Rather let us note that sometimes there has been something rational in the minds of those who have required the Science of the practical or Ethic to be constructed independently of all Metaphysic. In truth, that programme of the independence of the Science of the practical or Ethic of Metaphysic has had various meanings that it will be well to enumerate briefly. The first meaning was that the Science of the practical, in so far as it was philosophy, should be independent of the aggregate of the philosophical system (Metaphysic). In this case the claim was not acceptable, as we shall see, because it was at variance with the nature itself of philosophy, which is unity. The second meaning was that the Practical, as science, should be kept remote from every form of faith, or feeling or fancifulness (which has sometimes been called "Metaphysic"); and in this case the proposition was inexpugnable, however contestable may have seemed the opportuneity of the meaning given to that word. The third meaning was that the Science of the practical, in so far as it was descriptive, should stand by itself, in order to afford a base for philosophical induction. Use was here made of the erroneous idea, already rejected several times, of philosophy as an intensification of the psychological method, or as a carrying of it on. But in a fourth sense, it was desired finally to withdraw practical description from the perilous care of the philosophers, and it seems to us that with this fourth meaning was expressed a very just demand.
Damaging consequences of the invasions.
What are, in fact, the consequences of the care that philosophers have bestowed upon practical description? We would not wish to use an over-coloured simile, but what happens is very much what would happen if a man were given a baby to suckle. He would press it violently against his dry and arid breast, incapable of nourishing, but well capable of tormenting it. Philosophy, when it approaches the empirical classes, will either begin to criticize their distinctions and abolish them, reducing several classes to one, and then reducing the reduced classes in their turn to a less number, until none are left at all and it finds itself in company with the universal philosophical principle alone, or alone with itself;—or it will contrive to preserve them as classes, deducing them philosophically, and will thus make them rigid and absolute, removing from them that elasticity and fluidity which they derive from their historical character, and converting them from useful classes that they were, into bad philosophemes, concepts contradictory in themselves.
1a. Dissolution of the empirical concepts.
Both these consequences have occurred, for the books of philosophers are full of examples, now of destruction, now of corruption of the empirical classes of the Practical. The treatment of the doctrine of the virtues or of so-called natural rights affords examples of destruction. Striving to distinguish courage from prudence, or justice from benevolence, or on the other hand, egotism from wickedness, they ended by recognizing that true courage is prudence, true prudence courage; that benevolence is justice, justice benevolence; that egotism is wickedness, wickedness egotism, and so on. In this way, all the virtues became one, the virtue of being virtuous, the will for the good, duty. In like manner, by giving philosophical form to the natural rights of life, of liberty, of culture, of property, and so on, they ended by recognizing that all rights merge in one single right, which is that of existence; which latter, indeed, is not a right, but a fact. The passions were reduced from seventy or eighty classes to six or seven fundamental, but these six or seven were in their turn reduced to two only, pleasure and pain, and of these two; it was finally discovered that they constituted one only—life, which is pleasure and pain together. But virtues, rights, passions, possess value in practical description only in so far as they are multiplicity—their value is always plural, never singular. To reduce them to a single class signifies to annul them, as to blow upon a candle signifies to extinguish it and to remain in darkness; darkness is to be understood as without empirical light. Now the philosopher should certainly destroy empirical ideas, but only in so far as they present themselves as philosophical distinctions, that is, in so far as they are empirico philosophical: and in that case it suffices him to show that they are empirical, without pretending to annul them in their own domain also: debellare superbos, but parcere subjectis; that is, he should spare strangers who remain quietly in their own house.
Examples: war and peace, property and communism, and the like.
It might seem desirable to pass in review all these empirical distinctions and questions which the philosophers have thought that they had satisfactorily solved, when they had, on the contrary, passed beyond them. But the theme is inexhaustible, and we cannot here give even a rich selection, comprising the most frequent and important cases. We must limit ourselves to brief mention.—People discuss every day: whether war be an evil, and if it be possible to abolish it; if community of goods should take the place of private property; if rational government be that of liberty or of authority, of democracy or aristocracy, of anarchism or state organization; whether the State should be in the Church or the Church in the State, or side by side and independent; if freedom of thought should be admitted or restrained; if instruction should be free or undertaken by the State; and other similar problems. Now behold the philosopher applying himself to the study of these ideas. Having tested them, he is astonished that people can find in them opposing terms, and make them argument for dispute. In truth (he says), war is intrinsic to reality, and peace is peace in so far as by making an end of one war it prepares another; as Socrates demonstrated in the Phaedo, when, scratching his leg in the place where it had been pressed by the chain, he realized that he could not have experienced that pleasure had he not previously experienced the pain. Nor is property different from communism: the individual declares himself by an individual taking possession of things and becoming their owner; but by so doing he enters into relations and into communion with other individuals, and does business with them. And liberty excludes subjection the less, since sub lege libertas; nor does aristocracy exclude democracy, since the true aristocrat is the bearer of those universal values that are the substance of democracy; hence the more we are aristocratic the more we are democratic, and inversely. Nor does anarchism exclude State organization, because a collection of men, however free we suppose it to be, must nevertheless govern itself according to some laws, and these laws are the State. Then, the ideal State, being the best government of men for their perfectionment, both material and spiritual, accomplishes the work of the Church itself, which is neither above, nor below, nor beside the State, because it is the State. Thus in like manner, no one can grant or abolish freedom of thought, since thought is by definition freedom, and the restraint is thought itself, because liberty coincides with necessity. And finally State instruction cannot but correspond with rational demands, and the free instruction of citizens, if it be really so and not arbitrary and capricious, will be the same as that of the State, or will be changed into the instruction of the State.
Other examples.
Passing to other orders of fact that are less political, but are also argument for practical discussions, we shall refer to the so-called conflicts between duty or interest, as symbolized in the legendary Titus Manlius, when offered the alternative aut reipublicae aut sui suorumque obliviscendi;—or to the so-called question of the two moralities, private and public, in support of which the not legendary Camillo Cavour said in 1860, that if he had done in his private interest what he had done for Italy, he would have deserved the galleys;—or we can refer to questions of classification, and ask whether the kind of man who is socially harmless should be placed side by side with the criminal;—or to those others, famous in Casuistic, relating to capital punishment, homicide, suicide, lies, whether and when they should be permitted, and other similar questions. Here, too, the philosopher will smilingly observe that duties and interests can never be in conflict, because in every given case duty is always one only, and interest is always one only, that of the given case;—he will deny that there is one public and one private morality, because in man, the private person and the citizen, family relations, or those of friendship, and those of political life, are inseparable and indistinguishable;—that every man is bad and good, inoffensive and criminal, and that in the so-called criminal there must also be the non-criminal, if he be given the name of man;—that every punishment is a punishment of death, that is, it causes something to die, and that it is impossible to find a clear distinction between shutting a man up in prison and thus taking from him a more or less large slice of physical life, and taking it from him altogether by hanging or shooting him;—that homicide, as such, is so little a crime that in war it is a duty to commit it;—that a lie, which is silence as to what one knows, is in itself so innocent that no one in the world, save a foolish prater, tells all he knows, and that if it be admitted that one can and should be silent, that is to say, let others be deceived by our silence (though this is eloquent), there is no reason for not admitting that we can also betray them with speech (often less eloquent), as is done with children in order to send them to bed, and with sick persons in order to comfort them;—that, finally, culpable suicide is not the material act of depriving oneself of physical life (a thing done without incurring blame, and indeed with praise and glory, by those who sacrifice themselves for others in war, in epidemics, in dangers of all sorts, and by every one who consumes his own vital strength in a worthy cause), but the killing of the moral life in oneself.
Misunderstanding on the part of philosophers.