those who formulate it are wont to concede equivocally that a
Philosophy of history must be founded upon actual data, and have
induction as its basis. In reality, were those actual data documents
to be interpreted, we should not have the Philosophy of history that
they desire, but simply History. The actual data, the so-called
formless material, in the programme of the Philosophy of history,
are at the most already constructed histories, which do not content
the philosophers of history. They do not content them, not because
they judge them to be false interpretations of the documents (in
which case nothing else would be needed but to correct history with
history, carrying out the work that all historians do); but because
the _very method of history_ does not content them, and they demand
something else. History is despised as mere narration, and considered
not as a form of thought, but as its material, a chaotic mass of
representations. The true form of thought is for them the Philosophy
of history, which appears in history and not in documents. And how
does it appear? If the documents are removed, the _a priori_ synthesis
is no longer possible. It arises, then, by the parthenogenesis of the
abstract concept, which history finds in itself, without the spark
being struck by confrontation with documents. History is deduced
_a priori,_ not in the concrete but in the void. Whatever be the
declarations which philosophers of history add to their programme, its
essence cannot be changed. Were these declarations made seriously and
all their logical consequences accepted, there would be no reason for
maintaining a Philosophy of history beside and beyond history. The
two things would become identical, and the programme itself would be
annulled, both for those who propose it, and for us who judge it to
be contradictory. This is the dilemma, from which there is no escape:
either the Philosophy of history is an interpretation of documents,
and in this case it is synonymous with History and makes no new
claim;--or it does make a new claim and in that case, being no longer
interpretation of documents and intending all the same to think facts,
it thinks them without documents and draws them from the empty concept,
and we have the Philosophy of history, philosophism, panlogism.
[Sidenote: _Philosophy of history and false analogies._]
In order to give itself body, the Philosophy of history has recourse to
analogy. This is a legitimate process of thought, which, in its search
for truth, seeks analogies and harmonies. But it is legitimate, as
we know, only on condition that the analogy does not remain a merely
heuristic hypothesis, but is effectively thinkable and thought. Now the
concepts that the Philosophy of history deduces cannot be effectively
thought, because they are void; they are neither pure concepts nor
pure representations, but an arbitrary mixture of the two forms, and
therefore contradiction and vacuity. Thus the analogies of which the
Philosophy of history avails itself, are _false analogies,_ that is
to say, _metaphors_ and _comparisons,_ transformed into analogies and
concepts. It will declare, for instance, that the Middle Ages are the
negation of ancient civilization, and that the modern epoch is the
synthesis of these two opposites. But ancient civilization is nothing
but an unending series of facts, of which each is a synthesis of
opposites, real only in so far as it is a synthesis of opposites. And
between ancient civilization and the Middle Ages, there is absolute
continuity, not less than between the Middle Ages and the modern epoch.
Facts cannot stand to one another as opposite concepts, because they
cannot be opposed to one another as positive and negative. The fact
that is called positive is positive-negative and so, in like manner,
is that which is called negative. It will further declare (always by
way of example) that Greece was thought and Rome action, and the modern
world is the unity of thought and action. But in reality, Greek life
was thought and action, like that of Rome, and like modern life. Every
epoch, every people, every individual, every instant of life is thought
and action, in virtue of the unity of the spirit, whose distinctions
are never broken up into separate existences. The affirmations that
belong to the Philosophy of history are all of this kind, and when they
are not of this kind, it means that they do not belong to the essence
of the Philosophy of history.
[Sidenote: _Distinction between the Philosophy of history, and the
books thus entitled. Philosophical and historical merits of these._]
The last-mentioned case occurs frequently in books that bear the title
of Philosophy of history. These certainly cannot be considered to have
been refuted when the concept of that science has been refuted. Science
is one thing and the book another. The error of a false attempt at
science is one thing and the value of books, which usually (especially
with great thinkers and writers) have deeper motives and more valuable
parts, is another. Among books upon the philosophy of history are
numbered some masterpieces of human genius,--fountains of truth, at
which many generations have quenched their thirst and to which men
return perpetually. They have often indeed been marvellous books on
history, true history, produced by reaction against superficial,
partisan or trifling histories. They have for the first time revealed
the true character of certain epochs, of certain events, of certain
individuals.[1] The sterile form of duality and opposition between
Philosophy of history and simple History, concealed the fruitful
polemic of a better history against a worse history. Even the formulae,
which were falsely regarded as deductions of concepts (for example,
that the Middle Ages are the negation of antiquity and the Renaissance
the negation of the Middle Ages, or that the Germanic spirit, from the
Reformation to the Romantic movement, is the affirmation of inward
liberty, or that Italy of the fifteenth century represents Art,
France the State, and so on), were at bottom vivacious expressions of
predominant characteristics, by means of which the various epochs and
events were portrayed. These expressions and truths could be accepted
without there being any necessity for presupposing clear and fixed
oppositions and distinctions, or for denying the extra-temporality of
spiritual forms. Besides these historical characteristics, discoveries
more strictly philosophical appeared for the first time in those books;
hence not only do we find in them the first outlines of a Logic of
historical science (a Logic of the individual judgment), but also,
sometimes in imaginative forms, determinations of eternal aspects of
the Spirit, which had previously been unknown or ill-known. Such is
the case with the concept of _progress_ and _providence,_ and of that
other concept concerning the spiritual autonomy of _language_ and of
_art,_ which presented itself for the first time as the discovery of
the historical epoch, in which man, wholly sense and imagination,
without intelligible genera and concepts, is supposed to have spoken
and poetized without reasoning. In an equally imaginary fashion the
constancy of the spirit, which eternally repeats itself, also found
in those philosophies the formula of the perpetual _passing_ away and
returning of the various epochs of civilization. These philosophical
truths, like the historical characteristics, must be purged, the first
from the representations improperly united with them, the second from
the logical character which they wrongly assumed. But they cannot be
discarded, unless we are willing to throw away the gold, through our
unwillingness to have the trouble of separating it from the dross.
And this necessity for purification further confirms the error of the
philosophism, since it is the purification of Philosophy and of History
from the Philosophy of History.
[Sidenote: _Philosophy of nature._]
Another manifestation of the philosophism, somewhat different from
the preceding, is the science which assumes the name of _Philosophy_
of _nature._ Here it is claimed to deduce, not the historical facts
themselves, but the general concepts, which constitute the natural
sciences. The philosophy of nature can be considered as the converse
error to the empiricist error, which claims to induce philosophic
categories _a posteriori,_ whereas this claims to deduce empirical
concepts _a priori._
[Sidenote: _Its substantial identity with the Philosophy of history._]
But the theoretic content of empirical concepts and of the natural
sciences is, as we know, nothing but perception and history. So that,
in the final analysis, the Philosophy of nature can be reduced to the
Philosophy of history (extended to so-called inferior or subhuman
reality), making, like the other, the vain attempt to produce in the
void what thought can produce only in the concrete, that is to say,
by synthesizing. And that it tends to become a Philosophy of history
is also to be seen from its not infrequent hesitances before abstract
concepts, or mathematical science, sometimes declaring that the pure
abstractions of the intellect must remain such and are not otherwise
deducible and capable of being philosophized about. The Philosophy
of nature has usually been extended to the field of the physical and
natural sciences, including also some parts of mechanics. But it has
refused to undertake the deduction of the theorems of geometry and
still more the operations of the Calculus.
[Sidenote: _The contradictions of the Philosophy of nature._]
The Philosophy of nature, like the Philosophy of history, has abounded
in declarations of the necessity of the historical and empirical
method. It has recognized that the physical and natural sciences are
its antecedent and presupposition and that it continues and completes
their work. But it is not permitted to complete this work because
this work extends to infinity. And it would not be able to continue
it, save by turning itself into physics and natural sciences, working
as these do in laboratories, observing, classifying, and making laws
(legislating). Now the Philosophy of nature does not wish to adopt such
a procedure, but to introduce a new method into the study of nature.
And since a new method and a new science are the same thing, it does
not wish to be a continuation of physics and of the natural sciences,
but a new science. And since a new science implies a new object, it
wishes to give a new object, which is precisely the _philosophic
idea of nature._ This philosophic idea of nature would therefore be
constructed by a method which would not and could not have anything
in common with that of the empirical sciences. Yet the Philosophy of
nature is not able to dispense with the empirical concepts, which it
strives to deduce _a priori._ And here lies the contradictoriness of
its undertaking. The dilemma which confronted the Philosophy of history
must be repeated in this case also:--either it has to continue the work
of the physical and natural sciences, and in this case there will be
progress in the physical and natural sciences and not in the Philosophy
of nature; or it has to construct the Philosophy of nature (the
physical and natural sciences); and this cannot be done, save by an _a
priori_ deduction of the empirical and thus falling into the error of
panlogism or philosophism.
[Sidenote: _False analogies in the Philosophy of nature._]
The Philosophy of nature, like that of history, expresses itself in
false analogies. It will say, for instance, that the poles of the
magnet are the opposed moments of the concept, made extrinsic and
appearing in space; or that light is the ideality of nature; or that
magnetism corresponds to length, electricity to breadth and gravity to
volume; or again (like more ancient philosophers), that water, or fire,
or sulphur, or mercury, is the essence of all natural facts. But these
phenomena which are given as essences, those classes of natural facts
which are given as moments of the concept and of the spirit, are no
longer either scientific phenomena, or the concepts and spiritual forms
of philosophy. The first are intuitions and not categories; the second
categories and not intuitions; and just because they are so clearly
distinguished from one another they mutually mingle in the _a priori_
synthesis. On the other hand, the concepts of the Philosophy of nature
are categories, which as such present themselves in their emptiness
as intuitions, and intuitions, which in their blindness present
themselves as categories. These thoughts are contradictory. They can
be _spoken,_ or rather _tittered,_ because it is possible to combine
phonetically contradictory propositions, but it is impossible to think
them. Such combinations by their ingenuity often give rise to surprise
or astonishment. But mental satisfaction is never obtained from them
merely because the mind is excited and deluded. On the other hand, the
Philosophy of nature, in this labour of ingenuity, runs against limits,
which even ingenuity cannot overcome. Then are heard affirmations,
which amount to open confessions of the impossibility of the task. Of
this sort is the assertion that nature contains the contingent and the
irrational and therefore is incapable of complete rationalization;
or that nature in its self-externality is impotent to achieve the
concept and the spirit. In like manner. Philosophies of history end by
confessing that there are facts which are told and are not deduced,
because they are small, contingent and fortuitous matter for chronicle.
Thus, after having announced in the programme the rationality of nature
and of history, they recognize in the execution of the programme that
the contrary is true. They simply deny the rationality of the world,
because they cannot bring themselves to deny the rationality of the
pseudo-sciences of philosophism.
[Sidenote: _Works entitled Philosophy of nature._]
Finally, the reservations made in the case of works dealing with the
Philosophy of history are to be repeated for those dealing with the
Philosophy of nature. In them, too, there is something more than, and
something different from, the sterile analogical exercises that we have
mentioned. Some of the philosophers of nature, in the pursuit of their
illusions, have made occasional scientific discoveries, in the same way
that the alchemists seeking the philosopher's stone made discoveries
in Chemistry. Those discoveries in physical and natural science cannot
serve to increase the value of the theory of the Philosophy of nature
any more than those made in chemistry increased the value of alchemy.
But they confer value on the books entitled Philosophy of nature, and
do honour to their authors as physicists, not as metaphysicians. From
the philosophical point of view, those works have had the merit of
affirming, though but in imaginative and symbolical ways, the unity
and spirituality of nature, opening the path to its unification with
the history of man. They have the yet greater merit of contributing
effectively in the battle engaged by them against the sciences of
making clear the empirical character of the naturalistic concepts and
the abstract character of the mathematical. Nevertheless, they drew
illegitimate conclusions from such gnoseological truth and carried on
a war of conquest, which must be held to be unjust. In virtue of the
positive elements that they contain, works on the Philosophy of nature
have aided the advance both of the sciences and of philosophy, which in
their properly philosophico-naturalistic parts they have violated and
debased and forced into hybrid unions.
[Sidenote: _Contemporary demands for a Philosophy of nature and their
various meanings._]
In our day demands for a Philosophy of history are rare and received
with scant favour; but it seems that those for a Philosophy of nature
are again acquiring vigour. On seeking the inward meaning of this fact,
it is seen that on the one hand many of those who demand a Philosophy
of nature are empiricists, desirous of a natural science elaborated
into a philosophy, and therefore not properly of a Philosophy of
nature, but of a view of the natural sciences that may supplant
philosophy. Other upholders of a Philosophy of nature echo the only
programme of such a philosophy, as it was formulated especially by
Schelling and by Hegel, but declare themselves altogether dissatisfied
with the attempts to carry it out made by Schelling, by Hegel and by
the followers of both. They are dissatisfied, but incapable of setting
their dissatisfaction at rest by a new attempt at carrying out the
programme. They are also without the intellectual courage necessary
to question and to re--examine the solidity of the programme itself,
which is in their judgment plausible and guaranteed by such great
names. For what indeed is more plausible upon first inspection than
the affirmation that the empirical sciences must be elevated to the
rank of philosophy? It seems that too much mental liberty is needed
to understand and to distinguish from the preceding, the somewhat
different proposition that empiricism (empirical philosophy) must
certainly be elevated to the rank of non-empirical philosophy, but that
the _empirical sciences_ must be left in peace to their own methods,
without any attempt to render perfect by means of extrinsic additions
that which has in itself all the perfection of which it is capable.
It seems that more intelligence than is usually met with is necessary
in order to recognize that this last proposition does not establish a
_dualism_ of spirit and nature, of philosophy and the natural sciences,
but for ever destroys every dualism by making of the natural sciences
a merely practical formation of the spirit, which has no voice in
the assembly of the philosophical sciences, as the object which it
has created has no reality. An ultimate tendency can be discerned in
the complex movement of the day toward a Philosophy of nature. This
is the attainment of the consciousness that reality is on this side
of the classifications of the natural sciences, and that the natural
sciences must be retranslated into _history,_ by means of a historical
consideration (concrete and not abstract) of the facts that are called
natural. But this tendency is not something that will attain its end
in a near or in a distant future. It has always shown its value and
shows it also to-day; it can be recommended and promoted, but neither
more nor less than every other legitimate form of spiritual activity
can be recommended and promoted. Classifications are classifications;
and what man really seeks out, what continually enriches the empirical
sciences, is always the history of nature,--the series of facts, which,
as we know, can be distinguished only in an empirical manner from the
history of man, and which along with this constitutes _History_ without
genitive or adjective; history, which cannot even be strictly called
history of the spirit, for the Spirit is, itself, History.
[Footnote 1: See my _Essay on Hegel,_ chap. ix. (_What is living, etc.,
of Hegel,_ tr. D. Ainslie).]
IV
MYTHOLOGISM
[Sidenote: _Rupture of the unity of the synthesis a priori.
Mythologism._]
When by the severance of subject from predicate, of history from
philosophy, the mutilated subject is given as predicate, mutilated
history as philosophy, and consequently a false predicate is
posited, which predicate is an abstract subject and therefore mere
representation; when this happens, there occurs the opposite error
to that which we have just particularly examined. That was called
philosophism; this might be called historicism; but since this last
term has usually been employed to indicate a form of positivism, it
will be more convenient to call it _mythologism._
The process of this error (somewhat abstruse in the way that we have
stated it) becomes clear at once in virtue of the name that has been
assigned to it. Every one has examples of myths present in his memory.
Let us take the myths of Uranus and Gæa, of the seven days of creation,
of the earthly Paradise, and of Prometheus, of Danaë, or of Niobe.
Every one is ready to say of a scientific theory which introduces
causes not demonstrable either in the experience or in thought, that it
is not theory, but mythology, not concept, but myth.
[Sidenote: _Essence of the myth._]
What then is it that is called myth? It is certainly not a simple
poetic and artistic fancy. The myth contains an affirmation or logical
judgment, and precisely for this reason may be considered a hybrid
affirmation, half fanciful and erroneous. If it has been confused with
art, it is not so much a false doctrine of the myth that should be
blamed, as a false æsthetic doctrine, which we have already refuted,
and which fails to recognize the original and ingenuous character of
art. On the other hand, the logical affirmation does not stand to the
myth as something extrinsic, as in the case of a fable or image put
forward to express a given concept, where the difference of the two
terms and the arbitrariness of the relation between them declares
itself more or less openly. In this case there is not myth, but
_allegory._ In myth, on the contrary, the concept is not separated
from the representation, indeed it is throughout penetrated by it.
Yet the compenetration is not effected in a logical manner, as in the
singular judgment and in the _a priori_ synthesis. The compenetration
is obtained capriciously, yet it gives itself out as necessary and
logical. For instance, it is desired to explain how sky and earth were
formed, how sea and rivers, plants and animals, men and language arose;
and behold, we are given as explanations, the stories of the marriage
of Uranus and Gæa, and the birth of Chronos and of the other Titans;
or the story of a God Creator, who successively drew all things out of
chaos in seven days, and made man of clay and taught him the names of
things. It is desired to explain the origin of human civilization, and
the tale is told of Prometheus, who steals fire and instructs men in
the arts; or of Adam and Eve, who eat the forbidden fruit, and driven
from the earthly Paradise are forced to till the ground and bathe it
with their sweat. It is desired to explain the astronomical phenomena
of dawn or of winter, and the story is told of Phœbus, who pursues
Daphne, or of the same god who slays one after the other the sons of
Niobe. These naturalistic interpretations may pass as examples, however
contested and antiquated they may be. In place of the concepts which
should illuminate single facts, we are given representations. Hence
are derived what we have called false predicates. Philosophy becomes a
little anecdote, a novelette, a story; history too becomes a story and
ceases to be history, because it lacks the logical element necessary
for its constitution. The true philosophic doctrine in the preceding
cases, for example, will be that of an immanent spirit, of which stars
and sky, earth and sea, plants and animals, constitute the contingent
manifestations; the doctrine which looks upon the consciousness of
good and evil and the necessity for work, not as the result of a theft
made from the gods or of a violation of one of their commands, but
as eternal categories of reality; and which regards language, not as
the teaching of men by a god, but as an essential determination of
humanity, or indeed of spirituality, which is not truly, if it does
not express itself. They will also, if we like, be the philosophic
doctrines of materialism and of evolutionism; but these, in order
to be accepted as philosophic, must prove, like the preceding, that
they do not substitute representations for concepts and are strictly
founded upon thought and employ its method, that is to say, that they
are philosophy and not mythology. For this reason, in philosophical
criticism, adverse philosophies often accuse one another of being
more or less mythological, and we hear of the mythology of _atoms,_
the mythology of _chance,_ the mythology of _ether,_ of the _two
substances,_ of _monads,_ of the _blind will,_ of the _Unconscious,_
or, if you like, of the mythology of the _immanent Spirit._
[Sidenote: _Problems concerning the theory of myth._]
The particular treatment of all the problems that concern the myth does
not belong to this place, where it was important solely to determine
the proper nature of that spiritual formation. It is customary, for
instance, to distinguish between _myth_ and _legend,_ attributing
the first name to stories of universal content, and the second to
stories with an individual and historical content. This partition is
analogous to that between philosophy in the strict sense and history,
and as such, though it possesses no little practical importance, it is
without philosophic value, because, as has been remarked, in myth the
universal becomes history and history becomes legend. Nor is it only
legend of the past, but it extends even to the future, and thus appear
_apocalypses,_ the legend of the _Millennium,_ and _eschatology._
Again, myths are usually distinguished as _physical_ and _ethical,_
and this division is in turn analogous to that between the philosophy
of the external world and the philosophy of the internal world, the
philosophy of nature and the philosophy of the spirit, and stands or
falls with it. So that by this criticism we can solve the disputes as
to whether physical myths precede ethical or inversely, whether the
origin of myth is or is not anthropomorphic, and the like.
[Sidenote: _Myth and religion. Identity of the two spiritual
formations._]