[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.
Criticism of the philosophy of history.
Historical intellectualism has opened the way to the many attempts, made especially during the last two 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 Æsthetic should be called "sociological Æsthetic," or Logic, "sociological Logic." The grave evil is that such Æsthetic is an old-fashioned 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 Æsthetic, 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.
Æsthetic intrusions into Logic.
The principle of authority, of the ipse dixit, is an intrusion by historicity into the domains of science and 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 Æsthetic 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 Æsthetic 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 Æsthetic.
Logic in its essence.