knowledge of the logical error of which the analysis has been given:
the name of _religion._ Mythologism is the _religious error._ Against
this thesis various objections have been brought, such as that religion
is not theoretical but practical, and has therefore nothing to do
with myth; or that it is something _sui generis,_ or that it is not
exhausted in the myth, since it consists of the complex of all the
activities of the human spirit. But against these objections it must
above all be maintained that religion is a theoretic fact, since
there is no religion _without affirmation._ The practical activity,
however noble it may be held, is always an operating, a doing, a
producing, and to that extent is mute and alogical. It will be said
that that affirmation is _sui generis_ and goes beyond the limits
of human science. This is most true, if by science we understand
the empirical sciences; but it is not true, if by human science we
understand philosophy, since philosophy also goes beyond or is outside
the limits of the empirical sciences. It will be said that every
religion is founded upon a _revelation,_ whereas philosophy does not
admit of other revelation than that which the spirit makes to itself
as thought. That too is most true; but the revelation of religion, in
so far as it is not that of the spirit as thought, expresses precisely
the logical contradiction of mythologism: the affirmation of the
universal as mere representation, and this asserted as a universal
truth on the strength of a contingent fact, a communication which
ought to be proved and thought, whereas on the contrary it is taken
capriciously, as a principle of proof and as equivalent or superior to
an act of thought. The theory of religion as a mixture hardly merits
refutation, since that complex of the activities of the spirit is a
metaphor of the spirit in its totality; that is to say, it gives not a
theory of religion, but a new name of the spirit itself,--the object of
philosophic speculation.
[Sidenote: _Religion and philosophy._]
Since then, religion is identical with myth, and since myth is not
distinguishable from philosophy by any positive character, but only
as false philosophy from true philosophy and as error from the truth
which rectifies and contains it, we must affirm that religion, in
so far as it is truth, is identical with philosophy, or as can also
be said, _that philosophy_ is the _true religion._ All ancient and
modern thought about religions, which have always been dissolved in
philosophies, leads to this result. And since philosophy coincides
with history, and religion and the history of religion are the same,
and myth and religion are strictly speaking indistinguishable, we can
see very well the vanity of the attempt that is being made beneath our
eyes to preserve a religion or mythological truth side by side with a
history of religions, which on the contrary is supposed to be practised
with complete mental freedom and with an entirely critical method.
This, which is one of the tendencies of so-called _modernism,_ is
condemned as contradictory and illogical, by philosophy not less than
by the Catholic Church.[1] The history of religions is an integral part
of the history of philosophy, and as inseparable from it as error from
the history of truth.
[Sidenote: _Conversion of errors into one another. Conversion of
mythologism into philosophism (theology) and of philosophism into
mythologism (mythology of nature, historical apocalypses, etc.)._]
When religion does not dissolve into philosophy and wishes to persist
together with it, or to substitute itself for philosophy, it reveals
itself as effective error; that is to say, as an arbitrary attempt
against truth, due to habit, feelings and individual passions. But
the destiny of every form of error is to be unable to persist before
the light of truth. Hence the constant change of tactics and the
passage of every error into the error from which it had at first
wished to disassociate itself, or into which it did not mean to fall.
Thus æstheticism, dislodged from its positions, takes refuge in
those of empiricism; and empiricism either descends again into pure
sensationalism and æstheticism, or becomes volatilized in mysticism.
Thus (to stop at the case we have before us) mythologism, which intends
to be the opposite of philosophism and to work with blind fancy instead
of with empty concepts, is obliged in order to save itself from the
attacks of criticism to have recourse to philosophism; and religion is
then called _theology._ Theology is philosophism, because it works with
concepts which are empty of all historical and empirical content. Myth
becomes _dogma_; the myth of the expulsion from Paradise becomes the
dogma of original sin; the myth of the son of God becomes the dogma of
the incarnation and of the Trinity. Nor must it be thought that for its
part philosophism does not accomplish the opposite transition. Every
philosophy of nature ends by appearing as a _mythology of nature,_
every philosophy of history as an _apocalypse._ Sometimes even a sort
of revelation occurs in them, and we often find that the unthinkable
connections of concepts constituting those pseudo-philosophies are
obtained and comprehended in virtue of second sight, as the result of a
mental illumination, which is the prerogative of but a few privileged
persons. Finally, philosophism and mythologism embrace one another
and fall embracing into empiricism and into the other forms of error
previously described.
[Sidenote: _Scepsis._]
This perpetual transition from one form of error to another gives rise
to a _scepsis,_ which promotes the reciprocal dissolution of errors,
and scorning illusions and confusions, throws their _mental vacuity_
into clear light. Such a scepsis fulfils an important function. The
lies of æstheticism, mathematicism, philosophism, mythologism, cannot
resist it. Their little wordy strongholds are broken into; the shadows
are dispersed. Especially against mythologism, which in a certain sense
may be called the most complete negation of thought, a scepsis is
helpful; and owing to the resistance offered here more than elsewhere,
by passions and interests, it often takes the form of violent satire.
The last great epoch of this strife is what is called the _Aufklärung,_
Encyclopedism or Voltaireism, and was directed against Christianity,
especially in its Catholic form. We must make so many reservations in
what follows concerning the enlightened Encyclopedist and Voltairean
attitude, that here we feel obliged to indicate explicitly its serious
and fruitful side.
[Footnote 1: See with reference to this G. Gentile, _Il modernismo e
l'enciclica, Critica,_ vi. pp. 208-229.]
V
DUALISM, SCEPTICISM AND MYSTICISM
[Sidenote: _Dualism._]
Total scepticism can be reached only through _dualism,_ which, in
addition to being a particular error in a given philosophic problem,
is a logical error, consisting in the attempt to affirm two methods of
truth at the same time--the philosophic method and the non-philosophic
method, however the second of these be afterwards determined. Such an
error would not be error but supreme truth, if the various methods
were given each its due post (which is what has been attempted in
this Logic); but it becomes error when the various methods are made
philosophical and placed _alongside_ the philosophical. This is the
error of those conciliatory people, who, unwilling to seek out where
reason stands, admit that reason is operative in all of them, and
divide the kingdom of truth amongst all in equal parts. Thus arise
those logical doctrines which demand for the solution of philosophic
problems, the successive or contemporaneous application of the
naturalistic method, of mathematics, of historical research, and so
on. At the least they demand the combination of the naturalistic
method (empiricism) with the speculative and the use of what they call
the double criterion of _teleology_ and _causality,_ or of _double_
causality. To the question, what is reality, they reply with two
methods and consequently offer two concurrent and parallel realities.
Beneath the appearance of treatment and solution, they abandon the
philosophic problem. Instead of conceiving, they describe, and
description is given as concept, and concept as description: hence the
justifiable intervention of the scepsis.
[Sidenote: _Scepsis and scepticism._]
But the scepsis, which clears the ground of all forms of erroneous
logical affirmation, is the negation of error and consequently the
negativity of negativity. The negativity of negativity is affirmation,
and for this reason, the true scepsis, like every true negation, always
contains a positive content in the negative verbal form, which can be
also verbally developed as such. If this positive content, instead of
being developed, is choked in the bud, if instead of negation, which
is also affirmation, a mere negation is given,--an abstract negation,
which destroys without constructing, and if this negation claims to
pass as truth, the final form of error is obtained, which is no longer
called scepsis, but _scepticism._
[Sidenote: _Mystery._]
Scepticism is the proclamation of mystery made in the name of
thought;--a definition the contradictoriness of which leaps to the
eye. It is mortally wounded both by the ancient dilemma against
scepticism and by the _cogito_ of Descartes. Nevertheless, since a
singular tenderness for the idea of mystery seems to have invaded the
contemporary world, it is desirable to leave open no loophole whatever
for misunderstanding. The _mystery_ is _life itself,_ which is an
eternal _problem_ for thought; but this problem would not even be a
problem, if thought did not eternally solve it. For this reason, both
those who consider mystery to be definitely penetrated by thought and
those who consider it impenetrable are equally wrong. The first we
already know: they are the philosophists who reduce reality to pure
terms of abstract thought, by breaking up the _a priori_ synthesis
and by neglecting the historical element, which is ever new and ever
assuming forms not determinable _a priori._ Thus, they claim to shut
up the world for ever in one single act (maybe in some particular
philosophic system). Through their excessive love of the infinite
they make it finite; the sun and the earth and all the stars, the
historical forms of life, and what is called human life, which has
been known for some thousands of years, are transformed by them into
categories of thought, solidified and made eternal. This conception,
which appears (at least as a tendency) in certain parts of the Hegelian
philosophy, is narrow and suffocating. The spirit is superior to all
its manifestations hitherto known, and its power is infinite. It
will never be able to surpass itself, that is to say, its eternal
categories, just as God (according to the best theological doctrines)
could destroy heaven and earth, but not the true and the good, which
are his very essence; yet the spirit is able to surpass, and actually
does surpass, its every contingent incarnation. The world, which is
abstractly assumed to be more or less constant, is all in movement and
becoming. Those who will be raised up to think it will know what worlds
will issue from this world of ours. That we cannot know, for we must
think this world which exists at our moment, and must act on the basis
of it.
[Sidenote: _Critique of the affirmations of mystery in philosophy._]
But if the philosophers incur the guilt of arrogance, the sceptics,
who affirm a mystery, that is to say, that reality is impenetrable to
thought, fall under the accusation of cowardice. These, when faced with
the problems of the real (soluble, we repeat, by the very fact that
they are problems), avoid the hard work of dominating and penetrating
them, and think it convenient to wrap themselves in abstract negation
and to affirm that _mystery is._ There is mystery, without doubt; and
this means that there is a problem, something that invokes the light of
thought. And it is a beautiful solution which these mysterious ones and
sceptics offer, for it consists in stating the problem and leaving it
untouched. In the same way, when a man asks for help, we might claim to
have given it to him when we had noticed his request. Charity consists
in hastening to render effective aid, not in noting that aid has been
asked for and then turning the back. To think is to break up the
mystery and to solve the problem, not simply to recognize that there is
a problem and a mystery, and to renounce seeking the solution as though
it had already been given and the matter settled by that recognition.
It seems strange that it should be necessary to explain these
elementary concepts; yet in our time it is necessary, so much have
those concepts been darkened for historical reasons, which it would
take long to expound here, and which can all of them be summarized
as due to a certain moral weakening. And it may be opportune here to
give a warning (since we are dealing with a theme that belongs to
the elementary school of philosophy) that to inculcate the courage
to confront and to solve the problem and to conquer the mystery, is
not to counsel the neglect of difficulties, or superficiality and
arrogance. Mysteries are covered and must continually be covered
by their own shadows; problems torment and must torment, yet it is
only through these shadows and by means of those torments that we
attain to momentary repose in the true; and only thus does repose not
become sloth, but the restoration of our forces to resume the eternal
journey. Superficiality, arrogance, neglect of difficulties, belong
to the sceptics who deafen themselves with words and contrive to live
at their ease in their abstract negation. True thinkers suffer, but
do not flee from pain. "_Et iterum ecce turbatio_ (groans St. Anselm
amid the anxious vicissitudes of his meditations), _ecce iterum obviat
maeror et luctus quaerenti gaudium et laetitiam. Sperabat jam anima
mea satietatem, et ecce iterum obruitur egestate. Conabar assurgere
ad lucem Dei, et recidi in tenebras meas: immo non modo cecidi in
eas, sed sentio me involutum in eis...."_[1] Such words as these are
the pessimistic lyric of the thinker. Sceptics create no such lyric,
because they have cut the desire at the root. They are as a rule
blissfully calm and smiling.
[Sidenote: _Agnosticism as a particular form of scepticism._]
There is a form of scepticism which would like to appear critical and
refined and which takes the name of _agnosticism._ It is a scepticism
limited to ultimate things, to profound reality, to the essence of
the world, which amounts to saying that it is limited to the supreme
principles of philosophy. Now, since the principles of philosophy are
all equally supreme, such agnostic scepticism extends its affirmation
of mystery over neither more nor less than the whole of philosophy and
consequently over the whole of human knowledge. Its limits would be
nothing less than the boundaries of knowledge. Indeed, agnosticism is
the spiritual fulfilment sought by all those who negate philosophy,
such as æstheticists, mathematicians, and especially empiricists; and
agnostics and empiricists are ordinarily so closely connected that the
one name is almost synonymous with the other.
[Sidenote: _Mysticism._]
The sceptical error, which consists in stating the problem as solution
and mystery as truth, can give way to another mode of error, in which
the very affirmation of scepticism is denied and it is recognized
that thought cannot explicitly state mystery. But this recognition,
which would imply that of the authority of thought, is strangely
combined with the most precise negation of such authority. Thought
being excluded, either affirmatively or negatively, as in the
self-contradiction of scepticism, what remains is life, no longer
a problem, or a solution of a problem, but just life, life lived.
To affirm that truth is life lived, reality directly felt in us as
part of us and we part of it, is the pretension of _mysticism._
This is the last general form of error that can be thought; and its
self-contradiction is evident from the genetic process which we have
already expounded. Mysticism affirms, when no affirmation is permitted
to it; and it is yet more gravely contradictory than scepticism, which,
though forbidding to itself logical affirmation, does not forbid
itself speech, that is to say, æsthetic expression. To mysticism not
even words can be permissible, because mysticism, being life and not
contemplation, practice and not theory, is by definition _dumbness._
But we shall say no more of mysticism, having had occasion to refer to
it, as also to æstheticism and empiricism, at the beginning of this
treatise on Logic.
[Sidenote: _Errors in the other parts of philosophy._]
When we consider these errors more closely, it is easy to see that
dualism, scepticism, and mysticism manifest themselves not only in the
forms of thought, in philosophy as Logic, but also in all the other
particular philosophic problems, distinct from those that are peculiar
to Logic, and in the errors due to them. The complete enumeration of
these and their concrete determination would (as has already been said)
require the development of the whole philosophic system, and therefore
cannot all be contained in the present treatise. Indeed, they take
their name, not from the forms of the spirit, with which the logical
form is confused, or from the internal mutilation of the logical form,
but from the confusion and mutilation of the remaining spiritual forms.
They are no longer called æstheticism, mathematicism, or philosophism,
but ethical utilitarianism, moral abstractionism, æsthetic logicism,
sensationalism and hedonism, practical intellectualism, metaphysical
dualism or pluralism, optimism and pessimism, and so on. It is not
those who, as in the previous instances, deny philosophy itself, that
fall into such errors, but those who admit it and carry it out more
or less badly in its other parts. Without the admission of the method
of philosophic thought, and without the assertion of a concept, it is
impossible to conceive logical usurpations in the domain of another
concept, which is not less necessary than the first to the fulness and
unity of the real.
_Ethical utilitarianism,_ for instance, thinks the concept of
utilitarian practical activity; but its fallacy consists in arbitrarily
maintaining that the concept of utility altogether exhausts that of
the practical activity, thus negating the other concept distinct from
it, the practical moral activity. _Moral abstractionism_ commits
the opposite error, affirming the moral activity, but negating the
utilitarian. _Æsthetic logicism_ rightly affirms the reality of the
logical mental form, but is wrong in not recognizing the intuitive
mental form and in considering it to be resolved in the logical
form. Æsthetic _sensationalism,_ directing its attention to crude
and unexpressed sensation, emphasises the necessary precedent of the
æsthetic activity, but then makes of the condition the conditioned,
defining art as sensation. Æsthetic _hedonism, utilitarianism or
practicism,_ is true in so far as it notes the practical and hedonistic
envelope of the æsthetic activity; but it becomes false in so far as
it takes the envelope for the content, and treats art as a mere fact
of pleasure and pain. _Practical intellectualism_ perceives that the
will is not possible without a cognitive basis, but by exaggerating
this, it ends by destroying the originality of the practical spiritual
form, and reduces it to a complex of concepts and reasonings. In like
manner, _metaphysical dualism_ avails itself of the difference between
the concept of reality as spirit and that of reality as nature, the
one arising from logical thought, the other from an empirical and
naturalistic method of treatment, in order to transmute them into
concepts of two distinct forms of reality itself, as spirit and matter,
internal and external world, and so on. _Pluralism_ or monadism,
confounding the individuality of acts with the substantiality which
belongs to the universal subject, makes entities of single acts and
turns them into a multiplicity of simple substances. _Pessimism_ and
_optimism,_ each one availing itself of an abstract element of reality,
which is the unity of opposites, maintain that reality is all evil and
suffering, or all goodness and joy. This process of exemplification
could be carried much further, and would become, as we see, a deduction
of all philosophical concepts and errors.
[Sidenote: _Conversion of these errors with one another and with
logical errors._]
Now, each one of those false solutions, obeying the law of errors,
is obliged, in order to maintain itself, to pass into that from
which it was distinguished, and then to pass back again from that
to this. Thus utilitarianism becomes abstract morality and abstract
morality utilitarianism. Hence the work of scepsis and the consequent
appearance of a _particular scepticism of this or that concept._ Ethics
having vainly struggled with the alternate negations, of utility and
of morality, ends in _ethical scepticism;_ Æsthetic torn between
sensationalism and utilitarianism and logicism, and other errors, and
destroying them all with its scepsis, ends in _Æsthetic scepticism_;
Metaphysics, torn between materialism, abstract spiritualism,
dualism, pluralism, pessimism, optimism, and other erroneous views,
ends in _metaphysical scepticism._ And to these errors of particular
scepticism, errors of _particular mysticism_ soon succeed. Thus we hear
it said that there is no concept of the beautiful, as there is of the
true or the good, but that it is only felt and lived; or, again, that
there is no possible definition of what is good, since it concerns a
thing that must be left to sentiment and to life; or, finally, that
thought has value within the limits that abstraction has value, but
that it is impotent before complete reality, because life alone is
capable of comprehending reality, by receiving it into its very bosom.
On the other hand, it is not possible that any æstheticism, empiricism,
mathematicism, philosophism, mythologism, or logicism whatever, should
remain limited to a determinate philosophic concept without coming
in contact with others, because those forms of error strike at the
logical form of thought itself, and therefore equally at all other
philosophic concepts. The ethical or æsthetic empiricist, for instance,
must logically affirm a general philosophic empiricism if he does not
wish to correct himself by contradicting himself (an hypothesis which
must be neglected and left to be understood in this consideration of
the simple, elementary, fundamental, or _necessary_ forms of error).
He who in a particular philosophic problem has committed a confusion
of concepts, and has thence arrived at a particular scepticism and
mysticism, is led by the systematic and unitary character of philosophy
to widen that mysticism and scepticism from particular to general. From
this general mysticism and scepticism, he is led to return gradually to
mythologism, philosophism, empiricism, and to the other negations of
the logical form of philosophy. Everything is connected in philosophy
and everything is connected in error, which is the negation of
philosophy.
[Footnote 1: _Proslog.,_ c. 18.]
VI
THE ORDER OF ERRORS AND THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
[Sidenote: _Necessary character of the forms of errors. Their definite
number._]