Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept

by Benedetto Croce

The distinctions of the concept not logical, but real.

Since all subdivision of the logical form of the concept has been excluded, the multiplicity of concepts can be referred only to the variety of the objects, which are thought in the logical form of the concept. The concept of goodness is not that of beauty; or rather, both are logically the same thing, since both are logical form; but the aspect of reality designated by the first is not the same aspect of reality as is designated by the second.

Multiplicity of the concepts, and the logical difficulty arising therefrom. Necessity of overcoming it.

But here arises the difficulty. How can it be that since in the concept we deal with reality, in its universal aspect, we yet obtain so many various forms of reality, that is, so many distinct concepts (for example, passion, will, morality, imagination, thought, and so on), so many universals, whereas the concept should give us the universal. If this variety were not overcome or capable of being overcome by the concept, we should have to conclude that the true universal is not attainable by thought, and to return to scepticism, or at least to that peculiar form of logical scepticism which makes the consciousness of unity an act of the inner life, which cannot be stated in terms of logic; that is, mysticism. The distinction of the concepts, one from another, in the absence of unity, is separation and atomism; and it would certainly not be worth while getting out of the multiplicity of representations if we were then to fall into that of the concepts. For this, no less than the other, would issue in a progressus ad infinitum, for who would ever be able to affirm that the concepts which were discovered and enumerated were all the concepts? If they be ten, why should they not be, if better observed, twenty, a hundred, or fifty thousand? Why, indeed, should they not be just as numerous as the representations, that is to say, infinite? Spinoza, who counted, without mediating between them, two attributes of substance, thought and extension, admitted, with perfect coherence, that two are known to us, but that the attributes of Substance must in reality be considered infinite in number.

Impossibility of eliminating it.

The concept, then, demands that this multiplicity be denied; and we can affirm that the real is one, because the concept, by means of which alone we know it, is one; the content is one, because the form of thought is one. But in accepting this claim, we run into another difficulty. If we jettison distinction, the unity that we attain is an empty unity, deprived of organic character, a whole without parts, a simple beyond the representations, and therefore inexpressible so that we should return to mysticism by another route. A whole is a whole, only because and in so far as it has parts, indeed is parts; an organism is such, because it has and is organs and functions; a unity is thinkable only in so far as it has distinctions in itself, and is the unity of the distinctions. Unity without distinction is as repugnant to thought as distinction without unity.

Unify as distinction.

It follows, therefore, that both terms are reciprocally indispensable, and that the distinctions of the concept are not the negation of the concept, nor something outside the concept, but the concept itself, understood in its truth; the one-distinct; one, only because distinct, and distinct only because one. Unity and distinction are correlative and therefore inseparable.

Inadequateness of the numerical concept of multiplicity.

The distinct concepts, constituting in their distinction unity, cannot, above all, be infinite in number, for in that case they would be equivalent to the representations. Not indeed that they are finite in number, as if they were all alike equally arranged upon one and the same plane, and capable of being placed in any other sort of order, without alteration in their being. The Beautiful, the True, the Useful, the Good, are not the first steps in a numerical series, nor do they permit themselves to be arranged at pleasure, so that we may place the beautiful after the true, or the good before the useful, or the useful before the true, and so on. They have a necessary order, and mutually imply one another; and from this we learn that they are not to be described as finite in number, since number is altogether incapable of expressing such a relation. To count implies having objects separate from one another before us; and here, on the contrary, we have terms that are distinct, but inseparable, of which the second is not only second, but, in a certain sense, also first, and the first not only first, but, in a certain way, also second. We cannot dispense with numbers, when treating of these concepts of the spirit, owing to their convenience for handling the subject; hence we talk, for example, of the ten categories, or of the three terms of the concept, or of the four forms of the spirit. But in this case the numbers are mere symbols; and we must beware of understanding the objects which they enumerate, as though they were ten sheep, three oxen, and four cows.