Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept

by Benedetto Croce

The Renaissance and naturalism. Bacon.

This realist, mystical and dialectical current of thought was destined to yield its best fruits some centuries later. For the time being, in the seventeenth century, and yet more in the century that followed, the victory seemed to rest with nominalism, that is to say, with naturalism. In Italy, Leonardo da Vinci laughed at theological and speculative disputes and celebrated, not the mind, but the eye of man, that is, the science of observation. The same tendency appeared in the anti-Aristotelians and naturalists, who placed the natural sciences above scholasticism. In England, the other Bacon, however slight his importance both as philosopher and naturalist, yet has much importance as the symptom and spokesman of the self-assertion of naturalism. In the Novum Organum, the universal of the for the most part claims its rights as against the universal of the necessary and eternal. He does not wish, however, to do away with the latter, but rather to complete it; the syllogism is insufficient, induction also is needed. Philosophy and theology are well where they are, but a science of physics is also needed; philosophic induction, which goes at a leap to first causes, must be accompanied by a gradual induction (the only one that interests the naturalist), which connects particular facts by means of laws more and more general; final causes must be banished from the study of nature, and only efficient causes admitted. Anticipationes naturae, that is to say, the invasions of philosophism into the natural sciences, are to be prohibited. These utterances are far more discreet than those that have so often since been heard.

The ideal of exact science and the Cartesian philosophy.

By another school of this period, on the other hand, the pure concept was wrongly identified with the abstract concept. Thus speculative rationalism took the form of mathematical rationalism and the ideal of philosophy was confused with the ideal of exact science. This tendency is also to be found in Leonardo, who exalted "reason" alone, that is calculation, as outside of and sometimes superior to experience. Galileo expressed similar thoughts later. The Cartesian philosophy is animated with it, that is to say, the philosophy of Descartes and of his great followers, especially Spinoza and Leibnitz. Thus this is especially an intellectualist philosophy, full of empty excogitations and rigid divisions, developed by a mechanical or by a teleological method, which always operated by means of mechanism. It is true that even under these improper forms, philosophic thought progressed. The consciousness of the inner unity of philosophy progressed with Descartes, that of the unity of the real by means of Spinoza's concept of substance, and that of spiritual activity by means of the dynamism of Leibnitz; but Logic remained as a whole the old scholastic logic. The purity of the concept was asserted at the expense of concreteness; thus the concept, in the Logic of those writers, is always something abstract, although its reality is so far recognized that it is thought possible to think with it the most real (the God of Descartes, the substance of Spinoza, the Monad of Leibnitz). The eighteenth century, mathematical, abstractionist, intellectualist ratiocinative, anti-historical, illuminist, reformist, and finally Jacobin, is the legitimate issue of this Cartesian philosophy, which confuses the Logic of philosophy with the Logic of mathematics. France, which was the country of its birth and where it became most firmly rooted and most widely disseminated, owes to it, perhaps even more than to Scholasticism, the mental imprint which it still bears and which the strong Germanic influence that has made itself felt there also in the last century has not sufficed to eradicate. It is only in our day that the country which is the type of the abstract intellect strives to become philosophically more concrete. It is now occupied with æstheticism or intuitionism, and, unless the movement is suffocated or dissipated, it may effect a true revolution in the traditional French spirit.

Adversaries of Cartesianism. Vico.

The opposition to abstractionism had no representatives in the seventeenth century and for a great part of the eighteenth, except among thinkers of but slight systematic powers, with whom it did not progress beyond the logical form of the presentiment and the literary form of the aphorism. In France, Blaise Pascal was one of these, with his anti-Cartesianism, his restriction of the value of mathematics, and his celebration of the reasons of the heart which reason does not know. In Germany there was Hamann, who possessed such a strong sense of tradition, of history, of language, of poetry and of myth, and finally of the truth contained in the principle of the coincidence of opposites which he had met with somewhere in Bruno. The Italian Giambattista Vico was the only great systematic thinker to express opposition to abstractionism and Cartesianism. Prior to and more clearly than Hamann, he perceived the unity of philosophy and history, or as he called it, of philosophy and philology. He conceived thought as an ideal history of reality, immanent in the real history which occurs in time; he abolished the distinctions of the concept as separate species and substituted the notion of degrees or moments, which (as Schelling did after him) he called ideal epochs; he considered the abstractionist and mathematical century which he saw rising before him, as a period of philosophic decadence, and foretold the evil effects of Cartesian anti-historicism. (His presage was fulfilled.) In this way, he sketched a new Logic, very different from that of Aristotle or of Arnaud which was the most recent, a Logic in which he attempted to satisfy Plato and Bacon, Tacitus and Grotius, the idea and the fact. But if the other opponents of abstractionism had very little effect, because of their immaturity and want of system, Vico also was ineffectual, because he was born in Italy precisely at the time when Italy as a productive country was definitely issuing from the circle of European thought and was beginning passively to accept the more popular forms of foreign thought. Finally, Naples, the little country of Vico, was then becoming encyclopædist and sensationalist, and did not really begin to know until a century later the remedy for such evils composed in anticipation by Vico.

Empiricist Logic and its dissolution—Locke, Berkeley and Hume.

The surpassing of the Logic of the abstract concept and the achievement of that of the concrete concept or pure concept or idea, was realized in other ways, primarily by a sort of reduction to the absurd of empiricist and mathematical Logic, in the scepticism which was its result. This reduction to the absurd, this final scepticism, is to be observed in the movement of English philosophy, beginning with Locke or even with Hobbes, to Hume. Locke, starting from perception as his presupposition, derived all ideas from experience, with the sole instrument of reflection; and rejecting innate ideas and looking upon others as more or less arbitrary, he preserved some objectivity to mathematical ideas alone, which relate to what are called primary qualities. Berkeley denies objectivity even to the primary qualities. All concepts, naturalist and mathematical alike, are for him abstract concepts and to that extent without truth. The only truth is the "idea," which means here nothing but sensation or the representation of the individual. His Logic is not empiricist, because it is in no respect Logic. At the most it is an Æsthetic substituted for and given as Logic. It is true, notwithstanding his complete denial of universals—of empirical and abstract, no less than of philosophic, which he never even mentions—that he deludes himself into thinking that he has overcome scepticism; and it is true also that he laid the foundations of a spiritualist and voluntarist conception of reality, which in our opinion should be preserved and adopted by modern thought. But this proves only that his philosophy does not wholly agree with his Logic, and not that his Logic is not the complete denial of the concept and of thought. The logical consequence of Berkeley could not, then, be anything but the scepticism of David Hume, who shakes the very foundation upon which the whole of the science of nature rests, namely, the principle of causality.

Exact science and Kant. The concept of the category.

As the effect of this extreme scepticism, the surpassing of empiricist and abstractionist Logic had to be begun with the restoration of that Logic itself (because that which does not exist cannot be surpassed), that is to say, with the demonstration, against Hume, that the exact science of nature is possible. Such is the principal task of the Critique of Pure Reason, which contains the Logic of the natural and mathematical sciences, thought no longer by an empiricist, but by a philosopher who has surpassed empiricism and recognized that the concepts of experience presuppose the human intellect, which originally constructed them. Leibnitz had already travelled this road, when in a polemic against Locke he maintained that reflection to which Locke appealed, referred back to the innate ideas: for if reflection (he said) is nothing but "une attention à ce qui est en nous et les sens ne nous donnent point ce que nous portons déjà avec nous," how can it ever be denied "qu'il y est beaucoup d'inné en nous, puisque nous sommes, pour ainsi dire, innés à nous mêmes? Peut-on nier qu'il y ait eu nous être, unité, substance, durée, changement, action, perception, plaisir et mille autres objets de nos idées intellectuelles?"[13] The New Essays, in which theses and other similar themes were developed, remained for a time unedited, but appeared opportunely in 1765 to fecundate German thought, and acted upon Kant, together with English empiricism and scepticism, the latter giving the problem and the former almost an attempt at a solution. But the innate ideas of Leibnitz are profoundly transformed in the Kantian concept of the category, which is the formal element and really exists only in the very act of judgment, which it effects. Mathematics are thus secured in their possession, no longer by means of the primary qualities of Locke, but because they arise from the a priori forms of intuition, space and time. The natural sciences are also secured, because the concepts of them are constituted by means of the categories of the intellect, on the data of experience. In other words, mathematical and natural science have value, in so far as they are a necessary product of the spirit.