Nature of our treatise in respect to the forms of knowledge.
All this amounts to saying that the things we shall discuss concerning the various forms of knowledge are not to be understood as a special Logic, although they are grouped in a second part for literary reasons. There we shall examine one by one the various forms of knowledge, in order to confirm their identity with the forms of awareness and to demonstrate how the characters adopted by them are reducible to those already explained for the others, and how the difficulties found in them are overcome by means of the same principles that we employed to overcome the difficulties presented by the others. In so doing, we shall also gain the advantage of making more clear the doctrines already laid down as to the elementary forms, by fixing our attention upon those manifestations of them which are presented on a larger scale. To those who forget or deny the existence of the pure concept or of the abstract concept, it will be of assistance, in giving the speculative deduction of those forms, to point out the masterpieces of Art, of Philosophy, or of Mathematics, and to invite an examination of their structure. It is true that in our day preference is given to another method, which is not only antiphilosophical but also antipædagogic. This method consists in altogether neglecting philosophic demonstration in the attempt to divert the attention from notable and luminous manifestations of the spirit, in order to devote it to rude and uncertain manifestations. Inscriptions of savages are preferred to the art of Michael Angelo, the philosophy that is still crudely enveloped in religion and custom to that of civilized times, something whose nature none can tell precisely, owing to lack of documents and the elements of research, to what is evidently art and philosophy. Such enquirers adopt precisely an opposite course to that followed by the sciences of observation, which have made telescopes and microscopes to enlarge the little and bring the distant near. They seek for instruments which shall diminish the great and make the near remote. Theirs is a strange empirical caricature of philosophy, which substitutes the chronologically remote for the fundamentally conceptual, and for the logically simple, the materially small, which is not, on that account, simple and is far less transparent. For our part (and we say it in passing), we believe that to furnish examples of where to fix the attention in logical enquiry, the minds of an Aristotle or of a Kant afford all we require, without there being any necessity to have recourse to the psychology of sucklings and idiots. But to study Aristotle and Kant does not suffice for knowledge of the truth of the concept. We must find in all beings of whatever grade and importance, the universal Spirit and its eternal forms.
And since we have studied the first and most ingenuous form of knowledge, Art, in a special volume, we shall here begin our examination of the second of its forms, Philosophy; and first of all, of Philosophy in the strict sense.
[II]
PHILOSOPHY
Philosophy as pure concept and the various definitions of philosophy. Those which deny philosophy.
All the definitions that have ever been given of philosophy will be found to contain the thought that philosophy is the pure concept (or to say the same thing with more words and less precision), that it has the pure concept as its directive criterion. All, be it well understood, save those which, in negating the pure concept, negate also the peculiar nature of philosophy. But such are not, properly speaking, definitions of philosophy, although even these, by contradicting themselves, imply and assume the definition of philosophy as an original form, and so as the pure concept. Such is the case with the theories already examined, of æstheticism, mysticism, and empiricism (and also of mathematicism), to which we shall return. For them, philosophy is art, sentiment, the empirical (or abstract) concept. But it is an art in some way differentiated from the rest of art, a sentiment that acquires a peculiar value, an empirical or abstract concept, which raises itself up and looks over the heads of the others. Thus it is something peculiar, a mode of reflecting sui generis, and so precisely the pure concept. Empiricism especially reveals this intimate contradiction, when it advocates a philosophy consisting of a systematization or synthesis of the results of the empirical sciences. That is to say, it advocates something not given by the empirical sciences, because, were they to give it, they would already be systematized and synthesized of themselves, and the further elaboration asked for would be altogether superfluous.
Those that define it as the science of supreme principles, ultimate causes, etc.; contemplation of death, etc.;