Genesis of the systematic prejudice and rebellion against it.
But the rebellion against systems has another more serious cause, less literary and more philosophical. Sometimes the demand for a system becomes a systematic prejudice. This fact merits explanation, because thus stated it may reasonably appear to be paradoxical. However could the demand inherent in a function be changed into a prejudice, or into an obstacle to that function? Stated in these terms, it certainly seems inconceivable. But it becomes clear and admissible, when we remember that philosophical enquiry is both induction and deduction, the thinking of distinction and the thinking of unity in distinction. Neither of the two processes, which are one single thing, should be substituted for or dominate the other. If we think the concept of morality, it should be placed in relation to and deduced from the other forms of the spirit and thus from unity; but it must also be thought in itself. The thinking of the peculiar nature of the moral act cannot remain isolated and atomic, but unity in its turn cannot give the character of the moral act, unless this act be present to the spirit and make itself known for what it is. In the process of research, it is possible to deduce the moral act from the consideration of the other activities of the spirit, without thinking it in itself. But here a heuristic process is adopted, a hypothesis is made, and this hypothesis must afterwards be verified, in order to become effective thought and concept. Now the systematic prejudice consists precisely in thinking the unity without thinking the distinctions, in deduction without induction, in changing the hypothesis into a concept without having seriously verified it. Hence analogical constructions (or falsely analogical, and so metaphysical and fantastic), which take the place of philosophical distinctions, and hence the systematic prejudice, which is a false idea of system. Against this rebellion is justified. But the mistake is usually made of discarding the true demand for system through horror of the false, or of denying the utility of the analogical process, which is blameable in the system, but useful in enquiry.
Sacred and philosophical numbers; meaning of the demand which they express.
Another aspect of this same rebellion which has become universal in most recent times, is the distrust of or open hostility towards the search for symmetry, the arrangement of philosophic concepts in dyads, triads, quatriads, or in other suchlike numbers, which precisely express symmetry in the ordering of those concepts. And such distrust will be judged reasonable by any one who recalls the excesses caused by this love of symmetry and the puerilities to which some even of the loftiest philosophers abandoned themselves, owing to their excessive attachment to certain numbers. The pedantry of the Kantian quatriads and triads is truly insupportable, nor are Hegel's triads less artificial. These were very often reduced by his disciples to conjuring tricks and almost to buffoonery. It was natural that there should be a reaction towards the search for the asymmetrical and towards the doctrine that the concepts attained cannot be arranged in a beautiful order, for they change their order from one sphere to another, but that nevertheless they and no others are the concepts of reality—inelegant but honest; asymmetrical but true. The reaction is comprehensible, the distrust justifiable; but the hostility is certainly unjustifiable. If distinct concepts constitute a unity, they must of necessity constitute an order or symmetry, of which certain numbers, that can be called regular, are the expression or symbol. The concepts of an empirical science may be thirty-seven, eighty-three, a hundred and thirteen, or as many as you like according as they are arranged. But the concepts of philosophy will always be dyads, triads, quatriads and the like, that is to say, an organic unity of distinctions and a correspondence of parts. For this reason, the human race has always had sacred numbers in religion and philosophic numbers in philosophy. Let him laugh who wills; but we do not say that he laughs well. The criterion of symmetry must not become a prejudice. It must, however, act as a control upon the enquiry that has been accomplished, since it greatly aids, as a heuristic process, the enquiry that is yet to be made. Astronomers are praised, when, thanks to their calculations, supported by the criterion of proportion and symmetry, they form a hypothesis that a star, unseen at the time, but which the telescope eventually discovers, must be at a certain place in the sky. Why should not a philosopher be equally praised, who deduces that for reasons of symmetry, there must be in the spirit a form, as yet unobserved, or that for the same reasons, there should be eliminated a form which does not seem to be eliminable, but which spoils the symmetry? Why should the spirit be less rhythmical and less symmetrical than the starry sky?
Impossibility of dividing philosophy into general and particular.
When the systematic character of philosophy is conceived in this way, it is seen that the system is not something superadded, like a thread used for binding together the various parts of philosophy and quite external to the objects that it unites, so that we can consider separately the objects and the thread, the parts and the system. In philosophy, none of the parts are without the whole, and the whole does not exist without the parts. Translated into other terms, this means chat there are not particular philosophic sciences, just as there is not a general philosophy. We have made use of this proposition, in order to confute the usual conception of Logic as a prologue to philosophy, and to show how this error (which in the case of Logic is supported by special reasons) is the principal source of other like errors. Thus Metaphysic or Ontology, or some other science, which is supposed to give the unity of the real, of which the special philosophic sciences give only the distinctions, is placed before or after the special philosophic sciences like a prologue or an epilogue. The truth is that general philosophy is nothing but the special philosophic sciences, and vice versa. The plural and the singular cannot be separated in the pure concept, where the plural is plural of the singular, and the singular is singular of the plural.
Evils of the conception of a general philosophy, separated from particular philosophies.
The destruction of this erroneous idea of a general philosophy has direct practical, importance. For, once the so-called science has been constituted, by means of a group of arbitrarily isolated problems, which really belong to the various sciences called particular, we are led to believe that true philosophy consists of a medley, in constant agitation and shock, and that, thanks to this agitation and these shocks, it becomes ever more worthy of itself, that is, of being a medley. But the problems of God and of the world, of spirit and of matter, of thought and of nature, of subject and of object, of the individual and of the universal, of life and death, torn from Logic, from Æsthetic, from the Philosophy of the practical, become insoluble or are solved only in appearance (that is to say, verbally and imaginatively). Many young men, ignorant of all particular philosophical knowledge, attack them as if they were the first step in philosophy, and many old professors find themselves at the end of their lives in the same state of mental confusion as at the beginning, indeed with their confusion increased and henceforth inextricable, owing to the false path that they have followed for so many years. They have not respected philosophy, in their first relations with it; they resemble those men who will never really love a woman, because they failed of respect to women in their youth. On the other hand, the so-called particular philosophical sciences, deprived of some of their organs and become blind or deaf or otherwise maimed, fall into the power of psychologism and empiricism. Hence the empirical and psychological treatment of Morality, of Æsthetic, and of Logic itself. In regard to this evil, now more than ever rampant in philosophic studies, it is necessary to remember, that the history of philosophy teaches that no philosophic progress has ever been achieved by so-called general philosophy, but always by discoveries made in one or other of the so-called special philosophies. The concept of Socrates and the dialectic of Hegel are discoveries in Logic. Kant's concept of freedom is a discovery in Ethics. The concept of intuition is a discovery in Æsthetic. The critique of formalist logic is a discovery in the Philosophy of language. The old idea of God has been dissolved by those most modest, yet greatest of men, who contented themselves with formulating a new proposition on the syllogism or on the will, on art or history, or with defining the abstract intellect or with fixing the limits of the fancy. Had we been obliged to await these solutions from the cultivators of that anæmic general philosophy, the old idea of God would now be more rife than before. And in truth it is still rife among those philosophers of whom we have spoken, for it reappears from the midst of the medley which they stir, either with the name of the Unknowable, or with the old name that still is reverenced.