HISTORICAL RETROSPECT

The truth of all philosophies, and critique of eclecticism.

The philosophy which each one of us professes at a determinate moment, in so far as it is adequate to the knowledge of facts and in the proportion in which it is adequate, is the result of all preceding history, and in it are organically brought together all systems, all errors and all suggestions. If some error should appear to be inexplicable, some suggestion without fruit, some concept incapable of adoption, the new philosophy is to that extent more or less defective. But the organic reconciliation, which preceding philosophies must find in those that follow, cannot be the bare bringing them together in time, andeclecticism,as in those superficial spirits, who associate fragments of all philosophies without mediation. Eclecticism (from the historical point of view also, as for instance in the relation of Victor Cousin to Hegel, whom he admired, imitated and failed to understand) is the falsification or the caricature of the vastness of thought, which embraces in itself all thoughts, though apparently the most diverse and irreconcilable. The peace of the lazy, who do not collide withone another, because they do not act, must not be made sublime and confounded with the lofty peace that belongs to those who have striven and have fraternized after strife, or, indeed, during the actual combat.

Researches concerning the authors and precursors of truths: and the reason for the antinomies which they exhibit.

A proof of thisconstancyof philosophy, which is immanent in all philosophies and in all the thoughts of men, and also of its perpetual variation and novelty of historical form, is to be found in the questions that have been and are raised, concerning theoriginordiscoveryof truth. Hardly has the truth been discovered, when the critics easily succeed in proving that it was already known, and begin the search forprecursors.And there can be no doubt that they are right and their researches deserve to be followed up. Every assertion of discovery, in so far as it seems to make a clear cut into the web of history, has something arbitrary about it. Strictly speaking, Socrates did not discover the concept, or Vico æsthetic fancy, or Kant thea priorisynthesis, or Hegel the synthesis of opposites; nor even perhaps, did Pythagoras discover the theorem of the square on the hypotenuse, or Archimedes the law of the displacement of liquids. If a discovery is represented as an explosion, this happens for reasons ofpractical and mnemonic convenience in narrating and summarising history; and, for that matter, the explosion, the eruption and the earthquake are continuous processes. But the rational side of the search for precursors must not cause the acceptance of the irrational side, which is the denial of theoriginalityof discoveries, as though they were to be found point for point in the precursors, or as though they consisted only in the aggregation of elements which pre-existed, or in like insignificant changes of form. To attach oneself to precursors, does not mean to repeat them, but to continue their work. This continuation is always new, original, and creative and always gives rise to discoveries, be they small or great. To think is to discover. The reduction to absurdity of the wrong meaning of the search for precursors is to be found in the fact that every one of the most important thoughts can be discovered in a certain sense in common beliefs, in proverbs, in ways of speech, and among savages and children. This is so much the case that by this path we can return to the Utopia of aningenuousphilosophy, outside history; whereas philosophy is truly ingenuous or genuine only when itis,and it is not, save in History.

[1]See above, Part II.Chap. III.

[2]See ch. ix.What is Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel,by the Author, English translation by Douglas Ainslie.

Logic and the defence of philosophy.

Attacks upon Philosophy and defences of it have been made as more or less academic exercises. But the true defence of it can only be Philosophy itself, and above all, Logic, which, by determining the concept of Philosophy, recognizes its necessity and function. And since Logic itself teaches that a concept is not truly known, save in the system where it is shown in all its relations, the complete defence is obtained in our opinion only, when this treatise dedicated toLogicis placed in relation to the preceding, which treats ofÆsthetic,and with that which follows and has for its object thePhilosophy of the practical.

The utility of Philosophy and the philosophy of the practical.

To this last must be relegated the complete elucidation of the problem concerning the utility or non-utility of philosophy. It is a problem about which We can here raise no fundamental question, if the equation posited by us be true:philosophy = thought = history = perception of reality. Thus the doubt concerning the utility of philosophy would be of equal value with the extravagant doubt as to the utility of knowledge. The philosophy of the practical also demonstrates that no action is possible, save when preceded by knowledge, and that presupposed in action there is always historical or perceptive knowledge, that is, the knowledge which contains in itself all other knowledge. And it also demonstrates that reality, being always will and action, is always thought, and that therefore thought is not an extrinsic adjunct, but an intrinsic category constitutive of the Real. Reality is action, because it is thought, and it is thought because it is action.

Consolation of philosophy, as joy in thought and in the truth. Impossibility of a pleasure arising from falsity or illusion.

If thought is so useful that without it the Real would not be, the common concept of an unconsolatory philosophy cannot be accepted. Consolation, pleasure, joy, is activity itself, which rejoices in itself. So far as is known, no other mode of pleasure, joy and consolation has yet been discovered. Now, knowledge of the true, whatever it is, is activity and promotes activity, and therefore brings with it its own consolation. "The truth, known, though it be sad,has its delights."Not a few would wish to attributethese delights, not to truth, but toillusion.But illusion is either not recognized as illusion, or it is so recognized. When it is not recognized as such and yet truly satisfies the mind, it cannot be called illusion, but truth, which has its own good reasons, since nothing can be held to be true without good reasons; it is that much of truth which can be noted in the given circumstances and which from the point of view of a more complete truth can only arbitrarily be called illusion: the consolation given by the pretended illusion resides, therefore, in its truth—or it is recognized as illusion, because the actual circumstances have changed; and then it is anguish and desire to attain to the truth. If there is no desire to attain to this truth, and if in order to avoid it, affirmations are brought forward, which are not adequate to the new conditions in which we find ourselves, there is error, which, as such, is always more or less voluntary; and from error, which is self-critical, arise evil conscience, and remorse, and so again anguish and desire for the truth, which dissipates illusion and produces consolation, because ... "the truth though it be sad, yet has its delights."

Critique of the concept of a sad truth.

Yet (it will be said), the true can besad;true, but sad. This prejudice also should be eliminated.Truth is reality, and reality is never either glad or sad, since it comprehends both these categories in itself, and therefore surpasses them both. To judge reality to be sad, it would have to be admitted that we possessed besides the idea of it, the idea ofanotherreality, which should be better than the reality known to us. But this is contradictory. The second reality would be not real and therefore not thinkable, and so no idea at all of it could be formed. And if we did attempt to form an idea of it, thought, entering into contradiction with itself and striving in a vain effort, would be seized with terror, and would produce, not that ideal reality, but at the most an æsthetic expression of terror, like that of a man who looks upon a bottomless abyss.

Examples: philosophical criticism and the concepts of God and of Immortality.

Once upon a time and even to-day many found and find consolation in the idea of a personal God, who has created and governs the universe, and of an immortal life, above this life of ours, which vanishes at every instant. And this consolation seems to have diminished in our times, or to many of us, owing to Philosophies. But he who does not limit himself to the surface and analyses the state of soul of sincere and noble believers, realizes that the God who comforted them is the same who comforts us and whom our Philosophiescall the universal Spirit, immanent in all of us—the continuity and rationality of the universe—just as the Immortality in which they reposed was the immortality which transcends our individual actions, and in transcending them, makes them eternal. All that is born is worthy to perish; but in perishing, it is also preserved as an ideal moment of what is born from it; and the universe preserves in itself all that has ever been thought and done, because it is nothing but the organism of these thoughts and actions. Philosophy has rendered those concepts of God and of Immortality more exact, and has liberated them from impurities and errors and thus at the same time from perplexities and anguish; it has rendered them more, not less, consolatory. On the other hand, the absurdity which mingled with those concepts, has never consoled any one who seriously thought them—and serious thinking of them is an indispensable condition of obtaining consolation from concepts. If they are not thought, but mechanically repeated, the consolation is obtained from something else, from distraction and occupation with life lived, not from the concepts. In the effort to think a God outside the world, a Despot of the world, we are seized with a sense of fear for that God,who is a solitary being, suffering from his omnipotence, which makes activity impossible for him and dangerous for his creatures, who are his playthings. That God becomes an object of maledictions. Equally, in seriously thinking our immortality as empirical individuals, immobilized in our works and in our affections (which are beautiful only because they are in motion and fugitive), we are assailed by the terror, not of death, but of this immortality, which is unthinkable because desolating and desolating because unthinkable. Ideal immortality has generated the poetic representations of Paradise, which are representations of infinite peace; the false concepts of an empirical immortality can generate no other representation than Swift's profoundly satirical picture of theStruldbrugsor immortals, plunged in all the miseries of life, unable to die, and weeping with envy at the sight of a funeral.

Consolatory virtue belonging to all spiritual activities.

But we do not wish to close these new considerations upon the old themede consolatione Philosophiae,without noting that philosophy is not the sole or supreme consoler, as the philosophers of antiquity believed, and some among the moderns, who assumed the same attitude. It is neither the sole nor the supreme consoler, because thought does not exist alone, nor doesit exist above life: thought is outside and inside life; and if on one side it surpasses life, on the other it is a mode of life itself. Philosophy brings consolation in its own kingdom, putting error to flight and preparing the conditions for practical life; but man is not thought alone, and if he has joys and sorrows from thought, other sorrows and joys come to him from the exercise of life itself. And in this exercise action heals the evils of action and life brings consolation for life. The error of Stoicism and of similar doctrines consists in attributing to philosophy a direct action upon the ills of life and of making it in consequence the whole totality of the real. But philosophy has no pocket-handkerchiefs to dry all the tears that man sheds, nor is it able to console unhappy lovers and unfortunate husbands (as sentimental people pretend): it can only contribute to their comfort by healing that part of their pain which is due to theoretic obscurity. Such part is certainly not small: all our sorrows are irritated and made more pungent by mental darkness which paralyses or fetters the purification of action. But it is a part and not the whole. Every form of the activity of the Spirit, art like philosophy, practical life like theoretic life, is a fount of consolation and none suffices alone.

Sorrow and the elevation of sorrow.

"He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow" is a false saying, because the increase of knowledge is the overcoming of sorrow. But it is true, in so far as it means that the increase of knowledge does not eliminate the sorrows of practical life. It does not eliminate, butelevatesthem; and to adopt the fine expression of a contemporary Italian writer, superiority is "nothing but the right to suffer on a higher plane." On a higher plane, but neither more nor less than others, who are at a lower level of knowledge,—to suffer on a higher plane, in order to act upon a higher plane.

Reality, Thought and Logic.

The three terms,Reality, ThoughtandLogic, and their relations, could be represented by a system of three circles, the one included in the other, and by marking at will as the first term that which includes all, or that which is included in all: R T L or L T R. Limiting ourselves to the first method, the first circle would be Reality, which Thought (the second circle) would think, in the same way that it would in its turn be thought in the third circle, formed by Logic, the Thought of thought, or the Philosophy of philosophy. This graphic symbol is probably destined to some fortune; but the reader must not seek it in our pages, because knowing how much inadequacy, clumsiness and danger it contains, we share the repugnance, almost instinctively felt at such materializations, which seem to be and are of slight value.

Relation of these three terms.

The vice of that spatial figuration is that it divides into three circles what is three, but three in one, and should consequently be expressed as a triple circle which should also be a single circle, in which all the three coincide; which is geometrically unrepresentable. The relation of Reality, Thought of Reality and Thought of Thought, divided into three circles, legitimately gives rise to the question: Why should there not be a fourth, a fifth, a sixth circle (and so on to infinity) which should include respectively the third, the fourth, the fifth (and so on to infinity)? Why should not a Logic of Logic, or a thought of the thought of thought, and so on, follow the thought of thought, which is Logic? For us, this question raises no objection that need bring us to a halt for a single instant, just because we have never divided the one reality into two or more different realities (matter and spirit, nature and idea, and so on), nor into a series of different realities, the one following the other; but we have conceived it as a system of relations and of correlations, constituting a unity, indeed the only unity concretely thinkable. There is no progress to infinity, when the terms are coincident and correlative; hence to think the thought of thought would not be a new act, but equivalentto thinking thought. The mental act will be new (and any mental act is new) for the individual who accomplishes it in conditions that are always new; but its spiritual form will always be that of Logic, which thinks thought and contains within itself, on its side, the process of reality. Further, the indifference exhibited by the symbol of the triple circle as to the determination of the first as last and the last as first, confirms for us the non-existence of a first that is only first and of a last that is only last; confirms, that is to say, the coincidence of unity in relation that is first and last. Reality is not only thought by thought, but is also thought; and thought is not only thought by Logic, but is also Logic. Those who wish to expound philosophy and history, proceeding from the centre of the logos or Logic, and those who wish to expound them, proceeding from the periphery of facts, are both right and wrong, because the centre is periphery and the periphery centre.

Non-existence of a general philosophy outside the particular philosophic sciences:

By adopting this view, which affirms the most complete immanence, it has never happened that in any part of the Real we have discovered a division between idea and fact, between general and particular, between primary and secondaryreality and the like, but we have found, in every part, relation and correlation, unity and distinction in unity. There is no general philosophy opposed to, or consequent on, or alongside particular philosophies; particular philosophy is general, and the general is the particular; nor is there a general history, which is not also particular history, andvice versa.History is always the history of man as artist, thinker, economic producer, and moral agent, and in distinguishing these various aspects, it gives their unity, which does not transcend these various aspects, butisthese various aspects themselves.

and consequently of a History of general philosophy outside the histories of particular philosophic sciences.

In like manner, the History of thought, or the History of Philosophy, which is one of these determinate aspects, is distinguished in the histories of particular philosophic concepts, as the history of Æsthetic, of Logic, of Economics and of Ethics; but it is also unified in them andconsists in nothing but them,completely resolving itself into them. There is nogeneral History of Philosophy,in the sense of a history ofgeneral Philosophy,or ofMetaphysics,or whatever else it may be called, outside particular histories (which are unity in particularity).

One of the errors which in our opinion vitiates the writing of the history of philosophy, appearsto be just the prejudice in favour of a treatment of the general part of this history, in which, for instance, speculations concerning practice enter only incidentally, a great part of logical doctrine is excluded as not belonging to it, and the doctrines of Æsthetic are hardly referred to at all. The prejudice is derived, in the last analysis, from the old idea of an Ontology or Metaphysic, as the science of an ideal world, of which nature and man are the more or less imperfect actualizations; hence the relegation of a great part of true and proper philosophy to what is called the human and natural world, and the looking upon this as a special philosophy, distinguished from general philosophy and consequently lying outside the true and proper history of philosophy. That prejudice, amounting almost to a survival, persists even in those who have more or less surpassed such a conception, and determines the curious configuration of a general history of philosophy, outside the special histories. Such a scheme, when closely examined, shows itself to be a complex of historical elucidations of some problems of Logic, and of some of the philosophy of the practical (individuality, liberty, the supreme good, etc.), and of some arising from their relations (knowing and being, spiritand nature, infinite and finite, etc.). These are all without doubt arguments of philosophical history; but they must be united with the others, from which they have been wrenched, and without which they prove but little intelligible. Philosophy is present in the Poetics and the Rhetoric of Aristotle as much as in the Metaphysics; not less in theCritique of Pure Judgmentof Kant, than in theCritique of Pure Reason.It is never outside those treatises concerning what are called the special parts of philosophy. The present-day historians of philosophy who have overcome so many forms of transcendence and re-established immanence, must also overcome the residue of transcendence, which, so to speak, they still retain in their own house.

Histories of particular philosophies and literary value of such division.

Certainly, the reality of the distinctions between the various aspects of the real and between the various particular philosophies renders possible literary divisions, through which there are composed special treatises upon Ethics and so upon the history of Ethic; upon Logic and so upon the history of Logic; upon Æsthetic and so upon the history of Æsthetic; but it is not possible by a like method of division to construct a treatise upon general Philosophyand a corresponding History of general philosophy. It is not possible, because this literary division presupposes a distinction of concepts; and a general philosophy is not conceptually distinguishable. When the attempt to distinguish it is made, we have, as we saw, a mass of historical fragments taken from the various philosophic sciences; that is to say, not the coherent historical treatment of problems relating to a definite aspect of the real, but a more or less arbitrary aggregate.

History of Logic in a particular sense.

With these considerations, we have answered the question concerning the relation between the History of Logic and the History of Philosophy. This relation is the same as that between Logic and Philosophy,—terms which are capable neither of distinction nor of opposition. The history of Logic is not outside the history of Philosophy, but is an integral part of this history itself. To make it the object of special treatment always means to compose a complete history of philosophy, in which, from the literary point of view, prominence and priority are given to the problems of Logic, the others being thrown, not outside the picture, but into the background. The same may be said of the History of Æsthetic or of Ethic or of any otherparticular discipline, which is never held to be distinguishable.

Works relating to the history of Logic.

Logic being more or less profoundly renovated (as we have sought to do in this book), it is natural that the histories of Logic hitherto available can no longer be completely satisfactory. For they are written from points of view that have been surpassed, such as Aristotelian formalism or Hegelian panlogism, and therefore either do not interpret facts with exactitude, or they give prominence and exaggerated importance to certain orders of facts, neglecting others far more worthy of mention and of examination.

Of the special books bearing the title of the History of Logic, there is really only one—that of Charles Prantl—which, based upon wide researches, is truly remarkable for its doctrine and for lucid and animated exposition. Unfortunately this does not go further than the fifteenth century and omits the whole movement of modern philosophy.[1]But even the period exhaustively treated by him (Antiquity and the Middle Ages) is looked at from the narrow angle of an Aristotelian and formal temperament.Other works bearing the same title are not worthy of attention.[2]On the other hand, the better histories of Logic must not be sought under this title, but especially in the better Histories of Philosophy, beginning with that of Hegel, which, for the most part, is precisely a history of Logic.

In inaugurating a new treatment, governed by the principles which we have defended, we shall confine ourselves, in the following pages, to a sketch of the history of some of the principal parts of logical doctrine, without any claim to even approximate completeness, and with a view to giving simple illustrations of the things that were said in the theoretical part. In this theoretical part, in virtue of the identity of philosophy and history which we have explained, history may be said to be already contained and projected, even though names and dates are mostly omitted and left to be understood.

[1]Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande,Leipzig, 1855-1870, 4 vols. Scattered memoirs of certain writers belonging to later times are being published by Prantl in academic journals, and it would be opportune to collect these in a volume.

[2]A rapid sketch, compiled in part from the work of Prantl, with a polemical addition directed against the adversaries of the Hegelian Logic, precedes theLogic2of Kuno Fischer. The historical part of theSystem der Logikof Ueberweg (fifth edition, 1882, edited by J. B. Meyer) has an almost exclusively bibliographical character with excerpts, and that contained in L. Rabus,Logik ii. System der Wissenschaften,Erlangen-Leipzig, 1895, is yet more arid. TheGesch. d. Logikof F. Harms (Berlin, 1881) is meagre in facts, verbose and vague. In recent monographs on special points, one feels the effect of what is called Logistic or new formalism, which makes the authors pursue ineptitudes and curiosities of slight value.

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 veryprinciple of logical Science,[2]the rigorous form of truth.

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 heldfirmly that there is no science of the accidental and individual, and of sensation, which is bound to space and time, to thewhereand thewhen,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]

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 betweenvalues 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 asvalues,not asbeings;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.

Controversies as to the various forms of concept in Plato.

The beginning of the enquiry as to the natureof 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.

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 fromempirical 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 ortheology(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 ofmatter is obtained in them by aphairesis or abstraction.[6]

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 thealways(τοῡ ἀεί) and that of thefor 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 thefor the most partalone existed and not also thealways; 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, notwith 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.

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, ofwhich 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]

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 existingante, inandpost 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 summarizingdiscordant 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 theuniverselles substantiaewerenonnisi 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."

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, thesecunda intentio,was certainly something arbitrary andad 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 fromone-sided realism and from one-sided nominalism, extends its hand at the dawn of the new Era to the philosophy of Cusanus, to scepticism, todocta 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 thecoincidence 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 thatpeccatum 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 dominantin Jacob Böhme it was stripped of its religious form and eloquently defended in Italy by Giordano Bruno.[12]

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