Chapter I: Front Matter

LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF THE PURE CONCEPT

TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN OF

BENEDETTO CROCE

BY

DOUGLAS AINSLIE

B.A. (OXON.), M.R.A.S.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1917

[Benedetto Croce's Philosophy of the Spirit, in the English translation by Douglas Ainslie, consists of 4 volumes (which can be read separately): 1. Aesthetic as science of expression and general linguistic. (A first ed. is available at Project Gutenberg. A second augmented ed. follows.) 2. Philosophy of the practical: economic and ethic. (In preparation) 3. Logic as the science of the pure concept. 4. Theory and history of historiography. (In preparation) Transcriber's note.]

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

The publication of this third volume of the _Philosophy of the Spirit_ offers a complete view of the Crocean philosophy to the English-speaking world.

I have striven in every way to render the Logic the equal of its predecessors in accuracy and elegance of translation, and have taken the opinion of critical friends on many occasions, though more frequently I have preferred to retain my own. The vocabulary will be found to resemble those of the _Æsthetic_ and the _Philosophy of the Practical,_ thereby enabling readers to follow the thought of the author more easily than if I had made alterations in it. Thus the word "fancy" will be found here as elsewhere, the equivalent of the Italian "fantasia" and "imagination" of "immaginazione"; this rendering makes the meaning far more clear than the use of the words in the opposite sense that they occasionally bear in English; this is particularly so in respect of the important distinction of the activities in the early part of the _Æsthetic._ I have also retained the word "gnoseology" and its derivatives, as saving the circumlocutions entailed by the use of any paraphrase, especially when adjectival forms are employed.

I think that this Logic will come to be recognized as a masterpiece, in the sense that it supplants and supersedes all Logics that have gone before, especially those known as formal Logics, of which the average layman has so profound and justifiable mistrust, for the very good reason that, as Croce says, they are not Logic at all, but illogic--his healthy love of life leads him to fight shy of what he feels would lead to disaster if applied to the problems that he has to face in the conduct of life. It is shown in the following pages that the prestige of Aristotle is not wholly to blame for the survival of formal Logic and for the class of mind that denying thought dwells ever in the _ipse dixit._ Indeed, one of the chief boons conferred by this book will be the freeing of the student from that confusion of thought and word that is the essence of the old formal Logic--of thought that rises upon the wings of words, like an aviator upon his falcon of wood and metal to spy out the entrenchments of the enemy.

One of the most stimulating portions of the book will, I think, be found in Croce's theory of error and proof of its necessity in the progress of truth. This may certainly be credited to Croce as a discovery. That this theory of the uses of error has a great future, I have no doubt, from its appearance at certain debates on Logic that have taken place at the Aristotelian Society within the last year or two, though strangely enough the name of the philosopher to whom it was due was not mentioned. A like mysterious aposiopesis characterized Professor J. A. Smith's communication to the same Society as to the development of the ethical from the economic activity (degrees of the Spirit) some years after the publication of the _Philosophy of the Practical._

It is my hope that this original work, appearing as it does in the midst of the great struggle with the Teutonic powers, may serve to point out to the Anglo-Saxon world where the future of the world's civilization lies, namely in the ancient line of Latin culture, which includes in itself the loftiest Hellenic thought. It is sad to think that the Germans have relapsed to barbarism from the veneer of cultivation that they once possessed, particularly sad when one comes upon the German names that must always abound in any treatise on the development of thought. Their creative moment, however, was very brief, and the really important names can be numbered on the fingers of one hand, that of Emmanuel Kant being corrupted from the Scots Cant. Of recent years the German contribution has been singularly small and unimportant, such writers as Eucken being mere compilers of the work of earlier philosophers, and without originality. The foul-souled Teuton will need a long period of re-education before he can be readmitted to the comity of nations upon equal terms--his bestiality will ask a potent purge.

In conclusion, I can only hope that the fact of this work having been put into the hands of readers a decade earlier than would in all probability have been the case, had I not been fortunate enough to make a certain journey to Naples, will be duly taken advantage of by students, and that it will serve for many as a solid foundation for their thought about thought, and so of their thought about the whole of life and reality in the new world that will succeed the War.

DOUGLAS AINSLIE.

THE ATHENAEUM, PALL MALL,

_March_ 1917.

ADVERTISEMENT

This volume is, and is not, the memoir entitled _Outlines of Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept,_ which I presented to the Accademia Pontiana at the sessions of April 10 and May 1, 1904, and April 2, 1905, and which was inserted in volume xxxv. of the _Transactions_ (printed as an extract from them by Giannini, Naples, 1905, in quarto, pp. 140).

I might have republished that memoir, and made in it certain corrections, great and small, and especially I might have enriched it with very numerous developments. But partial corrections and copious additions, while they would have injured the arrangement of the first work, would not have allowed me to attain to that more secure and fuller exposition of logical doctrine which, after four years' study and reflection, it now seems to be in my power to offer. I have therefore resolved to rewrite the work from the beginning on a larger scale, with a new arrangement and new diction regarding its predecessor as a sketch, which in a literary sense stands by itself, and only making use of a page, or group of pages, here and there, as suited the natural order of exposition.

Owing to this connection between the present volume with the above-mentioned academic memoir, it will be seen in what sense it may be called, and is called, a "second edition." It is a second edition of my thought rather than of my book.

B. C.

NAPLES,

_November_ 1908.