Chapter 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._]

Without dwelling upon the later scepticism, mysticism and mythologism, which represented the dissolution of ancient philosophy and the germ of a new life (especially in Christian mythologism, which had absorbed elements of ancient philosophy and was accompanied by a very developed theology), we must pass on to note the progress which the logical problem made in the schools of the Middle Ages. To look upon mediæval philosophy (as many do) as a negligible episode, a mere detritus of ancient culture quite unconnected with the later spiritual activity, is now no longer possible. Certainly in the disputes of the nominalists and realists, the problem of transcendence and of immanence was neglected. It could not be solved on the presumptions of a philosophy which had at its side a theology, of which it constituted itself the handmaiden. The Platonic transcendence was incurable in Christianity, and those who even to-day seek to purify Christianity from survivals of Greek thought, do not perceive that, in this purification effected by their philosophies of action and of immanence, they are destroying Christianity itself.[9]

[Sidenote: _Nominalism and realism._]

But in those disputes, besides the question of the place that belongs to science in relation to religious faith, or to mundane science in relation to revealed and divine science, the question of the nature of the concept was also raised; that is to say, they continued the Platonic-Aristotelian enquiry into the doctrine of the concept in the second of the meanings that we have distinguished. But no true conclusion was reached in this enquiry. The conciliatory formula of the Arabic interpreters of Aristotle, accepted by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, in which the universals were affirmed as existing _ante, in_ and _post rem,_ in so far as it is possible to confer upon it an exact meaning, was understood in a superficial manner, and therefore it has not unreasonably seemed too easy and too expeditious.[10] A dispute of this sort cannot be solved by summarizing discordant opinions, as in the formula we have mentioned, or by fixing a mean, as in conceptualism. But the realists, bravely maintaining the truth of the philosophic universal, maintained the rights of rational thought and of philosophy; and the nominalists, on their part, asserting in contradiction to the former, the nominalist universal, prepared the modern theories of natural science. Realism produced philosophic thought of high importance, as in the so-called ontological argument of Anselm of Aosta, which (though through the myth of a personal God) asserts the unity of Essence and Existence, the reality of what is truly conceivable and conceived. Gaunilo, who confuted and satirized that concept, by employing the example of a "most perfect island," thinkable yet non-existent, seems an anticipation of Kant; at least of the Kant who employed the example of the hundred dollars to illustrate the same case--if it is not more accurate to say that Kant was, in that case, a late Gaunilo. Anselm replied (as Hegel did to Kant) that it was not a question of an island (or of a hundred dollars of something imaginable that is not at all a concept), but of the being than which it is impossible to think a greater and a more perfect (the true and proper concept). On the other hand, the nominalists, who like Roscellinus maintained that the _universelles substantiae_ were _nonnisi flatus vocis,_ performed the useful office of preventing the sciences of experience from being absorbed and lost in philosophy. In Roger Bacon we see clearly the connection of nominalism with naturalism. He considered individual facts, so-called external experience, in its immediacy, as the true and proper object of science. Concepts were for him a simple expedient, directed towards the mastery of the immense richness of the individual. "_Intellectus est debilis_ (he said); _propter eam debilitatem magis conformatur rei debili, quae est universale, qitam rei quae habet multum de esse, ut singulare._"

[Sidenote: _Nominalism, mysticism and coincidence of opposites._]

But the nominalists, _dialecticae haeretici_ (as Anselm called them), were heretics only in the circle of the dialectic. The truth remained for them something beyond; the concept, the _secunda intentio,_ was certainly something arbitrary and _ad placitum instituta_; it was "_forma artificialis tantum, quae per violentiam habet esse,_" but beyond it were always faith and revelation. God is the truth, and in God the ideas are real; hence Roger Bacon gave to inner light (as the positivists or neocritics of to-day give to feeling) a place beside sensible experience. Mysticism, being developed from mediæval philosophy, both from one-sided realism and from one-sided nominalism, extends its hand at the dawn of the new Era to the philosophy of Cusanus, to scepticism, to _docta ignorantia._ This was not a mere negation; so much so that in it (though in a negative form and mixed with religion) there appears in outline nothing less than the theory of the _coincidence of opposites,_ that is to say, the cradle of that modern logical movement, which was destined definitely to conquer transcendence. The coincidence of opposites is the germ of the dialectic, which unifies value and fact, ideal and real, what ought to be and what is. This important thought reappears in German mysticism; and (significantly for its future destinies) rings out upon the lips of Martin Luther, who declared that virtue coexists with its contrary, vice, hope with anxiety, faith with vacillation, indeed with temptation, gentleness with disdain, chastity with desire, pardon with sin; as in nature, heat coexists with cold, white with black, riches with poverty, health with disease; and that _peccatum manet et non manet, tollitur et non tollitur,_ and that at the moment a man ceases to make himself better, he ceases to be good.[11] And before it became dominant in Jacob Böhme it was stripped of its religious form and eloquently defended in Italy by Giordano Bruno.[12]

[Sidenote: _The Renaissance and naturalism. Bacon._]

This realist, mystical and dialectical current of thought was destined to yield its best fruits some centuries later. For the time being, in the seventeenth century, and yet more in the century that followed, the victory seemed to rest with nominalism, that is to say, with naturalism. In Italy, Leonardo da Vinci laughed at theological and speculative disputes and celebrated, not the mind, but the _eye_ of man, that is, the science of observation. The same tendency appeared in the anti-Aristotelians and naturalists, who placed the natural sciences above scholasticism. In England, the other Bacon, however slight his importance both as philosopher and naturalist, yet has much importance as the symptom and spokesman of the self-assertion of naturalism. In the _Novum Organum,_ the universal of the _for the most part_ claims its rights as against the universal of the necessary and eternal. He does not wish, however, to do away with the latter, but rather to complete it; the syllogism is insufficient, induction also is needed. Philosophy and theology are well where they are, but a science of physics is also needed; philosophic induction, which goes at a leap to first causes, must be accompanied by a gradual induction (the only one that interests the naturalist), which connects particular facts by means of laws more and more general; final causes must be banished from the study of nature, and only efficient causes admitted. _Anticipationes naturae,_ that is to say, the invasions of philosophism into the natural sciences, are to be prohibited. These utterances are far more discreet than those that have so often since been heard.

[Sidenote: _The ideal of exact science and the Cartesian philosophy._]

By another school of this period, on the other hand, the pure concept was wrongly identified with the abstract concept. Thus speculative rationalism took the form of mathematical rationalism and the ideal of philosophy was confused with the ideal of _exact science._ This tendency is also to be found in Leonardo, who exalted "reason" alone, that is calculation, as outside of and sometimes superior to experience. Galileo expressed similar thoughts later. The Cartesian philosophy is animated with it, that is to say, the philosophy of Descartes and of his great followers, especially Spinoza and Leibnitz. Thus this is especially an intellectualist philosophy, full of empty excogitations and rigid divisions, developed by a mechanical or by a teleological method, which always operated by means of mechanism. It is true that even under these improper forms, philosophic thought progressed. The consciousness of the inner unity of philosophy progressed with Descartes, that of the unity of the real by means of Spinoza's concept of substance, and that of spiritual activity by means of the dynamism of Leibnitz; but Logic remained as a whole the old scholastic logic. The purity of the concept was asserted at the expense of concreteness; thus the concept, in the Logic of those writers, is always something abstract, although its reality is so far recognized that it is thought possible to think with it the most real (the God of Descartes, the substance of Spinoza, the Monad of Leibnitz). The eighteenth century, mathematical, abstractionist, intellectualist ratiocinative, anti-historical, illuminist, reformist, and finally Jacobin, is the legitimate issue of this Cartesian philosophy, which confuses the Logic of philosophy with the Logic of mathematics. France, which was the country of its birth and where it became most firmly rooted and most widely disseminated, owes to it, perhaps even more than to Scholasticism, the mental imprint which it still bears and which the strong Germanic influence that has made itself felt there also in the last century has not sufficed to eradicate. It is only in our day that the country which is the type of the abstract intellect strives to become philosophically more concrete. It is now occupied with æstheticism or intuitionism, and, unless the movement is suffocated or dissipated, it may effect a true revolution in the traditional French spirit.

[Sidenote: _Adversaries of Cartesianism. Vico._]

The opposition to abstractionism had no representatives in the seventeenth century and for a great part of the eighteenth, except among thinkers of but slight systematic powers, with whom it did not progress beyond the logical form of the presentiment and the literary form of the aphorism. In France, Blaise Pascal was one of these, with his anti-Cartesianism, his restriction of the value of mathematics, and his celebration of the reasons of the heart which reason does not know. In Germany there was Hamann, who possessed such a strong sense of tradition, of history, of language, of poetry and of myth, and finally of the truth contained in the principle of the _coincidence of opposites_ which he had met with somewhere in Bruno. The Italian Giambattista Vico was the only great systematic thinker to express opposition to abstractionism and Cartesianism. Prior to and more clearly than Hamann, he perceived the unity of philosophy and history, or as he called it, of _philosophy and philology._ He conceived thought as an _ideal history_ of reality, immanent in the real history which occurs in time; he abolished the distinctions of the concept as separate species and substituted the notion of degrees or moments, which (as Schelling did after him) he called _ideal epochs_; he considered the abstractionist and mathematical century which he saw rising before him, as a period of philosophic decadence, and foretold the evil effects of Cartesian anti-historicism. (His presage was fulfilled.) In this way, he sketched a new Logic, very different from that of Aristotle or of Arnaud which was the most recent, a Logic in which he attempted to satisfy Plato and Bacon, Tacitus and Grotius, the idea and the fact. But if the other opponents of abstractionism had very little effect, because of their immaturity and want of system, Vico also was ineffectual, because he was born in Italy precisely at the time when Italy as a productive country was definitely issuing from the circle of European thought and was beginning passively to accept the more popular forms of foreign thought. Finally, Naples, the little country of Vico, was then becoming encyclopædist and sensationalist, and did not really begin to know until a century later the remedy for such evils composed in anticipation by Vico.

[Sidenote: _Empiricist Logic and its dissolution--Locke, Berkeley and Hume._]

The surpassing of the Logic of the abstract concept and the achievement of that of the concrete concept or pure concept or idea, was realized in other ways, primarily by a sort of reduction to the absurd of empiricist and mathematical Logic, in the scepticism which was its result. This reduction to the absurd, this final scepticism, is to be observed in the movement of English philosophy, beginning with Locke or even with Hobbes, to Hume. Locke, starting from perception as his presupposition, derived all ideas from experience, with the sole instrument of reflection; and rejecting innate ideas and looking upon others as more or less arbitrary, he preserved some objectivity to mathematical ideas alone, which relate to what are called primary qualities. Berkeley denies objectivity even to the primary qualities. All concepts, naturalist and mathematical alike, are for him abstract concepts and to that extent without truth. The only truth is the "idea," which means here nothing but sensation or the representation of the individual. His Logic is not empiricist, because it is in no respect Logic. At the most it is an Æsthetic substituted for and given as Logic. It is true, notwithstanding his complete denial of universals--of empirical and abstract, no less than of philosophic, which he never even mentions--that he deludes himself into thinking that he has overcome scepticism; and it is true also that he laid the foundations of a spiritualist and voluntarist conception of reality, which in our opinion should be preserved and adopted by modern thought. But this proves only that his philosophy does not wholly agree with his Logic, and not that his Logic is not the complete denial of the concept and of thought. The logical consequence of Berkeley could not, then, be anything but the scepticism of David Hume, who shakes the very foundation upon which the whole of the science of nature rests, namely, the principle of causality.

[Sidenote: _Exact science and Kant. The concept of the category._]

As the effect of this extreme scepticism, the surpassing of empiricist and abstractionist Logic had to be begun with the restoration of that Logic itself (because that which does not exist cannot be surpassed), that is to say, with the demonstration, against Hume, that the exact science of nature is possible. Such is the principal task of the _Critique of Pure Reason_, which contains the Logic of the natural and mathematical sciences, thought no longer by an empiricist, but by a philosopher who has surpassed empiricism and recognized that the concepts of experience presuppose the human intellect, which originally constructed them. Leibnitz had already travelled this road, when in a polemic against Locke he maintained that reflection to which Locke appealed, referred back to the innate ideas: for if reflection (he said) is nothing but "_une attention à ce qui est en nous et les sens ne nous donnent point ce que nous portons déjà avec nous,_" how can it ever be denied "_qu'il y est beaucoup d'inné en nous, puisque nous sommes, pour ainsi dire, innés à nous mêmes? Peut-on nier qu'il y ait eu nous être, unité, substance, durée, changement, action, perception, plaisir et mille autres objets de nos idées intellectuelles?_"[13] The _New Essays,_ in which theses and other similar themes were developed, remained for a time unedited, but appeared opportunely in 1765 to fecundate German thought, and acted upon Kant, together with English empiricism and scepticism, the latter giving the problem and the former almost an attempt at a solution. But the innate ideas of Leibnitz are profoundly transformed in the Kantian concept of the _category,_ which is the formal element and really exists only in the very act of judgment, which it effects. Mathematics are thus secured in their possession, no longer by means of the primary qualities of Locke, but because they arise from the _a priori_ forms of intuition, space and time. The natural sciences are also secured, because the concepts of them are constituted by means of the categories of the intellect, on the data of experience. In other words, mathematical and natural science have value, in so far as they are a necessary product of the spirit.

[Sidenote: _The limits of science and Kantian scepticism._]

But a limitation of value due also to Kant, accompanies this theoretic reinforcement of exact science. That science is necessary, because produced by the categories; but the categories cannot develop their activity except upon the data of experience; so that exact science is limited to experience, and whenever it makes the attempt to surpass it, it becomes involved in antinomies and paralogisms and gesticulates in the void. Science moves among phenomena and can never penetrate beyond them and attain to the "Thing in itself."

[Sidenote: _The limits cf science and Jacobi._]

It would seem from this that Kant was bound to end in a renovated nominalism and mysticism, and indeed such is partly the case. Contemporaneously with him, Jacobi also observed the limit in which is enclosed the mechanical and determinist science of nature (the highest philosophic expression of which was then found in the _Ethic_ of Spinoza), since it works with the principle of causation and is impotent, unless it wishes to commit suicide, to leave the finite which it describes in a causal series, and Jacobi concluded in favour of mysticism and of _feeling,_ the organ of the Knowledge of God. Kant, like Jacobi, in his turn has recourse to the non-theoretic form of the spirit, to the practical reason and its postulates, to provide that certitude of God, of immortality, and of human freedom, which is not evident to the theoretic reason. But in Kant there are other positive elements which are not in Jacobi, and these elements, although not sufficiently elaborated by him and not harmonized with one another, confer upon his philosophy the value of a new Logic, more or less sketched. For he recognizes not only a theoretic but also a practical reason, which cannot be called simply practical, if it in any way produce (although only under the title of postulates), knowledge (and knowledge of supreme importance). He recognises also an æsthetic judgment, which, although developed without concepts, does not belong to the sphere of practical interests; and a teleological judgment, which is regulative and not constitutive, but not on this account arbitrary or without meaning. Finally, the very contradictions, in which the intellect becomes involved, when it wishes to apply the categories beyond experience, could not reasonably be considered by him to be mere errors, because they constitute serious problems, if the intellect becomes involved in them, not capriciously, but of _necessity._ All this presages the coming of a new Logic, which shall set in their places these scattered elements of truth and solve the contradictions.

[Sidenote: _The a priori synthesis._]

But the Kantian philosophy also contains, in addition to these elements and these stimulations, the concept of the new Logic in the _a priori_ synthesis. This synthesis is the unity of the necessary and the contingent, of concept and intuition, of thought and representation, and consequently is the pure concept, the _concrete_ universal.

[Sidenote: _The intimate contradiction of Kant. Romantic principle and classical execution._]

Kant was not aware of this; and instead of developing with a mind free from prejudice the thought of his genius, he also allowed himself to be vanquished by the abstractionism of his time and out of the logical and philosophical _a priori_ synthesis he made the more or less arbitrary _a priori_ synthesis of the sciences. In this way, the apriority of the intuition led him, not to art, but to mathematics (transcendental Æsthetic)[14] the apriority of the intellect led him, not to Philosophy, but to Physics (abstract intellect): hence the impotence which afflicted that synthesis, when confronted with philosophic problems. When he discovered the _a priori_ synthesis, Kant had laid his hand upon a profoundly _romantic_ concept; but his treatment of it became afterwards _classicist_ and _intellectualist._ The synthesis is the palpitating reality which makes itself and knows itself in the making: the Kantian philosophy makes it rigid again in the concepts of the sciences; and it is a philosophy in which the sense of life, of imagination, of individuality, of history, is almost as completely absent as in the great systems of the Cartesian period. Whoever is not aware of this intimate drama and fails to understand this contradiction; whoever, when confronted with the work of Kant, is not seized with the need, either of going forward or of going backward, has not reached the heart of that soul, the centre of that mind. The old philosophers who condemned Kant as sceptical and as a corrupter of philosophy, and who confined themselves strictly to Wolfianism and to scholasticism, and the new who greeted him as a precursor and made of him a stepping-stone on which to mount higher,--these alone came truly into contact with Kant's philosophy. For in his case there are but two alternatives: abhorrence or attraction, loathing or love. In the midst of a battle one must flee or fight: to sit still and take one's ease is the attitude of the unconscious and the mad. Certainly it is better to fight than to flee, but it is better to flee than to sit inactive. He who flees, saves at least his own skin, or, to abandon metaphor, saves the old philosophy, which is still something; but the inactive man loses both life and glory, the old philosophy and the new.

[Sidenote: _Advance upon Kant: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel._]

The new philosophy was that of the three great post-Kantians, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. With Fichte, all trace of the thing in itself has disappeared and the dominating concept is that of the Ego, that is, of the Spirit, which creates the world by means of the transcendental imagination and recreates it in thought. In Schelling is found the concept of the Absolute, the unity of subject and object, which has, as its instrument, intellectual intuition. In Hegel, there is this same concept, but it has itself as instrument, that is to say, it is truly logical. All three are Kantians, but all three (and especially the last two) are not simply Kantian. They employed elements which Kant ignored or employed timidly, and in particular the mystical tradition and the new tendencies of æsthetic and historical thought. Thus they pass beyond the abstractionism and intellectualism of the Kantian period, and inaugurate the nineteenth century. They are connected ideally with Vico (Hamann was the little German Vico), and they enrich him with the thoughts of Kant.

[Sidenote: _The Logic of Hegel. The concrete concept or Idea._]

Neglecting the particular differences between these thinkers and the 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._]

But in order that this result should be obtained, the idea of the philosophic universal must be reawakened and strengthened, in conformity with its most perfect elaboration in the history of thought, at the hands of Hegel. The critics of the sciences are at present far from this mark. The term that is distinct from the empirical and abstract concepts, the knowledge of reality which is not falsified by practical ends and discovered beneath labels and formulae, is supplied, not by the pure concept, by reality thought in its concreteness, by philosophy which is history, but by pure sensation or intuition. Both Avenarius and Mach appeal to pure and primitive experience, that is, to experience free of thought and anterior to it. Bergson, with an artistic talent that is wanting to the two Germans, but following the same path, has proclaimed a new metaphysic, which proceeds in an opposite sense to that of symbolical knowledge and of generalizing and abstracting experience. He has defined the metaphysic which he desires, as a science _qui prétend se passer des symboles,_ and therefore as "_Science de l'expérience intégrale._" This metaphysic would be the opposite of the Kantian ideal, of the mathematical universal, of the Platonism of the concepts, and would be founded upon intuition, the sole organ of the Absolute: "_est relative la connaissance symbolique par concepts pré-existants qui va du fixe au mouvant, mais non pas la connaissance intuitive, qui s'installe dans le mouvement et adopte la vie même des choses. Cette intuition atteint l'absolu._"[28] The conclusion is æstheticism, and sometimes something even less than æstheticism, namely mysticism, or _action_ substituted for the concept. The criticism of the sciences thereby comes to mean the negation of knowledge and of truth. Hence the protest of Poincaré[29] against Le Roy, justified in its motive, but ineffective, because based upon the presuppositions of mathematics and physics. In others again, it becomes intermingled with the turbid waters of pragmatism, which is a little of everything, but, above all, chatter and emptiness.

[Sidenote: _The theory of values._]

Finally, another of the thinkers that we have mentioned, Rickert (following Windelband), wishes to integrate naturalistic and abstract knowledge with the historical knowledge of individual reality. Being reasonably diffident as to the possibility of a metaphysic as an "experimental science" (such as Zeller was among the first to desire), he moves towards a general theory of values. This indeed is the form (imperfect because stained with transcendence) by means of which many in our day are approaching a philosophy as the science of the spirit (or of immanent value). But in the hands of Windelband and Rickert it is understood as a primacy of the practical reason, which is taken to govern the double series of the world of the sciences and the world of history. This doubtless represents progress, as compared with empiricism and positivism; but not as compared with the Hegelian Logic of the pure concept, which included in itself what is and what ought to be.

Such, briefly stated, is the present state of logical doctrines concerning the Concept.

[Footnote 1: _De sophist. elench._ ch. 34.]

[Footnote 2: _Metaphys._ M 4, p. 1078 b 28-30; cf. A 6, p. 987 b 2-3.]

[Footnote 3: Cf. _Æsthetic,_ part ii. chap. i.]

[Footnote 4: See in this connection the observations of Lasson, in the preface to his recent German translation of the _Metaphysic,_ Jena, Diederichs, 1907.]

[Footnote 5: Cf. especially the _Parmenides,_ the _Theætetus,_ and _Book of the Republic._]

[Footnote 6: _Metaphys._ E I, p. 1025 b, 1026 a.]

[Footnote 7: _Metaphys._ vi. 1027 a.]

[Footnote 8: _Anal. post._ i. ch. 30.]

[Footnote 9: See the writings of Gentile concerning De Wulf and La Berthonnière in the _Critica,_ iii. pp. 203-21, iv. pp. 431-445.]

[Footnote 10: Prantl, _Gesch. d. Logik,_ iii. pp. 182-3.]

[Footnote 11: For these references to writings of Luther, see F. J. Schmidt, _Zur Wiedergeburt des Idealismus,_ Leipzig, 1908, pp. 44-6.]

[Footnote 12: See my Essay upon Hegel, ch. ii.]

[Footnote 13: Preface to _Nouveaux Essais._]

[Footnote 14: See what is said on this point in my _Æsthetic,_² Part II. Chap. VIII.]

[Footnote 15: _Krit. d. rein. Vern._ ed. Kirchmann, pp. 22-3.]

[Footnote 16: _Wiss. d. Logik,_ i. p. 35; cfr. p. 19.]

[Footnote 17: Kuno Fischer in his _Logic,_ when expounding the thought of Hegel, clearly distinguishes the empirical concepts from the pure concepts, and notes that those which are pure or philosophical, are, in the spirit, the basis and presupposition of the others. "These others, the empirical, are formed from single representations or intuitions, by uniting homogeneous characteristics and separating them from the heterogeneous; and thus arise general representations, concepts of classes": empirical, because of their empirical origin, and representative, because they represent entire classes of single objects, that is, are generalized representations. But at the base of each of these are found judgments or syntheses, which contain non-empirical and non-representable elements, elements which are _a priori_ and only thinkable. These are the true concepts, the first thoughts in the ideal order, without which nothing can be thought (_Logik²,_ i. sect. i. § 3). The difference between these pure concepts or categories and empirical concepts or categories is not quantitative, but qualitative: the pure concepts are not the most general, the broadest classes; they do not represent phenomena, but connections and relations; they can be compared to the signs (+,-, x, ÷, √, etc.) of arithmetical operations; they are not obtainable by abstraction, indeed it is by means of them that all abstractions are affected (_loc. cit._ §§ 5-6).]

[Footnote 18: See my essay, _What is Living and what is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel,_ for the criticism here briefly summarized.]

[Footnote 19: _Dialektik,_ ed. Halpern, pp. 203-245.]

[Footnote 20: _Werke,_ ed. Grisebach, ii. chap. 39.]

[Footnote 21: The movement of Italian thought in the first decades of the nineteenth century was rather a progress of national philosophic culture than a factor in the general history of philosophy. In this last respect, the rôle of Italy was for the time being ended; though it did not end in the seventeenth century with Campanella and Galileo (as foreign historians and the Italians who copy them believe). It ended magnificently in the first half of the eighteenth century with Vico, the last representative of the Renaissance and the first of Romanticism. The influence of German philosophy continued to manifest itself in Italy in the nineteenth century, at first almost entirely through French literature, then directly. It can be studied in the three principal thinkers of the first half of the century, Galuppi, Rosmini, and Gioberti. The first began from the Scottish school, and while attacking Kant, he absorbed not a few of his principles. The second, also in a polemical sense and in a Catholic wrapping, can be called the Italian Kant. The third, who had always only the slightest consciousness of history, assumed the same position as Schelling and Hegel. To have attained (between 1850 and 1860) to such historical consciousness is the merit of Bertrando Spaventa (see especially his book, _La filosofia italiana nelle sue relazioni con la filosofia europea,_ new edition, by G. Gentile, Bari, Laterza, 1908), who represented Hegelianism in Italy in a very cautious and critical form. But there was no true surpassing of Hegelianism either by his disciples or by his adversaries, and some original thought is to be found only among non-professional philosophers, particularly in Æsthetic, with Francesco de Sanctis (cf. _Estetica,_ part ii. chap. 15).]

[Footnote 22: _Krit. d. rein. Vernunft, loc. cit._]

[Footnote 23: _Logik,_ p. 42 _sqq._]

[Footnote 24: See, among other books, _L'Analisi delle sensazioni,_ Italian translation Turin, Bocca; 1903.]

[Footnote 25: _Grenzen d. naturwissensch. Begriffsbildung,_ Freiburg i. B, 1896-1902, chaps. 1-3.]

[Footnote 26: See above, p. 528.]

[Footnote 27: See his articles in the _Revue de métaphys. et de morale,_ vols. vii. viii. xi.]

[Footnote 28: "Introduction à la Métaphysique," in the _Revue de métaphys. et de mor._ xi. pp. 1-36.]

[Footnote 29: _La Valeur de la science,_ Paris, 1904.]