Confirmation of the impossibility of a Philosophy of history.
But the unjustified transportation of the concept of mystery from history, where it indicates the future that the past prepares and does not know, into philosophy, causes to be posited as mysteries which give rise to probabilities and conjectures, problems that consist of philosophical terms, and should therefore be philosophically solved. But if the infinite progress and the infinite perfectibility of man is to be affirmed, although we do not know the concrete forms that progress and perfectibility will assume (not knowing them, because now it imports not to know, but to do them), then there is no meaning in positing as a mystery the immortality of the individual soul, or the existence of God; for these are not facts that may or may not happen sooner or later, but concepts that must be proved to be in themselves thinkable and not contradictory, or to determine in what form they are thinkable and not contradictory. Their thinkability will indeed be a mystery, but of the kind that it is a duty to make clear, because synonymous with obscurity or mental confusion. What has so far been demonstrated has been their unthinkability in the traditional form. Nor is it true that they correspond to profound demands of the human soul. Man does not seek a God external to himself and almost a despot, who commands and benefits him capriciously; nor does he aspire to an immortality of insipid ease: but he seeks for that God which he has in himself, and aspires to that activity, which is both Life and Death.
VI
TWO ELUCIDATIONS RELATING TO HISTORIC AND ÆSTHETIC
The relation of desires and actions; and two problems of Historic and of Æsthetic.
From the consideration of the practical activity in its dialectic, and in particular from the theory relating to desire and to action, shines forth, if we mistake not, the full light that has hitherto perhaps been invoked in vain upon certain capital points of Historic and Æsthetic, which, when treating of those disciplines, we were obliged either hardly to touch upon, or to develop in a manner altogether inadequate. The reason of this was that an adequate development, to be convincing, demanded as presupposition, a minute exposition as to the nature, the relations and the constitution of the practical activity, all of them things that could not be treated incidentally.
History and art.
History or historical narrative is, as we know, very closely related to art, in contradistinction to the abstract sciences, since both art and history do not construct concepts of class, but represent concrete and individuated facts. History, however, is not art pure and simple, but is distinguished from it, because artistic representation is in it continually illuminated with the critical distinction between the real and the possible, what has happened and what has been imagined, the existing and the inexisting, with the consequent determinations connected with them, as to this or that particular mode of reality, event, and existence, that have taken place. In every historical narrative are always to be found, understood or implied, the affirmations that the narrative is real, that a different narrative would be imaginary, that the reality of the event in question properly belongs to this or that concept of politics, rights, war, diplomacy, economy, and so on. All this is quite absent from art, which is by nature ingenuous and free of critical discernment; so much so, that hardly have its representations become objects of reflection, than they are dissolved as art, to reappear with a changed appearance (no longer youthful, but virile or senile), as history.