Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept

by Benedetto Croce

Elimination of a misunderstanding concerning this practical character.

The word "practical" having been pronounced, it behoves us to eliminate a misapprehension which leads to the natural sciences (or simply sciences, as they are also called) being said to be practical, in the same sense as those whose aim is action. Bacon was a fervent apostle of the naturalistic movement of modern times and full of this latter idea or preconception. He proclaimed to satiety that meta scientiarum non aha est quam ut dotetur vita humana novis inventis et copiis; that they propose to themselves potentiae et amplitudinis humanae fines in latim proferre; and that, by means of them, reality ad usus vitae humanae subigitur[1] But in our day also, many theorists do not tire of repeating that the sciences are ordonnées à faction. Now, this does not suffice to describe the natural sciences, because all knowledge is directed to action, art, philosophy, and history alike, which last, by providing knowledge of the actual situation, is the true and complete precedent and fact, preparatory to action.[2] The misapprehension in favour of the natural sciences arises from the vulgar idea that the only practical things in life are eating, drinking, clothes, and shelter. It is forgotten that man does not live by bread alone, and that bread itself is a spiritual food if it increase the force of spiritual life. But further: the natural sciences, just because they are composed of empirical concepts (which are not true knowledge), do not directly subserve action, since in order to act it is necessary to return from them to the precise knowledge of the individual actual situation. That is to say, in ordinary parlance, abstractions must be set aside and it must be seen how things truly and properly stand. The patient, the individual patient, is treated, not the malady; Socrates or Callias (as Aristotle said), not man in general: θεραπευτὸν τὸ καθ' ἕκαστον: knowledge of materia medica does not suffice; the clinical eye is needed. The natural sciences are not directed to action, but are, themselves, actions: their practical character is not extrinsic, but constitutive. They are actions, and are therefore not directed to action, but to aid the cognitive spirit. Thus they subserve action (that is, other actions) only in an indirect way. If an action does not become knowledge, it cannot give rise: to a new action.

Impossibility of unifying them in a concept.

The empirical character (and the practical character in the sense already established) of the natural sciences is commonly admitted in the case of such of them as consist in classifications of facts: for example, of zoology, botany, mineralogy, and also of chemistry, in so far as it enumerates chemical species, and of physics, in so far as it enumerates classes of phenomena or physical forces. The universals of all these sciences are quite arbitrary, for it is impossible to find an exact boundary between the concept of animal (the universal of zoology) and that of vegetable (the universal of botany). Indeed it is impossible to find one between the living and the not living, the organic and the material. Finally, the cellule, which is, for the present at any rate, the highest concept of the biological sciences, is differentiated from chemical facts only in an external way. It will be objected that there is in any case no lack of attempts to determine strictly the supreme concepts of the sciences, such, for instance, as those that place the atom at the beginning of all things and attempt to show each individual fact as nothing but a different aggregate of atoms. There are also those who mount to the concept of ether or of energy and declare all individual facts to be nothing but different forms of energy. Or finally, the vitalists recognize as irreducible the two concepts of the teleological and the mechanical, of organic and inorganic, of life and matter. But in all these cases the natural sciences are deserted, phenomena are abandoned for noumena, and philosophic explanations are offered. These may or may not have value, but they are of no use from the point of view of the natural sciences, or at most ensure to some professor the insipid pleasure of calling an animal "a complex of atoms," heat "a form of energy," and the cellule "vital force."

Impossibility of introducing into them strict divisions.

Since the natural sciences cannot be unified in a concept (hence their ineradicable plurality), and therefore remain unsystematic, a mass of sciences without close relation among themselves, logical distinctions are not possible in any science. No one will ever be able to prove that genera and species must be so many and no more, or describe the truly original character by which one genus may be distinguished from another genus and one species from another species. The animal species hitherto described have been calculated it over four hundred thousand, and those that may yet be described as fifteen millions. These numbers simply express the impotence of the empirical sciences to exhaust the infinite and individual forms of the real and the necessity in which they are placed of stopping at some sort 1 of number, of some hundreds, of some thousands, or of some millions. Those species, however few or many they may be, flow one into the other owing to the undeniable conceivability of graduated, indeed of continuous intermediate forms, which made evident the arbitrariness of the clean cut made into fact by separating the wolf from the dog or the panther from the leopard.

Laws in the natural sciences, and so called prevision.

But some doubt is manifested where we pass from classification and description or from system (as the lack of system of naturalistic classifications is called, by a curious verbal paradox) to the consideration of the laws that are posited in those sciences. It is then perceived that the classification is certainly a simple labour of preparation, arbitrary, convenient, and nominalistic, but that the true end of the natural sciences is not the class but the law. In the compass of the law strict accuracy of its truth is indubitable; so much so that by means of laws it is actually possible to make previsions as to what will happen. This is indeed a miraculous power, which places the natural sciences above every form of knowledge, and endows them with an almost magical force, by means of which man, not contented with knowing what has happened (which is yet so difficult to know), is capable of knowing even what has not yet happened, what will happen, or the future! Prevision(there must be a clear understanding of the concepts) is equivalent to seeing beforehand or prophesying, and the naturalist is thus neither more nor less than a clairvoyant.

Empirical character of naturalistic laws.