Chapter 6

I. Distinction between history of the practiced principle and history of the liberation from the transcendental.

I. A first warning to bear in mind concerns the historical inquiry as to the varyingrecognition of, or failure to recognizethepractical reasonin respect to the other forms of the spirit.This series of thoughts is not to be confounded with thatother historical process,so long and so intricate, which had its origin in the debate between St. Augustine and Pelagius (or perhaps rather in the opposition between Platonic mysticism and Aristotelian humanism), and through analogous debates, arising afresh during the Middle Ages and onward to modern times, culminating in the strife for the independence of morality and the practical reason in general from religion, which took place in the seventeenth century. The account of the various incidents of that debate perhaps occupies a larger space and a different place in the special histories of Ethic than it deserves. For it is not concerned with an entirely ethical or practical problem, but with that general philosophical movement which produced the progressive elimination of the transcendental and founded the immanentistic consideration of the real: a necessary condition for the conceivability of philosophy itself. In this lay the great importance of the affirmation that the practical and the moral spirit of man reveals itself as constant in the midst of the most various and opposed religious beliefs. This amounts to saying that it is independent of religion and knowable naturally and humanly, without thenecessity of having recourse to the authority of revelation and of making shipwreck in mystery. It is customary to say that in the seventeenth century free-thought definitely won the victory upon the point most ardently contested, and in this connection are recorded the names of Charron, Grotius, Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle. To these could be added that of G. B. Vico, who conceived of Providence as immanent and considered that morality arose from "a sense common to all men," from a judgment "without any sort of reflection," foundation of the natural rights of man. But should the word "definite" be really used here? Whenever the idea of the transcendental reappears, even in the timid form of agnosticism, the autonomy of the practical reason is denied, or at least again put in doubt (and with it that of the whole human spirit).

Two examples only of this must suffice, but they are conspicuous. Emmanuel Kant, not having been able to surpass the mystery that he had formulated—the principle of the practical reason—the categoric imperative remained suspended in the void, and in that void it invokes in relation to itself faith in a personal God and in a transcendental future life, which shall conciliate virtue and happiness, at variance inthe life lived upon earth. This scrap of mystery which Kant allowed to remain in his system, suffices to obscure that autonomy of the practical reason and that concept of spiritual productivity which he had affirmed with so much energy. Another example, perhaps even more characteristic, is furnished by the Ethic that was prevalent for three centuries in the English School. It was a utilitarian Ethic and therefore incapable of truly founding moral reason. What was the consequence of that incapacity when recognized as such? Nothing but the renewed introduction of mystery, the explanation obtained by means of the idea of a personal God, assuming that most extravagant form known as "theological utilitarianism." By this theory, moral actions that in this life do not receive adequate recompense and seem to be unjustified from the utilitarian point of view, are rewarded by God in another life, thus finding their economic motive for being carried out in the present life. In our theoretic treatment of the subject, we do not concern ourselves with the controversy, already mooted in theEutyphron,as to whether sanctity be loved by the gods as sanctity, or whether it be sanctity because it is beloved by the gods[1]—aquestion that in the Middle Ages was transformed into that other one, differently solved by Abélard, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus: whether the moral law be given by divine decree, or whether the idea of God does not of necessity coincide with the idea of moral law. We do not treat of this, since we are occupied with the practical, not with theology or antitheology, and consider that the contest between philosophy and theology has been already solved and surpassed in the theory of knowledge. For the same reason, it seems to us that we should not trace its history in the History of the Philosophy of the Practical.[2]

II. The distinction of the practical from the theoretical.

II. The true and proper history of the practical principle, conceived as autonomous, and of the problem concerning the identity or the distinction of the practical from theory, has a different line of development. As a rule this problem is referred back to the celebrated sayings of Socrates, that virtue is knowledge and vice ignorance, and to the corrections that Aristotle, while accepting, proposes in them, when he takes note of the part that belongs to the non-cognoscitive element. But, as often happens,those sayings and those corrections have been taken as being more profound than they genuinely were and could be. This, if it have not aided the exactness of historical interpretation, has nevertheless stimulated and fecundated thought. On reading without prejudice the parts of theMemorabilia,of the Platonic dialogues, of theNicomachean Ethics,and of theMagna Moraliathat relate to it, it appears evident that what is treated of in them is the altogether empirical question of the importance that mental development has for practical life, and whether knowledge suffices for this, or natural dispositions and discipline of the passions be not also necessary. Aristotle replied to Socrates, who had insisted upon the element of knowing, conceiving virtue as knowledge (λόγος), by modifying the statement with the assertion that virtue is not indeed simply knowledge, but iswithknowledge (μετὰ λόγου). In these very ingenuous considerations is to be found at the most implicitly, but certainly not explicitly, the problem that was only stated later on; and it would be rash to classify Socrates as an intellectualist and Aristotle as a voluntarist. It is certain that the Aristotelian philosophy, in accordance with good sense,preserved the distinction between the two forms of the spirit, the theoretical and the practical, the reason and the will, a distinction that has also passed into the scholastic philosophy (ratio cognoscibilis, ratio appetibilis) and into that of the Renaissance. But it remained always vague, sometimes brought into prominence, sometimes, on the other hand, attenuated. Almost dissipated in those who conceive the principles of the practical as something similar or analogous to mathematical truths (Cudworth, Clarke, Wollaston, etc.), it always reaffirms itself when importance is given to the affections and passions, as is the case with many thinkers of the seventeenth century (Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Vico); and the doctrines of the Scottish school of sensationalists contributed not a little to keep it alive.

It seems indubitable that Emmanuel Kant is to be connected to some extent rather with this last tradition than with that of the intellectualists: with Kant the practical reason possessed a domain of its own altogether distinct from and almost antithetical to the domain of the theoretical. But it is erroneous to present the successors of Kant as forgetful of the practical reason and as resolving every spiritual manifestationin the theoretical form of the spirit. For instance, Fichte, who had a very strong consciousness of the peculiarity of the practical activity, did not do this, nor did Hegel, though as commonly as unjustly accused of being a cold intellectualist. It should suffice to recall how Hegel always opposed that view of Plato and of other thinkers (for example Campanella) who assigned the government of the State to philosophers, a view in which the resolution of the practical into the theoretical spirit and of the will into knowledge seemed to become concrete. For Hegel, on the contrary, the domain ofhistoryis different from that ofphilosophy;history is indeed the idea, but the idea that shows itself in anatural and unconsciousmanner, andphilosophicalgenius is notpoliticalgenius. Nor must we forget the importance that he accorded to passion, to custom, to what is called the heart and is wont to be opposed to the brain and to argument. For Hegel, the will is not thought, but a special kind of thought, that is to say, thought which translates itself into existence, the impulse to give oneself existence. Whereas in the theoretical process, the spirit takes possession of the object and makes it its own by thinking, that isby universalizing it, in the practical process a difference is also stated and determined, which on the other hand consists of its own determinations and ends. The theoretical is contained in the practical, since there cannot be will without intelligence; but, on the other hand, the theoretical contains the practical, since to think is also to act. Hegel, in short, distinguishes the practical from the theoretical and unifies them, while retaining the distinction.[3]What is not perhaps altogether clear to him, notwithstanding his view that history is the idea in a natural and unconscious mode, is the unreflective character of willing. To have given relief to this character, although in the exaggerated and inacceptable form of the will as blind and unconscious, is the merit of Arthur Schopenhauer, who is indeed far from standing alone in assigning an eminent place to the will, but connects himself with all the Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, and in the first place with Fichte and Schelling.

III. The mixtures of philosophy of the practical and description.

III. The mixture of philosophical concepts with empirical concepts and with rules is a vice common to nearly all treatises of the Philosophy of the practical, beginning with theNicomachean Ethic,which, although in certain places loftily philosophical, should be placed in greater part rather at the head of the history of the works of the moralists and of writers on the practical, than of Ethic. The author himself recognized this practical character when he wrote,πάς ὁ περὶ τῶν πρακτῶν λόγος τύπῳ καὶ οὐκ ἀκριβῶς ὀφείλει λέγεσθαι.[4]And in this appears the prejudice that practical philosophy should be occupied with the practical: ἐπεὶ οὖν ἡ παροῦσα πραγματεία οὐ θεωρίας ἕνεκά ἐστιν ὥσπερ αἱ ἅλλαι (οὐ γὰρ ἵνα εἰδῶμεν τί εστιν ἡ ἀρετὴ σκεπτόμεθα άλλ' ἵν' ἀγαθοὶ ηινώμεθα, ἐπεὶ ούδὲν ἃν ἧν ὄφελος αὐτῆς), κτλ.[5]Even the greatest thinkers of modern times are not exempt from that characteristic. Emmanuel Kant, while recognizing that the division and treatment of duties do not belong to the Critique of the Sciences (he should therefore have excluded them from philosophy, which is alwayscriticism),finally relegates them to what he calls the "system" (and is in truth the anti-systematic)[6]and writes theMetaphysic of Customs,divided into the doctrines of law and of the virtues. Fichte, in hisSystem of Ethic,makes the applied follow the theoretical part. Hegel gives the doctrineof duties in the third part of hisPhilosophy of Law,which is entitled Of Ethicity (Sittlichkeit.) The Ethic of Herbart is intrinsically descriptive, for the author himself professed to wish simply "to describe the ideal of virtue,"[7]and the five practical ideas that he takes as principles were at bottom nothing but classes of virtue refined into ideas. Treatises of to-day are overflowing with empirical elements, as can be seen from those in English by Ladd and Seth, and by those in German of Paulsen, Wundt, and Cathrein. Sometimes a more concrete historical element is coupled in those treatises with the empirical classification of practical examples and institutions: as, for instance, in Cathrein, a modernized Jesuit, who exposes at length the moral views, not only of civilized people, ancient and modern, but also of the savages of Oceania, of Asia, of Cochin China, of the Hottentots and Boschimans, of the Botocudis, and so on. Questions of casuistry also survive in these treatises, such as whether and on what occasions it is permissible to tell a lie; this question is notably represented in the history of ideas, from the Socrates of theMemorabiliato Kant and Schopenhauer.[8]Kant addedquestions of casuistry to the various sections of theMetaphysic of Customs,as scholia to the system and examples of the way in which the truth of particular questions should be sought.[9]

Vain attempts at definitions of empirical concepts.

But the efforts of ancient and modern philosophers rigorously to define empirical concepts afford more interest than the external form of treatment, as do their efforts to modify or to simplify, or indeed finally to deduce them rationally. The Platonic dialogues, such as theCharmides,theLachetes,theProtagoras,are most instructive in this respect. Here it is sought to define sophrosune, andreia and the other virtues, without arriving at any precise result, or rather arriving at the contradictory one, that each of these virtues isthe whole of virtue,whereas it should only be apartof it. In theRepublicis sought the relation of the four virtues, or rather of three of them, prudence, temperance, and fortitude, with justice, which forms as it were the foundation and unity of the whole. From such discussions arose the affirmation, to be found also in Cicero, that the virtues are inseparable from one another:virtutes ita copulatae connexaeque sunt, ut omnesparticipes sint, nec alia ab alia possit separari.[10]The difficulty of the Platonic inquiry is renewed with all those who have given definitions of the virtues and of the other empirical concepts, because, when they have achieved with much labour a definition which appears satisfactory, it is afterwards always found to be too narrow or too wide. Thus the definition given by Kant and by others (Fichte, Schopenhauer) of egoism, consisting in their view, of considering other individuals as means and not ends, is the definition, not of egoism, but of any form of immorality which debases the Spirit that should be the end, by means of its own caprices. The same is to be said of the definitions given by Fichte as to the duties inherent to this or that condition and state: the duties, for instance, of the learned, who should love truth, communicate it to others, rectify errors, promote culture,[11]and so on. These are all things that form part of the duty, not only of the learned, but of every man. The simplifiers are not more fortunate in their attempts to reduce the number of empirical concepts, for the concepts excluded by them have neither more nor less right torecognition than the others that they have accepted. Schopenhauer, for instance, when he rejects the class of duties toward oneself,[12]should also reject that of duties toward others. For others and ourselves are correlative terms, and we cannot be benevolent to others and malevolent to ourselves, just to others and unjust to ourselves. If this be met with the objection that the empirical self is not the object of duties, we must reply that neither are the empirical "others," but only that Spirit which is in all and constitutes all. In reacting against these unifiers and simplifiers, other philosophers (as for example Herbart) have maintained the indeducibility of the virtues or duties from a single principle, which means that they have received those concepts into their philosophy atomistically, and left them there as something not digested and not digestible, an extraneous element. If they had openly admitted this and drawn from it the legitimate consequence, and for that reason excluded those concepts from philosophy, they would really have contributed toward simplifying and unifying, by making it homogeneous. But Herbart, if he have no other merit, has at any rate declared that the Philosophy of the practical is notcapable of solving all the problems that occur in life, and that we must always rely upon the answer of the heart, upon the delicacy of individual tact. And, therefore, while Kant still preserved casuistic questions in Ethic and professed to solve them rationally, Herbart showed that they lack the determinations that are of true importance in real cases, and that such questions are therefore as a rule either without meaning or insoluble (entweder gar keiner Fragen, oder im Allgemein unauflöslich).[13]

Attempts at eduction.

As concerns the attempt to connect and to deduct the empirical part of treatises from the philosophical, the first example is the Aristotelian division of the virtues into the dianoetic and ethic, with their consequent determination by means of the concept of mediacy (μεσότης) between two extremes. But this Aristotelian method, which was continued by the Scholastics, seemed to others (as for example Schleiermacher) nothing but "a heap of virtues," without any rule and without any certainty; hence he made constant attempts at new classifications and new deductions. Kant recognized that the ethical obligation, that is, respect for the law, is something unique and indivisible, and that to attainfrom that to duties orethica officia,which are many, it is necessary to introduce the consideration of objects.[14]Here he should have stopped, because objects have infinite determinations, are infinite. Hence the enumeration, division and deduction of duties, should be simply pronounced impossible. Instead of doing this, he passed at a bound, how far logical we know not, from the general ethical obligation, to the division of duties into two great classes: of man toward man, and of man toward beings that are not human. He divided the first into duties toward oneself and duties toward other men, the second into that of the duties toward beings beneath man (animals) and those toward beings above him (God).[15]The strangeness of these divisions, which sometimes verge on the comic, can already be seen, though abridged, in the first class of the duties toward oneself, subdivided in its turn into duties toward oneself as an animal or physical being, and duties toward oneself as a moral being; as though human duties are not always to be referred to spirituality and can ever concern physicality or animality. In their first aspect they receive a tripartite division, into the duty of self-preservation,which is violated by suicide, by allowing oneself to be castrated (in order to sing soprano, as used to be done at that time at the San Carlo of Naples and at the Opera of Berlin), by allowing a healthy tooth to be pulled out in order to sell it (as does poor Fantine in the story of theMisérables); into the duty of preserving the species (violation: unnatural use of the sexual impulse);—into the duty of preserving the use of one's own strength (violation: gluttony). The duty of preserving the dignity of man is contained beneath the second heading (violation, lying, covetousness, abjection, etc.[16]). The fact is that the duty of preserving the dignity of man comprises in itself, not only the class that stands first, of duties toward oneself, but also all the other duties toward men, animals, or gods. Fichte feels the difficulty, because he sees that conscience is that which determines our duty on each occasion; but he adds: "This is not enough for science: either we must be able to determinea priorithat which our conscience will affirm in universal, or we must admit that an Ethic, as a pure applied science, is impossible."[17]The second horn of the dilemma was precisely thatof the truth, but Fichte, like Kant, bowed to the supreme power of tradition and clung to the first. He divides duties into mediate and conditioned (toward oneself) and immediate and unconditioned (toward others), and into general and special (those of various states and conditions), deducing from this the fourfold division, resulting from the meeting of general conditioned duties, particular conditioned, general unconditioned, and particular unconditioned. Hegel, who in his youthful writings had denied absolute value to the virtues, and consequently the possibility of collisions between the virtues (for example, in theLife of Jesus,recently published), well defines the altogether empirical character of that treatise, calling it, by reason of its natural element and of the quantitive considerations upon which it is founded, "a natural history of the spiritual world" (eine geistige Naturgeschichte); but since he did not perceive the identity of the concept of duty with that of virtue, he believes in the possibility of a philosophical theory of duties.[18]This is developed by him, as has been said, in the section of Ethicity, applying to it the dialectical rhythm proper to the philosophical universal, and distinguishing in it three moments: of theimmediate natural spirit, which is the family, of the dissension from which arises civil society, and of conciliation, whence arises the State. But notwithstanding the external dialectical form, there is to be found in all this section of the Ethicity at every point, not so much the philosopher properly so-called, as the historian who describes and narrates, the acute and well-balanced politician and moralist. The merit of such a treatise resides precisely, therefore, in the abhorrence of a sham philosophy; with but slight modifications of literary form, it could be developed into a series of excellent historico-political essays. Certain of the propositions of the writing onNatural Law(1802-3)[19]would tend to show that Hegel inclined to look upon the treatment of duties and institutions as nothing more than a provisional classification of historical and changeable material, a thought that is in any case suggested by his whole system. Schleiermacher was among the philosophers of that time who laboured, perhaps, with the greatest tenacity upon the empirical classes, with a view to reducing them to philosophical form; but the results were unhappy, only revealing, by their contradictions persisting after such efforts, theimpossibility of the task. In fact, Schleiermacher sees and does not see the unity of the three spheres of things good, of duties, and of virtues; hence they appeared to him to be three aspects of the same object, and he strangely placed them in analogical connection with three spheres of the natural world, the mechanical, the chemical, and the organic. He, too, starting from a double division and a double antithesis, ideal and temporal, of knowledge and exposition (Darstellen,) arrived at a quadruple division of the virtues, into wisdom and love, discretion and perseverance, which seemed to him to coincide with the four Platonic virtues, of φρόνησις, δικαιοσύνη, σωφροσύνη, and ἀνδρeίa, or with the four cardinal virtues derived from them, to which would correspond the four duties: of right, of vocation, of love, and of conscience.[20]After this, it would be superfluous to proceed to enumerate the ethical systems of contemporary philosophy, noteworthy neither for the ingenuity of their artificial deductions nor for the grandeur of their paradoxes.[21]

IV. Various questions.

IV. The very copious empirical element that fills the books on the Philosophy of the practicaland the attempt to treat it philosophically have also had the injurious effect of distracting their authors from entering deeply into the problems of true and proper philosophy, to which the practical activity gives rise. Thus a history of the aforesaid aberrations would be as rich as a history of the speculation as to the will would be poor. The problem of the theoretic element in the volitional act, or of the theoretic phase of deliberation, has not been developed as it deserved, and as the important pages of the third and seventh books of theEthica Nicomacheaseemed to augur. The question, too, of the priority of the will over the concepts of the useful and of the good and of the practical judgments, is hardly touched by a philosopher here and there, and the Herbartian theory of practical judgments failed to excite any fervour of examination, criticism, or opposition. The concept of good will and of good intention, to which Kant gave a prominent place, is not discussed profoundly, save by Hegel, who goes deeply into the difficult problems of abstract and concrete intention in the introduction and in the second section of thePhilosophy of Law.The other problem, as to the possibility or impossibility of willing without full knowledge, wasnot adequately treated after Descartes and Spinoza.

The practical nature of error.

In Descartes are also to be found the most acute observations as to the practical nature of error. After having stated that it is impossible that God should have given to man any faculty that was not perfect of its kind, he asks himself: "D'où est-ce donc que naissent mes erreurs? C'est à savoir, de cela seul que la volonté, étant beaucoup plus ample et plus étendue que l'entendement, je ne la contiens pas dans les mêmes limites, mais que je l'étends aussi aux choses que je n'entends pas; auxquelles étant de soi indifférente, elle s'égare fort aisément, et choisit le faux pour le vrai et le mal pour le bien: ce qui fait que je me trompe et je pèche." Errors arise from the concourse of two causes, the faculty of knowing and the faculty of choice: "car pour l'entendement seul je n'assure ni ne nie aucune chose, mais je conçois seulement les idées des choses que je puis assurer ou nier."[22]For Descartes the affirmation was an act of the will, and here perhaps lies his mistake and the mistake of those who have followed him in this theory (Rosmini for example); that is to say, they havemistakentheaffirmation,which is theoretical,for thecommunication,which is practical, or they have taken as being of the same degree the general will that is in affirmation through the unity of the spirit, and the particular will that is in error. Spinoza opposes Descartes' theory of error, but in conformity with the deterministic nature of his philosophy, his criticism relates only to the point as to whether the will can be the cause of error when it is not more than a mere abstraction orens rationis;hence errors or theparticulares volitionescan be determined, not indeed by the will and by liberty, buta causis externis[23]The consciousness of the introduction of the will into the theoretical spirit as production of error has been affirmed by Schleiermacher as well as by Rosmini:[24]"It is the will (he writes) that conceals men from themselves: the judgment cannot err if it turn its gaze really upon itself."[25]Baader frankly reduced incredulity to ill-will and moral corruption.[26]

Practical taste.

As to the concept of an immediate form of practical discrimination, independent of theintellectual judgment, it is to be remarked that the faculty oftastein Gracian and in other thinkers of the seventeenth century[27]has a practical rather than a theoretical origin, and that the sentimentalists of Ethic (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and others) were led to posit a moral tact sense. Before Herbart talked of amoral taste (sittlicher Geschmack[28])Jacobi, who saw better than others the analogy between practical and æsthetic facts, had written: "The science of the good, like the science of the beautiful, is subject to the condition oftaste,without which nothing can be decided, and beyond which nothing can be carried. The taste for the good, like that for the beautiful, is formed by means of models of excellence, and original acts are always the work of genius. By means of genius, nature gives laws to art, both as regards the good and the beautiful. Both areliberalarts; they do not allow themselves to be lowered to the level of mechanical arts and placed at the service of industry."[29]

V. The doctrines of feeling.

V. With the mention of a few facts and names, it can be proved that the function of the term "feeling" in the history of philosophyhas been as shown above. We have already said that the peculiarity of the practical form has been asserted by the use of the word "feeling" or similar denominations ("moral sense," "conscience," and the like), especially by the Scottish School, in opposition to intellectualist reductions. Jacobi appealed to the feeling of duty (Gefühl der Pflicht) or conscience in his ethical discussions. In our day, too, it has been affirmed (by Simmel[30]and others), in opposition to abstract and imperative Ethics, that the practical decision is the product of feeling and is not definable by theoreticians. But the principal cause of the importance attached to feeling in the eighteenth century was the æsthetic problem. This is seen in Dubos's book, in the English sentimentalists (who approach the ideas of virtue and of beauty, treating of the moral sense and of the beautiful), and, finally, in the doctrines of Leibnitz himself and of his school, as toconfused cognition,which led to theAestheticaof Baumgarten.

The Wolfians.

We owe the word and the concept offeeling(Gefühland sometimes alsoEmpfindung) principally to the Leibnitzian-Wolfians and to the German thinkers under the influence of Wolff (Mendelssohn, Tetens, Sulzer, Riedel).

Jacobi and Schleiermacher.

By means of thespeculation of Jacobi, on the other hand, feeling was called upon to fulfil the functions of a true and proper metaphysical organ. He had demonstrated in a rigorous and irrefutable manner that the form of the empirical sciences and of the abstract intellect, since it proceeds by nexus of cause and effect, is incapable of attaining to the infinite, and had assigned the affirmation of God to the "sense of the supersensible," to "immediate knowledge," and to "feeling." After Jacobi, the same position was assumed by Schleiermacher, who maintained that it was impossible to know God by means of the intellect and to treat Him as an object, since He is indifference of thought and being. He can be known only by feeling, which is indifference of all determinate functions of ideal and real, of thought and being. The neocriticists and agnostics of to-day, with their appeal to feeling in all truly philosophical questions, are followers, often unconscious and certainly less coherent, of Jacobi and Schleiermacher.

The concept of feeling in the Kantian philosophy can be said to derive its importance from the meeting of two unsatisfied wants, namely, that which sought a concept for the æsthetic activity and that which sought aforma mentisproper to philosophy. Indeed, theCritique of Judgmentcorresponds to feeling, the first part of which consists of an inquiry into the nature of the beautiful and of art. The second part (critique of the theological judgment) is an anticipation of theconcrete concept,or of that organ of speculative thought which theCritique of Pure Reasonhad not discovered.

Hegel.

Feeling, therefore, cannot but lose importance in the Hegelian philosophy, which makes of art a form of knowledge, and of the teleological judgment the logic of the idea or philosophical logic, resolving also in it the demand of Jacobi, whose feeling or immediate knowledge is shown to be logical knowledge and supreme mediation. In Hegel feeling is nothing but a class of spiritual facts, the lowest of all, that in which theory and practice are still indistinct. But this class has a merely psychological value in his system, not philosophical and real (which is not clearly recognised by him). Indeed, feeling, which was absolute knowledge for Jacobi and for Schleiermacher, is placed, not in the sphere of the absolute spirit, nor in that of the objective or practical spirit, but in the subjective spirit, or Psychology. The "doctrineof the three faculties" (Dreivermögenslehre), as was called that elaborated from Mendelssohn to Kant and promulgated in the Kantian philosophy, did not, however, remain without opponents in the nineteenth century; from Krug (1823) to the youthful Fichte, and in more recent times Brentano (1874).

Opponents of the doctrine of the three faculties. Krug.

Krugs confutation is wrongly combated by Hamilton and discredited by Brentano, for it proceeds with perfect correctness, and is founded on the correct philosophical principle that' there are no other activities of the spirit conceivable, save those directed either inwardly or outwardly (immanent or theoretical and transcendent or practical), and that therefore there is no place for feeling, which would be a mixture of the two activities, and consequently a failure of direction or inactivity, nothing, therefore, but a poor, rudimentary knowing or willing, that is, a psychological class, not a philosophical category.

Brentano.

Brentano, returning in a measure to Descartes, constructs the doctrine of the three faculties in a different way, determining them as representation (to which he makes art and the æsthetic activity correspond), judgment (to which corresponds science), and love and hate (to whichcorresponds the practical). Feeling, therefore, does not find a place of its own in the psyche, and that which is wont to be called feeling is either representation, or love and hate. Brentano shows himself inferior to Krug in the philosophical demonstration of the inconceivability of this form of the spirit, but he has the merit of having substituted certain positive elements for the indeterminate word "feeling," although the function exercised by feeling in the development of philosophical thought is more important than Brentano succeeds in perceiving, for among other things he ignores and fails to recognize the relation of the concept of feeling to the demands of speculative thought.[31]

[1]Eutyphron,10.

[2]The history of the enfranchising of Ethic from Religion has been done with especial care by Jodl,Gesch. d. Ethik als philos. Wissensch.vol. I2. (Stuttgart—Berlin, 1906). For Vico, cf. my book,The Philosophy of G. B. Vico(Bari, 1911).

[3]Phil. d. Rechts,§ 4, Zus.;Gesch. d. Philos.ii. pp. 66, 169.

[4]Eth. Nicom.1103.

[5]See above.

[6]Kritik d. prakt. Vern.,ed. Kirchmann, pp. 7-8.

[7]Allg. prakt. Phil.,ed. Hartenstein, p. 107.

[8]Memor.iv., c. 2, §§ 14-16. Schopenhauer also exhaustively,Gründl. d. Moral,inWerke,ed. Grisebach, iii. pp. 603-607.

[9]Metaphys. d. Sitten,ed. Kirchmann, p. 248.

[10]De Finibus,v, c. 23.

[11]System der Sittenlehre,§ 29, inWerke,iv. 346-347.

[12]Gründl. d. Moral,ed., cit., iii. pp. 506-508.

[13]Allg. prakt. Philos.,ed. Hartenstein, pp. 29-30.

[14]Metaphys. d. Sitten,pp. 247-248.

[15]Op. cit.p. 251.

[16]Metaphys. d. Sitten,p. 255sqq.

[17]System d. Sittenlehre,pp. 208.

[18]Philos. d. Rechts,§§ 148, 150.

[19]Werke,i. 323-423.

[20]In theEntwurf e. Systems d. Sittenlehre(inWerke,sec. iii. vol. v.), and cf. the collected writings inWerke,iii. I.

[21]For example, F. Paulsen,System der Ethik,Leipzig, 1906.

[22]Médit.iv.; andRéponses aux 3mes et aux 3mes object.

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