genetic process by which we pass from one to the other, and taking the
result of that speculative movement in its most mature form, which is
the philosophy of Hegel, we see in it (like a new, securely established
society after the frequent changes of a revolution) the establishment
of the new doctrine of the concept. Kant's unconsciousness of the
consequences of the _a priori_ synthesis had been such that he had
not hesitated to affirm that Logic, since the time of Aristotle,
had possessed so just and secure a form as not to need to take one
single step backward, and to be unable to take one forward.[15] But
Hegel insisted that this was rather a sign that that science demanded
complete re-elaboration, since an application of two thousand years
should have endowed the spirit with a more lofty consciousness of
its own thought and of its own essential nature.[16] What was the
concept for Hegel? It was not that of the empirical sciences, which
consists in a simple general representation and therefore always
in something finite; it is barbaric to give the name concepts to
intellectual formations, like "blue," "house," or "animal." Nor was
it the mathematical concept, which is an arbitrary construction. All
the logical rationality that there is in mathematics is what is called
irrational. These so-called concepts are the products of the abstract
intellect; the true concept is the product of the concrete intellect,
or reason. It has therefore nothing to do with the immediate knowledge
of the sentimentalists and of the mystics, and with the intuition of
the æstheticists; such formulae as these express the necessity for the
concept, but give only a negative determination of it. They assert what
it is not in relation to the empirical sciences and then misstate what
it is in philosophy. For the rest, the shortcomings of the abstract
intellect, generating the pure void or _thing in itself_(which far
from being, as Kant believed, unknowable, is indeed the best known
thing of all, the abstraction from everything and from thought itself)
prepare the environment for the phantasms and caprices of mysticism
and intuitionism. The true concept is the _idea,_ and the idea is the
absolute unity of the concept and of its objectivity.
[Sidenote: _Identity of the Hegelian Idea with the Kantian a priori
synthesis._]
This definition has sometimes seemed whimsical, sometimes most obscure;
yet it presents nothing but the elaboration in a more rigorous form
of the Kantian _a priori_ synthesis, so that these two terms could
without further difficulty be regarded as equivalent; the _a priori_
logical synthesis is the Idea and the Idea is the _a priori_ logical
synthesis. If Hegel has not been understood, that is due to the fact
that Kant himself has not been understood. Those who assert that they
understand what Kant meant to say, but not what Hegel meant to say,
deceive themselves. For Kant and Hegel say the same thing, though the
latter says it with greater consciousness and clearness, that is to
say, better.[17]
[Sidenote: _The Idea and the Antinomies. The Dialectic._]
The idea, the concrete universal, the pure concept, rebels against
the mechanical divisions employed for the empirical concepts. For it
has its own division, its own proper and intimate rhythm, by means
of which it divides and unifies, and unifies itself when dividing
and divides itself when unifying. The concept thinks reality, which
is not immobile but in motion, not abstract being, but becoming;
and therefore in it distinctions are generated one from another and
oppositions reconciled. Hegel not only gives the true meaning of
the Kantian _a priori_ synthesis, recognizing it as the concrete
concept, but replaces the antinomies in its bosom. The contradiction
is not due to the limitation of thought before a non-contradictory
reality, which thought is unable to attain; it is the character of
reality itself, which contradicts itself in itself, and is opposition,
_coincidentia oppositorum,_ the synthesis of opposites, or dialectic.
A new doctrine of opposites and the outlines of a new doctrine of
distinction accompanies the new doctrine of the pure concept. In this
philosophy is truly summarized all the previous history of thought. The
concept of Socrates has acquired the reality of the idea of Plato, the
concreteness of the substance of Aristotle, the unity-in-opposition
of Cusanus and Bruno, the Vichian reconciliation of philosophy and
philology, the unity-in-distinction of the Kantian synthesis and the
æsthetic suppleness of Schelling's intellectual intuition.
[Sidenote: _The lacunæ and errors of the Hegelian Logic. Their
consequences._]
Nevertheless, the history of thought does not stop at Hegel. In Hegel
himself are found the points to which later history must attach
itself; the lacunæ which he left and the errors into which he fell.
The fundamental error was the abuse of the dialectic method, which
originated for the philosophic solution of the problem of opposites,
but was extended by Hegel to the distinct concepts, so that he
interpreted even the Kantian synthesis itself as nothing but the unity
of opposites. Hence arises his incapacity to attribute their true
value and function to the alogical forms of the spirit, such as art,
and to the atheoretic, such as the natural sciences and mathematics;
and even to logical thought itself, which, violating the laws of the
synthesis, ended by imposing itself upon history and the natural
sciences, attempting to resolve them into itself by dialectizing them,
as the philosophy of history and the philosophy of nature. To this,
therefore, is due the philosophism or panlogism which is characteristic
of the system. This error was assisted by Hegel's want of clearness as
to the nature of the empirical sciences. For him as for Kant, these
remained _sciences,_ that is to say, knowledge of truth, although
imperfect knowledge of it. They therefore constituted even for him
the material or the first step in philosophy. It is true that he also
had other more acute and profound thoughts upon this subject. Amid a
number of incidental observations, he emphasized the arbitrariness
(_Willkurlichkeit_), with which those forms are affected; and this is
tantamount to declaring their practical and atheoretic character. But
instead of respecting this character, he decided upon surpassing it by
means of a philosophic transformation of those sciences, which was not
so much their death as pretended philosophies (a most true conclusion),
as their elevation to the rank of particular philosophies by means of a
mixture of empirical concepts and pure concepts, of abstract intellect
and of reason. The erroneous tendency found nourishment and took
concrete form in the idea of a Philosophy of nature, which Schelling
had obtained, partly from Kant himself and partly had found in his
own at first latent and then manifest theosophism. In this way, the
system of Hegel became divided into three parts, a Logic-metaphysic,
a Philosophy of nature and a Philosophy of Spirit, whereas it should
on the contrary have unified Logic and the Philosophy of Spirit, and
expelled the Philosophy of nature. By its internal dialectic, panlogism
or philosophism was converted, even in Hegel himself, and still more
among his disciples, into mythologism, and from the system of the Idea
and of absolute immanence, because of the imperfections which they
contained, there reappeared theism and transcendence (the Hegelian
right wing).[18]
[Sidenote: _Contemporaries of Hegel: Herbart, Schleiermacher, and
others._]
It would be vain to seek the correction of Hegel among those thinkers
that were his contemporaries, for they were all, though in various
degrees, inferior to him. None of them had attained, through Kant, to
the height attained by Hegel. Dwelling on a lower level, they could
certainly refuse to recognize him and vituperate him, but they could
never collaborate with and beyond him, in the progress of truth.
Herbart held those concepts to which the particular sciences give rise
to be contradictory, but he claimed to surpass the contradiction by
means of an elaboration of the concepts (_Bearbeitung der Begriffe_),
conducted in the very method of the old Logic, that is, of the Logic
of the empirical sciences. Schleiermacher renounced the attempt to
reach the unity of the speculative and the empirical, of Ethic and
Physics, that is, the realization of the pure idea of knowledge;
and he substituted for that ideal, which for him was unattainable,
_criticism,_ a form of worldly wisdom; that is to say, of philosophy
(_Weltweisheit_) which gave access to theology and to religious
feeling.[19] Schopenhauer accepted the distinction between concept
and idea, the first abstract and artificial, the second concrete and
real; but so slight was his understanding of the idea (which he called
the Platonic idea) that he confused it with the concept of natural
species,[20] that is to say, precisely with one of the most artificial
and arbitrary of empirical concepts. Finally, Schelling, who had been
a precursor of Hegel in his youth and had collaborated with him,
not only failed to improve his logic of the intuition in his second
philosophical period, but he abandoned even this embryonic form of the
concrete concept, and gave himself over as a prey to the will and to
irrationality. In his positive philosophy the old adversary of Jacobi
made a bad combination of the alogism of Jacobi with the Hegelian
idea of development and with mythologism, as in metaphysic he had
anticipated the blind will of Schopenhauer.[21]
[Sidenote: _Later positivism and psychologism._]
The ensuing period, both in Germany and in the whole of Europe, had
little philosophical interest. It was marked by the reappearance of
a form of naturalism and of Empiricism, in part justified by the
abuse of the dialectic, which had sometimes, in the hands of Hegel's
disciples, seemed altogether mad. But this recrudescence was in every
way very poor in thought and inadequate to previous history. With this
Empiricism is associated the deplorable _Logic_ of John Stuart Mill,
one of those books which do least honour to the human spirit. That
less than mediocre reasoner did not even succeed in producing a Logic
of the natural sciences. He became involved in contradictions and
tautologies, talking, for instance, of experience, which criticises
itself and imposes its own limits upon itself, and of the principle
of causality, as a law which affirms the existence of a law that
there shall be a law. Still less had he any notion of what it is
to philosophize, maintaining that in order to make progress in the
moral and philosophical sciences it is necessary to apply to them
the method of the physical sciences. Nothing is more puerile than
his nominalism, which gives language a logical character, and then
pretends that language must be logically reformed. Logical science was
altogether lost in the evolutionism or physiologism of Spencer, and in
the psychologism which had and still has many followers in Germany, in
France, and in England, not less than in Italy. The state in which the
Logic of philosophy is found in such an environment can be inferred
from the fact that even mathematical Logic fared ill there, since there
have not been wanting those who have dared to conceive a _psychology
of arithmetic._ Finally, as a healthy corrective of psychologism, the
danger of which to the old Logic had already been noted by Kant,[22]
there came the revival of the Aristotelian, and even of the scholastic
Logic, in which there yet lived, though in erroneous forms, the idea of
the universal which had been discovered by the Greek philosophers.
[Sidenote: _Eclectics. Lotze._]
Other thinkers have not abandoned all contact with classical German
philosophy; but, in comparison with the thoughts of Kant and of Kant's
great pupils, they seem like children. They try to lift the weapons
of the Titans, and either they do not move them at all or they let
them fall from their hands, wounding themselves with them, but failing
to grip them. The thoughts of Schelling and of Hegel indeed were
discredited, but not touched; and those of Kant were touched, but
ill-treated. In the most esteemed Logics of this description, such
as those of Sigwart and of Wundt, the capital distinction between
pure concepts and representative concepts, between _universalia_ and
_generalia,_ has no prominence at all. Sigwart is obliged to complete
the knowledge obtained from naturalistic and mathematical procedure
by faith and by a gradual elevation to the idea of God. Wundt, who
does not attribute to philosophy a method which is proper to it and
different from that of the other forms of knowledge, conceives the
final result of metaphysical thought as the position of a perpetual
hypothesis. In the Logic of Lotze, who combated Hegelianism and revived
transcendentalism and theism, there is just a luminous streak, a
faint trace, of the idealist philosophy. Lotze understands that it
is impossible to form (empirical) concepts by simply cancelling the
varying parts of representations and preserving the constant parts, and
recognizes that the formation of concepts presupposes the concept: the
universal is made with the universal. He strives to issue from this
circle by positing a _primary_ universal, not formed by the method of
the others, but such that thought finds it in itself. This primary
universal has nothing particular and representative; and only by means
of it is it possible to combine heterogeneous and to differentiate
homogeneous elements, and to form the ideas of size, of more or less,
of one and of many and such like, with which the _second_ universals of
the synthesis are afterwards constructed.[23]
[Sidenote: _New gnoseology of Science. The Economic theory of the
scientific concept._]
While students of philosophy, although manifesting some doubt and
dissatisfaction, allowed themselves to be intimidated by naturalism
(dazzled, like the public, with technical applications, or confounded
by the applause of the public), a tendency has become more and more
accentuated during the last decades, which seems to us to offer great
assistance to Logic and philosophy in general, if it is understood
how to adapt it to its true end. It has not had any single centre
of diffusion, but has arisen, almost contemporaneously, in several
places, becoming at once diffused everywhere, like something that has
happened at the right time. Several of its founders and promoters
are mathematicians, physicists, and naturalists. From the very fact
of their having begun to reflect upon their activity, these men
have certainly ceased to be mere specialists, notwithstanding their
protests to the contrary. Yet they obtain considerable strength from
their specialism, finding in it a guide and a curb to prevent their
losing sight in their gnoseological enquiry of the actual procedure of
naturalistic constructions, which are its origin. The formula of this
tendency is the recognition of the _practical or economic_ character of
the mathematical, physical, and natural sciences.
[Sidenote: _Avenarius, Mach._]
The empirocriticism of Avenarius considers science to be a simple
description of the forms of experience, and conceptual procedure to
be the instrument that alters pure and primitive experience (pure
intuition or pure perception) for the purpose of simplifying it. Ernest
Mach has developed and popularized these views, for as a student of
mechanics he had reached the same conclusions by his own path and in
his own way. The physical sciences (he says), not less than zoology and
botany, have as their sole foundation the description of natural facts
in which there are never identical cases. Identical cases are created
by means of the schematic imitation that we make of reality; and here
toe lies the origin of the mutual dependence that appears in the
character of facts. To this therefore he restricts the significance of
the principle of causality, for which (in order to avoid fancifulness
and mythologicism) it would be opportune to substitute the concept of
_function._ Bodies or things are abbreviated intellectual _symbols_ of
groups of sensations; symbols, that is to say, which have no existence
outside our intellect. They are cards, like those which dealers attach
to boxes and which have no value except in so far as there are goods of
value inside the box. In this economic schematicism lies the strength,
but also the weakness, of science; for in the presentation of facts
science always sacrifices something of their individuality and real
appearance, and does not seek exactness in another way save when
obliged to do so, by the requirements of a definite moment. Hence the
incongruity between experience and science. Since they are developed
upon parallel lines, they can reduce to some extent the interval that
separates them, but they can never annul it by becoming coincident with
one another.[24]
_Rickert,_ in his book on the _Limits of the Naturalistic Concepts,_
maintains similar ideas, though with different cultural assumptions.
The concept, which is the result of the labour of the sciences, is
nothing but a means to a scientific end. The world of bodies and of
souls is infinite in space and time. It is not possible to represent
it in every individual part, by reason of its variety, which is not
only extensive but also intensive: intuition is inexhaustible. The
naturalistic concept is directed to surpassing this infinity of
intuitions. It effects this by determining its own extension and
comprehension, and by formulating its being in a series of judgments.
Thus, in order to conquer intuition altogether, the natural sciences
tend to substitute for concepts of _tilings_ concepts of _relations_
free from all intuitive elements. But the ultimate concept must always
of necessity be a concept of things (though of things _sui generis,_
immutable, indivisible, perfectly equal among themselves, expressible
in negative judgments); and besides, they find everywhere insuperable
barriers in the historical or descriptive element, which surrounds them
all and is ineliminable. This naturalistic procedure can be applied
and is indeed applied, not only to the science of bodies, but also to
that of souls, to psychology and sociology; and Rickert opportunely
insists (as did Hegel in his time) upon the possibility of empirical
sciences of what is called the spiritual world; or (as he says) the
word "nature," as used in this connection, means not a reality, but a
particular point of view from which reality is observed, in order to
reach the end of conceptual simplification.[25]
[Sidenote: _Bergson and the new French philosophy._]
In France, the same ideas or very similar are represented by a group
of thinkers, who are called variously philosophers of contingency, of
liberty, of intuition, or of action. Bergson, who is the chief of them,
looks upon the concepts of the natural sciences in the same way as
Mach, as _symboles_ and _étiquettes._ Besides the extremely apposite
applications that he has made of this principle to the analysis of
time, of duration, of space, of movement, of liberty, of evolution, he
has also the great merit of having broken his country's traditions of
intellectualism and abstractionism, of giving to France for the first
time that lively consciousness of the intuition, which she has always
lacked, and of shaking her excessive reliance upon clear distinctions,
upon well-turned concepts, upon classes, formulæ, and reasonings that
proceed in a straight line, but run upon the surface of reality.[26]
[Sidenote: _Le Roy and others._]
Le Roy, one of the followers of Bergson, has set himself to
demonstrate, with many examples, that scientific laws only become
rigorous when they are changed into conventions and depend upon vicious
circles. The course of events is habitual and regular (if you like
to say so), but it is not at all necessary. The great security of
astronomical previsions is commonly praised; but that security is not
always such in actual fact ("_il y a des comètes qui ne reviennent
pas_"), and in any case it is always approximate. The rigorous
necessity of which the natural sciences boast, is not known, but is
rather postulated, and this postulation has merely the practical object
of dominating single facts and of communicating with our neighbours
("_parler le monde_"). The law of gravity holds, but only when external
forces do not disturb it. In this way it is well understood that it
always holds. The conservation of energy avails only in closed systems;
but closed systems are just those in which energy is conserved. A body
left to itself persists in the state of repose; but this law is nothing
but the definition of a body left to itself, and so on.[27] Poincaré
boldly affirms the conventional character of the mathematical and
physical sciences, as do Milhaud and several others. They have deduced
it as a consequence of the impression aroused by the theories of higher
geometry, which has contributed more or less successfully towards
revealing the practical character of mathematics, which was formerly
held to be the foundation or model of truth and certainty.
[Sidenote: _Reattachment to romantic ideas and advance made upon them._]
All those criticisms directed against the sciences do not sound new
to the ears of those Schelling, of Novalis, and of other romantics,
and particularly with Hegel's marvellous criticism of the abstract
(that is, empirical and mathematical) intellect. This runs through
all his books, from the _Phenomenology of the Spirit_ to the _Science
of Logic,_ and is enriched with examples in the observations to the
paragraphs of the _Philosophy of Nature._ But if compared with that of
Hegel, they are at the disadvantage of not being based upon powerful
philosophical thought; they have, on the other hand, this superiority:
that they do not present the characteristics observed in the sciences
as errors which must be corrected, but define them as physiological,
necessary, uncensurable characteristics, derived from the very function
of the sciences, which is not theoretic, but practical and economic. In
this way there is posited one of the premisses that are necessary for
preventing the mixture of the economic method with the method of truth,
of empirical and abstract concepts with pure theoretic forms, and thus
for making impossible that speculative hybridism, which is expressed in
philosophies of history and of nature, and which fashions an abstract
reason to work out a dialectic of the naturalistic concepts, and even
of the representations of history. And with the prevention of this
error there is also prepared a more exact idea of the relation between
pseudoconcepts and concepts and a better constitution of philosophic
Logic.
[Sidenote: _Philosophy of pure experience, of intuition, of action,
etc.; and its insufficiency._]