Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept

by Benedetto Croce

[VII]

THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES

The theory of the forms of knowledge and the doctrine of the categories.

The explanations given as to the various forms of knowledge are also explanations concerning the categories of the theoretic and theoretic-practical spirit: the intuition, the concept, historicity, type, number; and also quality and quantity and qualitative quantity, space, time, movement, and so on. They form part of that doctrine of the categories, in which the account of philosophy in the strict sense is completed. To ask what mathematics or history is, means to search for the corresponding categories; to ask what is the relation between history and mathematics, and in general how the various forms of knowledge are related to one another, means to develop genetically all these forms, which is precisely what we have attempted.

The problem of the classification of the sciences and its practical nature.

But the difficult enquiry as to the forms of knowledge as categories has not been much in favour in recent times. Another problem has, on the other hand, acquired vogue. It has seemed more easy, but that is not so, because though artfully disguised, it is at bottom identical with the preceding problem. Instead of putting the question in the manner indicated above, which implies seeking out the constitution of the theoretic spirit, a modest request has been made for a classification of the various forms of knowledge, a classification of the sciences.

Scant confidence in philosophic thought, and excessive confidence in naturalistic methods, have so operated that, unable to renounce the necessity of dominating the chaos of the various competing sciences and not wishing to have recourse to philosophic systematization, an attempt has been made to classify the sciences like minerals, vegetables, and animals. Even now there exist writers occupying professorships who claim to be specialists in classifying sciences. Volumes on this theme appear with an unprofitable frequency and abundance.

False philosophic character that it assumes.

Certainly, if such writers and professors were to proceed in an altogether empirical manner, corresponding with their declarations, nothing could be said against their labours, beyond advising them not to discuss them philosophically in order that they may not waste time in misunderstandings, and to recognize their slight utility. But, as a fact, none of them contains himself within empirical limits, but each gives some philosophic and rational basis to the classification which he proposes. Thus there appear bipartitions of the sciences into concrete and abstract, into historical and theoromatic(or nomotechnical), into sciences of the successive and sciences of the coexistent, or into real and formal; or tripartitions, into sciences of fact, of law and of value; into phenomenalist, genetic and systematic sciences; and into similar partitions and groups, of which some are old acquaintances and correspond to functions of the spirit that we have already distinguished, while others, on the contrary, must be held to be false, because they confuse under the same name functions that are different and divide functions that are unique. But all of them, true or false, leave the empirical and direct themselves to the problem of Logic and of theoretic Philosophy. This is not the place to criticize them, because substantially it has already been done in the course of the exposition of our theories; and what is left would reduce itself to a criticism of minute errors, which finds a more suitable place in reviews dealing with books of the day than in philosophic treatises. So true is it that those classificatory systems pass with the day that witnessed their birth.