon the enquiry that
has been accomplished, since it greatly aids, as a heuristic process,
the enquiry that is yet to be made. Astronomers are praised, when,
thanks to their calculations, supported by the criterion of proportion
and symmetry, they form a hypothesis that a star, unseen at the time,
but which the telescope eventually discovers, must be at a certain
place in the sky. Why should not a philosopher be equally praised, who
deduces that for reasons of symmetry, there must be in the spirit a
form, as yet unobserved, or that for the same reasons, there should
be eliminated a form which does not seem to be eliminable, but which
spoils the symmetry? Why should the spirit be less rhythmical and less
symmetrical than the starry sky?
[Sidenote: _Impossibility of dividing philosophy into general and
particular._]
When the systematic character of philosophy is conceived in this
way, it is seen that the system is not something superadded, like a
thread used for binding together the various parts of philosophy and
quite external to the objects that it unites, so that we can consider
separately the objects and the thread, the parts and the system. In
philosophy, none of the parts are without the whole, and the whole does
not exist without the parts. Translated into other terms, this means
chat there are not _particular_ philosophic sciences, just as there
is not a _general_ philosophy. We have made use of this proposition,
in order to confute the usual conception of Logic as a prologue to
philosophy, and to show how this error (which in the case of Logic
is supported by special reasons) is the principal source of other
like errors. Thus Metaphysic or Ontology, or some other science,
which is supposed to give the unity of the real, of which the special
philosophic sciences give only the distinctions, is placed before or
after the special philosophic sciences like a prologue or an epilogue.
The truth is that general philosophy is nothing but the special
philosophic sciences, and _vice versa._ The plural and the singular
cannot be separated in the pure concept, where the plural is plural of
the singular, and the singular is singular of the plural.
[Sidenote: _Evils of the conception of a general philosophy, separated
from particular philosophies._]
The destruction of this erroneous idea of a general philosophy has
direct practical, importance. For, once the so-called science has been
constituted, by means of a group of arbitrarily isolated problems,
which really belong to the various sciences called particular, we
are led to believe that true philosophy consists of a medley, in
constant agitation and shock, and that, thanks to this agitation and
these shocks, it becomes ever more worthy of itself, that is, of
being a medley. But the problems of God and of the world, of spirit
and of matter, of thought and of nature, of subject and of object,
of the individual and of the universal, of life and death, torn from
Logic, from Æsthetic, from the Philosophy of the practical, become
insoluble or are solved only in appearance (that is to say, verbally
and imaginatively). Many young men, ignorant of all particular
philosophical knowledge, attack them as if they were the first step
in philosophy, and many old professors find themselves at the end of
their lives in the same state of mental confusion as at the beginning,
indeed with their confusion increased and henceforth inextricable,
owing to the false path that they have followed for so many years.
They have not respected philosophy, in their first relations with it;
they resemble those men who will never really love a woman, because
they failed of respect to women in their youth. On the other hand,
the so-called particular philosophical sciences, deprived of some of
their organs and become blind or deaf or otherwise maimed, fall into
the power of psychologism and empiricism. Hence the empirical and
psychological treatment of Morality, of Æsthetic, and of Logic itself.
In regard to this evil, now more than ever rampant in philosophic
studies, it is necessary to remember, that the history of philosophy
teaches that no philosophic progress has ever been achieved by
so-called general philosophy, but always by discoveries made in one or
other of the so-called special philosophies. The concept of Socrates
and the dialectic of Hegel are discoveries in Logic. Kant's concept
of freedom is a discovery in Ethics. The concept of intuition is a
discovery in Æsthetic. The critique of formalist logic is a discovery
in the Philosophy of language. The old idea of God has been dissolved
by those most modest, yet greatest of men, who contented themselves
with formulating a new proposition on the syllogism or on the will, on
art or history, or with defining the abstract intellect or with fixing
the limits of the fancy. Had we been obliged to await these solutions
from the cultivators of that anæmic general philosophy, the old idea of
God would now be more rife than before. And in truth it is still rife
among those philosophers of whom we have spoken, for it reappears from
the midst of the medley which they stir, either with the name of the
Unknowable, or with the old name that still is reverenced.
III
HISTORY
[Sidenote: _History as individual judgment._]
Since all the characteristics assigned to Philosophy are verbal
variants of its unique character, which is the pure concept, so all
the characteristics of History can be reduced to the definition and
identification of History with the individual judgment.
History, being the individual judgment, is the synthesis of subject and
predicate, of representation and concept. The intuitive and the logical
elements are both indispensable to it and both are bound together with
an unseverable link.
[Sidenote: _The individual element and historical sources; relics and
narratives._]
Owing to the necessity for the subject or intuitive element, history
cannot be constructed by pure reason. The vision of the thing done
is necessary and is the sole _source_ of history. In treatises upon
historical method the sources are usually divided into _remains_ and
_narratives,_ meaning by remains (_Ueberreste_) the things which
remain as traces of an event (for example, a contract, a letter, a
triumphal arch), and by narratives the accounts of the event as they
have been communicated by those who were more or less eye-witnesses, or
by those who have consulted the notes of eye-witnesses. But, in truth,
narratives are valuable just in so far as it is presumed that they
place us in direct contact with the thing that happened and make us
live it again, drawing it forth from the obscure depth of the memories
that the human race bears with it. Had they not this virtue, they would
be altogether useless, as are the narratives to which for one reason
or another credence is refused. A hundred or a thousand narratives
lacking authenticity are not equal to the poorest authentic document.
An authentic narrative is both a document and remains; it is the
reality of the fact as it was _lived_ and as it vibrates in the spirit
of him who took part in it. The search for veracity and the criticism
of the value of sources are reducible in the ultimate analysis, to the
isolation of this genuine resonance of fact, by its liberation from
perturbing elements, such as the illusions, the false judgments, the
preoccupations and passions of the witness. Only in so far as this can
be successfully done, and in the measure in which it is successful,
do we have the first condition of history as act of cognition--that
something can be _intuited_ and thereby transformable into the
_subject_ of the individual judgment, that is to say, into historical
narrative.
[Sidenote: _The intuitive faculty in historical research._·]
On this necessity is based the importance which in the examination of
historians is attached to intuition, or touch, or scent, or whatever
else it may be called, that is to say, to the capacity (derived in
part from natural disposition and in part from practical exercise) of
directly intuiting what has occurred, of passing beyond the obstacles
of time and space and the alterations produced by chance or human
passion. An historian without intuitive faculty, or more exactly (since
no one is altogether without it), with but slender intuitive faculty,
is condemned to barrenness, however learned and ingenious he may be in
argument. He finds himself inferior to others, less learned and less
logical than he, inferior even to the uncultured and to the illogical,
when it is a question of feeling what lies beneath words and signs, or
of reproducing in himself what actually happened. For the same reason,
it sometimes happens that an expert in a given trade is astonished to
hear the learned arm-chair historian describe certain orders of facts,
of which he has no experience and of which he talks as a blind man
talks of colours. A sergeant can intuite a march better than a Thiers,
and laugh at the millions of men that Xerxes had led into Greece by
simply enquiring how they were fed. A political schemer understands
a court or ministerial intrigue far better than an honest man like
Muratori. A craftsman can reconstruct the successive brush-strokes and
the traces of change of mind in a picture better than the erudite and
æsthetic historian of art. Historical works perhaps defective or even
failures from other points of view, sometimes fascinate by the proof
they give of freshness of impression: and this quality may serve to
increase our knowledge of facts and to rectify the errors into which
their authors have fallen in other respects. To a historian of the
French Revolution we can pardon even the mistaking of one personage
for another, of a river for a mountain, or the confusion of months and
years, when on the whole he has lived again better than others the soul
of the Jacobins, the spiritual conditions of the mob of Paris, the
attitude of the peasants of Burgundy or of La Vendée. What is called an
historical novel sometimes has in certain respects greater value than
a history, if the novel is inspired by the spirit of the time and the
history contains merely an inventory.
[Sidenote: _The intuitive faculty in historical exposition. Similarity
of history and art._]
The intuitive faculty, indispensable in research, is not less
indispensable in historical exposition; since it is necessary to
intuite the actual fact, not in a fugitive and sketchy manner, but so
firmly as to be able to express it and to fix it in words, in such a
way as to transmit its genuine life to others. Hence the specially
artistic character that must be possessed by true historians. Here
they resemble pure artists, painting pictures, as they do, composing
poems and writing tragic dialogues. Certainly, every thought, even that
of the most abstruse philosopher and mathematician, becomes concrete
in artistic form. But the historian (in the somewhat empirical sense
of the word) approximates much more nearly to those who express pure
intuitions, since he gives literary preference to the subject over
the predicate. This has been generally recognized both by historians,
who have freely presented themselves as bards of their race invoking
the Muse who represents History upon Parnassus, while there is there
no representative of Philosophy, Mathematics, or Science; and by
theorists, who have constantly debated the question as to _whether
history is art._ It seems indeed to be art, when the predicate or
logical element is so well concealed that hardly any attention is paid
to it.
[Sidenote: _Difference between history and art. The predicate or
logical element in history._]
I say _hardly_; because if no attention whatever be paid to it, if
literary emphasis become logical mutilation, art will remain, but
history will have gone. A book of history will no longer merely
_resemble_ a poem or romance, but will _be_ a poem or a romance. What
is it that, from the point of view of intuition, distinguishes an
imaginative vision and an historical narrative? If we open the _Divine
Comedy_ or the _Rime_ of Petrarch and read: "In the middle pathway
of our life, I found myself in a dark forest ...," or, "I raised my
thought to where she whom I seek was and find not upon earth ..."; and
if we open Livy's _History,_ at the place where he recounts the battle
of Cannae, and read: "_Consules satis exploratis itineribus sequentes
Poenum, ut ventum ad Cannas est, ubi in conspecta Poenum habebant,
bina, castra communiunt,"_ nothing at first seems changed; both are
narratives. Yet everything is changed. If we read Livy as we read
Dante or Petrarch, the battle of Cannae in the same way as the voyage
of Dante to the Inferno, or the passage of the spirit of Petrarch to
the third heaven, Livy is no longer Livy, but a story book. In like
manner, if we read a book of stories, as, for example, the _Kings of
France_ or the _Guerin Meschino,_ in the same way as they are read by
the uneducated man of the people, who seeks history in them, the story
book becomes transformed into a historical book, although of a kind
that must be criticized and refuted when a higher degree of culture has
been attained. This suffices to show the importance of that predicate,
which is sometimes left to be understood in the words, but whose
effective presence transforms the pure intuition into the individual
judgment and makes _history_ of a _poem._
[Sidenote: _Vain attempts to eliminate it._]
The necessity of the logical element has been several times denied,
and it has been affirmed that the historian must let things speak for
themselves and put into them nothing of his own. This fine phrase may
have some reference to a-certain truth, as we shall see. But if it is
understood as the exclusion of the logical element in favour of pure
intuition (and worse still, if it intends to exclude also the category
of intuition, for in that case we have simple _muteness),_ it proclaims
the death of history. Without the logical element it is not possible to
say that even the smallest, the most ordinary fact, belonging to our
individual and everyday life, has _occurred;_ as, for instance, that I
rose this morning at eight o'clock and took luncheon at twelve. For (to
give no other reasons) these historical propositions imply the concept
of existence or actuality and the correlative concept of non-existence
or possibility, since in affirming them I also deny that I only dreamed
of rising at eight or of taking luncheon at twelve. All will agree that
we cannot speak of a historical fact if we do not know that it is a
fact, that is to say, something that has happened; even stories become
the object of history, in so far as their existence as stories is
attributed to them. A story, told without knowing or deciding whether
it be or be not a story, is poetry; perceived and told as a story, it
is mythography, that is to say, history; the author of the _Iliad_ or
the author of the _Niebelungen_ is not Adalbert Kuhn, Jacob Grimm or
Max Müller.
[Sidenote: _Extension of historical predicates beyond that of mere
existence._]
But the criterion of existentiality does not itself suffice, as some
believe, for the effectual constitution of historical narrative. For
what sort of narrative should we have, if we merely said that something
had happened, without saying _what_ had happened? That something has
happened and does happen at every instant, is not, as we know, the
content of historical narrative, because it is the affirmation that
being is, or that becoming is. What has been said of the individual
judgment, namely, that it is constituted by all the predicates
together, that is, of the whole concept, and not by the predicate of
existence alone, torn from the others, must also be said of historical
narrative. It is truly complete and therefore realized, when the
intuition, which supplied it with the rough material, is completely
penetrated by the concept, in its universality, particularity and
singularity. That the consuls, after having sufficiently explored
the routes, followed the Carthaginian, entered Cannae, and seeing
themselves face to face with the army of Hannibal, pitched and
fortified their camp (as runs Livy's narrative), implies a crowd of
concepts, equal in number to the historical affirmations collected in
that sentence. No one ignorant as to what is man, war, army, pursuit,
route, camp, fortification, dream, reality, love, hatred, fatherland,
and so on, is capable of _thinking_ such a sentence as this. And the
obscurity of one of those concepts is sufficient to make it impossible
to form the narrative as a whole, just as any one who does not
understand the meaning of the word _castra_ is not in a position to
understand what forms the argument of Livy's narrative. If the sources
are changed, the historical narrative changes; but this latter changes
no less, if our convictions as to the concepts are changed. The same
matter is differently arranged and gives rise to different histories,
if it is narrated by a savage or a cultured European, by an anarchist
or a conservative, by a protestant or a catholic, by the me of this
moment or the same me of ten years hence. Given that all have the same
documents before them, each one reads in them a different happening.
[Sidenote: _Alleged insuperable variation in judging and presenting
historical facts, and consequent claim for a history without
judgments._]
But the fact here stated seems to lead straight to despair as to the
fate of history, or at least as to its fate, so long as it is bound
to the logical element, to convictions about the concepts. When it is
observed that the same facts are narrated in the most different way;
that what for some is the work of God is for others the work of the
Devil; that what for some is the manifestation of spiritual forces is
for others the product of material movements of the brain, according
as it is well or ill-nourished; that to some the good of life lies in
every explosion and revolt, while to others it lies only in regular
work under the tutelage of laws rigorously observed and made to be
observed,--we arrive at the conclusion of historical scepticism,
namely, that history as usually narrated is nothing but a story woven
from such a state of degeneration seems to be a return to the pure and
simple reproduction of the document, or at least to the pure intuition,
which introduces no element of _judgment,_ or of what is called
_subjective._ But this salvation is only a figure of speech, for pure
intuition is poetry and not history, and to return to it is equivalent
to abolishing history. This, however, is clearly impossible, for the
human race has always narrated its doings, and none of us can dispense
with establishing at every instant how things have happened, what has
really happened, and in what actual or historical conditions he finds
himself.
[Sidenote: _Restriction of variations and exclusion of apparent
variations._]
Historical scepticism is, however, as inexact and one-sided in the
observation of fact as it is puerile in the suggestion of a remedy.
Certainly, there are divergences between the various accounts of
the same fact; but (setting aside _apparent_ divergences, derived
from the different interest taken in a given fact, owing to which
verbal prominence is given to one or to another aspect of it, and
limiting ourselves here to _real_ differences) we must, for the sake
of exactitude, take account of all the no less real agreements, to
be found side by side with these divergences. In virtue of them, for
instance, Protestant and Catholic are unanimous in recognizing that
Luther and Leo X. existed, that the one produced a definite movement
in Germany and that the other had recourse to certain definite
prohibitions; and, finally, both Protestant and Catholic recognize (now
at least) the corruption of the ecclesiastical orders at the beginning
of the sixteenth century, and the mundane and political interests of
the German princes in the wars of religion. In like manner no one,
however revolutionary or conservative he is, will question the bad
condition of French finances at the eve of the Revolution; or that
Louis XVI. convoked the States General; or that he attempted flight
and was stopped at Varennes; or that he was guillotined on the 21st
of January 1793; or that the French Revolution was an event which
profoundly changed the social and moral life of the whole of Europe.
Owing to this substantial agreement between two historians in very many
points, and indeed in the greater part of the narrative, it happens
that we can often read and advise others to read histories that are
tainted with the passions of the partisan, while merely recommending
the reader to make a mental allowance for these passions. In like
manner, we can usefully employ a defective instrument of measurement,
provided we include in the calculation the coefficient of aberration.
[Sidenote: _The overcoming of variations by means of deepening the
concepts._]