Chapter VII: Historical Annotations

[Sidenote: _The problem of freedom._]

I. For the reasons stated in their place, a history of the concept of freedom would end by becoming almost a general history of philosophy. Denied in different ways in the mechanistic and deterministic conceptions (from the Stoics to Spinoza), and in the theological and arbitraristic (from Epicurus to St. Augustine and the mystics), that concept afterwards continually assumed a more and more conciliatory form; an indication that the question must be put in an altogether different way. This movement culminated in the Kantian theory, in which freedom, defended against the psychologists, is withdrawn from natural causality and affirmed _a priori,_ as causality by means of freedom; but, at the same time, Kant did not succeed in fully justifying it, owing to his failure in the solution of the antitheses, the defect of the Kantian philosophy, which never really became a system. The embarrassments and absurdities to which the unsolved antithesis between liberty and causality gives rise, are sufficiently exemplified in a proposition to be found in the _Critique of Practical Reason_: "It would be possible to foresee what man will do in the future, if we possessed all the facts; yet he would be perfectly free."[1] But notwithstanding these contradictions and embarrassments, the energetic affirmation of the principle of freedom by Kant (which had an altogether special certitude in Kant, in respect to the other two postulates of the practical reason, God and immortality, from which in this respect it was distinguished) helped to make prevalent the conviction of the impossibility of eliminating that concept or of escaping from it, and made of it the field of battle, where the fortunes of philosophy were decided. The problem of the freedom of willing is really solved or near to a solution, in those philosophies which do not fatigue themselves with it as a particular problem, but treat of it as something to be understood of itself, provided there be a non-mechanistic conception of reality, such as would not need special defence. This happens, not only with sentimentalists and mystics such as Jacobi and Schleiermacher, but also and above all in the Hegelian philosophy. Perhaps no philosopher has been less occupied with the problem of liberty than Hegel, just because he was always occupied with it. The will is free (he contents himself with saying); freedom is the fundamental determination of the will, as gravity is of matter; thus as gravity is matter itself, so is freedom the will. Hegel consequently saw true in the contest between arbitrarism and determinism, recognizing in determinism the merit of having given its value to the content, the datum, in opposition to the certainty of abstract auto-determination, so that freedom understood as free will is considered to be illusion. Free will is both determined and indetermined.[2] But how Hegel could conciliate this theory of freedom with the mechanistic concept of nature that persists in him is another question. His failure to attain to this conciliation was perhaps among the reasons that made his profound solution of the antithesis between determinism and indeterminism seem a vain playing with words.

After Hegel, a return was made to the Kantian doctrine, variously modified, in which is posited, now a double causality, now a composition of diverging forces, now a double point of view, now two worlds, the one included in the other and dominated, the one by the principle of the conservation of energy, the other by that of increase. Such contradictory doctrines are to be found for example in Lotze and Wundt, to the latter of whom belongs the formula that the causal explanation is certainly to be applied to spiritual facts, but _a parte post,_ not _a parte ante_[3] The philosophy of Bergson represents in a certain way a return to the sound idealistic view, which declares that the dilemma of determinism and indeterminism is surpassed.[4]

[Sidenote: _The doctrine of evil._]

II. The conception of the relation between bad and good, as reality opposed to reality, is mythological and religious (Parseeism, Manichæism, Jewish-Christian doctrine of the devil, etc.). But evil had already begun to reveal itself to the philosophical reflection of the ancients as the unreal, the not being; and this is explicitly affirmed in Neoplatonism. It was not, however, possible to understand this function of unreality, real in its way, without a general dialectical conception, which became very slowly mature. Without a dialectic conception, evil, conceived as unreality, becomes mere illusion, not so much a moment of the real as an equivocation of man philosophizing. This is clearly to be seen in Spinoza, who opposes the full laws of reality to the narrow laws of human nature, saying: _Quidquid nobis in natura ridiculum, absurdum aut malum videtur, id inde venit quod res tantum ex parte novimus, totiusque naturae ordinem et cohaerentium maxima ex parte ignoramus, et quod omnia ex usu nostrae rationis dirigi volumus, cum tamen id, quod malum esse dictat, non malum sit respectu ordinis et legum universae naturae; sed tantum solius nostrae naturae legum respectu._ For indeed, if evil, error and wickedness were something that had essence, God, who is the cause of all that has essence (continues Spinoza), would also be the cause of evil, of error, and of wickedness. But this is not so, because evil is nothing real. _Neronis matricidium_ (he observes) _quatenus aliquid positivum comprehendebat, scelus non erat: nam facinus externum fecit, simulque intentionem ad trucidendam matrem Orestes habuit, et tamen, saltem ita uti Nero, non accusatur. Quodnam ergo Neronis scelus? Non aliud quam quod hoc facinore ostendit se ingratum, immisericordem ac inobedientem esse. Certum autem est, nihil horum aliquid essentiae exprimere, et idcirco Deum eorum non fuisse catisam, licet causa actus et intentionis Neronis fuerit_[5] But Spinoza was not able to determine in what sense Nero was really ungrateful, implacable, and disobedient, nor in what way such a judgment could be justified, owing to his idea of Substance, not as subject, spirit, activity, but as cause.

Kant did not succeed in understanding the nature of evil; for him good and evil were "the categories of freedom,"[6] and the view of Fichte who makes the radical evil to be _vis inertiae,_ laziness (_Trägheit,_) which is in nature and in man as nature,[7] represents progress in respect to the Kantian position. But only with the Hegelian dialectical view of evil, understood as negation, is evil at the same time given its right place; and its unreality, contradiction, which is no longer the product of illusion of thought, but of things themselves, in intimate contradiction with one another, if it be a blemish, is shown to be the blemish, not of human thought, but of reality.[8]

[Sidenote: _Decision and freedom._]

III. Free will, too, is not considered as a quality and character of complete liberty, but as its negation, will as contradiction, in the Hegelian philosophy. It was preceded in this respect, not only by Kant, but also by Descartes. Descartes wrote of the decision of indifference: _Cette indifférence que je sens lorsque je ne suis point porté vers un côté plutôt que vers un autre par le poids d'aucune raison est le plus bas degré de ma liberté, et fait plutôt paraître un défaut dans la connaissance qu'une perfection dans la volonté: car si je connaissais toujours clairement ce qui est vrai et ce qui est bon, je ne serais jamais en peine de délibérer quel jugement et quel choix je devrais faire; et ainsi je serais entièrement libre, sans jamais être indifférent._[9]

Among the false formulæ of the _freedom of choice_ can be mentioned that of Rosmini, who calls it _bilateral_ freedom, or that of performing or not performing a given action.[10] But since the spirit cannot be reduced to complete passivity, not to perform a given action is equivalent to performing a different one; and if this other action that presents itself before us be also not willed by us, then it will be another, and so on. Thus it is not a question of bilaterality, but of multiplicity of tendencies: not of the choice between two volitions, but of the synthesis of many appetites in one, which is the will or freedom.

[Sidenote: _Conscience and responsibility_]

We may mention the disputes that have been preserved in the _Memorabilia_ as to the greater responsibility of him who knows more (or wills more), as compared with him who knows less (or wills less), as to whether he that acts voluntarily be more unjust than he who acts involuntarily (ὁ ἑκὼν ἤ ὁ ἄκων). In this connection it is to be observed that he who voluntarily does not write or read well is certainly more grammatical than he who reads and writes ill through ignorance; and therefore that he who commits injustice while knowing what is just, is more just than he who commits it because he does not know what is just; and that he is better, who says what is false when he knows what is true, than he who says what is false, not knowing what is true. The dispute leads to the celebration of knowledge of self, or, as we should say, of knowing and possessing oneself.[11]

These thoughts are discussed anew in the _Hippias minor,_ where the multiple difficulties are placed in relief and a conclusion reached that does not even satisfy those who propose it.[12] It is henceforward clear that the question must be solved in the sense that he who is conscious of sinning is certainly a sinner, whereas he who is not conscious of so doing, does not sin at all; but this being even incapable of sinning is in itself a sin, and places the man who is in such a condition yet a degree lower. In the polemic of Pascal with the Jesuits--who maintained that in order to sin it was necessary to be conscious of one's own infirmity and of the suitable remedy, the wish to be healed and to ask it of God--the Jesuits were theoretically on the side of reason. _Croira-t-on, sur votre parole_ (wrote Pascal), _que ceux qui sont plongés dans l'avarice, dans l'impudicité, dans les blasphèmes, dans le duel, dans la vengeance, dans les vols, dans les sacrilèges, aient véritablement le désir d'embrasser la chasteté, l'humilité et les autres vertus chrétiennes?_ Nevertheless, it is inevitably so, if those acts of theirs are to be judged to be vices (and if they really are so). Hegel places himself on the side of Pascal, who accepts and refers to the following argument and reduction to the absurd: _Ils seront tous damnés ces demi-pécheurs qui ont quelque amour pour la vertu. Mais pour ces francs-pécheurs, sans mélange, pleins et achevés, l'enfer ne les tient pas: ils ont trompé le diable à force de s'y abandonner._[13]

A reduction to the absurd which is not such: because the formula given as absurd expresses at bottom a very simple truth, which Hegel too stated in his own way, when he said that it was necessary to prefer self-will, evil, the erring Spirit, to the innocence of plants and animals, or of Nature.[14]

[Sidenote: _The concept of duty._]

IV. A classical example of the disputes as to the principle of the Philosophy of the practical, arising from the consideration of this principle in its empirical formulations, can be furnished from the polemic of Herbart against Kant on the subject of _duty._ Herbart demonstrated that duty is not an original but a derived concept, and that it appears only when there is disagreement between the practical _ideas_ and the _will_.[15] But it would be possible to demonstrate with the same method that the practical ideas are derived concepts, because they do indeed presuppose the moral will, from the manifestations of which they are constituted by means of abstraction. Herbart was in the right against Kant, but he afterwards let the axe fall on his own feet. The hard formula of the imperative preferred by Kant had already been combated by Frederick Schiller, who accentuated the moment of pleasure, sympathy and enthusiasm in the good action.

[Sidenote: _Repentance and remorse._]

As to the other concepts and to the disputes to which they gave rise, it will be opportune to mention repentance and remorse. Spinoza does not see that it has value as a necessary negative moment, for he declared: _Poenitentia virtus non est, sive ex ratione non oritur; sed is qui facti poenitet bis miser, seu impotens est. Nam primo prava cupiditate, dein tristitia vinci se patitur;_ and he concludes by assigning to it value for altogether empirical motives. Men rarely live (he says) _ex dictamine rationis_; and yet repentance and other similar affections do more good than harm, and if it be necessary to sin _in istam partem potius peccandum. Terret vulgus, nisi metuat._[16] But it was Hegel who instituted a regular persecution of the concept of repentance and remorse. There are certain passages in his works that should be read in connection with this question, in order that we may clearly see how he had an eye to contingent and historical events in his criticism. "In the Christian world in general (he writes) there is in force an ideal of the perfect man, who cannot exist as multitude in a people; and if this ideal is found realized in monks, quakers, and such-like pious folk, it must be remarked that a mass of these sad creatures does not constitute a people, just as lice and parasitic plants cannot exist by themselves, but only on an organic body. In order to constitute a people, it would be above all desirable to destroy that lamblike gentleness of theirs, that vanity which is occupied solely with their own persons, the caring for them and holding them dear, and has always before it the image and consciousness of its own excellence. For life in the universal and for the universal demands, not such vile and listless gentleness, but an energetic gentleness, not a thinking of oneself and one's own sins, but of the universal and of what should be done for it. To him who nourishes so false an ideal, men must always appear to be affected with weakness and corruption, and that ideal to be so constituted that it can never be translated into reality. They attribute importance to trifles, to which no reasonable person pays special attention, and believe that such weaknesses and defects exist, even when they are not remarked. Nor should we admire their greatness of soul, but note rather that their corruption lies precisely in standing still and looking at that which they call weaknesses and errors, and in making out of nothing something that exists. A man with such weaknesses and defects is immediately quit of them, if he do not attach to them importance." The observations that Hegel makes in his _Æsthetic,_ regarding the type of the Magdalen in Italian art, are in this respect especially curious. "In Italian painting the Magdalen appears, both within and without, as the _beautiful sinner;_ sin in her is as seductive as conversion. But here neither sin nor sanctity are to be taken too seriously. She was pardoned, because she had loved much; she sinned through love and beauty; and the affecting element lies in this, that she has scruples about her love, and beautiful and sensible as she is, sheds torrents of tears. But her error is not that she has loved so much; her beautiful and moving error is precisely that she believes herself to be a sinner, whereas her sensitive beauty gives the impression that she could not have been otherwise than noble and of lofty senses in her love."[17]

[Sidenote: _The doctrine of the passions._]

V. The relation between the passions or desires and the will has rather been studied at the moment of strife between the will and the passions, than for itself and within its two terms, although Aristotle had already begun an analysis as to the diversity of appetites or βούλησις in respect to the intention or προαίρεσις, observing that the intention relates only to what can be done, whereas the appetition relates also to things that are impossible.[18] The opposed schools of the Cynics and Cyrenaïcs, Stoics and Epicureans, and others such, were chiefly concerned with the antithesis of the passions and the rational will; but the formulæ of all these schools, if they have some empirical value as precepts of life more or less suitable for definite individuals, classes and times, possess none or very little for philosophy. Cynics and Cyrenaïcs, Stoics and Epicureans, they seem rather to be monks following this or that rule than philosophers. The question as to the mode of freeing oneself from the passions and of dominating them, which lingered till the treatises of Descartes and Spinoza, has also a chiefly empirical character. G. B. Vico took up a position opposed to the two opposed degenerations arising from those practical tendencies, that of "quenching the senses," and of "making a rule of them." He despised both Stoics and Epicureans as "monastic or solitary philosophers," and maintained as "a philosopher politician," that it is needful "not to tear away his own nature from man, nor to abandon him in his corruption," but "to moderate the human passions and to make of them human virtues."[19] Rarely has the defence of the passions enjoyed an equally limpid philosophical enunciation; as a rule, and even in Hegel, it has been directed chiefly against certain social tendencies, rather than against philosophical doctrines.[20] The absolute abandonment to the passions or their absolute destruction, are theories that have not had true and proper representatives.--The confusion between the various meanings of the word "passion," understood now as appetition, or concrete and actual passion, now as a state of the soul (joy and sorrow), now as volitional habit, is to be found in the various treatises that we have already had occasion to record. It is natural that their character of indifference when understood as habits should have often been observed. Thus for Descartes, _elles sont toutes bonnes de leur nature et nous n'avons rien à éviter que leurs mauvais usages ou leur excès._[21]

[Sidenote: _Virtues and Vices._]

On the other hand, the erroneous form of the defence of the passions, consisting of making them the preparation or cause of the virtues, is already to be found in the English philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (More, Shaftesbury, etc.); and in the celebrated _Fable of the Bees_ of Mandeville, it assumes the aspect of a paradoxical theory, in which the vices are looked upon as promoters and factors of progress, morality as inefficacious and harmful for this purpose. And La Rochefoucauld had written: "_Les vices entrent dans la composition des vertus comme les poisons dans la composition des remèdes._"[22]

[Sidenote: _The doctrine of individuality: Schleiermacher._]

All these are false or crude forms, in which is involved the doctrine of the right to individuality, and they have always constituted and still constitute its danger. This doctrine received its most energetic expression in the romantic and preromantic period, thanks above all to Schleiermacher, after it had been referred to in a rather vague way by Jacobi.[23]

"For some time" (writes Schleiermacher in the _Monologues_) "I too was satisfied that I had discovered Reason; and venerating equality with the _Unique Being_ as that which is most lofty, I believed that there was one single measure for every case, that action should be in all of them the same, and that each one is distinguished from the other only in so far as it occupies a place of its own in space. I believed that humanity manifested itself differently only in the variety of external facts; but that the internal man, the individual, was not a being peculiarly (_eigenthümlich_) constructed, and that each was everywhere equal to the other." "But afterwards was revealed to me that which instantly raised me to a high state of exaltation: it became clear that every man must represent humanity in his own way, in an altogether individual combination of its elements, in order that it may manifest itself in every mode, and that everything most different may issue from its bosom and become effectual in the fulness of time and space.... Owing to this thought, I felt myself to be a work individually willed and therefore elected by the Divinity and such that it must enjoy a particular form and culture; and the free act to which this thought belongs has collected and intimately joined together the elements of human nature in a peculiar existence."

"While I now do whatever I do according to my spirit and sense, my fancy places before me as very clear proof of the internal determination, a thousand other modes, in which it would be possible to act otherwise without offending the laws of humanity: I rethink myself in a thousand different forms, in order to discover with the greater certainty that which is especially mine."[24]

[Sidenote: _Romantic and very modern theories._]

But this peculiarity (_Eigenthümlichkeit,_) opportunely placed in relief by Schleiermacher, and a thought much loved by the Romantics (Herder, Jacobi, G. Humboldt, the Schlegels, etc.), is often seen to degenerate into individual caprice, even in those times, as may be observed in the sort of caricature which Frederick Schlegel made of the Fichtian I, become the individual I, and in the notorious _Lucinde,_ to which the same Schleiermacher inconsiderately devoted a series of letters of comment and defence. The last offshoots of the Romantics were Max Stirner and Frederick Nietzsche: in the former the value of individuality becomes changed into an affirmation of spasmodic egotism; in the second there is a continuous mixture of true and false, of good and of bad individuality, as is natural in a writer whose _Eigenthümlichkeit_ was rather that of a poet than of a thinker.

[Sidenote: _The concept of development and progress._]

VI. We have discussed elsewhere Hegel's concept of development, and his thought as synthesis of opposites, which essentially belongs to the Hegelian philosophy and has been superficially treated and adopted by other philosophical schools, and this is not the place either to retrace their history or to demonstrate into what errors Hegel fell through abusing the truth that he had discovered. Among the errors of that philosophy (as for that matter of all contemporary philosophies and of those that have followed one another down to our own day), is to be noted the persistence of the concept of Nature as a mode of reality opposed to the mode of the Spirit, whence came a dualism that was not effectually surpassed, save in appearance. The doctrine of development by opposites is to be understood as accepted and maintained here, with the correction of the concept of nature, and also the doctrine of the synthesis of opposites, free from the use or abuse of it by Hegel for distinct concepts (and worse still, for empirical concepts). As for the concept of Providence, which is neither Fate nor Fortune, nor the work of a transcendent God, this, in its modern form, goes back to the _Scienza nuova_ of Vico and is not to be confounded with the personal religious beliefs that Vico held and kept distinct from his philosophical concept as to immanent Providence. The same concept reappears in the Hegelian philosophy under the form of the Idea, or of the _astuteness of Reason,_ which avails itself of men as its instruments and managers of business.[25] Finally, the conception of cosmic progress was extraneous to the oriental world, to the Græco-Roman, and to the Christian worlds, prevailing in turn in the latter that of decadence from an original state of perfection and of circles or returns. In its modern form it takes its origin from thinkers free of these religious views, who merge in the philosophies of becoming and of evolution. But the concept of progress destroyed itself in many of these rationalistic philosophies, the "disappearance of evil" being posited as possible (Spencer), and a definite state of perfection conceived (though transferred from the past into the future), that is to say a Reality that should be Reality, indeed, perfect Reality having ceased to be development, that is to say, itself.

[1] _Kr. d. prakt. Vern._ p. 119.

[2] _Phil. d. Rechtes,_ §§ 4, 15.

[3] Lotze, _Grundzüge der Ethik_ (Leipzig, 1884), pp. 26, 30-31; Wundt, _Ethik_² (Stuttgart, 1892), pp. 463-464.

[4] _Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience_ (Paris, 1898).

[5] _Tract, theol.-pol._ vi. c. 6; _Ethica,_ p. iv. intr.; _Epist._36 (_Opera,_ pp. 208, 378, 597).

[6] _Kr. d. pr. Vernf._ p. 79.

[7] _System der Sittenlehre,_ in _Werke,_ iv. pp. 198-205.

[8] See my study: _Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto della filosofia di Hegel_ (Bari, 1907).

[9] _Médit._ iv.

[10] For example, _Compendio di Etica_ (Roma, 1907), p. 56.

[11] _Mentor,_ iv. c. 2, § 19 _sqq._

[12] _Hippias minor,_ 375.

[13] Pascal, _Provine,_ i, iv.; Hegel, _Phil. d. Rechtes,_ § 40.

[14] _Enc._§ 248.

[15] _Allg. prakt. Phil._ pp. 121-122; _Einl. i. d. Phil._ (trad, ital.), pp. 118, 171, 224.

[16] _Ethic,_ iv. prop. 54, p. 480.

[17] _Gesch. d. Phil._ ii. 240-241; _Vorles. üb. Aesth._ ii. 162-163.

[18] _Eth. Nicom._ Bk. iii. cc. 2-3, 1111-1113.

[19] _Scienza nuova seconda,_ degn. 5.

[20] _Phän. d. Geistes,_ pp. 484-486; _Encycl._ § 474; _Phil. d. Rechtes,_ § 124; _Phil. d. Gesch._ pp. 39-41.

[21] _Traité des passions,_ iii. § 211.

[22] _Maximes,_ n. 182 (Ed. Garnier, p. 43).

[23] _Woldemar,_ pp. 112-113.

[24] _Monologen,_ in _Werke,_ i. 366-368, 372.

[25] See the study of Hegel mentioned.

THIRD SECTION

UNITY OF THE THEORETICAL AND THE PRACTICAL

[Sidenote: _Double result; precedence of the theoretical over the practical and of the practical over the theoretical._]

The study of the practical activity in its relations that we made in the first section has removed all doubt as to the thesis that the practical activity presupposes the theoretical, or that _knowledge is the necessary precedent of volition and action._[1] But the succeeding study of the practical activity in its dialectic having led to the result that the practical activity is reality itself in its immediacy, and that no other reality (or we may say _other nature_) is conceivable outside will-action, compels us also to affirm the opposite thesis, that the theoretic activity presupposes the practical, and that _the will is the necessary precedent of knowledge_.[2] And it is a precedent, not indeed in the sense admitted from the beginning, of the necessary implication of the will in every theoretical act, as will to know, by means of the unity of the Spirit[3] (for this will is subsidiary and not constitutive; but if it become constitutive it produces, as has been seen, wilfulness and the theoretical error[4]), but precisely in the sense of a constitutive will, without which no knowledge would be thinkable.

Knowledge, indeed, is knowledge of something: it is the remaking of a fact, an ideal recreation of a real creation. If there have not previously been a desire, an aspiration, a nostalgia, there cannot be poetry; if there have not been an impulse or a heroic deed, the epic cannot arise; if the sun do not illumine a landscape, or a soul invoke a ray of sunlight upon the countryside, the picture of a luminous landscape cannot exist. And if there be not a world of reality that generates a world of representations, Philosophy, which is the search for the universal, is not conceivable, nor History, the understanding of the individual.

[Sidenote: _Error of those who maintain the exclusive precedence of either._]

The indubitability of this affirmation, which no force of sophistry can destroy, renders fallacious both the opposite theses, which have several times been variously proposed and maintained: the exclusive priority of the theoretic, and the exclusive priority of the practical.

Those who maintain them enter into so desperate a contest with reality, that in order to issue from it without too much dishonour, they are finally compelled to call in the aid of a third term, which is in turn either thought that is not thought, or will that is not will, or something grey that contains in itself thought and will, without being either the one or the other, nor the unity of that duality. On the one hand is postulated a Logos, a thought _in se_ (one does not understand how this can ever think and be thought), and it is made to adopt the resolution (which one does not understand how it can ever adopt) of coming forth _from itself_ and creating a nature, in order to be able to return finally to itself, by means of this alienation, and to be henceforth _per se,_ that is to say, able to think and to will. The defect of this artificial construction, its mythological and religious origin, can be said to have been already revealed, in the comparison employed with reference to it by the author who maintained it (Hegel), to the effect that the Logos is God _before_ the creation of the world: a God, that is to say, altogether unreal and absurd. On the other hand, the excogitation of a _blind Will_ (Schelling, Schopenhauer) completely tallies with this Thought that does not think because it has not previously willed, and that does not truly will because it has not previously thought, and all of a sudden fashions for itself the instrument of knowledge, to succeed in surpassing itself in this alienation from itself, by means of liberation from willing obtained in the contemplation of the ideas and in asceticism. Here, too, we must repeat that the one error passes over and converts itself into the other, and this inevitable conversion causes the other secondary and hybrid forms of theory to have but slight interest, those in which the priority has been conceived as that of fancy, or feeling, or the unconscious, or the indifferentiated, and the like, all of which represent vain efforts to suppress one of the two fundamental forms of the spirit, or to derive them from a third, which consciousness does not reveal.

[Sidenote: _Problem of the unity of this duality._]

This however does not mean that the demand to conceive the link of that duality, or the unity of the theoretical and the practical, manifested in all these erroneous attempts, is not legitimate. But in order to conceive this, it is necessary to insist above all upon the reality of this duality, of which is sought the connection and the unity.

[Sidenote: _Not the duality of opposites._]

This connection cannot be the relation or synthesis of opposites. The theoretical is not the opposite of the practical, nor the practical the opposite of the theoretical: the opposite of the theoretical is error or the false, as the opposite of the practical is the volitional contradiction or evil. The theoretical, far from being negative, is positive, not less than the practical, and inversely. Neither form can therefore be in any way debased to a simple opposite. Opposition is intrinsic to the spirit and is to be found in each one of its forms: hence the general value of the spirit (activity against passivity, rationality and reality against irrationality and unreality, being against not-being) and that of its special forms (beautiful against ugly, true against false, useful against useless, good against evil). But precisely for this reason, it cannot constitute the character of one form in respect to the other: neither that of the true against the good, nor that of the beautiful against the useful, and so on.

[Sidenote: _Not duality of finite and infinite._]

Nor can the connection be thought as are thought the subdivisions of the theoretic and the practical forms, or according to the relations of individual to universal, of finite to infinite, the first of which terms conditions the second, but is conditioned by it only in an implicit manner. Of the two theoretical forms (and we shall see further on that the forms of the practical are also two), the æsthetic precedes the logical and is autonomous: a song, a story, a statue, do not express any concept; but the philosophy that gives the concept, is at the same time fancy, expression, word: the prose of the philosopher is his song. The æsthetic form is the knowledge of the individual; the logical that of the universal, which is also individual. But this relation that arises within the theoretic, as within the practical form, cannot be transported to the relation of the two forms without logical incoherence: the subdivision, so to speak, is not the division. Thought is not the finite in respect of willing, which is the infinite; nor is the will the finite in respect of thought, which is the infinite. Thought and will are both of them at once finite and infinite, individual and universal. He who passes from action to thought, does not limit his own being by becoming finite; nor does he limit it by passing from thought to action; or better, in both cases he makes himself finite to attain to the infinite; poet to open to himself the way to the thought of the eternally true; man of action, that he may dedicate his work to the eternal good.

[Sidenote: _Perfect analogy of the two forms, theoretic and practical._]

The two forms, theoretical and practical, both positive, both a connection of finite and infinite, correspond in everything, as has already appeared from our exposition, in which the appeal to the one from the problems of the other has always aided a better penetration of the nature of such problems and the finding of their solution. Thus in both there is genius and creation (geniuses of art and of thought, and geniuses of action); in both, reproduction and judgment take place in the same way (æsthetic taste, practical taste; history of art and history of philosophy, history of actions); in both arise representative concepts and empirical rules. The analogy will be better illustrated by what is to follow, when will be demonstrated the correspondence between art and economic, logical thought and ethicity, historical discrimination and ethical discrimination, empirical concepts and laws of action, and so on.

[Sidenote: _Not a parallelism, but a circle._]

If this analogy exclude the possibility of the two forms being _unequal,_ it must not, on the other hand, be perverted with the object of conceiving them _parallel,_ as would perhaps be pleasing to the parallelists of spirit and nature, soul and body; this is an expedient that is certainly easy, but certainly not satisfying. They are not parallel, but are on the contrary bound, the one to the other, in such a way that the one proceeds from the other. From the æsthetic apprehension of reality, from philosophical reflection upon it, from historical reconstruction, which is its result, is obtained that knowledge of the actual situation, on which alone is formed and can be formed the volitional and practical synthesis, the new action. And this new action is in its turn the material of the new æsthetic figuration, of the new philosophical reflection, of the new historical reconstruction. In short, knowledge and will, theory and practice, are not two parallels, but two lines, such that the head of the one is joined to the tail of the other; or, if a geometric symbol also be desired, such that they constitute, not a parallelism, but a _circle._

[Sidenote: _The circle of Reality: thought and being, subject and object._]

They constitute therefore the circle of reality and of life, which is duality-unity of thought and being, of subject and object, in such a way that to think the subject is the same as to think the subject of an object, and to think an object is the same as to think the object of a subject. In truth, it sometimes seems strange and almost impossible that such hard and difficult questions should have arisen as to the objectivity of knowledge, and as to whether thought attains to being, or whether there be a being beyond thought. Thought is such, precisely because it affirms being, and being is such, precisely because it is generated by a thought. It is only when we remember that in those questions were included others of a very difficult and intricate nature, concerning divine transcendency and the content of the concept of nature (gnoseological questions, which it is the glory of modern philosophy to have asked and solved);--it is only then that we understand how the relation of thought and being, of knowing and of willing, has also become obscure. Kant was forced to come to a stop before the mystery of reality, because he had not altogether conquered transcendency, nor altogether surpassed the false conception of nature as _ens,_ given by the naturalists. It revealed itself to him, not as a circle, but as an assemblage of lines diverging or joining to infinity. Hegel made two of will and nature, owing to the insufficiency of his gnoseological theory relating to the natural sciences, and was led to posit a Philosophy of nature in opposition to a Philosophy of the spirit, thus permitting to exist a form of non-mediate dualism, after he had destroyed so many, or making it mediate in the artificial manner to which we have referred. The shadows of that gnoseology having been dispersed, the relation between theory and practice, subject and object, appears in full light; and the answer becomes very simple to the question as to how, when everything is unconvertible relation of condition and conditioned, thought and being are reciprocally condition and conditioned, and as to how the vicious circle is avoided. The criticism of vicious circles includes in itself and affirms the idea of a circularity that is not vicious; thought and being are not a succession of two finites, but an absolute relation, that is, the Absolute itself. To express ourselves mythologically, if the creation of the world be the passage from chaos to cosmos, from not-being to being, this passage does not begin either with the theoretic or with the practical, with the subject, or with the object, but with the Absolute, which is the absolute relation of the two terms. _In the beginning was neither the Word nor the Act; but the Word of the Act and the Act of the Word._

[Sidenote: _Critique of the theories as to the primacy of theoretical or of practical reason._]

It is well to state again that in consequence of the relation and correlation established, all the questions as to the primacy of thought or will, of the contemplative or active life, and speaking more empirically, of the thinker or the man of action, disappear. To pose such problems is as though one were to ask which of the two semicircles of a circle has precedence. Similar questions, always insoluble or badly solved, have their origin in internal obscurity as to the fundamental correlation. When man has attained to the summit of knowledge (a summit that is certainly not Art; nor, strictly speaking, Philosophy, but History, the knowledge of the concrete real, that is, the actuality of philosophy), when he has completely penetrated the actual situation, can he perhaps stop at this point and say _hic manebimus optime?_ Can he arrest life which is raging and demanding to be continued? And if he succeed in suspending it for an instant in thought, why has he suspended, if not to continue it? Knowledge is not an end, but an instrument of life: knowledge that did not serve life would be superfluous and harmful.--On the other hand, when a man has willed and has thrown himself into action, when he has produced another piece of life, can he blindly continue to produce life for ever? Would not blindness impede the production itself? Therefore he must rise from life to knowing, if he wish to look in the face the product that he has lived, and surpass it with thought, for which life is now means and instrument. Knowledge serves life and life serves knowledge; the contemplative life, if it do not wish to become insipid ease, must lead to activity, and that activity, if it do not wish to become an irrational and sterile tumult, must lead to contemplation. Reality, in specifying aptitudes, has formed men of thought and men of action, or of prevailing thought or prevailing action, these not superior to those, for they are collaborators.--Thus the discussions as to whether human progress be moral or intellectual, or whether the propelling force be the practical and economic activity, or philosophy, or religion (Buckle, Kidd, etc.), are shown to be vain.

[Sidenote: _New pragmatism: life conditioning Philosophy._]

It is rather to be considered that from this bond between theory and practice is obtained a pragmatism of a new sort, of which the pragmatists have never thought, or at least have not been able to distinguish from the others and to give it value. If Life condition Thought, we have in this the apodictic demonstration of the always historically conditioned form of every thought; not only of Art, which is always the art of a time, of a soul, of a moment; but also of Philosophy which can solve only those problems presented by Life. Every philosophy reflects and cannot but reflect the preoccupations, as they are called, of a definite historical moment; and this, not in the quality of its _solutions_ (in which case it would be and is indeed bad philosophy), but in the quality of its _problems._ Thus it is at once contingent and eternal, mortal and immortal, extratemporal and living only in time and history.

[Sidenote: _Deductive confirmation of the two forms and deductive exclusion of the third feeling._]

Finally, with the establishment of the duality-unity of the theoretical and the practical, we have demonstrated that which at the beginning of the exposition had only been asserted and presupposed: namely, why a _practical_ form of the spirit must be placed beside the theoretical,[5] and why there is no _third_ form beyond these, whether it be called _feeling_ or by any other name.[6] The theoretical form postulates the practical, because the subject postulates the object; but the spirit does not postulate a third form intermediate between the two, or unity of the two, because it is itself precisely mediator and unity of itself, _subject-object._

[1] Section I.

[2] Section II.

[3] Section I. c. 3.

[4] Section I. c. 4.

[5] Section I. c. 1.

[6] Section I. c. 2.

SECOND PART

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS SPECIAL FORMS

FIRST SECTION

THE TWO PRACTICAL FORMS: ECONOMIC AND ETHIC