Realism, on the other hand, falls into the opposite fault. So true is it that in vitium ducit culpae fuga § 4. Criticism & caret arte. If the universal be already of realism. real and the individual can add nothing to its reality, in what then does the individuality of the individual consist? We come back to the great difficulty of Plato, who remained imprisoned within the circle of the ideas, unable to return from them to the world, although it had been in order to understand the world that he had excogitated the ideas.
The eclectic theories succeeded no better. One of these was that of Avicenna, afterwards adopted and § 5 Criticism largely developed and disseminated by of the eclectic Thomas Aquinas. With the nominalists, Thomas Aquinas admitted the universalia in re^ but from these, with the conceptualists, he disvi THE ECLECTIC THEORIES 71 tinguished the universalia post rem, the universals man extracts from sensible experience in forming concepts; but also with the realists he maintained the value of the universalia ante rem, the divine thoughts which are realized in the world of natural individuals although they are real in God before they are realized in the world. As a solution it combines in one the difficulties of the opposed theses it would reconcile. Because, if the universals post rem are not one and the same with the universals in re, their difference signifies precisely, that in abstracting the universals from the individuals in which they inhere, we are withdrawing them from the reality which they have only while they adhere to the individuality. The concept, therefore, is an altera tion of the object and renders more remote the real being of things which it is proposed to know by means of the concept. And it comes to this, that for Thomas Aquinas, as for every nominalist, things in their individuality are unknowable.
And the knowability of things cannot be founded on the concept of the universale ante rem. Because this universal also is completely different from the other two, and they therefore cannot guarantee the value of the third which is realized in the mind of man. Be sides, granting to the individual thing the reality of the universal which it actuates, but which is already realized in the mind of God, the reality of this universal makes it impossible to understand in what its ulterior actualization can consist, since it is already full reality, in all its possible determinations, not one of which can be lacking in the idea which God resolves to realize. And the conclusion is that even the universale ante rem, notwithstanding the company of its brethren in re and post rem, remains quite alone, imprisoned in its pure ideality, impotent to explain the being of the individual. If the idea of the world precedes the world, and the idea is real, the world is impossible. And thus we see that even in the dispute concerning universals we are confronted with an insoluble antinomy. The reality of the individual cannot be made intelligible without the reality of the universal; but the reality of the universal renders unintelligible the reality of the individual.
This antinomy is even more insistent and per plexing than that which springs from the inquiry § 6. The concerning the individualizing principle: antinomy of because universalizing the individual is an the umversals. indispensable condition of conceiving it, it is indeed the very act of thinking it. And without the individual, hie et nunc^ there is no nature. Every thing concrete, even the life by which we live, flies off and vanishes. But to universalize is also to idealize, and therefore to see escaping from us, in another direction, everything real, for the real is always particular, determinate and individual.
Modern philosophy began to free itself from the bondage of this antinomy when with Descartes it said: § 7. Metaphysics c°Sito erS° sum- Jt was a beginning in so and empiricism far as in the cogito the concreteness of the in Descartes. individual, the " I " who thinks, coincides with the universality of thought. But it is only a beginning, inasmuch as in Descartes the coincidence between the individual and the universal is only to the extent that the thinking is my thinking, mine who say " cogito," and I who think am; that i^, in so far as the reality which is thought is the thought which thinks. So that, even in Descartes, no sooner is the thought turned away from the subject which is realized in its vi THE KANTIAN NOUMENON 73 own thinking, to the reality which is posited before the subject in virtue of his thinking, than the co incidence disappears, and the abyss between the individual and the universal reopens, and philosophy is constrained anew to oscillate between a world which is intelligible but not real (the rational world of the metaphysicians, from Descartes to Wolf) and a world real indeed, and substantial, but not intelligible, although obscurely felt and able to shine through sensible impressions, unconnected and manifold (the " nature " of the empiricists from Bacon to Hobbes, from Locke to Hume). Either a metaphysic of empty shadows, or a prostration of reason before an unknown and unknowable Absolute!
In Kant we meet a much more vigorous effort than Descartes's to understand the immanence of the universal in the individual, and to compreowe to Kant hend how thereby the concept of the and wherein individual is made possible. This is the a -priori synthesis which binds the intuition to the concept in a relation on which both the one and the other depend, and without which neither the one nor the other is. Yet Kant distinguishes the phenome non from the noumenon, and for him it is the noumenon which is the true root of the individual object of experience, and without experience thought would remain closed within the universal mesh of its pure forms (which are the Scholastic universals expressed in Kantian terminology). And when in Kant's successors the noumenon was dispensed with, and the individual was sought in thought itself, which is the universal, as an element or moment of it, specula tion, even in affirming the impossibility of conceiving an individual other than self-consciousness, can only make self-consciousness intelligible by transcending it in nature and in pure logic. We find once again the kingdom of universals, on which, as on the empire of Charles V., the sun never sets and from which there is no going forth. The universal has indeed separated itself from the individual, by revolting against it and devouring it.
In our own time the dispute concerning universals has come again into the arena in the doctrine of the § 9. The new practical character of mathematical and nominalism of naturalistic laws and concepts. This merits the pragmatists. particuiar consideration, because, while it renews the old nominalism, it appears to indicate, although distantly, that doctrine of the immanence of the universal in the particular which, as we shall see more clearly in the sequel, explains the individual who is only individual, but is not nature.
Several modern epistemologists, approaching philo sophy for the most part from the side of the natural and mathematical sciences, and inspired by observations which spring from the criticism of those sciences (Avenarius, Mach, Rickert, Bergson, Poincare and others), have pointed out that the concepts of the naturalists, like the definitions of the mathematicians, derive their value purely from the definite ends which they serve. They.do not mirror the real, for the real is always diverse and therefore merely individual; and consequently, in the true and proper meaning of the term, they are not knowledge. In the case of the natural sciences they are to be considered symbols, tickets, arbitrary and mnemonic schemes, devised by man in order to guide experience, regulate with the least effort the great press of single perceptions, and communicate their own experience to others in vi PRAGMATIST THEORIES 75 abbreviated formulae. In the case of the mathematical sciences they are conventional constructions and their validity is willed. The validity is inconceivable as existing in itself and in that sense true; it is willed and might therefore be not willed. There is a great variety of these epistemological theories and they may all be denoted by the name pragmatist which some of them adopt, because, in opposing knowledge to action and truth to practical volitional ends, they deny the cognitive character and therefore the truth value of o the universal concepts belonging to the natural and mathematical sciences, and they attribute to such concepts the character of actions directed to the attainment of an end.
The difference between the old nominalism and this modern form lies in this, that whilst the old maintained the necessity of the concept difference6 ^or t^le knowledge of the individual, between the old the modern actually rejects the universal nominalism character of knowledge, and posits the individual himself in his strict indi viduality, confronted with his thought. The know ledge of individuality, therefore, when it is knowledge is reduced to simple immediate intuition. But such difference is itself more a postulate than a real deduc tion; since it is most difficult to prove that thought, even though it be through simple intuition, can fix itself on an object actually individual with no light whatever shed by universality. And when, more over, the object intuited is intuited as not yet an existent (and yet also not as a non-existent); when too the mind, entirely absorbed in contemplation, has not yet discriminated the object at all; it cannot invest it even with the cateo-orv of the intuited without which there is no intuition. For this category implies the concept of being or object or however otherwise we choose to name it. So that bare individuality is not intuitable.
But what is the individual which the new nominalism opposes to the generic concept? It is not strictly a Th 'd Pure extreme individuality stripped of tity of the new every determination. An individual surely and the old is always determinate, formed. A dog, for example, which may be here and now beside me, is not the species dog which the zoologist constructs by abstracting the differences from his ideas of single individual dogs. Without these differences there is no living dog but only an artificial type, useful for systematizing observed forms and for learning about them. Now it is clear that the individual is intuited in so far as it is determined as true to type, however artificial this type may be thought to be. We are just as vividly conscious of the arbitrariness and inexactness of our intuition of the single individual dog, which gives support to the type, as we are of the arbitrariness and inexactness of the type which is abstracted from living experience. And the more our intuition perfects itself by acquiring precision and necessity, the more perfect we see our concept become, throwing off its artificiality and becoming ever more adequate by approaching the inmost essence of the real. If at last we are persuaded, philosophically, that the inmost essence of this dog, as of this stone and of everything that is, is mind, the concept of the dog will make us intuit, and that is, strictly speaking, think, the individual <iog.
But, if we insist on maintaining the presupposition that there is no objectivity except that of the individual, THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL 77 and that thinking must simply be adherent and cannot interpenetrate it with its constructions, and with its concepts, that is, with itself, then it is impossible to escape the consequences, disastrous for knowledge, which followed from the old nominalism and which will follow just the same from the new.
On the other hand, to the old error of expecting to attain the individual without the universal, the nominal- §12. Theprac- *sm °^ t^le m°dern epistemology of the tical character sciences adds a new one. It has its origin o of the new jn fae equivocation which the pragmatist nominalism and...Kant's primacy conception harbours within it, an equiof the practical vocation not really very new.
The well-known theory expounded by Kant in the Critique of Practical Reason, the theory of the primacy of the pure practical reason in its union with the speculative, is pragmatistic. " If practical reason could not assume or think as given, anything further than what speculative reason of itself could offer it from its own insight, the latter would have the primacy. But supposing that it had of itself original a priori principles with which certain theoretical positions were inseparably connected, while these were withdrawn from any possible insight of speculative reason (which, however, they must not contradict), then the question is, which interest is the superior (not which must give way, for they are not necessarily conflicting), whether speculative reason, which knows nothing of all that the practical offers for its acceptance, should take these propositions, and (although they transcend it) try to unite them with its own concepts as a foreign possession handed over to it, or whether it is justified in obstinately following its own separate interest, and according to the canonic of Epicurus rejecting as vain subtlety everything that cannot accredit its objective reality by manifest examples to be shown in experience, even though it should be never so much interwoven with the interest of the practical (pure) use of reason, and in itself not contradictory to the theoretical, merely because it infringes on the interest of the speculative reason to this extent, that it removes the bounds which this latter had set to itself, and gives it up to every nonsense or delusion of imagination? "x The speculative reason, it appears then, is nothing but philosophy from the standpoint of the Critique of Pure Reason, which aims at proving the possibility of mathematics and physics, and supposes no other world beyond that which these sciences propose to know, — nature. The practical reason, on the other hand, is substantially philosophy from the standpoint of mind or of the moral law, which requires us to affirm freedom, immortality and God. Which of the two philosophies must prevail? Since, says Kant, the same reason which speculatively cannot transcend the limits of experience, practically can and does judge according to a priori principles, and enunciates proposi tions which, whilst they are not contrary to the specu lative reason, are inseparably bound up with the practical interests of pure reason itself, that is, are such that in denying them it is impossible to conceive morality, reason in general, and therefore even speculative reason, must admit these propositions. " Admits them, it is true," he hastens to observe, " as something extraneous which has not grown on its own 1 Kant's Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason, Bo^k II. ch. II. sect, iii., Abbott's Translation. Kant had previously said, " To every faculty of the mind we can attribute an interest, that is a principle which contains the condition on which alone the exercise of that faculty depends."
KANT'S PRACTICAL REASON 79 soil, but which is yet sufficiently attested; and it must seek to confront them and connect them with every thing it has in its power as speculative reason, even allowing that they are not its cognitions, but extensions of its use under another aspect, that is, under its -practical aspect" So that the conflict between the two reasons is avoided in so far as the speculative submits to the practical. It submits, according to Kant, not because reason in passing from its theoretical to its practical purpose extends its own cognitions and sees more in them than it saw before; not because the practical reason has nothing to teach the speculative; but because the practical reason rivets the chain which holds the speculative reason confined within the bounds of experience, where alone its use is legitimate according to the Critique of Pure Reason.
Yet, if the propositions, to which the interest of reason in its practical use is inseparably bound, are not § 13. Criticism cognitions, but simply postulates or articles of the Kantian of faith on which only the practical interest pragmatism. can confer valUCj they cannot be compared with the propositions of the speculative reason, and in that case there is neither the possibility of conflict, nor of suppressing them by subordinating them to the speculative reason, and the theory of their primacy is incomprehensible. For if we are to conceive a conflict and the primacy which puts an end to it, we must put the postulates of the practical reason (simple postulates, not cognitions, from the stand point of the mere speculative reason) on the same plane as the cognitions of the speculative. And this is what Kant really does when he appeals from the two reasons to the one unique reason which is always reason, as much in its theoretical as in its practical 8o THE ABSTRACT AND THE POSITIVE CH.
use. And then not only are the propositions of the practical reason postulates for the speculative reason, but all the propositions of the speculative reason are no more than postulates for the practical reason. The one unique reason cannot declare only the propositions of the practical reason and not those of the speculative to be mere postulates. To do so is to cheat it with words and in fact to take the side of the speculative.
In reality, the higher reason, which is philosophy, when first of all it speculates on nature, can only justify it as causality, and is compelled therefore to reject the possibility of a science of freedom. When in the second place it speculates on morality, which is spiritual reality, it discovers freedom. It does not come upon it as something already discovered in its practical use, it discovers it in its higher speculative use, which leads it to seek to give the ground of that spiritual activity whose presence has already been found in the Critique of Pure Reason. And when Kant confines himself to the purely practical value of the principles of the will, he equivocates between practical reason as will which concerns the object of the Critique of Practical Reason and practical reason according to the concept which it acquires in the Critique itself; between what we may call the fact, and what we may call the philosophy, of morality. From the standpoint of the practical reason as philosophy, the postulates are cognitions in the true and proper meaning, they cannot be thought of as simple postulates, not even from the standpoint of the practical reason which is truly such (for practical reason is not the object of a speculation but itself a speculation) nor even from that of the so-called speculative reason, or rather of that THE USEFUL AND THE TRUE 81 reason which in the Critique of Pure Reason is enclosed within the limits of experience, or as we should say to-day is simply within the limits of science. In declaring such principles postulates science discredits them and does not preserve them. And, more over, science does not submit itself to morality, but rather includes morality in itself, by naturalizing the moral act, which then comes to be considered as a simple fact conditioned by definite principles to which no necessary and absolute value is to be attributed.
Pragmatism in so far as it characterizes Kant's doctrine of the primacy of the practical reason is a kind of naturalistic scepticism. Every of the new form of pragmatism is scepticism in so far epistemological as it depreciates an act of cognition in order to appreciate it as a practical act. There cannot be a practical act with no cognitive value, that is, an act which does not posit before the mind an objectively and universally valid reality.
So far as philosophy is concerned the Kantian moral has no (moral) value unless the postulates, to which the practical use of reason is inseparably bound, are true and proper cognitions. So likewise with regard to philosophy, the economic character of the concepts of science, according to the new pragmatists, is not really and truly economic, unless the schemes and symbols of science in order to be useful are true. We ought, therefore, rather to say that they are useful in so far as they have a truth. Pragmatic truth is different from the truth of the ideas or perceptions of the individual mind, and yet it is only by virtue of these that pragmatic truth is possible.
It is said indeed that the purpose these schemes and G Av J symbols, which are fashioned by the will, serve, is that of directing, and imposing order on, the mass of single and particular facts of experience; but is it not quite clear that they could not render this service were the cognitive character of these particular experiences cancelled? Moreover, each of these particular experiences may be thought of as useful, however superseded its usefulness may be; but it can only be useful on the condition that it is true, that it has its own proper value as experience. So in very truth is every naturalistic concept useful in so far as it effectively permeates the intuition of the particular with itself, for it is precisely in so doing that it is itself made possible as a true and proper concept.
The source of error in this matter is always in not looking at the unity of universal and particular, „ T, for it is in that unity that individuality unity of the consists. We think of the universal as universal and the antecedent or consequent of the particular, as posited outside it and pre sented to thought. This in its turn is due to our o thinking abstractly of the two abstract moments, which analysis discovers in the individual. They then become elements of the individuality thought (which by itself is inert and inorganic) rather than moments of the individual thinking.
Thus in philosophy to-day as in Aristotle's time there is keenly felt the need of individuality as a § 16. The concreteness of the real. In the philoindividual. sophies of pure experience, of intuitionism and of aestheticism there is a struggle against the abstractions of the thought which universalizes experience by including it in itself. But philosophy vi THE NEED FOR THE INDIVIDUAL 83 has never succeeded in ridding itself of the ancient alternative between the empty concept and the blind intuition. On the one hand we are offered the light, the transparency of thought to itself, the subjective elaboration of the immediate data; an elaboration which leaves the data far behind and loses all trace of them. On the other hand we are offered the datum, the immediate, the positive, the concrete, that which is hie et nunc but never succeeds in attaining the individual. To-day all are athirst for individuality; but what sort of thing is this in dividuality to which we must cling if we would escape from the fathomless ocean of thought and from its schemes devoid of any theoretical bearing? Any one who reflects will see that it is the same question which Aristotle was driven to ask when dissatisfied with the Platonic idealism. It remains to-day unanswered.
If we would reply to this question we must first direct attention to the origin of the idea of this need for the individual in the Socratic positive char- and Platonic doctrine. The consciousacter of the ness of thought as reality detached from the pure immediate object of experience, for so it began to take shape for us in the Platonic speculation, made the want felt of that individual element which had wholly slipped through its meshes. What was lacking in this thought? It is clear from the Aristotelian polemic against the theory of the ideas, and from the efforts which Plato himself made in his speculation to conceive the relation of the ideas to nature, that the defect of the ideas, apparent at once, and apparent always whenever in the history of philosophy thought has been alienated from )C empirical reality, is this: the ideas have been con ceived as ideas of the reality and not as the reality itself, just as the idea of a house which an architect is going to construct is not the house. Now the idea of an architect is a self-consistent reality in the architect's mind which may never be even trans lated into reality; and to understand its being we have not got to go to the constructed house. We say that so far as the idea is concerned it can arise in any one's mind who conceives it. In the house, instead of ideas and reality in general there already is the reality. We leave out the actual house when we think the ideas. We think of the idea as the beginning or cause of it. So that when ideas are in question they are actually thought of as the principle of the reality, which means that the concept of the ideas is integrated in the concept of the reality. This reality, when the ideas are posited as the thinking of it, is no other than the ideas themselves but with one difference only: the ideas are not real; the ideas realized are the reality. The real, which for Plato and so many after him is the characteristic of nature, is opposed to the ideal, which is the characteristic of thinking, and they are conjoined only in so far as the ideal has existence and the real is existence.
When Plato says that what really exists, or, to speak precisely, is, is rather the idea than the thing, he means the existing or being in thought, not the being which Kant, and so many with him, distinguished by the fact that it has not the mark of the concept. The distinction is one which Plato himself allows when he opposes ideas to things. Neither Plato nor any one else has ever affirmed that the idea of a horse is a horse one can ride.
WHAT POSITIVE MEANS 85 Now for Aristotle nature, the individual, is pre cisely that which is to be and not only ought to § 18. The be. It is the positive. The positive is positive. no longer jn fier^ \^ is an effect Or con clusion of a process. It is conceived, not as the principle only nor as the process always going on and never complete, but as the already formed result. The doing, which unfolds it, has given place to the fact; the process of its formation is exhausted. This is what we all mean by positive. The historical fact is positive when it is no longer the ideal of a man or of a race but a de facto reality which no one can make not be. It impresses itself, therefore, with a force which allows the mind no choice. It appears as what the mind in the purely theoretical form of its working must accept. Every fact of nature in so far as it is an observed fact is positive. It is not what will be, but what is, or to be precise, what has been. Consequently we describe a man as positive, not in so far as in his speculation and action he attains an ideal end, which might not have existed had he not brought it to pass, but in so far as he is already an effect of the past, what no one can unmake. The positive is the terra firma on which we can walk securely.
Thought, as Plato conceived it, and as it has ever since been conceived, as the universal which is not the simple particularizing of single things, lacks, not all reality, but that reality realized which is the positive. It lacks it we already know, and it cannot generate it; since the idea while it is unreal in regard to that other reality the individual, is in itself completely realized. And the individual of which the idea goes in search is precisely the positive.
There are, however, two different ways in which even the positive itself may be understood. Because, if the positive be what has been posited, jective and the it may be either what is posited by the objective subject for whom it is positive, or posited for the subject by others. The positive of which thought as pure universal has need cannot be the positive posited by the subject. And for this reason the Platonic ideas (and the same is true of the Cartesian ideas and even of the Hegelian Logos) are themselves already positive, inasmuch as they are only thinkable in so far as they are already real (real as ideas) and have not to be realized. Yet they have not the same title to be called positive that the things which are to arise from them have, nor are they real therefore in regard to these. That is to say, the mind which thinks of ideas, and of ideas alone, thinks the ideas already real: it thinks them, therefore, as a positive reality (it imagines them, we may say, as the objects of a real positive experience in the hyperuranion). When the mind, however, thinks the ideas in relation with things it is then the things which are positive and not the ideas, in such wise that in relation to the things themselves the ideas in spite of their transcendence can no longer be thought of as already effected fact, something positive to which the sub jective process of the mind which refers to them is posthumous. The ideas in so far as they serve for the knowledge of things, and fulfil therefore their peculiar function in thinking, are intrinsic to the mind and are valued for what they are worth to it. They are reproduced by avd^vrjcn^ without which their existence within the mind would be actually useless and null.
In other words, the ideas so far as they are immanent in the mind are not in any sense positive, they imply