judgment arises the confirmation of the impossibility of the
psychological method as the foundation of a Philosophy of the
practical. Descriptive psychology is based upon practical facts
historically ascertained, or upon practical judgments. Hence, by
proceeding from particular to particular, it is not only incapable of
exhausting the infinite and of attaining to the real universal, but by
the very choice of particular examples, which should be the foundation
of philosophical research relating to the practical, it is under the
necessity of first possessing a concept of the practical. Hence it
stands between Scylla and Charybdis, between a vicious _progressus ad
infinitum_ and a not less vicious circle.
In this way is eliminated the problem, monstrous from whatever point
of view it may arise, as to the historical origin of the practical
activity (economy or morality). If these activities be categories,
which constitute fact and judge it reflected in the spirit, they
cannot have arisen historically, as contingent facts. When we prove
the historical origin of anything, with that very proof we destroy
its universal value. The fears of certain moralists lest, with the
indication of the historical origin of morality, its value should
come to be denied, have therefore been wrongly mocked. Certainly, if
morality had a historical origin, it would also have an end, like all
historical formations, even the most grandiose, the Empire of the
East or the Empire of the West, the Hunnish Empire of Attila or the
Mongolian Empire of Gengiskhan. The fear manifested by the moralists
in question was then an instinctive horror of the incorrect method
of philosophical psychology, which now presupposes, now destroys the
categories that it would wish to establish.
VII
THE PRACTICAL METHOD, RULES AND CASUISTRY
[Sidenote: _Justification of the psychological method and of empirical
and descriptive disciplines._]
In repeatedly rejecting the psychological method, as at the end
of the last chapter, we have been very careful to make use of a
cautious phraseology. Thus we have employed such expressions as
"psycho-philosophical method," "speculative-descriptive method,"
and the like, in order to make it quite clear that our hostility is
directed against that mixture, or rather against its introduction into
Philosophy, but is not directed against Psychology itself, that is,
descriptive psychology. This psychology has always been practised,
since the world was world, and we all practise it at every instant, and
could not propose to banish it from the spirit, save at the risk of
going mad.
If indeed we know that the true and proper knowledge of theoretical
philosophy is resolved into the cycle of art, philosophy, and history,
and that we possess no other means of knowing the individual, both
ingenuous and reflective, outside the knowledge of the universal given
by philosophy, then we also know that the spirit needs to arrange and
to classify the infinite intuitions and perceptions given to it by art
and history, and to reduce them to classes, the better to possess and
to manipulate them. We also know that the method called _naturalistic
or positive_ performs this function, and that hence arise natural
disciplines or sciences. These do not, as is the popular belief,
deal only with so-called inferior reality (minerals, vegetables, and
animals), but with all manifestations of reality, including those most
strictly termed spiritual.
Thus we can at this point reduce to a more correct meaning a claim
that has been usually maintained by those who have treated of the
Practical and of the Ethical in our day. They demand that a science of
the practical and of morality should be preceded by a wide historical
inquiry and have a great mass of facts as its foundation. If such
science be understood as a Philosophy of the practical and as an Ethic,
such a demand is an irrational pretension, because the true relation is
exactly the opposite: from philosophy to history, not from history to
philosophy. But if, on the other hand, this science be understood as a
naturalistic and empirical discipline, the claim is rational, because
it is not possible to construct a discipline of that sort, save with
material that has been historically-verified.
Sidenote: _Practical description and its literature._
The practical discipline that arranges in groups and classifies the
spiritual facts concerning man, is _Psychology._ But the writer or the
professor is not the only psychologist. Man himself is a psychologist;
even the savage constructs in some sort of way his psychology of types
and classes. And to remain within the circle of volitional acts, their
psychology or description by types has always existed. A conspicuous
example of this was the Comedy of Menander or the New Comedy in Greece.
This partly received and gave artistic form to the results of the
observations of the moralists and partly served as material for the
elaboration of treatises, to such an extent that the _Characters_
of Theophrastus have been looked upon as a repertory or summary of
theatrical types. In the _Rhetoric_ of Aristotle, a whole book is
devoted to a description of affections, passions, and habits. In modern
times, Descartes lamented the insufficiency of ancient treatises on the
subject, and presented as quite a new thing his _Traité des passions._
In this treatise, six _primitive_ passions being distinguished
(admiration, love, hate, desire, joy, and sadness), he maintained that
all the others were derived from them: esteem, contempt, generosity,
pride, humility, baseness, veneration, disdain, hope, fear, jealousy,
certainty, desperation, irresolution, courage, hardihood, emulation,
cowardice, terror, remorse, mockery, piety, satisfaction, repentance,
favour, gratitude, indignation, anger, glory, shame, and so on.
Spinoza, following the example of Descartes and correcting his
theories, devoted the third part of his _Ethic_ to the affections or
passions, considering them _perinde ac si quaestio de lineis planis aut
de corporibus esset._ Let it suffice to mention the _Anthropologia_ of
Kant among the other most celebrated treatises upon the argument.
[Sidenote: _Extension of practical description._]
But although we have recorded as examples these general treatises on
the passions, it would be impossible to continue the enumeration,
because descriptive psychology is carried out, so to speak, with
the widest divergences and is infinitely subdivided. An ample
bibliography would not suffice to catalogue all the books dealing
with this discipline. These are sometimes arranged in chronological
divisions (Psychology of the Renaissance, of the eighteenth century,
of the Middle Ages, even including prehistoric man!). Sometimes
they contain geographical divisions (Psychology of the Englishman,
of the Frenchman, of the Russian, of the Japanese, and so on),
with subdivisions according to regions. Sometimes they combine the
two methods (Psychology of the ancient Greek, of the Roman of the
Decadence), and sometimes according to their psychical content
(Psychology of the priest, of the soldier, of the politician, of the
poet, of the man of science), and so on. And when the treatises that
bear a title of the kind above mentioned had been catalogued, it would
be also necessary to trace a great mass of descriptive psychology
(and of the best sort) in the books of historians, novelists,
dramatists, in memoirs and confessions, in maxims and advice for the
conduct of life in the sketches of satirists and caricaturists. And
when all these had been catalogued (a very difficult task), it would
be necessary to take account of all the other psychology, which,
formed in the spirit of individuals who are not writers, is poured
forth in speech. This is found, but in small part, in collections of
proverbs. It would also be necessary not to neglect (an altogether
desperate enterprize) everything that each one of us does and forgets
and substitutes continually in life, according to his own needs and
experiences. _Tantae molis_ would be a complete account, precisely
because psychological construction, having for its object actions and
individuals in action, is of such common use.
[Sidenote: _Normative knowledge or rules: their nature._]
There is another class of mental forms intimately connected with
Psychology, and of this also we have denied the justification in the
foregoing chapters, but only in the philosophical field, and not at
all outside it. These are the _norms,_ or _normative_ knowledge and
science, _maxims, rules, and precepts._ In truth, if philosophy,
which commands and wills and judges, when its task is on the contrary
to understand willing and commanding, and to make possible correct
judgment--if such a philosophy be a contradiction in terms, there
is yet nothing to prevent our taking the psychological classes, of
which we have indicated the formation, and separating them from one
another, according as they do or do not lead to certain other classes,
which are called _ends_ and are _abstract ends._ This is done when
those classes are selected which are more efficacious for practical
action. Psychological classes and rules are therefore the same, save
that in the second the character possessed by knowledge as prior to
action is placed in relief, that is to say, its _technical_ character.
This is proved by the easy convertibility of rules into psychological
observations, and of the latter into the former. It suffices to add
the imperative to the first and to remove it from the second. "Do
everything so as to seem good, for that helps in many things; but since
false opinions do not last, you will have difficulty in seeming good
for a long period, if you are not so in reality." That is a rule of
Francesco Guicciardini[1] (or rather of the father of Guicciardini,
quoted by him). Now if we transfer this proposition from the imperative
to the indicative mood and remove the predicate of exhortation, we
have a mere psychological observation: "To seem good helps in an
infinite number of things; but since false opinions do not last, it is
difficult to seem good for long, unless one really be so." Here is a
psychological observation of Vico upon seeming and being: "It happens
naturally that man speaks of nothing but what he affects to be and is
not."[2] This can be turned into a maxim: "Watch yourselves, in order
that by talking too much of a given advantage, you may not let it be
seen clearly that you do hot possess it." Or in relation to moral
classes it can be turned thus: "Try to be that which you would like to
appear to others," and so on.
[Sidenote: _Usefulness of rules._]
Of rules it can be said that they do not possess absolute value. This
is to be found written at the beginning of one of the best books of
rules: _Peu de maximes sont vraies à tous égards_ (Vauvenargues),
and he might have said, "no maxim"; for if it were ever possible
to produce one that was absolutely true, by that alone would it be
demonstrated not to be a true maxim. But criticism prevails against
the distortion of empirical rules into philosophical principles, or
against the confusion between, the psychological and the speculative
methods, to which attention has already been drawn. If this distortion
be not committed, then rules are altogether innocuous. Not only are
they innocuous, they are indispensable. Each of us is constantly
making them for use in his own life. To live without rules would be
impossible. Certainly, the man of action makes no practical rule, nor
does he indicate how we should will and act in definite circumstances,
nor does the poet make any rule of Poetic. Guicciardini himself,
whom we have just quoted, and who formulated stupendous maxims, warns
us: "These memories are rules that can be written down in books;
but special cases, which, since they have a different cause, ask a
different treatment, can ill be written down _elsewhere than in the
book of discretion._" Action depends upon the quickness of the eye,
upon the perception of the situation historically given, which has
never occurred before, and never will occur again, precisely identical.
But it is useful to possess these types of actions to encourage and
of actions to avoid, in order to sharpen the attention and to find
one's way in the world of action, to facilitate and to discipline the
examination of the concrete fact. If, therefore, individual rules are
more or less transitory, the formation of rules is immortal.
[Sidenote: _The literature of rules and its apparent decadence._]
The condition of literature in recent times would seem to be in
disagreement with this affirmation, since as a fact there is a great
falling off in the appearance of books of rules, compared with the
enormous mass that remains in our libraries as an inheritance of the
past. At one time rules of conduct were compiled for everything, not
only for the moral life, in the multiplication of treatises relating
to vice and virtue, to merits and to sins, to things good and evil,
to duties and to rights, dividing these and entering into minutiae,
and again, summaries, catechisms, and various "decalogues," relating
to every part of life. The literature of the Cinquecento gives rules
even for the procuress and the courtesan, in most elegant little
books, which bear the names of Piccolomini and of Aretino. In this
same century, too, Ignatius of Loyola formulated rules for "tying up"
the will, and for the reduction of the docile individual _perinde ac
cadaver,_ for the ends of "sanctity." We must further remark that
all rules, including those on poetry and the arts, have at bottom a
practical--character. That is to say, they are directed to the will, if
only as intermediary. Thus it is necessary to add to the great mass of
practical rules the unnumbered and innumerable treatises of Grammar,
Rhetoric, Poetry of the figurative arts, of music, of dancing, and so
on. But it is a fact that there are now hardly any treatises containing
rules, either for morality, politics, or for the arts. Has the world by
chance become learned on the subject, through inherited aptitude, or
rather has the inutility of rules been discovered?
Neither the one nor the other. The rules still live in books and
treatises; they have only changed their literary form. In literature
they have reabsorbed that imperative which they used at first to
display and to boast of, not only mentally but literally. That has
been made possible by the already established convertibility of rules
into psychological classes. Hence in modern times the literary form
of the psychological observation is preferred to that of rules. This
was indeed redundant, pedantic, and at the same time ingenuous, as
for instance in the Italian Seicento. It is difficult to restrain
a smile when reading the many books on what was called the _reason
of State,_ elaborated by the Italians of that day and imitated by
foreigners, especially Spaniards and Germans. Those _arcana imperii,_
those "secret strokes," those impostures, mysteriously inculcated on
the printed page, are a true and real æsthetic contradiction. The
eighteenth century therefore began to give up this form of treatise,
and as it happens that men are accustomed to attribute to moral virtue
that which is necessity or virtue of another kind, the writers of that
century boasted of the moral progress which had set them free from the
pernicious and immodest maxims of the "reason of State."
It is very amusing to assist at the acts of repulsion and of exorcism,
which a man like the Abbé Galiani believes himself obliged to make in
his treatise _Dei doveri dei principi neutrali_ (1782). When, having
amply discussed this matter from the point of view of morality, he goes
on to discuss it from the point of view of politics and of the reason
of State, he despatches it in a few pages, abhorring, as he says,
that "insidious and wicked science" which formed "the delight, first
of Italian and then of almost all European minds of the fifteenth and
seventeenth centuries." He protests at every step that he is "tired
of repeating and of developing teachings of cunning and wickedness."
But what the Abbot Galiani really abhorred was the robed scholastic
treatment of a matter that he who was termed _Machiavellino_ by his
French friends, and declared that he did not admit in politics anything
but _le machiavélisme pur, sans mélange, cru, vert, dans toute son
âpreté,_[3] handled with very different ability and elegance in his
conversations in Parisian _salons_ and in his witty letters to Madame
d'Épinay. The rules of the eighteenth century are to be sought in
the speeches, essays, political opuscules, tragedies, plays dealing
with the life of citizens, fiction, history, and books of memoirs. If
Aretino and Piccolomini provided for the necessities of the respectable
courtesans and procuresses of the Cinquecento, in the Settecento,
Giacomo Casanova constructed the type of the perfect adventurer. He
began with the rules to be followed as a system of life, the _se
laisser aller au gré du vent qui pousse,_ and passed to those that
were more special and yet fundamental, such as that one should have no
scruples _de tromper des étourdis, des fripons et des sots,_ because
they _défient l'esprit_ and _on venge l'esprit quand on trompe un
sot._ There should be still less scruple in deception in affairs of
love, for, _pour ce qui regarde les femmes, ce sont des tromperies
réciproques, qu'on ne met pas en ligne de compte; car, quand l'amour
s'en mêle, on est ordinairement dupe de part et d'autre_.[4] Let us
leave to the reader to investigate, if he please, the rules of life
that are concealed beneath the most modern forms of literature; these
are a continuous, if not always beneficent, guide for daily life.
[Sidenote: _Relation between the arts (collections of rules) and
philosophical doctrines._]
Another circumstance that has led to the belief in the disappearance
of books of rules is the observation that from those books dealing
with the so-called _arts,_ there has come to be a treatment of the
philosophy of their subject-matter, in which those treatises have been
dissolved. Thus from Poetics and Rhetorics has come Æsthetic, from
Grammatic the Philosophy of language, from the Art of teaching and of
reasoning Logic and Gnoseology, from the historical Art, Historic,
from the Arts of economic government, the Science of Economy, from the
treatises on Natural Law, the Philosophy of Law.
When such philosophies, then, had appeared, treatises upon the Arts
seemed to have become superfluous, and to this is attributed the cause
of their diminution or disappearance. But although it be impossible not
to recognize the historical process above described from books on the
arts to books of systems, it is necessary to be careful to interpret
it exactly and not to confuse it with a passing from empiria to
philosophy. Thus it will be seen that the part absorbed and dissolved
in philosophy has been precisely those philosophical attempts that
were mingled with such collections of rules and precepts. For it was
very natural that the writers who put them together and had ideas as
to what should be done and what avoided, were often led to investigate
the principles from which sprung the particular rules. Believing
that they were strengthening, they really came to surpass them, that
is, they passed unwittingly from one form of treatment to another,
from Psychology to Philosophy. But not even here has empiricism been
refined into philosophy (a refinement which, strictly speaking, is
impossible), but a more perfect philosophy has been substituted for one
less perfect. The dissolution, then, has not been of the rules, but of
that imperfect philosophy, a chemical process which has left the rules
in what they possess of original as residuum. Hence their persistence,
and indeed the impossibility that they should not persist, side by side
with the most pure and perfect of philosophies.
[Sidenote: _Casuistic: its nature and utility._]
_Casuistic_ has had the same fate as the rules, and was also at one
time responsible for a very copious literary production. Now it is
cultivated as literature only by a few Jesuits, who carry on the
glories of Escobar and of Sanchez, read only by priests preparing
themselves for the post of confessor, whose studies are based for
the most part upon old books (such as the _Theologia moralis_ of the
Neapolitan Sant' Alfonso de' Liguori). At one time Casuistic was
not confined only to profane or theological morality, to the _casus
conscientiae. _ There were also books of casuistry composed for all
aspects of life, for politics, for the life of the courtier ("the
Wise Man at Court"), for the art of love. When the literary form of
rules fell into discredit, that of Casuistic fell with it. But this
does not mean that it is dead; it lives and will live as long as rules
live. For Casuistic is nothing but the process of reasoning by which
rules are made always more precise, passing from more general cases to
those more particular, so that no one will ever be able to do without
them.--If we take for rule of life this maxim: to avoid scientific
polemics, because they constitute a waste of time, adding little to the
progress of knowledge; in what way must we behave if a polemic be such
that it enables us to gain on the one hand the time it makes us lose
on the other? Shall we maintain the general rule, or shall we waive
it on this occasion, if for no other reason than to give variety to
our occupations? And how shall we behave if not only we retrieve the
time lost but avoid losing more time in the future? Shall we wish to
enter upon the polemic at once? But if our future be looked upon as
uncertain, if we be far advanced in years or in bad health, will it not
be better to renounce the uncertain gain of the future for the certain
gain of the present?--This is a very simple example of Casuistic,
which a critic and writer (let us suppose that he is the writer of
these pages) is obliged to propose to himself and to solve. Naturally,
no Casuistic will ever furnish the concrete solution (which is the only
one that counts), since, as has been said, no rule can ever furnish
it. Rules and casuistry do not reach the individuality _omnimodo
determinata,_ which is the historical situation; yet if Casuistic
aid my action, this will always differ from that, as concrete from
abstract; or better, my action will always truly possess the form, the
definiteness that abstract casuistry cannot possess. Woe to practical
men who rely upon collections of maxims and casuistical reasonings,
and woe to those who rely upon them. Those who argue at length upon
practical matters and draw subtle distinctions, are to be avoided in
the world of affairs and in the world of action. If they have not yet
provoked some disaster, they are on the road to doing so now. This, at
least, is a good rule; like the supreme rule (which is not a rule but
philosophical truth), namely, that we must abandon rules, that is, face
the individual case, which, as such, is always irregular.
[Sidenote: _Jurisprudence as casuistry._]