V

ANALOGOUS ERRORS IN THE THEORY OF

HISTORY AND IN LOGIC

THE better to confirm these criticisms, it will be useful to cast a rapid glance over analogous and opposite errors, due to ignorance as to the true nature of art and its relation to history and to science. These errors have injured alike the theory of history and that of science, Historic (or Historiology) and Logic.

of history.

Historical intellectualism has opened the way to the Criticism of many attempts, made especially during the last two the philosophy centuries and continued to-day, to discover a philosophy of history, an ideal history, a sociology, a historical psychology, or whatever else a science may be called, whose object is to extract from history concepts and universal laws. What must these laws, these universals be? Historical laws and historical concepts? In that case, an elementary acquaintance with the theory of knowledge suffices to make clear the absurdity of the attempt. When such expressions as a historical law, a historical concept are not simply metaphors colloquially employed, they are truly contradictory terms: the adjective is as unsuitable to the substantive as in the expressions ‘qualitative quantity" or "pluralistic monism." History implies concreteness and individuality, law and concept mean abstractness and universality. But if the attempt to extract historical laws and concepts from history be abandoned, and it be merely desired to draw from it laws and concepts, the attempt is certainly not frivolous; but the science thus obtained will be, not a philosophy of

history, but rather, according to circumstances, either philosophy in its various forms of Ethics, Logic, etc., or empirical science with its infinite divisions and subdivisions. The search is in fact either for those philosophical concepts which, as already remarked, are the basis of every historical construction and differentiate perception from intuition, historical intuition from pure intuition, history from art; or already formed historical intuitions are collected and arranged in types and classes, which is exactly the method of the natural sciences. Great thinkers have sometimes donned the ill-fitting cloak of the philosophy of history, and notwithstanding the covering, they have attained philosophical truths of the greatest magnitude. The cloak discarded, the truth has remained. Modern sociologists are rather to be blamed, not so much for the illusion in which they are involved when they talk of an impossible science of sociology, as for the infecundity which almost always accompanies their illusion. It matters little that Esthetic should be called "sociological Esthetic," or Logic, sociological Logic." The grave evil is that such Esthetic is an oldfashioned expression of sensationalism, such Logic verbal and incoherent. The philosophical movement to which we have referred has however borne two good fruits in relation to history. First of all, a keener desire has arisen for a theory of history, that is, a theory of the nature and the limits of history, a theory which, in conformity with the analysis made above, cannot obtain satisfaction save in a general science of intuition, in an Esthetic, in which the theory of history would form a special chapter, distinguished by the insertion of universal functions. Furthermore, concrete truths relating to historical events have often been expressed beneath the false and presumptuous cloak of a philosophy of history; rules and warnings have been formulated, empirical no doubt, yet by no means useless to students and critics. It does not seem possible to deny this utility even to the most recent of philosophies of history, known as historical materialism, which has

thrown a very vivid light upon many sides of social life formerly neglected or ill understood.

The principle of authority, of the ipse dixit, is an Esthetic intrusion by historicity into the domains of science and intrusions into Logic. philosophy which has dominated the schools and substitutes for introspection and philosophical analysis this or that evidence, document, or authoritative statement, with which history certainly cannot dispense. But Logic, the science of thought and of intellectual knowledge, has suffered the most grave and destructive of all disturbances and errors through an imperfect understanding of the æsthetic fact. How could it be otherwise, if logical activity come after and contain in itself æsthetic activity? An inexact Esthetic must of necessity drag after it an inexact Logic.

Whoever opens a logical treatise, from the Organon of Aristotle to the modern works on the subject, must agree that all contain a haphazard mixture of verbal facts and facts of thought, of grammatical forms and of conceptual forms, of Esthetic and of Logic. Not that attempts have been wanting to escape from verbal expression and to seize thought in its true nature. Aristotelian logic itself did not become mere syllogistic and verbalism without some hesitation and indecision. The problem proper to logic was often touched upon in their disputes by the nominalists, realists and conceptualists of the Middle Ages. With Galileo and with Bacon, the natural sciences gave an honourable place to induction. Vico combated formalist and mathematical logic in favour of inventive methods. Kant called attention to the a priori synthesis. Absolute idealism despised the Aristotelian Logic. The followers of Herbart, though still loyal to Aristotle, emphasized those judgements which they called narrative and which have a character altogether differing from that of other logical judgements. Finally, the linguists insisted upon the irrationality of the word, in relation to the concept. But a conscious, sure and radical movement of reform can find no basis or point of departure, save in the science of Esthetic.

Logic in its

essence.

Distinction between logical

judgements.

In a Logic suitably reformed on this basis, this truth must first and foremost be proclaimed, and all its consequences deduced the logical fact, the only logical fact, is the concept, the universal, the spirit that forms, and in so far as it forms, the universal. And if by induction be understood, as sometimes it has been, the formation of universals, and by deduction their verbal development, then it is clear that true Logic can be nothing but inductive Logic. But since by the word " deduction" has been more frequently understood the special processes of mathematics, and the word "induction" those of the natural sciences, it will be best to avoid both words and say that true Logic is Logic of the concept. The Logic of the concept, while employing a method which is both induction and deduction, will employ neither exclusively, that is, it will employ the speculative method which is intrinsic to it.

The concept, the universal, considered abstractly in itself, is inexpressible. No word is proper to it. So true is this, that the logical concept remains always the same, notwithstanding the variation of verbal forms. In respect to the concept, expression is a simple sign or indication. There must be an expression, it cannot be absent; but what it is to be, this or that, is determined by the historical and psychological conditions of the individual who is speaking. The quality of the expression is not deducible from the nature of the concept. There does not exist a true (logical) sense of words. The true sense of words is that which is conferred upon them on each occasion by the person forming a concept.

This being so, the only truly logical (that is, æstheticoand non-logical logical) propositions, the only rigorously logical judgements, must be those whose proper and sole content is the determination of a concept. These propositions or judgements are definitions. Science itself is nothing but a collection of definitions, unified in a supreme definition; a system of concepts, or highest concept.

It is therefore necessary (at least as a preliminary) to exclude from Logic all those propositions which do not

affirm universals. Narrative judgements, not less than those termed non-enunciative by Aristotle, such as the expression of desires, are not properly logical judgements. They are either purely æsthetic propositions or historical propositions. "Peter is passing; it is raining to-day; I am sleepy; I want to read" these and an infinity of propositions of the same kind are nothing but either a mere enclosing in words the impression of the fact that Peter is passing, of the falling rain, of my organism inclining to sleep, and of my will directed to reading, or an existential affirmation concerning those facts. They are expressions of the real or of the unreal, historicalimaginative or pure-imaginative; they are certainly not definitions of universals.

This exclusion cannot meet with great difficulties. It Syllogistic. is already almost an accomplished fact, and the only thing required is to render it explicit, decisive and coherent. But what is to be done with all that part of human thought called syllogistic, consisting of judgements and reasonings based upon concepts? What is syllogistic? Is it to be looked down upon with contempt, as something useless, as has so often been done by the humanists in their reaction against scholasticism, by absolute idealism, by the enthusiastic admiration of our times for the methods of observation and experiment of the natural sciences?— Syllogistic, reasoning in forma, is not the discovery of truth; it is the art of expounding, debating, disputing with oneself and others. Proceeding from concepts already formed, from facts already observed, and appealing to the persistence of the true or of thought (such is the meaning of the laws of identity and contradiction), it infers consequences from those data, that is, it re-states what has already been discovered. Therefore, if it be an idem per idem from the point of view of invention, it is most efficacious in teaching and in exposition. To reduce affirmations to a syllogistic form is a way of controlling one's own thought and of criticizing the thought of others. It is easy to laugh at syllogizers, but, if syllogistic has been born and persists, it must have good reasons of its own. Satire on it can