Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept

by Benedetto Croce

But if history is the foundation of the natural sciences, it follows from this that those sciences are always based upon a philosophy. This is indubitable, for the naturalist, however much he be a naturalist, is above all things a man, and a man without a philosophy (or what comes to the same thing, without a religion) has not yet been found. This does not mean that the natural sciences are philosophy. Their special task is classification, and here they are just as independent and autonomous as philosophy is incompetent. But philosophy is competent in philosophy, and so we see that those naturalists who possess philosophic culture avoid the prejudices, errors, and absurdities that spring from bad philosophies, and to which other naturalists are prone. For instance, if the chemist Professor Ostwald had possessed a better philosophy, he would not have abandoned his good chemistry for that doubtful mixture of things—his Philosophy of Nature. And had Ernest Haeckel made an elementary study of philosophy, he would never have given up his researches upon micro-organisms, in order to solve the riddles of the universe and to falsify the natural sciences. Let us limit ourselves to these instances, for our life of to-day supplies innumerable examples of philosophizing men of science, who are as pernicious to science as they are to philosophy and to culture. The antithesis between science and philosophy, of which so many speak, is a dream. The antithesis is between philosophy and philosophy, between true philosophy and that which is very imperfect and yet very arrogant, and manifestly active in the brains of many scientists, though it has nothing to do with the discoveries made in laboratories and observatories.

Action of the natural sciences upon philosophy, and errors in conceiving such relation.

The action of philosophy upon the natural sciences is not constitutive of them, but preparatory. The action of the natural sciences upon philosophy is not even preparatory, but merely incidental and subsidiary, having for its end simplicity of exposition and of memorizing, just as in history. A very common error, derived from a too hasty analysis of the forms of spiritual life, is that of looking upon the empirical and natural sciences as a preparation for philosophy. But in the achievement of the natural sciences, philosophy has been cold-shouldered, and to recover it we must seek pure intuition, which is the necessary and only precedent of logical thought.

Still worse is it, when the natural sciences are considered, not only as preparation, but just as a first sketch, or a chiselling of the marble block, from which philosophy will carve the statue. For this view denies without being aware of it, either the autonomy of the natural sciences, or that of philosophy, according as either the philosophic method or the naturalistic method is held to be the method of truth.

Indeed, in the first case, if the natural sciences be of a philosophic nature and represent a first approximation to philosophy, they must disappear when philosophy is evolved, as the provisional disappears before the definite, as the proof before the printed book. This would mean that natural sciences as such do not exist and that what really exists is philosophy. In the second case, if philosophy have the same nature as the natural sciences, the further development of the first sketch will always be the work of the naturalistic method, however refined and however increased in power we may please to imagine it. Thus, what would really exist would never be philosophy, but always the natural sciences. This erroneous conception therefore reduces itself to a denial, either of the natural sciences or of philosophy; either of the pseudoconcepts or of the pure concepts; a negation that need not be confuted, because the whole of our exposition of Logic is its explicit confutation.

Motive of these errors: naturalistic philosophy.

The genesis of such a psychological illusion resides in the fact that the natural sciences seem to be tormented with the thirst for full and real truth, and philosophy, on the other hand, to be intent solely upon correcting the perversions and inexactitudes of the empirical and natural sciences. But it is a question of likeness or appearance only, because the thirst for truth belongs not to the natural sciences, but to philosophy, which lives in all men, and also in the naturalist. And the philosophic perversions and inexactitudes which have to be corrected do not form part of the natural sciences (which as such affirm neither the true nor the false), but to that philosophy which the naturalist forms and into which he introduces the prejudices derived from his special business.

Philosophy as destroyer of naturalistic philosophy, but not of the natural sciences. Autonomy of these.

The proof of the theory here maintained is that even when philosophy engages in strife with naturalistic prejudices, it dissolves those prejudices, but does not and could not dissolve the sciences which had suggested them. Indeed, a philosopher becoming again a naturalist, cultivates those sciences successfully, just as his philosophizing does not forbid his going into the garden and there scenting and pruning the plants. The naturalistic sciences of language and of art, of morality, of rights and of economics (to take instances from the intellectual world, which seem to have closer contact with philosophy), are not only what is called the empirical stage of the corresponding philosophic disciplines, but persist and will persist side by side with them, because they render services which cannot be replaced. Thus there is no philosophy of language and of art which can expel from their proper spheres, even if it does expel them from its own, empirical Linguistic, Grammar, Phonetics, Morphology, Syntax, and Metric, with their empirical categories, which are useful to memory. Nor can they eliminate the classifications of artistic and literary kinds, and those of the arts according to what are called means of expression, by means of which it is possible to arrange books on shelves, statues and pictures in museums, and our knowledge of artistic-literary history in our memories. Psychology, an empirical and natural science, certainly does not make us understand the activity of the spirit; but it permits us to summarize and to remember very many effective manifestations of the spirit, by classifying as well as may be the species or classes of facts of representation (sensations, intuitions, perceptions, imaginings, illusions, concepts, judgments, arguments, poems, histories, systems, etc.), facts of sentiment, and volitional facts (pleasure, pain, attraction, repulsion, mixed feelings, desires, inclinations, nostalgias, will, morality, duties, virtue, family, judicial, economic, political, religious life, etc.), or by classifying these same facts according to groups of individuals (the Psychology of animals, of children, of savages, of criminals, and of man, both in his normal and abnormal conditions). This wholly extrinsic mode of consideration, which is now prevalent in Psychology, is the source of the remark that it has risen (or has sunk?) to the level of a natural science, and that its method is mechanical, determinist, positive, antiteleological. Sociology, understood not as a philosophic science (—there is no such thing—), but as an empirical science, classifies as well as may be the forms of family and the forms of production, the forms of religion, of science and of art, political and social forms, and constructs series of classifications to summarize the principal forms which human history has assumed in the course of its development. The philosopher expels these classifications from philosophy, as extraneous elements causing pathological processes; but that same philosopher, in so far as he is a complete man, and in so far as he provides for the economy of his internal life and for more easy communication with his fellows, must fashion and avail himself of the empirical. Having ideally destroyed the adjective and the adverb, the epic and the tragic kinds, the virtues of courage and of prudence, the monogamous and the polygamous family, the dog and the wolf, he must yet speak when necessary of adjectives and adverbs, of epics and tragedies, of courage and of prudence, of families formed in this or that way, of the species "dog," as though it were clearly distinguished from the species "wolf."