a larger scale) was the philosophist error, which led him to the design
of a philosophy of history, rising above history properly so-called.
The psychological explanations of this strange duplication, together
with its philosophic motives, have already been adduced.[11] Wilhelm
von Humboldt certainly alluded to Hegel and intended to oppose him in
this respect in his discourse concerning the office of the historian
(1820). Here the method of the writer of history was likened to that
of the artist. Fancy is as necessary to the historian as to the poet,
Humboldt said, not in the sense of free fancy, but as the gift of
reconstruction and of association. History, like art, seeks the true
form of events, the pure and concrete form of real facts. But whereas
art hardly touches the fugitive manifestations of the real, in order to
rise above all reality, history attaches itself to those manifestations
and becomes totally immersed in them. The ideas which the historian
elaborates are not introduced by him into history, but discovered in
reality itself, of which they constitute the essence. They are the
outcome of the fulness of events, not of an extrinsic addition, as
in what is called philosophic or theological history (Philosophy of
history). Certainly, universal history is not intelligible without
a world-order (eine Weltregierung). But the historian possesses no
instrument which enables him directly to examine this design, and every
effort in which he attempts to reach it, makes him fall into empty and
arbitrary teleologism. He must, on the contrary, proceed by deducing
it from facts examined in their individuality; for the end of history
can only be the realization of the idea, which humanity must represent
from all sides and in all the different modes in which finite form
can ever be united with the idea. The course of events can only be
interrupted when idea and form are no longer able to interpenetrate
one another.[12] The protest was justified, not indeed against the
fundamental doctrine of Hegel, but rather against one of its particular
aberrations. But the protest was inferior in the determinateness of
its concepts to the philosophy which it opposed. Even in the healthy
tendency of the Hegelian doctrine, ideas should not be introduced but
discovered in history. And if it sometimes seemed that the Philosophy
of history introduced them from without, this happened because in that
case true ideas were not employed and the concreteness of the fact was
not respected.
[Sidenote: _F. Brentano._]
The theory of the individual judgment has made no progress in the
Logics of the nineteenth century, save for certain timely explanations
concerning the existential character of the judgment given by Brentano
and his school. Brentano, who is an Anti-Kantian, considers the period
inaugurated by Kant to be that of a new philosophical decadence. Yet
notwithstanding his sympathy for mediæval scholasticism and for modern
psychologism, he has too much philosophic acumen to remain fixed in the
one or to lose himself in the other. Thus the tripartition of the forms
of the spirit, maintained by him,[13] beneath the external appearance
of a renovated Cartesianism, bears traces of the abhorred criticism,
romanticism and idealism. The first form, the pure representation,
answers to the æsthetic moment; the second, the judgment, is the
primitive logical form answering to the Kantian _a priori_ synthesis;
and love and hatred, the third form, which contains will and feeling,
is not without precedent among the Post-Kantians themselves. He
reasonably criticizes the various more or less mechanical theories,
which treat the judgment as a connection of representations or a
subsumption of concepts, and defends the _idiogenetic_ against
allogenetic theories. But when he tries to prove that the judgment
"A is" cannot be resolved into "A" and "is" (that is, into A and
existence), because the concept of existence is found in the judgment
and does not precede it, he goes beyond the mark. For the concept of
existence certainly does not precede, but neither does it _follow_
the judgment: it is contemporaneous; that is to say, it exists only
in the judgment, like the category in the _a priori_ synthesis.
And he goes beyond the mark again, when he makes existentiality
the character of the judgment, whereas existentiality is only one
of the categories and consequently, if it be indispensable for the
constitution of the judgment, it is not sufficient for any judgment,
since for every judgment there is necessary the inner determination
of the judgment as essence and as existence. For the rest, this is
easily seen in the theories of his school, which end by establishing
a double degree or form of judgment, thus creating a duality that
cannot be maintained.[14] In any case, in the researches of Brentano
and his followers, there is affirmed the need for a complete doctrine
of the judgment and of its relation (which in our opinion is one of
identity) with the doctrine of the concept. The theories of values and
of judgments of values already mentioned, in their investigation of
the universal or valuative element, express the same need from another
point of view; although none of them discovers, by recalling the
Kantian-Hegelian tradition, that values are immanent in single facts,
and that consequently judgments of value, as judgments, are the same as
individual judgments.
[Sidenote: _Controversies concerning the nature of history._]
Enquiries concerning the character of history may assist the
constitution of a theory of individual judgments. These enquiries have
never enjoyed so much favour as in the last decade of the nineteenth
century. Naturalism or positivism has provided the incentive to such
enquiries, for it brought into being the problem: "whether history is
or is not a (natural) science," by its attempt to violate and pervert
history by raising it (as they said, and it must have sounded ironical)
to the rank of a science, that is to say, of a naturalistic science.
There were two answers to the problem: (1) that history is a science
_sui generis_ (not natural); (2) that it is, not a science, but an art,
a particular form of art, the representation of the real.
[Sidenote: _Rickert; Xénopol. History as science of the individual._]
The first of these answers is to be found in the work of Rickert
(1896-1902), cited above, and in the almost contemporary work
of Xénopol (1899).[15] Rickert's work is that of a professional
philosopher, and a follower of Windelband; the other, of an
intelligent historian, who is somewhat lacking in equipment as a
philosopher. Rickert, after having examined the naturalistic process
and demonstrated how it finds a limit in individuality, next examines
historical process, which takes possession of the field that naturalism
is obliged to relinquish. Xénopol upholds the same distinction, of a
double series of sciences, historical and theoretical, of _phénomènes
successifs_ and of _phénomènes de répétition._ To both these writers
(besides the merit of having revived, in opposition to naturalism, the
consciousness of individuality) belongs that of having understood that
the field of history extends far beyond that ordinarily assigned to it,
and embraces every manifestation of the real. But merely successive
phenomena or phenomena of mere repetition do not exist and are not
conceivable; nor is it true that the sciences dealing with the former
stop at differences of fact and neglect identities. For how could a
history of political facts be written, if no attention were paid to
the constant political nature of those facts? or of poetry, without
paying attention to the constant poetical nature of all its historical
manifestations? or of zoological species, without paying attention
to the constant nature of the organism and of life? The distinction,
therefore, as formulated by Xénopol, is little enough elaborated, not
to say crude. Rickert, for his part, falls into a like error, owing
to his failure to respect that intuitive and individual element,
which he had previously admitted. Hence the serious contradictions,
in which he becomes involved in the second part of his book. After
having defined the concept as peculiar to the naturalistic method, he
eventually claims to find also a species of concept in the procedure
of history, which he had distinguished from and opposed to the former:
a _historical_ concept, which is obtained by cutting out, in the
extensive and intensive infinity of facts, certain groups, which are
placed in relation by means of practical criteria of importance and
of value. It is true (he writes) that the concept has been defined by
us as something of universal content; but now we _wish_ precisely to
surpass this one-sidedness, and therefore in the interest of logic it
is justifiable to give the name concepts also to the thoughts which
express the _historical essence_ of reality.[16] It is worse still
when he attempts to explain the ineradicable intuitive and æsthetic
element of historical narration; for holding art to be without truth
and of use only in producing some sort of artistic (hedonistic?)
effect, he recognizes that element as a means of endowing narration
with liveliness and of exciting the fancy.[17] A consequence of this
lack of understanding of the æsthetic function has been the laborious
and vain attempt which Rickert is obliged to make, to determine to what
personages and facts we are to attribute objective historical value.
[Sidenote: _History as art._]
The second answer, that history is an art (that is to say, a special
form of art, which is distinguished from the rest, in that it
represents, not the possible but the real), avoids the above-mentioned
difficulties. It distinguishes clearly between the natural sciences
and history; it explains the ineliminability and the function of
the intuitive element in history, and does not lose itself in the
vain search for the distinctive criterion between historical facts
and non-historical facts, because it declares that all facts are
historical.[18] But it must in any case be corrected and completed with
the conclusion that the representation of the real is no longer simple
representation or simple art, but the interpenetration of thought and
representation, that is to say, philosophy-history.[19]
[Sidenote: _Other controversies concerning history._]
All the other controversies recently engaged upon, relate to the
criteria of interpretation, or the system of ideas, which serves as
the basis of any sort of historical narration. Thus there have been
disputes as to the precise meaning and the greater or less importance
in history of climate, of race, of economic factors, of individuality,
of collectivity, of culture, of morality, and of intelligence; and
also as to how teleology, immanence, providence, and so on, are to be
understood in history. In these disputes there recur constantly the
names of Buckle, of Taine, of Spencer, of Ranke, of Marx, of Lamprecht
and of others. It is evident that those controversies concern, not
only the gnoseological nature of historical writing, but the system of
the spirit and of the real, the conception of the world itself. The
materialist and the spiritualist, the theist and the pantheist, will
solve them differently. To write their history here would be to go
beyond the boundaries of Logic and of the particular history of Logic,
that we have set ourselves.
[Footnote 1: See my observations concerning the perpetuity of
historical criticism in _Critica,_ vi. pp. 383-84.]
[Footnote 2: _Poetics,_ chap. 8.]
[Footnote 3: _Anal. pr._ i. chap. 27.]
[Footnote 5: See (in particular for Polybius) E. Pais, _Della
storiografia della filosofia della storia presso i Greci,_ Livorno,
1889.]
[Footnote 6: _De dign. et augm._ i. ii. chaps. 1-2.]
[Footnote 7: _De homine,_ chap. 9.]
[Footnote 8: E. Maffei, _I trattati dell' arte storica del Rinascimento
fino al secolo XVII,_ Napoli, 1897.]
[Footnote 9: G. Gentile, "Contribution à l'histoire de la méthode
historique," in the _Revue de synthèse historique,_ v. pp. 129-152.]
[Footnote 10: _Encycl._ § 549; and all the introduction to the _Phil.
d. Gesch._]
[Footnote 11: See above, Part III. Chap. III.]
[Footnote 12: "Ueber die Aufgabe des Geschichtsschreibers," in the
_Transactions_ of the Academy of Berlin, 1882, and reprinted in _W. W._]
[Footnote 13: F. Brentano, _Psychologie,_ Leipzig, 1874.]
[Footnote 14: F. Hildebrand, _Die neuen Theorien der kategorischer.
Schlussen,_ Vienna, 1891.]
[Footnote 15: _Les Principes fondamentaux de l'histoire,_ Paris, 1899;
2nd ed., entitled _La Théorie de l'histoire,_ Paris, 1908.]
[Footnote 16: _Grenzen d. naturwiss. Begriffsbildung,_ pp. 328-29.]
[Footnote 17: _Op. cit._ pp. 382-89.]
[Footnote 18: This is the thesis maintained in 1893 by the author of
this book, cf. also B. Croce, "Les Études relatives à la théorie de
l'histoire en Italie," in the _Revue de synthèse historique,_ v. pp.
257-259.]
[Footnote 19: See above, Part II. Chap. IV., and the note concerning
it.]
IV
THEORIES OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THOUGHT AND WORD AND FORMALIST LOGIC
[Sidenote: _Relation between the history of Logic and that of the
Philosophy of language._]
The history of Logic depends very closely upon the history of the
Philosophy of language, or of Æsthetic, understood as the philosophy
of language and of expression in general. Every discovery concerning
language throws new light upon the function of thought, which,
surpassing language, employs it as an instrument, and therefore unites
itself with language both negatively and positively. It belongs to the
progress of the Philosophy of language, not less than to that of Logic,
to have determined in a more exact manner the relations between thought
and expression, as also to have dissipated or begun the dissipation of
empirical and formalist Logic. This Logic, deluding itself with the
belief that it was analysing thought, presents a series of mutilated
and empty linguistic forms.
[Sidenote: _Logical formalism. Indian Logic free of it._]
This error, which appeared very early in our western world, has spread
during the centuries and yet dominates many minds; so true is this that
"Logic" is usually understood to mean just illogic or formalist Logic.
We say our western world, because if Greece created and passed on the
doctrine of logical forms, which was a mixture of thoughts materialized
in words and of words become rigid in thoughts, another Logic is known,
which, as it seems, developed outside the influence of Greek thought,
and remained immune from the formalist error. This is Indian Logic,
which is notably antiverbalist, though very inferior to that of Greece
and of Europe in wealth and depth of concepts, and limited almost
exclusively to the examination of the empirical concept or reasoning,
of naturalistic induction or _expectatio casuum similium._ Indian
Logic studies the naturalistic syllogism in _itself,_ as internal
thought, distinguishing it from the syllogism _for others,_ that is to
say, from the more or less usual, but always extrinsic and accidental
forms of communication and dispute. It has not even a suspicion of the
extravagant idea (which still vitiates our treatises) of a truth which
is merely syllogistic and formalist, and which may be false in fact. It
takes no account of the judgment, or rather it considers what is called
judgment, and what is really the proposition, as a verbal clothing
of knowledge; it does not make the verbal distinctions of subject,
copula and predicate; it does not admit classes of categorical and
hypothetical, of affirmative and of negative judgments. All these are
extraneous to Logic, whose object is the constant: knowledge considered
in itself.[1]
[Sidenote: _Aristotelian Logic and formalism._]
It was a subject of enquiry and of disagreement, especially during
the second half of last century, whether formalist Logic, the Logic
of the schools, could legitimately be called _Aristotelian._ Some,
among whom were Trendelenburg and Prantl, absolutely denied this,
and wished to restore the genuine thought of Aristotle, opposing it
to post-Aristotelian and mediæval Logic. But they themselves were
so enmeshed in logical formalism, that they were not capable of
determining its peculiar character. The contrast between those two
Logics, so far as it struck them, concerned secondary points. If
the proper character of formalism consists in the confusion between
thought and word, how are we to deny that Aristotle fell into this
error, or that at any rate he set his foot upon the perilous way?
Certainly he did not proceed to the exaggerations and ineptitudes
of later logicians. He was ingenuous, not pedantic. And his books
(and in particular the _Analytics)_ are rich in acute and original
observations. He was a philosopher, and his successors were very
often manual labourers. But Aristotle (probably influenced by
the mathematical disciplines) conceived the idea of a theory of
_apodeictic,_ which, from simple judgments, through syllogisms and
demonstrations, reached completeness in the definition as its last
term. The concept was the first term, as the loose concept or name,
the last term was the concept defined. He was not ignorant that not
everything can thus be demonstrated, that in the case of the supreme
principles such a demonstration cannot be given, and it is vain to
look for it, and that there is alongside the apodeictic a science of
_anapodeictic._ But that did not induce him to abandon the study of
verbal forms for a close study of the concepts or of the category,
which is the demonstration of itself. In his divisions of judgments
he was very discreet; but yet he distinguished them verbally, as
universal, particular and indefinite, negative and affirmative. In the
syllogism he distinguished only three figures, and affirmed that of
those the first is the truly scientific (ἐπιστημὀνικον), because it
determines _what is,_ whereas the second does not give a categorical
judgment and affirmative knowledge, and the third does not give
universal knowledge; but these restrictions did not suffice to correct
the false step made in positing the idea of _figures_ and _moods_ of
the syllogism. When we examine the various doctrines of Aristotle
and compare them with the forms and developments which they assumed
later, it can be maintained that no logician was less Aristotelian than
Aristotle. But even he was Aristotelian, and the impulse to seek logic
in words had been begun in so masterly a manner that for centuries it
weighed upon the mind like a fate.
[Sidenote: _Later formalism._]
Why, then, should we rage, like many modern critics, against the later
manipulations and amplifications to which Aristotelian Logic was
submitted by Peripatetics and Stoics, by commentators and rhetoricians,
by doctors of the Church and masters of the University, by Neolatins
and Byzantines, by Arabs and Germans? We certainly harbour no
tenderness for the _hypothetical_ and _disjunctive_ syllogism, or for
the _fourth figure_ of the syllogism, as elaborated from Theophrastus
to Galen, or for the _five predicables_ of Porphyry, or for subtleties
upon the _conversions_ of judgments, or for the _mnemonic verses_ of
Michael Psellus and of Peter Hispanus, or for the geometric symbols
of the concepts and syllogisms invented by Christian Weiss in the
seventeenth century ("to direct blockheads aright,"[2] as Prantl
permits himself to say), or for the calculations upon the moods of the
syllogism made by John Hispanianus, which he found to be no less than
five hundred and sixty in number, thirty-six of which are conclusive.
We also willingly admit that errors have been made in the traditional
interpretation of certain doctrines of Aristotle (for example, in the
doctrine of the enthymeme).[3] But setting aside these errors, we can
say that for those excogitations and distinctions support was already
found in the Organon of Aristotle, and that they were derived from
principles there laid down. Certainly, with their crude roughness and
their evident absurdity, they shock good sense in a way in which the
distinctions of Aristotle did not, for these were in some sort of
relation with the empirical description of the usual mode of scientific
discussions. But the error nestled in themselves; and it was well that
it should be intensified, so that it might leap to the eyes of all,
just as it is sometimes well that there should be scandals in practical
life.
[Sidenote: _Rebellions against Aristotelian Logic. The opposition of
the humanists and their motives._]
The rebellions which the school (in the wide sense of the word,
from the Peripatetic to the modern) continued to arouse in regard
to these doctrines might seem to be of greater interest than this
labour of embroidering and carving. But since there has been a time
during which every protest, and indeed, every insult levelled against
the philosopher of Stagira seemed a sign of original thought, of
spiritual freedom and of secure progress, it is well to repeat that an
indispensable condition for surpassing the Aristotelian Logic was a new
Philosophy of language. Such a condition was altogether wanting in the
past and is partly wanting now. It is therefore not surprising that
when those rebellions are closely examined, we discover in the midst
of secondary and superficial disagreement something quite different
from what was expected; not the radical negation, but the substantial
acceptance, explicit or understood, of the principles of formalist
Logic.
Such is the case with the rebellions of the humanists, Ciceronians
and rhetoricians, which took place in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, of Lorenzo Valla, of Rudolph Agricola, of Luigi Vives,
of Mario Nizolio, of Peter Ramus. The motive power with all of them
was abhorrence for the heavy scholastic armour. Culture, leaving
the cloisters, spread itself abroad in life; philosophy began to be
written in the common tongue, and for this reason men sought forms of
exposition that were rapid, easy and clear or eloquent and oratorical.
But under these new forms the direction of logical thought remained
unchanged. Ramus, for example, who applied to Aristotle the elegant
terms of _fatuus impostor, chamæleon somnians et stertens,_ and so
forth, ended by claiming that he alone had understood his true thought,
and showed by the reforms of it that he proposed (among which was the
suggestion that the third figure of the syllogism should pass to the
first place) that he, too, was still revolving in the narrow circle of
formalism.[4]
[Sidenote: _The opposition of naturalism._]
Even the opposition of naturalism to the Aristotelian Logic did
not strike it to the heart, but wished to replace and more often
to accompany one form of empiricism with another: the rules of the
syllogism with the precepts of induction, the sophistical refutations
with the determination of the four idols that preoccupy men's minds.
Bacon never dreamed of denying to syllogistic the value of true
doctrine. He believed, however, that it had already been sufficiently
studied and developed, that it lacked nothing, and even possessed
something superfluous, whereas there was still wanting a criterion of
invention and of induction, which was of fundamental importance for
syllogistic itself. In making the inventory of knowledge (he writes) it
is to be observed that we find ourselves almost in the conditions of a
man who inherits an estate, in the inventory of which there is noted:
"ready money, none" ("numeratae pecuniae, nihil").[5] Hence he raised
his voice against the abuse of disputations and of reasoning as to
matters of fact; the subtlety of the syllogism is always conquered by
that of nature.[6] The syllogism consists of propositions, propositions
of words, and words are the counters of concepts; but if the concepts
are confused or wrongly abstracted, the syllogistic consequences
deduced from them are without any sort of security. Hence the necessity
of beginning with induction: "_spes est una in inciuctione vera._"[7]
Bacon's position (which was therefore not anti-formalist, but only
an addition or complement to formalism) has been renewed, word for
word, in all inductive Logics, up to that of the English school of the
nineteenth century, and to ours of to-day. Stuart Mill's book expresses
the combination of the two empiricisms, syllogistic and inductive, in
its very title: "A system of Logic, _ratiocinative_ and _inductive,_
being a connected view of the principles of evidence and the methods of
Scientific _investigation._"
[Sidenote: _Labour of simplification in the eighteenth century. Kant._]