Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept

by Benedetto Croce

Individuals and error.

But it is not necessary in yielding to the generous feeling for human fraternity to exaggerate in this last direction. The gratitude that we feel is not deserved by them; at the most, it is God or the universal spirit or Providence who deserves it. They did not wish to serve the truth and did not serve it, save through consequences which are not their work. One-sided and abstract optimism has intruded here also; and perceiving in error the element of suggestion, it has altogether cancelled the category of error in favour of that of suggestion and has pronounced that man always seeks the true, as he always wills the good. Certainly; but there is the man who stops at his individual good, fruges consumere natus; and there is the man who progresses to the universal good. There is the man who combines words to give himself and others the illusion of knowing what he does not know and of being able to attend to his own pleasures without further trouble; and there is the man who combines words with anxious soul and spirit intent, venator medii, a hunter of the concept. Here, too, the truth is neither in the optimism nor in the pessimism, but in the doctrine, which conciliates and surpasses them both. Nor does it matter that owing to the defect of abstract optimism that very philosopher, who did more than any other to reveal the hidden richness of the dialectical principle, was not able to look deeply into the problem of error.

The conscience of humanity well understood knows how to do justice to all men, without, on that account, confounding him who seeks with him who errs, the man of good will with the utilitarian. It does justice to them, because in every man, indeed at every instant in the life of every man, it discovers all those various spiritual moments, both inferior and superior. Error and the search for truth are continually intertwined. Sometimes a beginning is made with research, and it ends with an obstinate persistence in the suggestion that has been made, which is converted into a result and an erroneous affirmation. At others a beginning is made, with the deliberate intention of escaping difficulties by means of some sort of a combination of ideas; and that combination arouses the mind and becomes a suggestion for research, which is followed until peace is found in the truth. Each one of us is at every moment in danger of yielding to laziness and to the seduction of error and has hope of shaking off that laziness and following the attraction of truth. We fall and rise up again at every instant; we are weak and strong, cowardly and courageous. When we call another weak and cowardly, we are condemning ourselves; when we admire another as strong and courageous, we idolize the strength and courage which is active within us. When we are in the presence of a complex product, as, for example, a faith, a doctrine, a book, it would be naïve and fallacious to look upon it as only error or as only suggestion. For it is both the one and the other; that is to say, it contains equally the moments of error properly so-called, and the other moments of suggestion and search; the voluntary interposition of obstacles to the truth and the voluntary removal of such obstacles; the disfigured image of the truth and the outline of the truth. Sometimes we are unable to say of ourselves whether we are erring or are seeking, whether we believe that we have found the whole truth or only discovered a ray of it. The logical criticism which implacably condemns us seems to be unjust, although we cannot contest its arguments which impose the truth upon our thought. We feel that that truth was in a way sought, seen for a moment, and almost possessed in that spiritual state of ours, which has been summarily and abruptly condemned by others as altogether erroneous.

The double aspect of errors.

For this reason even that which has been rejected and blamed as false from one point of view must be accepted and honoured from another as an approach to truth. Empiricism is perverse in so far as it is a construction opposed to the philosophic universal, but it is innocuous and indeed beneficial in so far as it is an attempt to rise from pure sensation and representation to the thinking of the universal. Scepticism as error annuls the theoretic life; but as suggestion it is necessary to the demonstration of the impossibility of dwelling in that desert when all false doctrines have been annulled. Mythologism presents this double aspect in a yet clearer manner; religion is the negation of thought, but it is also in another aspect a preparation for thought; the myth is both a travesty and a sketch of the concept; hence every philosophy feels itself adverse to myth and born from myth, an enemy and a daughter of religions. In what is empirically defined as religion or as a body of religious doctrines, for example, in Christianity, in its myths and in its theology, there is so much of truth and suggestion of truth that it is possible to affirm (always from the empirical point of view) the superiority of that religion over a well-reasoned but poor, a correct but sterile philosophy. Nevertheless, a period of reverence, of attentive harkening, of philosophic study and criticism, which is not pure scepticism, succeeds to a period of encyclopædism, of irreligious scepticism, of enlightenment, and of Voltaireism. Those who in the nineteenth or in this twentieth century have repeated the Voltairean scepticism and have jibed at religion have with good reason been considered superficial of intellect and soul, vulgar and trivial people. The philosophy of the eighteenth century has filled and filled well the office of enemy of religion; that of the nineteenth century has disdained to give blows to the dead and has adopted towards religion the attitude of a pious daughter and diligent heir. For our part we are persuaded that the inheritance of religion has not been well and thoroughly utilized. This inheritance is at bottom indistinguishable from the philosophic inheritance, for is there not religion, in, for instance, the Cartesian idea of God, which unifies the two substances and guarantees with its truth the certainty of our knowledge? And is it not also philosophy, that is to say, the concept (in however gross a form), of the immanent Spirit which is a self-distinguishing unity and certainty of itself?

Last form of the methodological error; Hypothesism.

We have now attained to the theory of research, yet we cannot abandon the survey of the necessary forms of error without mentioning a new form which arises precisely from the confusion between truth and the search for the conditions preparatory to truth, between truth and hypothesis. This error, which converts Heuristic into Logic, may be called hypothesism. It asserts that in regard to truth man can do nothing more than propose hypotheses, which are said to be more or less probable, so that his fate is not dissimilar to the punishments which were assigned to Tantalus, Sisyphus, and the Danaids. But in the kingdom of the True, differently from that of Erebus: