theme _de consolatione Philosophiae,_ without noting that philosophy
is not the sole or supreme consoler, as the philosophers of antiquity
believed, and some among the moderns, who assumed the same attitude.
It is neither the sole nor the supreme consoler, because thought does
not exist alone, nor does it exist above life: thought is outside and
inside life; and if on one side it surpasses life, on the other it is a
mode of life itself. Philosophy brings consolation in its own kingdom,
putting error to flight and preparing the conditions for practical
life; but man is not thought alone, and if he has joys and sorrows
from thought, other sorrows and joys come to him from the exercise of
life itself. And in this exercise action heals the evils of action and
life brings consolation for life. The error of Stoicism and of similar
doctrines consists in attributing to philosophy a direct action upon
the ills of life and of making it in consequence the whole totality
of the real. But philosophy has no pocket-handkerchiefs to dry all
the tears that man sheds, nor is it able to console unhappy lovers
and unfortunate husbands (as sentimental people pretend): it can only
contribute to their comfort by healing that part of their pain which
is due to theoretic obscurity. Such part is certainly not small: all
our sorrows are irritated and made more pungent by mental darkness
which paralyses or fetters the purification of action. But it is a
part and not the whole. Every form of the activity of the Spirit, art
like philosophy, practical life like theoretic life, is a fount of
consolation and none suffices alone.
[Sidenote: _Sorrow and the elevation of sorrow._]
"He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow" is a false saying,
because the increase of knowledge is the overcoming of sorrow. But it
is true, in so far as it means that the increase of knowledge does not
eliminate the sorrows of practical life. It does not eliminate, but
_elevates_ them; and to adopt the fine expression of a contemporary
Italian writer, superiority is "nothing but the right to suffer on
a higher plane." On a higher plane, but neither more nor less than
others, who are at a lower level of knowledge,--to suffer on a higher
plane, in order to act upon a higher plane.
FOURTH PART
HISTORICAL RETROSPECT
I
THE HISTORY OF LOGIC AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
[Sidenote: _Reality, Thought and Logic._]
The three terms, _Reality, Thought_ and _Logic_, and their relations,
could be represented by a system of three circles, the one included in
the other, and by marking at will as the first term that which includes
all, or that which is included in all: R T L or L T R. Limiting
ourselves to the first method, the first circle would be Reality,
which Thought (the second circle) would think, in the same way that
it would in its turn be thought in the third circle, formed by Logic,
the Thought of thought, or the Philosophy of philosophy. This graphic
symbol is probably destined to some fortune; but the reader must not
seek it in our pages, because knowing how much inadequacy, clumsiness
and danger it contains, we share the repugnance, almost instinctively
felt at such materializations, which seem to be and are of slight value.
[Sidenote: _Relation of these three terms._]
The vice of that spatial figuration is that it divides into three
circles what is three, but three in one, and should consequently be
expressed as a triple circle which should also be a single circle, in
which all the three coincide; which is geometrically unrepresentable.
The relation of Reality, Thought of Reality and Thought of Thought,
divided into three circles, legitimately gives rise to the question:
Why should there not be a fourth, a fifth, a sixth circle (and so on
to infinity) which should include respectively the third, the fourth,
the fifth (and so on to infinity)? Why should not a Logic of Logic,
or a thought of the thought of thought, and so on, follow the thought
of thought, which is Logic? For us, this question raises no objection
that need bring us to a halt for a single instant, just because we have
never divided the one reality into two or more different realities
(matter and spirit, nature and idea, and so on), nor into a series of
different realities, the one following the other; but we have conceived
it as a system of relations and of correlations, constituting a unity,
indeed the only unity concretely thinkable. There is no progress to
infinity, when the terms are coincident and correlative; hence to
think the thought of thought would not be a new act, but equivalent
to thinking thought. The mental act will be new (and any mental act
is new) for the individual who accomplishes it in conditions that are
always new; but its spiritual form will always be that of Logic, which
thinks thought and contains within itself, on its side, the process
of reality. Further, the indifference exhibited by the symbol of the
triple circle as to the determination of the first as last and the
last as first, confirms for us the non-existence of a first that is
only first and of a last that is only last; confirms, that is to say,
the coincidence of unity in relation that is first and last. Reality
is not only thought by thought, but is also thought; and thought
is not only thought by Logic, but is also Logic. Those who wish to
expound philosophy and history, proceeding from the centre of the logos
or Logic, and those who wish to expound them, proceeding from the
periphery of facts, are both right and wrong, because the centre is
periphery and the periphery centre.
[Sidenote: _Non-existence of a general philosophy outside the
particular philosophic sciences:_]
By adopting this view, which affirms the most complete immanence, it
has never happened that in any part of the Real we have discovered a
division between idea and fact, between general and particular, between
primary and secondary reality and the like, but we have found, in every
part, relation and correlation, unity and distinction in unity. There
is no general philosophy opposed to, or consequent on, or alongside
particular philosophies; particular philosophy is general, and the
general is the particular; nor is there a general history, which is
not also particular history, and _vice versa._ History is always the
history of man as artist, thinker, economic producer, and moral agent,
and in distinguishing these various aspects, it gives their unity,
which does not transcend these various aspects, but _is_ these various
aspects themselves.
[Sidenote: _and consequently of a History of general philosophy outside
the histories of particular philosophic sciences._]
In like manner, the History of thought, or the History of Philosophy,
which is one of these determinate aspects, is distinguished in the
histories of particular philosophic concepts, as the history of
Æsthetic, of Logic, of Economics and of Ethics; but it is also unified
in them and _consists in nothing but them,_ completely resolving itself
into them. There is no _general History of Philosophy,_ in the sense
of a history of _general Philosophy,_ or of _Metaphysics,_ or whatever
else it may be called, outside particular histories (which are unity in
particularity).
One of the errors which in our opinion vitiates the writing of the
history of philosophy, appears to be just the prejudice in favour of a
treatment of the general part of this history, in which, for instance,
speculations concerning practice enter only incidentally, a great
part of logical doctrine is excluded as not belonging to it, and the
doctrines of Æsthetic are hardly referred to at all. The prejudice is
derived, in the last analysis, from the old idea of an Ontology or
Metaphysic, as the science of an ideal world, of which nature and man
are the more or less imperfect actualizations; hence the relegation of
a great part of true and proper philosophy to what is called the human
and natural world, and the looking upon this as a special philosophy,
distinguished from general philosophy and consequently lying outside
the true and proper history of philosophy. That prejudice, amounting
almost to a survival, persists even in those who have more or less
surpassed such a conception, and determines the curious configuration
of a general history of philosophy, outside the special histories.
Such a scheme, when closely examined, shows itself to be a complex of
historical elucidations of some problems of Logic, and of some of the
philosophy of the practical (individuality, liberty, the supreme good,
etc.), and of some arising from their relations (knowing and being,
spirit and nature, infinite and finite, etc.). These are all without
doubt arguments of philosophical history; but they must be united with
the others, from which they have been wrenched, and without which they
prove but little intelligible. Philosophy is present in the Poetics
and the Rhetoric of Aristotle as much as in the Metaphysics; not less
in the _Critique of Pure Judgment_ of Kant, than in the _Critique of
Pure Reason._ It is never outside those treatises concerning what are
called the special parts of philosophy. The present-day historians
of philosophy who have overcome so many forms of transcendence
and re-established immanence, must also overcome the residue of
transcendence, which, so to speak, they still retain in their own house.
[Sidenote: _Histories of particular philosophies and literary value of
such division._]
Certainly, the reality of the distinctions between the various aspects
of the real and between the various particular philosophies renders
possible literary divisions, through which there are composed special
treatises upon Ethics and so upon the history of Ethic; upon Logic and
so upon the history of Logic; upon Æsthetic and so upon the history
of Æsthetic; but it is not possible by a like method of division to
construct a treatise upon general Philosophy and a corresponding
History of general philosophy. It is not possible, because this
literary division presupposes a distinction of concepts; and a general
philosophy is not conceptually distinguishable. When the attempt to
distinguish it is made, we have, as we saw, a mass of historical
fragments taken from the various philosophic sciences; that is to
say, not the coherent historical treatment of problems relating to a
definite aspect of the real, but a more or less arbitrary aggregate.
[Sidenote: _History of Logic in a particular sense._]
With these considerations, we have answered the question concerning the
relation between the History of Logic and the History of Philosophy.
This relation is the same as that between Logic and Philosophy,--terms
which are capable neither of distinction nor of opposition. The history
of Logic is not outside the history of Philosophy, but is an integral
part of this history itself. To make it the object of special treatment
always means to compose a complete history of philosophy, in which,
from the literary point of view, prominence and priority are given
to the problems of Logic, the others being thrown, not outside the
picture, but into the background. The same may be said of the History
of Æsthetic or of Ethic or of any other particular discipline, which is
never held to be distinguishable.
[Sidenote: _Works relating to the history of Logic._]
Logic being more or less profoundly renovated (as we have sought
to do in this book), it is natural that the histories of Logic
hitherto available can no longer be completely satisfactory. For they
are written from points of view that have been surpassed, such as
Aristotelian formalism or Hegelian panlogism, and therefore either
do not interpret facts with exactitude, or they give prominence and
exaggerated importance to certain orders of facts, neglecting others
far more worthy of mention and of examination.
Of the special books bearing the title of the History of Logic, there
is really only one--that of Charles Prantl--which, based upon wide
researches, is truly remarkable for its doctrine and for lucid and
animated exposition. Unfortunately this does not go further than the
fifteenth century and omits the whole movement of modern philosophy.[1]
But even the period exhaustively treated by him (Antiquity and the
Middle Ages) is looked at from the narrow angle of an Aristotelian and
formal temperament. Other works bearing the same title are not worthy
of attention.[2] On the other hand, the better histories of Logic must
not be sought under this title, but especially in the better Histories
of Philosophy, beginning with that of Hegel, which, for the most part,
is precisely a history of Logic.
In inaugurating a new treatment, governed by the principles which we
have defended, we shall confine ourselves, in the following pages,
to a sketch of the history of some of the principal parts of logical
doctrine, without any claim to even approximate completeness, and with
a view to giving simple illustrations of the things that were said
in the theoretical part. In this theoretical part, in virtue of the
identity of philosophy and history which we have explained, history may
be said to be already contained and projected, even though names and
dates are mostly omitted and left to be understood.
[Footnote 1: _Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande,_ Leipzig, 1855-1870,
4 vols. Scattered memoirs of certain writers belonging to later times
are being published by Prantl in academic journals, and it would be
opportune to collect these in a volume.]
[Footnote 2: A rapid sketch, compiled in part from the work of Prantl,
with a polemical addition directed against the adversaries of the
Hegelian Logic, precedes the _Logic_² of Kuno Fischer. The historical
part of the _System der Logik_ of Ueberweg (fifth edition, 1882, edited
by J. B. Meyer) has an almost exclusively bibliographical character
with excerpts, and that contained in L. Rabus, _Logik ii. System der
Wissenschaften,_ Erlangen-Leipzig, 1895, is yet more arid. The _Gesch.
d. Logik_ of F. Harms (Berlin, 1881) is meagre in facts, verbose and
vague. In recent monographs on special points, one feels the effect
of what is called Logistic or new formalism, which makes the authors
pursue ineptitudes and curiosities of slight value.]
II
THE THEORY OF THE CONCEPT
[Sidenote: _Question as to who was the "father of Logic."_]
Just as whenever in Æsthetic any one sought the "father" of the science
Plato was usually named, so whenever a like enquiry has been proposed
for Logic that honourable title has been almost unanimously bestowed
upon Aristotle. But even if we admit (as we must) in a somewhat
empirical and expedient sense, the propriety of these searches for
"discoverers" and "fathers," Aristotle could not in our eyes occupy
that position. For if Logic is the science of the concept, such a
science was evidently begun before him. Further, Aristotle himself
claimed the distinction only of having reduced and treated the theory
of reasoning[1] and recognized elsewhere that to Socrates belonged the
merit of having directed attention to the examination and definition of
the concept (τούς τ' ἐπακτικοὺς λόγους καὶ τὸ όρίζεσθαι), that is to
say, to the very principle of logical Science,[2] the rigorous form of
truth.
[Sidenote: _Socrates, Plato, Aristotle._]
In this affirmation of the consistency and absoluteness of knowledge
and of truth (sustained in him by a vivid religious and moral
consciousness) lies the significance of Socrates as opposed to the
Sophists; as indeed in the same thing lies the importance of Hellenic
Logic of the truly classical period. This Logic elaborated the idea
of conceptual knowledge, of science or of philosophy, and transmitted
it to the modern world with a terminology, which is in great part
that which we ourselves employ. We too reject in almost the same
words as the Greek philosophers the renascent sophism, the perennial
Protagoreanism, and the sensationalism which denies truth, and (like
the ancient Gorgias), by declaring it incommunicable by the individual,
individualizes and reduces it to practical utility. In Plato, the
affirmation and glorification of conceptual knowledge was accompanied
by contempt for the knowledge of the individual, and in comparison
with the immortal world of ideas, the world of sensations was for him
so dark and obscure as to disappear in his eyes like phantoms before
the sun. But Aristotle, although he held firmly that there is no
science of the accidental and individual, and of sensation, which is
bound to space and time, to the _where_ and the _when,_ and that the
object of science is the universal, the essence, _which is being,_
was less exclusive than he; and as he saved the world of poetry from
the condemnation of Plato, so, in all his philosophy and in all his
work as physicist, politician and historian, he affirmed the world of
experience and of history.[3]
[Sidenote: _Enquiries concerning the nature of the concept in Greece.
The question of transcendence and immanence._]
On the other hand, there was in Socrates only the consciousness of
the universal still indefinite and vague; in Plato there appeared
for the first time the consciousness of the true character of the
universal, and so of its distinction from empirical universals; and
in Aristotle this enquiry gave important results. The problem of the
nature of the concept became, then and afterwards, interwoven with
that other problem of the transcendence or immanence of the concepts;
but since, notwithstanding many points of contact, the two problems
cannot be completely identified, they must not be confounded. Indeed,
the problem of the transcendence or immanence of the universals is
reducible to the more general problem of the relation between values
and facts, the ideal and the real, what ought to be and what is;
whereas the other, concerning the nature of the universals, centres
upon the distinction between universals that are truly logical, and
pseudological universals, and upon the greater or less admissibility
of one or the other or of both, and so upon their mode of relation.
The point of contact between the two problems lies in this, that where
pure and real universals are denied and only arbitrary and nominal
universals allowed to subsist, the question of the immanence or
transcendence of the universals also disappears. And as to the first
problem and the polemic of Aristotle against Plato concerning the
ideas, it has appeared to some critics (to Zeller and others) that
Aristotle misunderstood his master and invented an error that Plato
had never maintained, or attacked merely certain gross expositions of
doctrine which were current in some Platonic school. To others again
(to Lotze, for instance), it has seemed that Aristotle thought this
problem, at bottom, in the same way as Plato, who by placing the ideas
in a hyper-Uranian space, in a super-world or a super-heaven, thus
came to refuse to them that reality which Aristotle himself refused
to them and to consider them as _values,_ not as _beings;_ although
Greek linguistic usage prevented Plato from expressing the difference,
just as it prevented Aristotle from expressing the same thing, when it
led him to describe genera as "second substances" (δεύτεραι οὺσίαι).
However, as regards the first interpretation, it certainly seems to
us that it is impossible to raise doubts about such a document as
the testimony of Aristotle[4] by means of such frequently uncertain
documents as the Platonic dialogues. And as regards the second
interpretation, it seems to us that it does not so much purge Plato
of the vice of transcendence as convict his adversary also of sharing
that vice. On this point the opposition of Aristotle to his predecessor
does not coincide with that of modern nominalism and empiricism to
philosophic idealism, for the former sets in question the truth of the
concept itself. Aristotle denied this truth as little as Plato; indeed
he expressly asserted that his predecessor was right, and approved his
definite accusation of the sophists that they were occupied not with
the universal but with the accidental, that is to say, with not-being.
[Sidenote: _Controversies as to the various forms of concept in Plato._]
The beginning of the enquiry as to the nature of universals or of ideas
is to be seen, on the other hand, in Plato's embarrassments before the
questions as to whether there are ideas of everything, of artificial
as well as of natural things, of noble things and vile things alike,
of things only or also of properties and relations; of good things
or also of bad things (καλὸν καὶ αἰσχρόν, ἀγαθὸν καὶ κακόν)[5] He
does not escape from the embarrassments, save occasionally, by making
strange admissions, by accepting ideas of all the preceding, only
to fall immediately afterwards into contradictions, through which
however we see the outlines of the problems of to-day. Are the ideas
representative concepts (of things) or are they not rather categories
(ideas of relation)? Arc opposites particular kinds of ideas (if there
exist ideas of base and ugly things, as well as of beautiful and good
things)? Is it possible to distinguish, from the point of view of the
Ideas, between the natural world and the human world (between natural
things and artificial)? Plato himself refers to mathematical knowledge
as distinct from philosophic knowledge.
[Sidenote: _The philosophic concepts and the empirical and abstract
concepts in Aristotle. Philosophy, physics and mathematics._]
In Aristotle, the determination of the rigorous philosophic concept
and its distinction from empirical and abstract concepts make great
progress, although this does not amount to a solution of those Platonic
embarrassments. Aristotle accurately traces the limits between
Philosophy (and so the philosophic concept) and the physical and
mathematical sciences. Philosophy, the science of God or _theology_
(as he also calls it), treats of being in its absoluteness, and so
not of particular beings or of the matter that forms part of their
composition. The non-philosophical sciences, on the other hand, always
treat of particular beings (περὶ ὄν τι καὶ γένος τι). They take their
objects from sense or assume them by hypotheses, giving now more, now
less accurate demonstrations of them. All the physical sciences have
need of some definite material (ὕλη) because they are always concerned
with noses, eyes, flesh, bones, animals, plants, roots, bark, in short
with material things, subject to movement. There even arises a physical
science that is concerned with the soul, or rather, with a sort of
soul (περὶ ψυχῆς ἐνίας), in so far as this is not without matter.
Mathematics, like philosophy, studies, not things subject to movement,
but motionless being; but it differs from philosophy in not excluding
the matter in which their objects are as it were incorporated (ὡς ἐν
ὔλῃi): the suppression of matter is obtained in them by aphairesis or
abstraction.[6]
[Sidenote: _The universals of the "always" and those of the "for the
most part."_]
This divergence between philosophic and physical or mathematical
procedure is the point upon which empiricism and mathematicism rely;
but these, inferior here to Aristotle, deny the science of absolute
being (περὶ ὅντος άπλῶς) and leave in existence only the second
order of sciences, which deal with the particular and abstract.
There is another important distinction in Aristotle, but to tell
the truth it is impossible to say how far he connected it with the
preceding distinction between philosophy and physics, with which it is
substantially one. Aristotle knew two forms of universal: the universal
of the _always_ (τοῡ ἀεί) and that of the _for the most part_ (τοῡ
ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ).[7] He was well aware of the difference between the
first, which is truly universal, and the second, which is so only in
an approximate and improper manner; and he even asked himself if the
_for the most part_ alone existed and not also the _always_; but his
interest was directed not so much to the comparative differences of
the two series, as to the common character of universality which both
of them asserted as against the individual and accidental. Science (he
said) is occupied, not with the accidental, but with the universal,
whether it be eternal and necessary (ἀναγκαῖον) or only approximately
universal (ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ).[8] Philosophy, physics and mathematics felt at
this period that they had a common enemy in sensationalism and sophism,
and they formed an alliance against this common enemy, rather than as
happened later, dissipate their energies in intestinal welfare.
[Sidenote: _Controversies concerning Logic in the Middle Ages._]