Pure intuition, ingenuous representation of reality, representation of feeling, lyricism and personal intonation, are then all equivalent formulæ, all of them definitions of the æsthetic activity and of art. And it would be superfluous to repeat that art thus characterized remains the concrete form of the superior theoretical grades of the spirit. In fact, logical thought or concept is also volition, owing to the unity of the spirit, and the representation of such volition is the logos made flesh, the concept that incorporates itself in language, palpitating with the drama of its becoming. What word of man is there that is not personally and lyrically coloured, whether he communicate the truth of science or narrate the incidents of life? And how could we deny a place among the dramas that agitate human life and art portrays, to that drama of dramas, which is the drama of thought and of the historical comprehension of the real?
[1] B. Croce, Relazioni dei patrioti napoletani col Direttorio e col Consolato e l' idea dell' unità italiana, Napoli, 1902, pp. 69-73.
VII
HISTORICAL ANNOTATIONS
The problem of freedom.
I. For the reasons stated in their place, a history of the concept of freedom would end by becoming almost a general history of philosophy. Denied in different ways in the mechanistic and deterministic conceptions (from the Stoics to Spinoza), and in the theological and arbitraristic (from Epicurus to St. Augustine and the mystics), that concept afterwards continually assumed a more and more conciliatory form; an indication that the question must be put in an altogether different way. This movement culminated in the Kantian theory, in which freedom, defended against the psychologists, is withdrawn from natural causality and affirmed a priori, as causality by means of freedom; but, at the same time, Kant did not succeed in fully justifying it, owing to his failure in the solution of the antitheses, the defect of the Kantian philosophy, which never really became a system. The embarrassments and absurdities to which the unsolved antithesis between liberty and causality gives rise, are sufficiently exemplified in a proposition to be found in the Critique of Practical Reason: "It would be possible to foresee what man will do in the future, if we possessed all the facts; yet he would be perfectly free."[1] But notwithstanding these contradictions and embarrassments, the energetic affirmation of the principle of freedom by Kant (which had an altogether special certitude in Kant, in respect to the other two postulates of the practical reason, God and immortality, from which in this respect it was distinguished) helped to make prevalent the conviction of the impossibility of eliminating that concept or of escaping from it, and made of it the field of battle, where the fortunes of philosophy were decided. The problem of the freedom of willing is really solved or near to a solution, in those philosophies which do not fatigue themselves with it as a particular problem, but treat of it as something to be understood of itself, provided there be a non-mechanistic conception of reality, such as would not need special defence. This happens, not only with sentimentalists and mystics such as Jacobi and Schleiermacher, but also and above all in the Hegelian philosophy. Perhaps no philosopher has been less occupied with the problem of liberty than Hegel, just because he was always occupied with it. The will is free (he contents himself with saying); freedom is the fundamental determination of the will, as gravity is of matter; thus as gravity is matter itself, so is freedom the will. Hegel consequently saw true in the contest between arbitrarism and determinism, recognizing in determinism the merit of having given its value to the content, the datum, in opposition to the certainty of abstract auto-determination, so that freedom understood as free will is considered to be illusion. Free will is both determined and indetermined.[2] But how Hegel could conciliate this theory of freedom with the mechanistic concept of nature that persists in him is another question. His failure to attain to this conciliation was perhaps among the reasons that made his profound solution of the antithesis between determinism and indeterminism seem a vain playing with words.
After Hegel, a return was made to the Kantian doctrine, variously modified, in which is posited, now a double causality, now a composition of diverging forces, now a double point of view, now two worlds, the one included in the other and dominated, the one by the principle of the conservation of energy, the other by that of increase. Such contradictory doctrines are to be found for example in Lotze and Wundt, to the latter of whom belongs the formula that the causal explanation is certainly to be applied to spiritual facts, but a parte post, not a parte ante[3] The philosophy of Bergson represents in a certain way a return to the sound idealistic view, which declares that the dilemma of determinism and indeterminism is surpassed.[4]