Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at Free Literature (online soon
in an extended version, also linking to free sources for
education worldwide ... MOOC's, educational materials,...)
Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.

PHILOSOPHY OF THE

PRACTICAL

ECONOMIC AND ETHIC

TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN OF

BENEDETTO CROCE

BY

DOUGLAS AINSLIE

B.A. (OXON.), M.R.A.S.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1913

Benedetto Croce's Philosophy of the Spirit, in the English translation
by Douglas Ainslie, consists of 4 volumes (which can be read separately):
1. Aesthetic as science of expression and general linguistic. (Second augmented
   edition. A first ed. is also available at Project Gutenberg.)
2. Philosophy of the practical: economic and ethic.
3. Logic as the science of the pure concept.
4. Theory and history of historiography.
--Transcriber's note.

NOTE

Certain chapters only of the third part of this book were anticipated
in the study entitled _Reduction of the Philosophy of Law to the
Philosophy of Economy,_ read before the Accademia Pontaniana of Naples
at the sessions of April 21 and May 5, 1907 (_Acts,_ vol. xxxvii.);
but I have remodelled them, amplifying certain pages and summarizing
others. The concept of economic activity as an autonomous form of the
spirit, which receives systematic treatment in the second part of the
book, was first maintained in certain essays, composed from 1897 to
1900, and afterwards collected in the volume _Historical Materialism
and Marxist Economy_ (2nd edition, Palermo, Sandron, 1907).

B. C.

NAPLES,

19_th April_ 1908.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

"A noi sembra che l' opera del Croce sia lo sforzo più potente che il
pensiero italiano abbia compiuto negli ultimi anni."--G. DE RUGGIERO in
_La Filosofia contemporanea,_ 1912.

"Il sistema di Benedetto Croce rimane la più alta conquista del
pensiero contemporaneo."--G. NATOLI in _La Voce,_ 19th December 1912.

Those acquainted with my translation of Benedetto Croce's _Æsthetic
as Science of Expression and General Linguistic_ will not need to be
informed of the importance of this philosopher's thought, potent in its
influence upon criticism, upon philosophy and upon life, and famous
throughout Europe.

In the Italian, this volume is the third and last of the _Philosophy
of the Spirit, Logic as Science of the Pure Concept_ coming second in
date of publication. But apart from the fact that philosophy is like
a moving circle, which can be entered equally well at any point, I
have preferred to place this volume before the _Logic_ in the hands of
British readers. Great Britain has long been a country where moral
values are highly esteemed; we are indeed experts in the practice,
though perhaps not in the theory of morality, a lacuna which I believe
this book will fill.

In saying that we are experts in moral practice I do not, of course,
refer to the narrow conventional morality, also common with us, which
so often degenerates into hypocrisy, a legacy of Puritan origin; but
apart from this, there has long existed in many millions of Britons a
strong desire to live well, or, as they put it, cleanly and rightly,
and achieved by many, independent of any close or profound examination
of the logical foundation of this desire. Theology has for some
taken the place of pure thought, while for others, early training
on religious lines has been sufficiently strong to dominate other
tendencies in practical life. Yet, as a speculative Scotsman, I am
proud to think that we can claim divided honours with Germany in the
production of Emmanuel Kant (or Cant).

The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed with us a great
development of materialism in its various forms. The psychological,
anti-historical speculation contained in the so-called Synthetic
Philosophy (really psychology) of Herbert Spencer was but one of the
many powerful influences abroad, tending to divert youthful minds
from the true path of knowledge. This writer, indeed, made himself
notorious by his attitude of contemptuous intolerance and ignorance
of the work previously done in connection with subjects which he was
investigating. He accepted little but the evidence of his own senses
and judgment, as though he were the first philosopher. But time has
now taken its revenge, and modern criticism has exposed the Synthetic
Philosophy in all its barren and rigid inadequacy and ineffectuality.
Spencer tries to force Life into a brass bottle of his own making, but
the genius will not go into his bottle. The names and writings of J. S.
Mill, of Huxley, and of Bain are, with many others of lesser calibre,
a potent aid to the dissolving influence of Spencer. Thanks to their
efforts, the spirit of man was lost sight of so completely that I
can well remember hearing Kant's great discovery of the synthesis _a
priori_ described as moonshine, and Kant himself, with his categoric
imperative, as little better than a Prussian policeman. As for Hegel,
the great completer and developer of Kantian thought, his philosophy
was generally in even less esteem among the youth; and we find even the
contemplative Walter Pater passing him by with a polite apology for
shrinking from his chilly heights. I do not, of course, mean to suggest
that estimable Kantians and Hegelians did not exist here and there
throughout the kingdom in late Victorian days (the names of Stirling,
of Caird, and of Green at once occur to the mind); but they had not
sufficient genius to make their voices heard above the hubbub of the
laboratory. We all believed that the natural scientists had taken the
measure of the universe, could tot it up to a T--and consequently
turned a deaf ear to other appeals.

Elsewhere in Europe Hartmann, Haeckel, and others were busy measuring
the imagination and putting fancy into the melting-pot--they offered
us the chemical equivalent of the wings of Aurora. We believed them,
believed those materialists, those treacherous neo-Kantians, perverters
of their master's doctrine, who waited for guileless youth with mask
and rapier at the corner of every thicket. Such as escaped this ambush
were indeed fortunate if they shook themselves free of Schopenhauer,
the (personally) comfortable philosopher of suicide and despair, and
fell into the arms of the last and least of the Teutonic giants,
Friedrich Nietzsche, whose spasmodic paragraphs, full of genius but
often empty of philosophy, show him to have been far more of a poet
than a philosopher. It was indeed a doleful period of transition for
those unfortunate enough to have been born into it: we really did
believe that life had little or nothing to offer, or that we were all
Overmen (a mutually exclusive proposition!), and had only to assert
ourselves in order to prove it.

To the writings of Pater I have already referred, and of them it may
justly be said that they are often supremely beautiful, with the
quality and cadence of great verse, but mostly (save perhaps the volume
on _Plato and Platonism,_ by which he told the present writer that he
hoped to live) instinct with a profound scepticism, that revelled in
the externals of Roman Catholicism, but refrained from crossing the
threshold which leads to the penetralia of the creed.

Ruskin also we knew, and he too has a beautiful and fresh vein of
poetry, particularly where free from irrational dogmatism upon Ethic
and Æsthetic. But we found him far inferior to Pater in depth and
suggestiveness, and almost devoid of theoretical capacity. Sesame for
all its Lilies is no Open Sesame to the secrets of the world. Thus,
wandering in the obscure forest, it is little to be wondered that we
did not anticipate the flood of light to be shed upon us as we crossed
the threshold of the twentieth century.

It was an accident that took me to Naples in 1909, and the accident
of reading a number of _La Critica,_ as I have described in the
introduction to the _Æsthetic,_ that brought me in contact with the
thought of Benedetto Croce. But it was not only the _Æsthetic,_ it was
also the purely critical work of the philosopher that appeared to me at
once of so great importance. To read Hegel, for instance, after reading
Croce's study of him, is a very different experience (at least so I
found it) to reading him before so doing.

Hegel is an author most deeply stimulative and suggestive, but any
beginner is well to take advantage of all possible aid in the difficult
study.

To bring this thought of Hegel within the focus of the ordinary
mind has never been an easy task (I know of no one else who has
successfully accomplished it); and Croce's work, _What is living
and what is dead of the Philosophy of Hegel,_ as one may render the
Italian title of the book which I hope to translate, has enormously
aided a just comprehension, both of the qualities and the defects of
that philosopher. This work appeared in the Italian not long after the
_Æsthetic,_ and has had an influence upon the minds of contemporary
Italians, second only to the _Philosophy of the Spirit._ To clear away
the débris of Hegel, his false conception of art and of religion, to
demonstrate his erroneous application of his own great discovery of
the dialectic to pseudo-concepts, and thus to reveal it in its full
splendour, has been one of the most valuable of Croce's inestimable
contributions to critical thought.

I shall not pause here to dilate upon the immense achievement of Croce,
the youngest of Italian senators, a recognition of his achievement
by his King and country, but merely mention his numerous historical
works, his illuminative study of Vico, which has at last revealed that
philosopher as of like intellectual stature to Kant; the immense tonic
and cultural influence of his review, _La Critica,_ and his general
editorship of the great collection of _Scrittori d' Italia._ Freed
at last from that hubbub of the laboratory, from the measures and
microscopes of the natural scientists, excellent in their place, it is
interesting to ask if any other contemporary philosopher has made a
contribution to ethical theory in any way comparable to the _Philosophy
of the Practical._ The names of Bergson and of Blondel at once occur to
the mind, but the former admits that his complete ideas on ethics are
not yet made known, and implies that he may never make them entirely
known. The reader of the _Philosophy of the Practical_ will, I think,
find that none of Bergson's explanations, "burdened," as he says, with
"geometry," and as we may say with matter, from the obsession of which
he never seems to shake himself altogether free, are comparable in
depth or lucidity with the present treatise. The spirit is described by
Bergson as memory, and matter as a succession of images. How does the
one communicate with the other? The formula of the self-creative life
process seems hardly sufficient to explain this, for if with Bergson we
conceive of life as a torrent, there must be some reason why it should
flow rather in one channel than in another. But life is supposed to
create and to absorb matter in its progress; and here we seem to have
entered a vicious circle, for the intuition presupposes, it does not
create its object. As regards the will, too, the Bergsonian theory of
the Ego as rarely (sometimes never once in life) fully manifesting
itself, and our minor actions as under the control of matter, seems
to lead to a deterministic conception and to be at variance with the
thesis of the self-creation of life.

As regards Blondel, the identification of thought and will in the
philosophy of action leads him to the position that the infinite is not
in the universal abstract, but in the single concrete. It is through
matter that the divine truth reaches us, and God must pass through
nature or matter, in order to reach us, and we must effect the contrary
process to reach God. It is a beautiful conception; but, as de Ruggiero
suggests, do we not thus return, by a devious and difficult path, to
the pre-Hegelian, pre-Kantian, position of religious platonicism?[1]

This, however, is not the place to discourse at length of other
philosophies. What most impresses in the Crocean thought is its
profundity, its clarity, and its _completeness,--totus teres atque
rotundus._ Croce, indeed, alone of the brilliant army of philosophers
and critics arisen in the new century, has found a complete formula for
his thought, complete, that is, at a certain stage; for, as he says,
the relative nature of all systems is apparent to all who have studied
philosophy. He alone has defined and allocated the activities of the
human spirit; he alone has plumbed and charted its ocean in all its
depth and breadth.

A system! The word will sound a mere tinkling of cymbals to many
still aground in the abstract superficialities of nineteenth-century
scepticism; but they are altogether mistaken. To construct a system
is like building a house: it requires a good architect to build
a good house, and where it is required to build a great palace it
requires a great genius to build it successfully. Michael Angelo
built the Vatican, welding together and condensing the works of many
predecessors, ruthlessly eliminating what they contained of bad or of
erroneous: Benedetto Croce has built the Philosophy of the Spirit.
To say of either achievement that it will not last for ever, or that
it will need repair from time to time, is perfectly true; but this
criticism applies to all things human; and yet men continue to build
houses--for God and for themselves. Croce is the first to admit the
incompleteness, the lack of finality of all philosophical systems, for
each one of them deals, as he says, with a certain group of problems
only, which present themselves at a definite period of time. The
solution of these leads to the posing of new problems, first caught
sight of by the philosopher as he terminates his labours, to be solved
by the same or by other thinkers.

And here it may be well to state very briefly the basis on which rests
the _Philosophy of the Spirit,_ without attempting to do anything more
than to give its general outline. The reader should imagine himself
standing, like bold Pizarro, on his "peak of Darien," surveying at a
great distance the vast outline of a New World, which yet is as old as
Asia.

The Spirit is Reality, it is the whole of Reality, and it has two
forms: the theoretic and the practical activities. Beyond or outside
these _there are no other forms of any kind._ The theoretic activity
has two forms, the intuitive and individual, and the intellectual or
knowledge of the universal: the first of these produces images and is
known as _Æsthetic,_ the second concepts and is known as _Logic._ The
first of these activities is altogether independent, self-sufficient,
autonomous: the second, on the other hand, has need of the first, ere
it can exist. Their relation is therefore that of double degree. The
practical activity is the _will,_ which is thought in activity, and
this also has two forms, the economic or utilitarian, and the ethical
or moral, the first autonomous and individual, the second universal,
and this latter depends upon the first for its existence, in a manner
analogous to _Logic_ and to _Æsthetic._

With the theoretic activity, man understands the universe, with the
practical, he changes it. There are no grades or degrees of the Spirit
beyond these. All other forms are either without activity, or they are
verbal variants of the above, or they are a mixture of these four in
different proportions.

Thus the Philosophy of the Spirit is divided into _Æsthetic, Logic,
and Philosophy of the Practical_ (Economic and Ethic). In these it is
complete, and embraces the whole of human activity.

The discussion of determinism or free will is of course much more
elaborated here than in the Æsthetic, where exigencies of space
compelled the philosopher to offer it in a condensed form. His solution
that the will is and must be free, but that it contains two moments,
the first conditioned, and that the problem should be first stated in
terms of the Hegelian dialectic, seems to be the only one consonant
with facts. The conclusion that the will is autonomous and that
therefore we can _never_ be obliged to do anything against our will may
seem to be paradoxical, until the overwhelming argument in proof of
this has been here carefully studied.

Croce's division of the practical activity into the two grades of
Economic and Ethic, to which Kant did not attain and Fichte failed
fully to perceive, has for the first time rendered comprehensible much
that was hitherto obscure in ancient history and contemporary history.
The "merely economic man" will be recognised by all students of the
_Philosophy of the Practical,_ where his characteristics are pointed
out by the philosopher; and a few years hence, when Croce's philosophy
will have filtered through fiction and journalism to the level of
the general public, the phrase will be as common as is the "merely
economic" person to-day.

For indeed, all really new and great discoveries come from the
philosophers, gradually filtering down through technical treatises and
reviews, until they reach the level of prose fiction and of poetry,
which, since the _Æsthetic,_ we know to be one and the same thing with
different empirical manifestations. In truth, the philosophers alone
go deeply enough into the essence of things to reach their roots. Thus
some philosophy, generally in an extremely diluted form, becomes part
of every one's mental furniture and thus the world makes progress and
the general level of culture is raised. Thought is democratic in being
open to all, aristocratic in being attained only by the few--and that
is the only true aristocracy: to be on the same level as the best.

Another discovery of Croce's, set forth in this volume for the first
time in all the plenitude of its richness, is the theory of Error.
The proof of the practical nature of error, of its necessity, and of
the fact that we only err because we will to do so, is a marvel of
acute and profound analysis. Readers unaccustomed to the dialectic may
not at first be prepared to admit the necessary forms of error, that
error is not distinct, but opposed to truth and as such its simple
dialectic negation, and that truth is thought of truth, which develops
by conquering error, which must always exist in every problem. The full
understanding of the Crocean theory of error throws a flood of light
on all philosophical problems, and has already formed the basis of at
least one brilliant study of contemporary philosophy.

To the reduction of the concept of law to an economic factor, which
depends upon the priority and autonomy of Economic in relation to
Ethic, is devoted a considerable portion of the latter part of the
_Philosophy of the Practical,_ and it is easy to see that an elaborate
treatment of this problem was necessary, owing to the confusion as
to its true nature that has for so long existed in the minds of
thinkers, owing to their failure to grasp the above distinction. In
Great Britain indeed, where precedent counts for so much in law,
the ethical element is very often so closely attached as to be
practically indistinguishable from it, save by the light of the
Crocean analysis. In the _Logic as Science of the Pure Concept_ will
be found much to throw light upon the _Philosophy of the Practical,_
where the foreshortening of certain proofs (due to concentration upon
other problems) may appear to leave loopholes to objection. Thought
will there be found to make use of language for expression, though
not itself language; and it will be found useless to seek logic in
words, which in themselves are always æsthetic. For there is a duality
between intuition and concept, which form the two grades or degrees of
theoretic knowledge, as described also in the _Æsthetic._ There are
two types of concept, the _pure_ and the _false_ or _pseudo-concept,_
as Croce calls it. This latter is also divided into two types of
representation--those that are concrete without being universal (such
as the cat, the rose), and those that are without a content that can
be represented, or universal without being concrete, since they never
exist in reality (such are the triangle, free motion). The first
of these are called empirical pseudo-concepts, the second abstract
pseudo-concepts: the first are represented by the natural, the second
by the mathematical sciences.

Of the _pure concept_ it is predicated that it is ineliminable, for
while the pseudo-concepts in their multiplicity are abolished by
thought as it proceeds, there will always remain one thought namely,
that which thinks their abolition. This concept is opposed to the
pseudo-concepts: it is ultra or omni-representative. I shall content
myself with this brief mention of the contents of the _Philosophy of
the Practical_ and of the _Logic_ upon which I am now working.

Since the publication of _Æsthetic as Science of Expression and General
Linguistic,_ there has been some movement in the direction of the study
of Italian thought and culture, which I advocated in the Introduction
to that work. But the Alps continue to be a barrier, and the thought of
France and of Germany reaches us, as a rule, far more rapidly than that
of the home of all the arts and of civilization, as we may call that
Italy which contains within it the classical Greater Greece. A striking
instance of this relatively more rapid distribution of French thought
is afforded by the celebrated _Lundis_ of Sainte-Beuve, so familiar to
many readers; yet a critic, greater in depth than Sainte-Beuve, was
writing at the same period--greater in philosophical vision of the
relations of things, for the vision of Sainte-Beuve rarely rose above
the psychological plane. For one reader acquainted with the _History
of Italian Literature_ of De Sanctis, a hundred are familiar with the
_Lundis_ of Sainte-Beuve.

At the present moment the hegemony of philosophical thought may be
said to be divided between Italy and France, for neither Great Britain
nor Germany has produced a philosophical mind of the first order.
The interest in Continental idealism is becoming yearly more keen,
since the publication of Bergson's and of Blondel's treatises, and of
Croce's _Philosophy of the Spirit._ Mr. Arthur Balfour, being himself
a philosopher, was one of the first to recognise the importance of
the latter work, referring to its author in terms of high praise in
his oration on Art delivered at Oxford in the Sheldonian Theatre. Mr.
Saintsbury also has expressed his belief that with the _Æsthetic_ Croce
has provided the first instrument for scientific (_i.e._ philosophical,
not "natural" scientific) criticism of literature. This surely is well,
and should lead to an era of more careful and less impartial, of more
accurate because more scientific criticism of our art and poetry.

I trust that a similar service may be rendered to Ethical theory and
practice by the publication of the present translation, which I believe
to be rich with great truths of the first importance to humanity,
here clearly and explicitly stated for the first time and therefore
(in Vico's sense of the word) "created," by his equal and compatriot,
Benedetto Croce.

 Then leaning upon the arm of time came Truth, whose radiant face,

 Though never so late to the feast she go, hath aye the foremost place.

DOUGLAS AINSLIE.

ATHENAEUM CLUB, PALL MALL, _January_ 1913.

[1] G. de Ruggiero, _La Filosofia contemporanea,_ Laterza, Bari, 1912.

CONTENTS

FIRST PART

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN GENERAL

FIRST SECTION

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS RELATIONS

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY AS A FORM OF THE SPIRIT 3

Practical and theoretic life--Insufficiency of descriptive distinctions
--Insufficiency of the psychological method in philosophy--Necessity of
the philosophical method--Constatation and deduction--Theories which
deny the practical form of the spirit--The practical as an unconscious
fact: critique--Nature and practical activity--Reduction of the
practical form to the theoretical: critique--The practical as thought
in action--Recognition of its autonomy.

II

NEGATION OF THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF FEELING 21

The practical and the so-called third spiritual form: feeling--Various
meanings of the word: feeling, a psychological class--Feeling as a
state of the spirit--Function of the concept of feeling in the History
of philosophy: the indeterminate--Feeling as forerunner of the æsthetic
form--In Historic: preannouncement of the intuitive element--In
philosophical Logic: pre-announcement of the pure concept--Analogous
function in the Philosophy of the practical--Negation of
feeling--Deductive exclusion of it.

RELATION OF THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY WITH THE THEORETICAL 33

Precedence of the theoretical over the practical--The unity of
the spirit and the co-presence of the practical--Critique of
pragmatism--Critique of psychological objections--Nature of theoretic
precedence over the practical: historical knowledge--Its continual
mutability--No other theoretic precedent--Critique of practical
concepts and judgments--Posteriority of judgments to the practical
act--Posteriority of practical concepts--Origin of intellectualistic
and sentimentalistic doctrines--The concepts of end and means--Critique
of the end as plan or fixed design--Volition and the unknown--Critique
of the concept of practical sciences and of a practical Philosophy.

IV

INSEPARABILITY OF ACTION FROM ITS REAL BASE AND PRACTICAL NATURE OF THE
THEORETIC ERROR 53

Coincidence of intention and volition--Volition in the abstract
and in the concrete: critique--Volition thought and real volition:
critique--Critique of volition with unknown or ill-known base
--Illusions in the instances adduced--Impossibility of volition with
erroneous theoretical base--Forms of the theoretic error and problem
as to its nature--Distinction between ignorance and error: practical
origin of latter--Confirmations and proofs--Justification of the
practical repression of error--Empirical distinctions of errors and the
philosophic distinction.

V

IDENTITY OF VOLITION AND ACTION AND DISTINCTION BETWEEN VOLITION AND
EVENT 73

Volition and action: intuition and expression--Spirit
and nature--Inexistence of volitions without action and
inversely--Illusions as to the distinctions between these
terms--Distinction between action and succession or event--Volition
and event--Successful and unsuccessful actions: critique--Acting
and foreseeing: critique--Confirmation of the inderivability of the
value of action from success--Explanation of facts that seem to be at
variance.

VI

THE PRACTICAL JUDGMENT, HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE PRACTICAL 86

Practical taste and judgment--Practical judgment as historical
judgment--Its Logic--Importance of the practical judgment--Difference
between practical judgment and judgment of event--Progress in action
and progress in Reality--Precedence of the Philosophy of the practical
over the practical judgment--Confirmation of the philosophic incapacity
of the psychological method.

VII

PRACTICAL DESCRIPTION, RULES AND CASUISTIC 103

Justification of the psychological method and of empirical and
descriptive disciplines--Practical Description and its literature
--Extension of practical description--Normative knowledge or
rules: their nature--Utility of rules--The literature of rules and
its apparent decadence--Relation between the arts (collections
of rules) and philosophic doctrines--Casuistic: its nature and
utility--Jurisprudence as casuistic.

VIII

CRITIQUE OF THE INVASIONS OF PHILOSOPHY INTO PRACTICAL DESCRIPTION AND
INTO ITS DERIVATIVES 121

First form: tendency to generalize--Historical elements that
persist in the generalizations--Second form: literary union of
philosophy and empiria--Third form: attempt to put them in close
connection--Science of the practical, and Metaphysic: various
meanings--Injurious consequences of the invasions--1st, Dissolution of
empirical concepts--Examples: war and peace, property and communism,
and the like--Other examples--Misunderstandings on the part of the
philosophers--Historical significance of such questions--2nd, False
deduction of the empirical from the philosophic--Affirmations as to
the contingent changed into philosophemes--Reasons for the rebellion
against rules--Limits between philosophy and empiria.

IX

HISTORICAL NOTES 144

I. Distinction between history of the practical principle and history
of liberation from the transcendental--II. Distinction of the practical
from the theoretical--III. Minglings of the Philosophy of the
practical with Description--Vain attempts at a definition of empirical
concepts--Attempts at deduction--IV. Various questions--Practical
nature of error--Practical taste--V. Doctrines of feeling--The
Wolfians--Jacobi and Schleiermacher--Kant--Hegel--Opponents of the
doctrine of the three faculties. Krug--Brentano.

SECOND SECTION

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS DIALECTIC

NECESSITY AND FREEDOM IN THE VOLITIONAL ACT 173

The problem of freedom--Freedom of willing and freedom of action:
critique of such distinction--The volitional act, both necessary and
free--Comparison with the æsthetic activity--Critique of determinism
and arbitrarism--General form of this antithesis: materialism and
mysticism--Materialistic sophisms of determinism--Mysticism of doctrine
of free will--Doctrine of necessity-liberty and idealism--Doctrine
of double causality; of dualism and agnosticism--Its character of
transaction and transition.

II

FREEDOM AND ITS OPPOSITE. GOOD AND EVIL 192

Freedom of action as reality of action--Inconceivability of
the absolute absence of action--Non-freedom as antithesis and
contrariety--Nothingness and arbitrariness of non-liberty--Good as
freedom and reality, and evil as its opposite--Critique of abstract
monism and of dualism of values--Objections to the irreality of
evil--Evil in synthesis and out of synthesis--Affirmative judgments
of evil as negative judgments--Confirmations of the doctrine--The
poles of feeling (pleasure and pain); and their identity with the
practical opposites--Doctrine relating to pleasure and happiness:
critique--Empirical concepts relating to good and evil--To have to
be, ideal, inhibitive, imperative power--Evil, remorse, etc.; good,
satisfaction, etc.--Their incapacity for serving as practical
principles--Their character.

THE VOLITIONAL ACT AND THE PASSIONS 215

The multiplicity of volitions and the struggle for unity--Multiplicity
and unity as good and evil--Excluded volitions and passions or
desires--Passions and desires as possible volitions--Volition as
struggle with the passions--Critique of the freedom of choice--Meaning
of the so-called precedence of feeling over the volitional
act--Polipathicism and apathicism--Erroneity of both the opposed
theses--Historical and contingent meaning of these--The domination of
the passions, and the will.

IV

VOLITIONAL HABITS AND INDIVIDUALITY 229

Passions and states of the soul--Passions understood as volitional
habits--Importance and nature of these--Domination of the passions
in so far as they are volitional habits--Difficulty and reality of
dominating them--Volitional habits and individuality--Negations of
individuality for uniformity and criticism of them--Temperament
and character--Indifference of temperament--Discovery of one's
own being--The idea of "vocation"--Misunderstanding of the right
of individuality--Wicked individuality--False doctrines as to the
connection between virtues and vices--The universal in the individual,
and education.

V

DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRESS 246

Multiplicity and unity: development--Becoming as synthesis of
being and not-being--Nature as becoming. Its resolution in the
Spirit--Optimism and pessimism: critique--Dialectic optimism--Concept
of cosmic progress--Objections and critique--Individuals and
History--Fate, Fortune, and Providence--The infinity of progress
and mystery--Confirmation of the impossibility of a Philosophy of
history--Illegitimate transference of the concept of mystery from
History to Philosophy.

VI

TWO EXPLANATIONS RELATING TO HISTORIC AND ÆSTHETIC 262

Relation between desires and actions; and two problems of Historic
and Æsthetic--History and art--The concept of existentiality in
history--Its origin in the Philosophy of the practical: action and
the existing, desires and the non-existent--History as distinction
between actions and desires, and art as indistinction--Pure fancy and
imagination--Art as lyrical or representation of feelings--Identity
of ingenuous reality and feeling--Artists and the will--Actions and
myths--Art as pure representation of becoming, and the artistic form of
thought.

VII

HISTORICAL NOTES 273

I. The problem of freedom--II. The doctrine of evil--III. Will
and freedom--Conscience and responsibility--IV. The concept of
duty--Repentance and remorse--The doctrine of the passions--Virtues
and vices--V. The doctrine of individuality: Schleiermacher--Romantic
theories and most modern theories--VI. The concept of development and
progress.

THIRD SECTION

UNITY OF THE THEORETICAL AND THE PRACTICAL

Double result: precedence of the theoretical over the practical, and
of the practical over the theoretical--Errors of those who maintain
the exclusive precedence of the one or the other--Problem of the
unity of this duality--Not a duality of opposites--Not a duality of
finite and infinite--Perfect analogy of the two forms: theoretic and
practical--Not a parallelism, but a circle--The circle of Reality:
thought and being, subject and object--Critique of the theories as
to the primacy of the theoretical or of the practical reason--New
pragmatism: Life conditioning Philosophy--Deductive confirmation of the
two forms, and deductive exclusion of the third (feeling).

SECOND PART

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS SPECIAL FORMS

FIRST SECTION

THE TWO PRACTICAL FORMS: ECONOMIC AND ETHIC

DISTINCTION OF THE TWO FORMS IN THE PRACTICAL CONSCIOUSNESS 309

The utilitarian or economic form, and the moral or ethical
form--Insufficiency of the descriptive and psychological
distinction--Deduction and necessity of integrating it with
induction--The two forms as a fact of consciousness--The
economic form--The ethical form--Impossibility of eliminating
them--Confirmations in fact.

II

CRITIQUE OF THE NEGATIONS OF THE ETHICAL FORM 323

Exclusion of materialistic and intellectualistic criticisms--The
two possible negations--The thesis of utilitarianism against the
existence of moral acts--Difficulty arising from the presence of
these--Attempt to explain them as quantitative distinctions--Criticism
of it--Attempt to explain them as facts, either extraneous to the
practical or irrational, and stupid--Associationism and evolutionism.
Critique--Desperate attempt: theological utilitarianism and mystery.

CRITIQUE OF THE NEGATIONS OF THE ECONOMIC FORM 337

The thesis of moral abstractionism against the concept of the
useful--The useful as means, or as theoretic fact--Technical and
hypothetical imperatives--Critique: the useful is a practical fact
--The useful as the egoistic or the immoral--Critique: the useful
is amoral--The useful as ethical minimum--Critique: the useful
is premoral--Desperate attempt: the useful as inferior practical
conscience--Confirmation of the autonomy of the useful.

IV

RELATION BETWEEN ECONOMIC AND ETHICAL FORMS 348

Economic and ethic as double degree of the practical--Errors
arising from conceiving them as co-ordinated--Disinterested
actions: critique--Vain polemic conducted with such Supposition
against utilitarianism--Actions morally indifferent, obligatory,
supererogatory, etc. Critique--Comparison with the relation between
art and philosophy--Other erroneous conceptions of modes of
action--Pleasure and economic activity, happiness and virtue--Pleasure
and pain and feeling--Coincidence of duty with pleasure--Critique of
rigorism or asceticism--Relation of happiness and virtue--Critique of
the subordination of pleasure to morality--No empire of morality over
the forms of the spirit--Non-existence of other practical forms; and
impossibility of subdivision of the two established.

V

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMY AND THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF ECONOMY 364

Problem of the relations between Philosophy and Science of economy
--Unreality of the laws and concepts of economic Science--Economic
Science founded on empirical concepts but not empirical or
descriptive--Absoluteness of its laws--Their mathematical
nature--Its principles and their character of arbitrary postulates
and definitions--Its utility--Comparison of Economy with Mechanic,
and reason for its exclusion from ethical, æsthetic, and logical
facts--Errors of philosophism and historicism in Economy--The
two degenerations: extreme abstractism and empiristical
disaggregation--Glance at the history of the various directions of
Economy--Meaning of the judgment of Hegel as to economic Science.

VI

CRITIQUE OF THE CONFUSIONS BETWEEN ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF
ECONOMY 382

Adoption of the economic method and formulæ on the part of
Philosophy--Errors that derive from it--1st, Negation of philosophy
for economy--2nd, Universal value attributed to empirical concepts.
Example: free trade and protectionism--3rd, Transformation of the
functions of calculation into reality--The pretended calculus of
pleasures and pains; and doctrines of optimism and pessimism.

VII

HISTORICAL NOTES 391

I. Greek Ethic and its ingenuousness--II. Importance of Christianity
for Ethic--The three tendencies that result from it: utilitarianism,
rigorism, and psychologism--Hobbes, Spinoza--English Ethic--Idealistic
Philosophy--III. E. Kant and his affirmation of the ethical
principle--Contradictions of Kant as to the concept of the useful,
of prudence, of happiness, etc.--Errors that derive from it in
his Ethic--IV. Points for a Philosophy of Economy--The inferior
appetitive faculty--Problem of politics and Machiavellism--Doctrine
of the passions--Hegel and the concept of the useful--Fichte and the
elaboration of the Kantian Ethic--V. The problem of the useful and of
morality in the thinkers of the nineteenth century--Extrinsic union
of Ethic and of economic Science, from antiquity to the nineteenth
century--Philosophic questions arising from a more intimate contact
between the two--VII. Theories of the hedonistic calculus: from
Maupertuis to Hartmann.

SECOND SECTION

THE ETHICAL PRINCIPLE

CRITIQUE OF MATERIALISTIC AND OF FORMALISTIC ETHIC 425

Various meanings of "formal" and "material"--The ethical principle
as formal (universal) and not material (contingent)--Reduction
of material Ethic to utilitarian Ethic--Expulsion of material
principles--Benevolence, love, altruism, etc.; and critique of
them--Social organism, State, interest of the species, etc. Critique
of them--Material religious principles. Critique of them--"Formal" as
statement of a merely logical demand--Critique of a formal Ethic with
this meaning: tautologism--Tautological principles: ideal, chief good,
duty, etc. Critique of them--Tautological significance of certain
formulæ, material in appearance--Conversion of tautological Ethic into
material and utilitarian Ethic--In what sense Ethic should be formal;
and in what other sense material.

II

THE ETHICAL FORM AS ACTUALIZATION OF THE SPIRIT IN UNIVERSAL 440

Tautological Ethic, and its partial or discontinuous connection with
Philosophy--Rejection of both these conceptions--The ethical form
as volition of the universal--The universal as the Spirit (Reality,
Liberty, etc.)--Moral actions as volitions of the Spirit--Critique of
antimoralism--Confused tendency of tautological, material, religious
formulæ in relation to the Ethic of the Spirit--The Ethic of the Spirit
and religious Ethic.

HISTORICAL NOTES 452

I. Merit of the Kantian Ethic--The predecessors of Kant--Defect of
that Ethic: agnosticism--Critique of Hegel and of others--Kant and the
concept of freedom--Fichte and Hegel--Ethic in the nineteenth century.

THIRD PART

LAWS

LAWS AS PRODUCTS OF THE INDIVIDUAL 465

Definition of law--Philosophical and empirical concept of society--Laws
as individual product: programmes of individual life--Exclusion of
the character of constriction: critique of this concept--Identical
characters of individual and social laws--Individual laws as the sole
real in ultimate analysis--Critique of the division of laws into
judicial and social, and into the sub-classes of these. Empiricity of
every division of laws--Extension of the concept of laws.

II

THE CONSTITUTIVE ELEMENTS OF LAWS. CRITIQUE OF PERMISSIVE LAWS AND OF
NATURAL LAW 481

The volitional character and the character of class--Distinction of
laws from the so-called laws of nature--Implication of the second
in the first--Distinction of laws from practical principles--Laws
and single acts--Identity of imperative, prohibitive, and permissive
laws--Permissive character of every law and impermissive character
of every principle--Changeability of laws--Empirical considerations
as to modes of change--Critique of the eternal Code or natural
right--Natural right as the new right--Natural right as Philosophy
of the practical--Critique of natural right--Theory of natural right
persisting in judicial judgments and problems.

UNREALITY OF LAW AND REALITY OF EXECUTION. FUNCTION OF LAW IN THE
PRACTICAL SPIRIT 497

Law as abstract and unreal volition--Ineffectually of laws
and effectuality of practical principles--Exemplificatory
explanation--Doctrines against the utility of laws--Their
unmaintainability--Unmaintainability of confutations of them--Empirical
meaning of these controversies--Necessity of laws--Laws as preparation
for action--Analogy between practical and theoretical Spirit: practical
laws and empirical concepts--The promotion of order in reality and in
representation--Origin of the concept of plan or design.

IV

CONFUSION BETWEEN LAWS AND PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES. CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL
LEGALISM AND OF JESUITIC MORALITY 511

Transformation of principles into practical laws: legalism--Genesis
of the concept of the practically licit and indifferent--Its
consequence: the arbitrary--Ethical legalism as a simple special case
of the practical--Critique of the practically indifferent--Contests
of rigorists and of latitudinarians and their common error--Jesuitic
morality as doctrine of fraud on moral law--Concept of legal
fraud--Absurdity of fraud against oneself and against the
moral conscience--Jesuitic morality not explainable by mere
legalism--Jesuitic morality as alliance of legalism with theological
utilitarianism--Distinction between Jesuitic practice and doctrine.

V

JUDICIAL ACTIVITY AS GENERICALLY PRACTICAL ACTIVITY (ECONOMIC) 526

Legislative activity as generically practical--Vanity of disputes as to
the character of institutions, whether economic or ethical: punishment,
marriage, State, etc.--Legislative activity as economic--Judicial
activity: its economic character: its consequent identity with economic
activity--Non-recognition of economic form, and meaning of the problem
as to distinction between morality and rights--Theories of co-action
and of exteriority, as distinctive characteristics: critique of
them--Moralistic theories of rights: critique--Duality of positive and
ideal rights, historical and natural rights, etc.; absurd attempts at
unification and co-ordination--Value of all these attempts as confused
glimpse of amoral character of rights--Confirmations of this character
in ingenuous conscience--Comparison between rights and language.
Grammar and codes--Logic and language; morality and rights--History
of language as literary and artistic history--History of rights as
political and social history.

VI

HISTORICAL NOTES 543

I. Distinction between morality and rights, and its importance
for the history of the economic principle--Indistinction
lasting till Tomasio--II. Tomasio and followers--Kant and
Fichte--Hegel--Herbart and Schopenhauer--Rosmini and others--III.
Stahl, Ahrens, Trendelenburg--Utilitarians--IV. Recent writers
of treatises--Strident contradictions. Stammler--V. Value of
law--In antiquity--Diderot--Romanticism--Jacobi--Hegel--Recent
doctrines--VI. Natural rights and their dissolution--Historical
school of rights--Comparison between rights and language--VII.
Concept of law, and studies of comparative rights and of the general
Doctrine of law--VIII. Legalism and moral casuistic--Probabilitism
and Jesuitic morality--Critique of the concept of the
licit--Fichte--Schleiermacher--Rosmini.

CONCLUSION 586

The Philosophy of the Spirit as the whole of Philosophy--Correspondence
between Logic and System--Dissatisfaction at the end of every system
and its irrational motive--Rational motive: inexhaustibility of Life
and of Philosophy.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

This translation of Benedetto Croce's _Philosophy of the Practical_
(Economic and Ethic) is complete.

FIRST PART

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN GENERAL

FIRST SECTION

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS RELATIONS

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY AS A FORM OF THE SPIRIT

[Sidenote: _Practical and theoretic life._]

A glance at the life that surrounds us would seem more than sufficient
to establish, without the necessity of special demonstration, the
existence of a circle of practical activity side by side with the
theoretical. We see in life men of thought and men of action, men of
contemplation and of action, materially distinct, as it were, from one
another: here, lofty brows and slow dreamy eyes; there, narrow brows,
eyes vigilant and mobile; poets and philosophers on the one side; on
the other, captains and soldiers of industry, commerce, politics, the
army, and the church. Their work seems to differ as do the men. While
we are intent upon some discovery just announced, in chemistry or
in physic, or upon some philosophy that comes to shake old beliefs,
upon a drama or a romance that revives an artist's dream, we are
suddenly interrupted and our attention is called to spectacles of an
altogether different nature, such as a war between two states, fought
with cannon or with custom-house tariffs; or to a colossal strike, in
which thousands upon thousands of workmen make the rest of society feel
the power of their numbers and of their strength, and the importance
of their work in the general total; or a potent organization which
collects and binds together the forces of conservative resistance,
employing interests and passions, hopes and fears, vices and virtues,
as the painter his colours, or the poet his words, sometimes making
like them a masterpiece, but of a practical nature. The man of action
is from time to time assailed as it were with nausea at his orgies of
volitional effort and eyes with envy the artist or the man of science
in the same way as polite society used to look upon the monks who had
known how to select the best and most tranquil lot in life. But as a
general rule they do not go beyond this fleeting feeling, or if they
do resolve to cease their business on the Ides, they return to it on
the Kalends. But the contemplative man in his turn also sometimes
experiences this same nausea and this same aspiration; he seems to
himself to be idle where so many are working and bleeding, and he cries
to the combatants: "Arms, give me arms,"[1] for he too would be a miner
with the miners, would navigate with the navigators, be an emperor
among the kings of coal. However, as a general rule, he does not make
more out of this than a song or a book. Nobody, whatever his efforts,
can issue from his own circle. It would seem that nature supplies men
made precisely for the one or for the other form of activity, in the
same way as she makes males and females for the preservation of the
species.

[Sidenote: _Insufficiency of descriptive distinctions._]

But this mode of existence with which the practical activity manifests
itself in life, as though physically limited, has no certainty, when
separated from the theoretical life, nor is it, as might be believed,
a fact that imposes itself. Facts never impose themselves, save
metaphorically: it is only our thought which _imposes_ them upon
_itself,_ when it has criticized them and has recognized their reality.
That existence and that distinction, which seem so obvious that one
can touch them with one's hand, are at bottom nothing but the result
of primary and superficial philosophic reflection, which posits as
essentially distinct that which is so only at a first glance and in
the mass. Indeed, if we continue to meditate with the same method and
assumptions as in the first instance, we shall find that those very
distinctions, which reflection had established, are by reflection
annulled. It is not true that men are practical or theoretical.

The theoretical man is also practical; he lives, he wills, he acts
like all the others. The so-called practical man is also theoretical;
he contemplates, believes, thinks, reads, writes, loves music and the
other arts. Those works that had been looked upon as inspired entirely
by the practical spirit, when examined more closely, are found to
be exceedingly complex and rich in theoretic elements--meditations,
reasonings, historical research, ideal contemplations. Those works
on the other hand that had been assumed to be manifestations of the
purely artistic or philosophic spirit, are also products of the will,
for without the will nothing can be done; the artist cannot prepare
himself for his masterpiece for years and years, nor the thinker bring
to completion his system. Was not the battle of Austerlitz also a
work of thought and the _Divine Comedy_ also a work of will? From
such reflections as these, which might be easily multiplied, arises
a mistrust, not only of the statement first made, but also of the
inquiry that has been undertaken. It is as though one had filled a
vessel with much difficulty and were then obliged to empty it anew
with a like effort, to find oneself again facing the vessel, empty as
before. Or one adheres to the conclusion that neither the theoretic
nor the practical exists as distinct, but that they are one single
fact, which is one or other of the two, or a third to be determined,
manifesting itself concretely in infinite shades and gradations, which
we arbitrarily attempt to reduce to one or more classes, separating and
denominating them as distinct in a not less arbitrary manner.

[Sidenote: _Insufficiency of the psychological method in philosophy._]

By describing this process of ordinary reflection, in relation to
reality and by demonstrating its philosophic impotence, has at the
same time been demonstrated the nature and the _impotence_ of the
_psychological method,_ applied to philosophical problems. For
psychological philosophy, though contained in ponderous treatises
and in solemn academical lectures, does not really achieve more than
ordinary reflection, or rather, is nothing but ordinary reflection.
Having classified the images of the infinite manifestations of human
activity, placing, for instance, will and action side, by side with
thought and imagination, it looks upon this classification as reality.
But classes are classes and not philosophical distinctions: whoever
takes them too seriously, and understands them in this second sense,
finds himself eventually obliged to admit that they possess no reality.
Thereupon he declares with shouts and protestations the non-existence
of the _faculties of the soul,_ or rather their existence as a mere
mental artifice, without relation to reality. He may do more than this
and throw overboard the criterion or distinction itself, together with
those false distinctions, proclaiming that all spiritual manifestations
are reducible to a single element. This element turns out in the end
to be precisely one of the rejected classes; hence the attempt to show
that facts of volition are nothing but facts of _representation,_ or
that those of representation are nothing but facts of _volition,_ or
that both are nothing but facts of _feeling,_ and so on.

[Sidenote: _Necessity of the philosophical method._]

We must then remain perfectly indifferent to the affirmations or
negations of this psychological philosophy. If it affirm the existence
of the practical activity, we must not put faith in it until we have
recognized its existence by the philosophical method, and equally
so in case it should deny it. The philosophical method demands
complete abstraction from empirical data and from their classes, and
a withdrawal into the recesses of the consciousness, in order to fix
upon it alone the eye of the mind. It has been affirmed that by this
method the individual consciousness is made the type and measure of
universal reality, and it has been suggested, with a view to obviate
this restriction and danger, that we should extend observations, so
as to include the soul of other individuals, of the present and of
the past, of our own and of other civilizations, thus completing (in
the accustomed phrase) the psychological with the historical and the
ethnographical methods. But there is no need to fear, because the
consciousness which is the object of the philosophical inquiry is not
that of the individual as individual, but the universal consciousness,
which is in every individual the basis of his individual consciousness
and of that of other individuals. The philosopher who withdraws into
himself is not seeking his own empirical self: Plato did not seek the
son of Aristo and of Perictione, nor Baruch Spinoza the poor sickly
Jew; they sought that Plato and that Spinoza, who are not Plato or
Spinoza, but man, the spirit, universal being. The remedy proposed
will therefore seem not only useless, but actually harmful; for in
an inquiry whose very object is to surpass the empirical itself, is
offered the aid of a multiplicity of selves, thus increasing the tumult
and the confusion, where there should be peace and silence; offering,
in exchange for the universal that was sought, something worse than the
individual, namely, the _general,_ which is an arbitrary complex of
mutilated individualities.

[Sidenote: _Constatation and deduction._]

It may seem, however, that the result of such an inquiry as to the form
and the universality of consciousness would merely possess the value of
a statement of fact, not different from any other statement, as when
we say, for instance, that the weather is rainy, or that Tizio has
married. If these two last facts be indubitable, because well observed,
in like manner indubitable, because likewise well observed, will be
an affirmation concerning the universal consciousness. And since both
affirmations are true, there is certainly no difference between them,
or between truth and truth, considered as such. But since single and
contingent facts, like the two adduced in the example, are single
and contingent, precisely because they have not their own reason in
themselves, and because the universal is the universal, precisely
because it is a sufficient reason to itself, it clearly results that
we cannot assume that truth has been definitely established from the
universal standpoint of consciousness, save when the reason for this
also has been seen, that is to say until that aspect has been simply
enunciated and asserted, as in the case of a single fact. To affirm
the existence of the practical form of activity, side by side with the
theoretical, means to deduce the one from the other, and both from
the unity of the spirit and of the real. We do not intend to withdraw
ourselves from this duty and exigency; and if we limit ourselves
here at the beginning to the assertion of its existence and to the
demonstration that the arguments brought against it are unfounded, we
do so for didascalic reasons, certain that in due course we shall be
able to free this assertion from what it may contain of provisional,
that is to say, from the character itself of assertion.

[Sidenote: _Theories which deny the practical form of the spirit._]

The doctrines which deny the practical form of the spirit are and
cannot but be of two fundamental kinds, according to the double
possibility offered by the proposition itself which they propose to
refute. The first doctrine affirms that _the practical form is not
spiritual activity,_ the second that although it be spiritual activity,
_yet it is not in any way distinguishable from the already recognized
theoretic form of the spirit._ The second, so to speak, denies to it
specific, the first generic character.

[Sidenote: _The practical as a fact of unconsciousness._]

Those who maintain the first of these theses say:--We are unconscious
of the will at the moment of willing and during its real development.
This consciousness is only attained after one has willed, that is to
say, after the volitional act has been developed. Even then, we are not
conscious of the will itself, but of our representation of the will.
Therefore the will, that is to say the practical activity, is not an
activity of the spirit. Since it is unconscious, it is nature and not
spirit. The theoretic activity which follows it is alone spiritual.

[Sidenote: _Critique._]

Were we, however, to allow this argument to pass, the result would be
that none of the activities of the spirit would belong to the spirit,
that they would all be unconscious and all, therefore, nature. Indeed,
the activity of the artist, at the moment when he is really so, that
is to say in what is called the moment of artistic creation, is not
conscious of itself: it becomes conscious only afterwards, either in
the mind of the critic or of the artist who becomes critic of himself.
And it has also often been said of the activity of the artist, that it
is unconscious; that it is a natural force, or madness, fury, divine
inspiration. _Est Deus in nobis_; and we only become conscious of the
divinity that burns and agitates us when the agitation is ceasing and
cooling begun. But what of the activity of the philosopher? It may
seem strange, but it is precisely the same with the philosopher. At
the moment in which he is philosophizing, he is unconscious of his
work; in him is God, or nature; he does not reflect upon his thought,
but thinks; or rather the thing thinks itself in him, as a microbe
living in us nourishes itself, reproduces itself and dies: so that
sometimes the philosopher has also seemed to be seized with madness.
The consciousness of his philosophy is not in him at that moment; but
it is in the critic and in the historian, or indeed in himself a moment
after, in so far as he is critic and historian of himself. And will the
critic or the historian at least be conscious? No, he will not be so
either, because he who will afterwards criticize the historico-critical
work is conscious of it, or he himself, in so far as he criticizes
himself, and by objectifying himself occupies a place in the history of
criticism and of historiography. In short, we should never be conscious
in any form of the spiritual activity.

But this negation is founded on a false idea of consciousness:
spontaneous is confused with reflex consciousness, or that which is
intrinsic to one activity with that which is intrinsic to another,
which surpasses the first and makes of it its object. In such a
sense we can certainly not be conscious of the will, save in the
representation which follows it, as we are not conscious of a poem,
save at the moment of criticizing it. But there is also consciousness
in the act itself of him who reads or composes a poem, and he "is
conscious" (there is no other expression) of its beauty and of its
ugliness, of how the poem should and of how it should not be. This
consciousness is not critical, but is not therefore less real and
efficacious, and without it internal control would be wanting to the
formative act of the poet. Thus also there is consciousness in the
volitional and practical act as such: we are not aware of this act
in a reflex manner, but we feel, or, if you will, we possess it.
Without it there would be no result. It is therefore developed in
moments or alternatives of happiness and of unhappiness, of well-being
and of malaise, of satisfaction and of remorse, of pleasure and of
pain. If this be unconsciousness, we must say that unconsciousness is
consciousness itself.

[Sidenote: _Nature and practical activity._]

The practical activity may appear to be nature in respect of the
theoretical, but not as something without the spirit and opposed to
it, but as a form of the spirit opposed to another form, esthetic
contemplation has in like manner, as has already been mentioned,
appeared to be a natural force creating the world of intuition, which
the philosophical activity of man afterwards understands and recreates
logically. Hence art can be called nature (and has indeed been so
called), and conversely philosophy has been called spirituality. This
gives rise to the further problem: whether it be correct to consider
nature (it is convenient so to call it) that which has afterwards
been recognized in substance as spiritual activity; or whether the
concept and the name of spirit should not be reserved for that which
is truly altogether outside the spirit, and whether this something
placed altogether outside the spirit truly exists. This point does
not concern us here, although we are much disposed to admit that
one of the mainstays of that absurd conception of nature as of the
extra-spiritual is precisely the practical or volitional form of the
spirit, so conspicuously different from the theoretical form and from
the sub-forms of the same. We do not therefore hold those philosophers
to have been so completely in the wrong, who have identified nature and
will, for they have thus at any rate discovered one aspect of the truth.

[Sidenote: _Reduction of the practical form to the theoretical._]

Passing to the second thesis, which does not place the will outside
the spirit, but denies to it the distinction between practical and
the theoretical forms and affirms that the will is thought, there is
nothing to be objected to it, provided that, as is often the case,
"thought" be taken as synonymous with "spirit." In this case, as in
that where it is affirmed that art is thought, we need only inquire,
what form of thought is the will, as in the other what form of thought
is art. It is not, for instance, logical or historical thought, and
the will is neither imaginative, logical nor historical thought: if
anything, it must be _volitional thought._

But we have the genuine form of this thesis in the affirmation that
the will is the intelligence itself, that to will is to know, and that
action practically well conducted is truth. This thesis would not have
arisen, had it not found support in the real situation of things (and
what this support is will be seen when studying the relation of the
practical with the theoretic activity, and the complicated process of
deliberation). But, when tested here independently, it proves to be
unsustainable.

[Sidenote: _Critique._]

We must not oppose to it the usual observations as to the lack of
connection between great intellectual and great volitional development,
or the cases of those theoreticians who are practically quite
ineffectual, of philosophers who are bad governors of States, of the
"very learned" who are not "men" and the like; for the reason already
given, that an observation is not a philosophical argument, but a
fact which itself has need of an explanation, and when this has been
done, it may serve as proof of the philosophical theory, but can never
be substituted for it. But it is well to recall to memory the quite
peculiar character of the will and the practical activity in respect
of knowledge, intellectual light is cold, the will is hot. When we
pass from theoretic contemplation to action and to the practical, we
have almost the feeling of generating, and sons are not made with
thoughts and words. With the greatest intellectual clearness, we yet
remain inert, if something does not intervene that rouses to action,
something analogous to the inspiration that makes run a shiver of joy
and of voluptuousness through the veins of the artist. If the will
be not engaged, every argument, however plausible it may seem, every
situation, however clear, remains mere theory.

The education of the will is not effected with theories or definitions,
æsthetic or historical culture, but with the exercise of the will
itself. We teach how to will as we teach how to think, by fortifying
and intensifying natural dispositions, by example, which suggests
imitation, by difficulties to be solved (practical problems), by
rousing energetic initiative and by disciplining it to persist. When
an act of will has taken place, no argument will extinguish it. As an
illness is not to be cured with reasons, so an affective and volitional
state cannot be altered by these means. Reasoning and knowledge may
and certainly do assist, but they do not constitute the ultimate and
determining moment. The will alone acts upon the will, not in the sense
that the will of one individual can act upon that of another (which
is merely a fact among the facts perceived by him), but in the sense
that the will of the individual himself, causing the previous volition
to enter upon a crisis, dissolves it and substitutes for it a new
practical synthesis, with a new volition.

[Sidenote: _The practical as thought which realizes itself. Recognition
of its autonomy._]

The evident paradox of the thesis which identifies without any
distinction thought and will, theory and practice, has caused it to
be modified and to be produced in another form, expressed in the
definition; that the will is thought in so far as it _is translated
into act,_ thought in so far as it is _imprinted_ upon nature, thought
when _held_ so _firmly_ before the mind as to _become action,_ and
so on. Now it remains to determine what may be the relation between
thought and will, and when this has been done, we shall see what
is exact and what inexact in the above formulæ, of translating,
imprinting, and holding fast. These formulæ are all logically vague,
however imaginative they may be. But what is important to note here is
that with the new turn given to the thesis that denies the peculiarity
of the practical activity, this same peculiarity is unconsciously
affirmed, because that transforming, that imprinting, that holding
fast, which did not exist in the simple theory, conceal precisely the
will. Thus the ultimate form of the negation comes to join hands with
that of the affirmation, and we can consider undisputed the existence
of a particular form of the spirit, which is the practical activity. We
must now examine the relation of this form with the other from which it
has been distinguished.

[1] Allusion to a verse of Leopardi in _Canzone all' Italia._

II

NEGATION OF THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF FEELING

[_Sidenote: The practical activity and the so-called third spiritual
form: feeling._]

In affirming the existence of the practical form of activity, we have
had in view only the theoretical form and have demonstrated that
the one cannot be absorbed and confused in the other, and we have
referred only to the theoretic form, when announcing our intention of
determining the relations of the practical with the other forms of the
spirit. This seems but little correct, and in any case not exhaustive,
because there are or may be other non-theoretical forms of the spirit,
into which the practical form could be resolved. Of these it would be
necessary to take account. And not to beat too long about the bush,
that of which in this case it is question, is the form of _feeling,_
the last or intermediary of the three forms into which it is customary
to divide the spiritual activity: representation, feeling, tendency;
thought, feeling, will. Attempts have not been wanting to reduce
tendency or will to feeling, or, as is said, to a sentimental reaction
from perceptions and thoughts. In fact there is hardly a treatise
of philosophy of the practical without a preliminary study of the
relations between the will and feeling. We cannot, then, escape from
the dilemma; either we must recognize the omission into which we have
fallen and hasten to correct it, or else make explicit the supposition
that may be contained in that omission (which would thus be intentional
and conscious), that _a third general form of the spirit, or a form of
feeling, does not exist._ We have adopted precisely this last position,
and it therefore becomes incumbent upon us briefly to expose the
reasons for which we hold that the concept of feeling must disappear
from the system of the spiritual forms or activities.

[Sidenote: _Various meanings of the word feeling, as a psychological
class._]

Feeling may and has been understood in various ways, some of which do
not at all concern our thesis. In the first place, the word "feeling"
has been used to designate a class of psychical facts constructed
according to the psychological and naturalistic method. Thus it
has happened that, with various times and authors, all the most
rudimentary, tenuous, and evanescent manifestations of the spirit have
been called "feelings," slight intuitions (or sensations as they are
called), not yet transformed into perceptions, slight perceptions,
slight tendencies and appetites, in fact all that forms, as it were,
the base of the life of the spirit. The name has thus, on the other
hand, also been given to psychical processes and conditions, in which
various forms follow one another or alternate in relation to a material
empirically limited. Such are what are called feelings of "fatherland,"
"love," "nature," "the divine." Nothing forbids the formation of such
classes and the use of that denomination, but as has already been
declared in relation to the psychological method, they are of no use
to philosophy, which not only does not receive them within its limits,
but does not occupy itself with them at all, save to reject them when
they present themselves, as philosophical psychology or psychological
philosophy. To classify is not to think philosophically, and philosophy
on the one hand does not recognize criteria of small and great, of
weak and strong, of more and of less, and a small or smallest thought,
a small or smallest tendency, is for it thought and tendency and not
feeling at all; on the other, it does not admit complicated processes
without resolving these into their simple components. Thus the feeling
of love or of patriotism, and the others made use of in the example,
are revealed to philosophy as series of acts of thought and of will,
variously interlaced. Let the psychologists, then, keep their classes
and sub-classes of feeling. We, for our part, not only do not dream of
di-possessing them of such a treasure, but shall continue to draw from
it, when necessary, the small change of ordinary conversation.

[Sidenote: _Feeling as a state of the spirit._]

There also exists another meaning of the word "feeling," of which,
at present at any rate, we do not take account. This appears when
the word is used to designate _the state_ of the spirit or of one of
the special forms of the spirit; we should indeed term these more
correctly the _states,_ since the spirit in this case, as is known,
is polarized in two opposite terms, usually denominated _pleasure and
pain._ Indubitably these two terms can also be taken as psychological
(and are thus included in the preceding case). Hence it results that
pleasure and pain are represented by psychologists as the two extremes
of a continuous series, in which there is a passage from the one to
the other term by insensible increases and gradations. But we must
also recognize that this psychological representation is not the only
one possible, and indeed is not truly the real one, and that the two
terms have their place and their proper meaning in the philosophy
of the spirit. They are, as has been said, _opposites;_ and are
differentiated, not only by a more and a less, by a greatest and a
least, but also by the special character of distinction that opposites
possess. The doctrine of opposites and of opposites in the practical
activity of the spirit does not, however, appertain to this part of our
exposition. In denying feeling, we do not here deny the doctrine of
opposites, and that psychology of the _states_ of the spirit which is
founded upon it, but the doctrine of feeling considered as a particular
_form_ of _activity._

[Sidenote: _Function of the concept of feeling in the History of
philosophy; the indeterminate._]

The conception of feeling as a spiritual activity has answered to a
want of research, which may be described as _provisional excogitation._
Whenever thought has found itself face to face with a form or subform
of spiritual activity, which it was not possible either to eliminate
or to absorb in forms already recognized, the problem to be solved
has been endorsed with that word "feeling." With many this has passed
for a solution. Feeling, in fact, has been the indeterminate in the
history of philosophy, or rather the not yet fully determined, the
_half-determined._

Hence its great importance as an expedient for the indication of
new territories to conquer, and as a stimulus against remaining
obstinately shut up in old and insufficient formulæ. But hence also
its fate: the problem must not be exchanged for its solution, the
indeterminate or semi-determinate must be determined. Whenever the
determination of the forms and sub-forms of the spirit has not been
given in a complete manner, the category of feeling will reappear (and
it will be beneficial); but at the same time will reappear the duty of
exploring it and of understanding what is concealed beneath it, or at
least what unsolved difficulty has caused it to reappear afresh.

Now we have already met with the concept of feeling on more than one
occasion, when investigating the philosophy of the theoretic spirit,
as something supplying a theoretical need outside the theoretic forms
generally admitted, or as a special form of theoretic activity. Every
time that we have done this, an attentive examination has caused it
to disappear before our eyes, and has generally helped us, either to
discover something previously unknown, or to confirm the necessity of
contested categories.

[Sidenote: _Feeling as herald of the æsthetic form;_]

Thus it happened that when a special _æsthetic_ function was
not recognized and it was attempted to explain it, either
intellectualistically, as nothing but an inferior form of philosophy,
or historically, as a reproduction of the historical and natural datum,
or almost as the satisfaction of certain volitional wants (hedonistic
theory), the view of art as neither a form of the intellect nor of
perception nor of will, but of _feeling,_ was an advance, as also
was the appeal to men of _feeling_ to recognize and to judge it.
As a result of this insistence, it was eventually discovered that
art possessed an absolutely simple and ingenuous theoretic form,
without either intellectual or historical contents, the form of the
pure intuition which is that of the æsthetic and artistic activity.
Whoever returns to treat of art as a product of feeling, after this
discovery of the pure intuition, falls back from the determinate to the
semi-determinate, and is at the mercy of all the dangers which arise
from it.

[Sidenote: _As herald of the intuitive element in Historiography._]

The theory of historiography owes its progress in like manner to the
demonstration that it is impossible to deduce the historical statement
from concepts, but that we must deduce it in final analysis from an
immediate _feeling_ of the real, that is to say, from the _intuitive_
element, which inevitably exists in every historical reconstruction,
as in every perception. On the other hand, and in altogether another
sense, reacting against the false idea of an extra--subjective
historical objectivity, to be found in the mere reproduction of the
datum, it was made evident that no historical narration is possible
without the _reaction of feeling_ in respect to the datum. Thus was
discovered the indispensability of the _intellective_ element in the
historical affirmation. Whoever has recourse to feeling as a factor
in historiography, after this complete constitution of the historical
judgment, returns from the clear to the confused, from light, if not to
darkness, then to twilight.

[Sidenote: _Feeling as herald of the pure concept in philosophical
Logic._]

The concept of feeling has also been of capital importance in the
progress of the Logic of philosophy. For how could we begin to explain
that philosophy is constructed with a method altogether different from
that of the exact disciplines (natural sciences and mathematics),
without denying to those sciences the capacity of conquering the
supreme truth, the true truth, full reality, and recognizing such
capacity on the other hand to a special function called _feeling_
or _immediate_ knowledge? That function was void, that is to say,
undetermined, because defined in a negative and not in a positive
manner: feeling was something different from the abstract and arbitrary
procedure of the exact sciences, from the abstract intellect, but its
true nature was unknown. When this was at last known it was discovered
that it was not a question of "feeling" or of "immediate knowledge,"
but of the intellect itself, in its genuine and uncontaminated nature,
its pure and free activity, of intellect as _reason,_ of thought as
_speculative_ thought, of that "immediate knowledge," which is true,
intrinsic, perpetual _mediation._ Whoever henceforth returns to
feeling, after the discovery of the pure or speculative concept, and
believes it to be the creator of philosophy and of religion, fighting
with it against the natural and mathematical sciences, behaves as he
who should wish to return to-day to the flint-lock, for the excellent
reason that it was an advance upon the bow and the catapult. Thus those
who invoke feeling in philosophy are henceforth a little ridiculous.
This does not imply that they were not at one time to be taken
seriously, for this concept has been of great provisional assistance
and has been as it were the compass of the new idea of philosophy.

[Sidenote: _Analogous function in the Philosophy of the practical._]

The same will be the case in the investigation that we have begun of
the practical form of the spirit and of the problems to which it gives
rise. This concept of feeling has been mingled with them all, and
propositions have been formed, of which we shall indicate the true
significance in the proper places. Beginning at once and limiting
ourselves solely to the question of the existence of a peculiar
practical form, it is easy to understand why it has so often been
maintained against the intellectual and theoretical exclusivists, that
the will consists, not of knowledge, but of feeling; that the principle
of action, far from being an intellectual principle, is sentimental
emotion; that in order to produce a volition, reason, ideas, and facts
perceived do not suffice, but that it is necessary that all these
things be transformed into feelings, which must take possession of the
soul; that the base of life lived, that is, of practical life, is not
thought, but feeling, and so on. With these formulæ was recognized
the peculiarity of the practical activity. The theory of feeling in
respect of the practical represents progress as compared with the
intellectualistic theory, because the appearance of indeterminateness
is progress as compared with bad determinateness, and contains in
itself the new and more complete determinateness.

[Sidenote: _Negation of feeling._]

But in this very way of ours of understanding the value of these
formulæ, is implied their resolute negation, when they tend to
persist, after having accomplished their function, and to maintain
side by side with the theory of the practical a third general form
of the spirit, namely feeling. No spiritual fact or manifestation of
activity can be adduced, which, examined without superficiality, is
not reducible to an act of fancy, intellect and perception, that is,
of theory (when it is not at once revealed as an abstraction or as a
merely psychological class of these acts); or to an act of utilitarian
or ethical volition (when it is not here too a psychological class,
variously designated as aspirations, passions, affections, and the
like). Let him who will search his spirit and attempt to indicate one
single act, differing from the above, as something new and original and
deserving of the special denomination of feeling.

[Sidenote: _Its deductive exclusion._]

This constatation of fact (we repeat the warning) is but the first
step in the complete philosophical demonstration, which demands that
we show not only that a third form does not exist, but that _it cannot
exist._ This demonstration will be given further on, and will coincide
with that of the demonstration of the necessity of the two forms,
theoretical and practical; a duality that is unity and a unity that is
duality. Recognizing the legitimacy of the demand for a philosophical
deduction of the forms of the spirit, and therefore of a deductive
exclusion of those that are spurious and wrongly adopted, it seems that
if it be somewhat delayed, such a mode of exclusion will also yield
clearer results.

RELATION OF THE PRACTICAL TO THE THEORETIC ACTIVITY

[Sidenote: _Precedence of the theoretical activity._]

Freed from the equivocal third term, which is feeling, and now passing
to the problem of the relation between the theoretical and the
practical activity enunciated, we must in the first place declare the
thesis that _the practical activity presupposes the theoretical._ Will
is impossible without knowledge; as is knowledge, so is will.

[Sidenote: _The unity of the spirit and the co-presence of the
practical._]

In recognizing this precedence of knowledge to will, we do not wish to
posit as thinkable a theoretical man or a theoretical moment altogether
deprived of will. This would be an unreal abstraction, inadmissible
in philosophy, which operates solely with real abstractions, that is,
with universal concretes. The forms of the spirit are distinct and
not separate, rand when the spirit is found in one of its forms, or
is _explicit_ in it, the other forms are also in it, but _implicit,_
or, as is also said, _concomitant._ If theoretical and cognoscitive
man were not at the same time volitional, he would not even be able to
stand on his feet and look at the sky, and, literally speaking, if he
were not alive, he would not be able to think (and thinking is both
an act of life and an act of will, which is called _attention)._ Were
he not to will, he would be unable to pass from waking to sleep and
from sleep to waking. Thus in order to be purely theoretical, it is
necessary to be at the same time in some degree practical; the energy
of pure fancy and of pure thought springs from the trunk of volition.
Hence the importance of the will for the æsthetic and intellectual
life; the will is not theory, nor is it the force that makes grain to
grow or guides the course of rivers, but as it assists the culture of
grain or restrains the destructive impetus of rivers, so it assists and
restrains the force of fancy and of thought, causing them to act in
the best way, that is, to be as they really ought to be, namely, fancy
and thought in their purest manifestation. The practical activity,
therefore, acts in this way, and as it drags the man of science from
his study and the artist from his studio, if it be necessary to defend
his country or to watch at the bedside of his sick father, so it
commands the artist and the man of science to fulfil their special
mission and to be themselves in an eminent degree.

[Sidenote: _Critique of pragmatism._]

All the arguments that have been used in the past and that are used in
the present, to maintain the dependence of the theoretical upon the
practical activity, are of value for what of truth they contain, that
is, only to demonstrate this unity of the spiritual functions that
we have recognized, and the indispensability of the volitional force
for the health of the cognoscitive spirit. But the passage from this
thesis to the other, that the true is the production of the will, is
nothing but a sophism, founded on the double signification of the word
"production." It should be clear that to _assist_ the work of thought
with the will is one thing and that to _substitute_ the will for the
work of thought is another. To claim to substitute the will for the
work of thought, is equivalent to the negation of that force that
should be assisted; it is the most open proclamation of scepticism,
the most complete distrust of the true and of the possibility of
attaining to it. This attempt is now called _pragmatism,_ or is at
any rate one of the meanings of the word, with which the school of
the greatest confusion that has ever appeared in philosophy adorns
itself in our day. This school mixes together the most divergent
theses--that of the stimulating effect that the will has upon thought,
that other of the volitional or arbitrary moment, by means of which
perceptions and historical data are reduced to abstract types in the
natural disciplines, or postulates laid down for the construction
of mathematical classes. The third form, which might be called the
Baconian prejudice, maintains the exclusive utility of the natural
sciences and mathematics for the well-being of life. The fourth
thesis is positivistic: here it is maintained that we cannot know
anything save what we ourselves arbitrarily compress into the formula
and classes of mathematics and of naturalism. The fifth thesis is
a romantic exaggeration of the principle of creative power in man,
substituting the caprice of the individual for the universal spirit.
The sixth, something between silliness and Jesuistry, recommends
the utility of making one's illusions and believing them to be
true. The seventh is superstitious, occultist and spiritistic--and
there are others that we omit. If pragmatism has had and preserves
any attraction, it owes this to the truth of its first and second
theses and to the half truth of the fifth. All the three are however
heterogeneous in themselves and unreconcilable with the others, which
are most fallacious. But we repeat with the old philosophers that
whoever in thinking says, "Thus I will it," is lost for truth.

[Sidenote: _Critique of psychological objections._]

Certain reservations that are made to the above truth from the point
of view of that philosophy, which we have called psychological, are
scarcely deserving of brief mention. We find in treatises of Psychology
that knowledge does precede the practical act, but only in the higher
forms of volition, whereas in its lower forms are found only impulses,
tendencies, appetites, altogether blind of any knowledge. Thus they
are able to talk of involuntary forms of the practical activity, of
a will that is not a will, when once the true will has been defined,
as precisely appetition illumined by previous knowledge. The _blind
will_ of certain metaphysicians is derived from such excogitations of
psychologists, who make of it a practical act without intelligence.
They have here attributed the value of reality to a crude concept of
class, a thing that happens not infrequently. A blind will is however
unthinkable. Every form of the practical activity, be it as poor and
rudimentary as you like (and let as many classes and gradations as you
will be formed), presupposes knowledge of some sort. In animals too?
will be asked. In animals too, provided they be, and in so far as they
are centres of life, and so of perceptions and of will. This is also
true of vegetables and of minerals, always with the above hypothesis.
We must banish every form of _aristocracy_ from the Philosophy of the
practical, as we have banished it from Æsthetic, from Logic, from
Historic, esteeming it most harmful to the proper understanding of
those activities. The aristocratic illusion is closely allied to that
one which makes us believe that we, shut up in the egotism of our
empirical individuality, are alone aware of the truth, that we alone
feel the beautiful, that we alone know how to love, and so on. But
reality is democratic.

From the psychological point of view yet another objection has been
raised. Knowledge (it is affirmed) cannot be the indispensable base of
the will, if, as is the case, the ignorant are often far more effective
than many learned men and philosophers. These latter, they say,
although possessing very great knowledge, and no less a stock of good
intentions, yet do not know how to direct their lives successfully.
But it is evident that in these cases the so-called ignorant possess
just that knowledge which is necessary for the purpose and is lacking
to the learned and to the philosopher, who would themselves be the
ignorant in such a case. Nicholas Macchiavelli was ignorant as compared
with Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, when he kept the spectators waiting two
hours in the sun, while he was attempting to dispose three thousand
infantry according to the directions that he had written. This he would
never have succeeded in doing, had not Signor Giovanni, with the help
of drummers and in the twinkling of an eye caused them to execute the
various manœuvres and afterwards carried Master Nicholas to dine, who,
save for him, would not have dined at all that day.[1]

[Sidenote: _Nature of the theoretical precedence of the practical:
historical knowledge._]

The knowledge required for the practical act is not that of the artist,
nor of the philosopher, or rather, it is these two also, but only in so
far as both are to be found as elements co-operating in that ultimate
and complete knowledge which is _historical._ If the first be called
intuition, the second concept, and the third perception, and the third
be looked upon as the result of the two preceding, it will be said
that the knowledge required for the practical act is _perceptive._
Hence the common saying that praises the sure eye of the practical man;
hence, too, the close bond between historical sense and practical and
political sense; hence, too, the justifiable diffidence of those who,
unable to grasp effectual reality, hope to attain to it by force of
mere syllogisms and abstractions, or believe that they have attained to
it, when they have erected an imaginary edifice. They prove by so doing
that they can never be practical men, at least in the sphere of action
at which they are then aiming.

Such knowledge is not of itself the practical act. The historian as
such is a contemplative, not a practical man or politician. If that
spark which is volition, do not spring forth, the material of knowledge
does not catch fire and is not transformed into the material of the
practical. But that knowledge is the condition, and if the condition
be not the conditioned, yet one cannot have the conditioned without
the condition. In this last signification, it is true that action
is knowledge, will, and wisdom, that is to say, in the sense that
willing and acting presuppose knowledge and wisdom. In this sense, and
considered solely in the stage of the cognoscitive investigation which
will form the base of action, the deliberation is a theoretical fact.
The customary expressions of logical, rational, judicious actions,
are metaphors, because action may be weak or energetic, coherent or
incoherent; but it will not have those predicates which are proper to
theoretical acts that precede actions, on which the metaphors aforesaid
are founded. As are these acts, so originate the practical act, will,
and action. We can act in so far as we have knowledge. Volition is not
the surrounding world which the spirit perceives; it is a beginning,
a new fact. But this fact has its roots in the surrounding world,
this beginning is irradiated with the colours of things that man has
perceived as a theoretical spirit, before he took action as a practical
spirit.

[Sidenote: _Its continual changeability._]

It is important to observe, as much to prevent an equivoke into which
many fall, as because of the consequences that will follow from holding
it, that we must not look upon the perceptive knowledge of reality
that surrounds us as a firm basis, upon which we act, by translating
the formed volition into act. For were this so, we should have to
assume that the surrounding world, perceived by the spirit, stops after
the perceptive act, which is not the case. That world changes every
second, the perceptive act perceives the new and the different, and the
volitional act changes according to that real and perceived change.
Perception and volition alternate every instant; in order to will, we
must touch the earth at every instant, in order to resume force and
direction.

[Sidenote: _No other theoretic precedent._]

Continuous perception and continuous change, that is the necessary
theoretic condition of volition. It is necessary and unique. No other
theoretical element is needed, because every other is contained in it,
and beyond it no other is thinkable.

[Sidenote: _Critique of concepts and practical judgments._]

But if this be true and no other theoretic element save that precede
the volition, then we find in the aforesaid theory the criticism of a
series of other theories, generally admitted in the Philosophy of the
practical, not less than in ordinary thought, none of which can be
retained without alterations and corrections.

Or better, there are not so many various theories to criticize; there
is rather one theory, which presents itself under different aspects and
assumes various names. This theory consists substantially in affirming
that with the complex of cognitions, of which we have hitherto treated
(all of which are summed up in the historical judgment), we do not
yet possess that one which is necessary, before we can proceed to
volition and action. A special form of concepts and judgments which
can be called _practical,_ must, it is said, appear; these render
the will possible, by interposing themselves between the previous
merely historical judgment and the will. Is it not indubitable that we
possess practical concepts, that is, concepts of classes of action or
of supreme guides to action, concepts of things _good, of ideals, of
ends,_ and that we effect _judgments_ of value by the application of
those concepts to the image of given actions? Is it not indubitable
that those judgments and those concepts refer, not to the simple
present fact, but to the future? How could we will, if we did not know
what is good to will, and that a given possible action corresponds to
that concept of good?

[Sidenote: _Posteriority of judgments to the practical act._]

Now it is undeniable that we in fact possess the above-mentioned
concepts and judgments. But what we must absolutely deny is that they
differ in any respect from other concepts and theoretical judgments,
and that they deserve to be distinguished from these as practical and
that they have the future for their object. The future, that which
is not, is not an object of knowledge; the material of the judgment,
whether it concern actions or thoughts, does not alter its logical and
theoretical character; the concepts of modes of action are concepts
neither more nor less than those of modes of thought. With this
negation we at the same time deny the possibility of their interposing
themselves between knowledge and will. Those judgments, far from being
anterior to the will, are posterior to it.

Let us state a simple case and observe the course of analysis on
the lines of the theory here criticized. It is winter-time; I am
cold; there is a wood close by, and I know that by cutting wood one
can light a fire and that fire gives heat: I therefore resolve to
cut wood. According to that theory, the spiritual process would be
expressed in the following chain of propositions: I know the actual
situation, that is to say, that I am cold, that wood gives fire and
fire heat, and that there exists wood that can be cut; I possess the
concept that it is a good thing to provide for the health of the body;
I judge that with heat I shall procure health during the winter, and
that in consequence heat is a good thing and the cutting of wood,
without which I cannot procure heat, is also good. Having made all
these constatations, I set in motion the spring of my will, and I
_will_ to cut the wood.--The process as above described seems real
and controllable by every one; but it is, on the contrary, illusory.
The practical judgment: "I shall act well in cutting the wood" really
means, "I will to cut the wood;" "this is a good thing" really means,
"I will this." I may change my will a moment after, substituting for
this volition one that is different or contrary, that does not matter.
At the moment that I formed that judgment, I must have seen myself
in the volitional attitude of a man cutting wood; the will must have
come first. Otherwise the judgment would never have existed. Given the
first actual situation and its complete expression in the judgment, no
other judgment can arise, if the actual situation do not change and
nothing new supervene. This new thing is always my will, which, when
the situation changes (as in the example, if I walk from the house to
the tree, or if I simply move my body in an imperceptible, manner in
the direction of the action willed), by adding to the actual reality
something that was not there before, provides material for a new
judgment. This judgment is called practical, but it is theoretical,
like the others that precede it; a judgment believed to precede the
volition, whereas in reality it follows it; a judgment believed to
condition a future act of will, whereas it is in reality the past act
of will looking at itself in the glass; a judgment that is not really
practical but _historical._

The illusion that things happen differently is caused by the fact
that we possess judgments concerning our past volitions, which are
afterwards collected into abstract formulæ, such as that "it is well
to cut wood." But, on the one hand, those formulæ and judgments are
in their turn formed from previous volitions, and on the other, those
formulæ do not possess any absolute value in the single and concrete
situation, so that they can be modified and substituted for others that
affirm the opposite. The question is not whether cutting wood has been
as a rule a good thing for me in the past, nor whether I have generally
willed it in the past: the question is to will it at this moment, that
is, to posit the cutting of wood at this moment as a good thing.

[Sidenote: _Posteriority of the practical concepts._]

As is the case with the pretended practical judgments and concepts of
classes formed upon them, so the concepts that they imply, of _things
good, of ideals, of ends, of actions worthy of being willed,_ and so
on, do not precede, but follow the volition that has taken place. These
concepts are the incipient reflection, scientific and philosophical,
upon the spontaneous acts of the will, and we cannot practise science
nor philosophize save about facts that have already taken place: if
the fact do not precede, there can be no theory. Certainly theory
does not do other than seek out the already created and give the
real principles of actions in the form of thought principles, in
the same manner as Logic discovers those principles that live and
operate in logical thought. But since the formula of the principle of
contradiction is not necessary for thinking without contradiction, but
presupposes it, so the concepts of ends, of things good, and of ideals
are not necessary for volitions, but presuppose them.

[Sidenote: _Origin of intellectualist and sentimentalist doctrines._]

The thesis of the will as knowledge draws support from the mistaken
belief in the practical principles and judgments that precede volition,
as also does the proposition that he who knows what is good for him
also wishes it, and that he who does not wish it does not know it.
This thesis is to be inverted, because to know what is good for one
means that one has willed it. From the opposite point of view, the
other thesis, of the impossibility of volition unless _feeling_ be
interposed between what is known and the will, is to be attributed to a
like mistaken belief. Feeling is held to give, as it were, a particular
value to facts, and to cause them to be felt as they should be felt, or
to be changed. The customary merit possessed by theories of feeling is
to be recognized in this thesis: that is to say, it has awakened or
reawakened consciousness of the peculiarity of the practical act in
respect to intellectualistic reductions and identifications. This merit
is not altogether lacking to the general theory of practical judgments
itself. These, although called judgments, were classified differently
to all the others, precisely because they were _practical._

[Sidenote: _The concepts of end and means._]

Having thus shown that it is not true that man first knows the end
and then wills it, it is possible to establish with greater precision
what is to be understood by _end._ The end, then, in universal, is the
concept itself of will. Considered in the single act, as this or that
end, it is nothing but this or that determinate volition. Hence is
also to be derived a better definition of its relation to the _means,_
which it is usual to conceive empirically and erroneously as a part of
volition and action at the service of another part. An act of will is
an infrangible unity and can be taken as divided only for practical
convenience. In the volitional act, all is volition; nothing is means,
and all is end. The means is nothing but the actual situation, from
which the volitional act takes its start, and is in that way really
distinguished from the end. Distinction and unification take place
together, because, as has been remarked, the volition is not the
situation, yet, on the other hand, as the volition, so the situation:
the one varies as a function of the other. Hence the absurdity of
the maxim, that _the end justifies the means._ This maxim is of an
empirical character and has sometimes been employed to justify actions
erroneously held to be unjustifiable, and more often to make pass as
just actions that were unjustifiable. As the end, so the means, but the
means is what is given and has no need of justification. The end is
what has been willed and must be justified in itself.

[Sidenote: _Critique of the end as flan or as fixed design._]

The idea that we generally have of finality is to be eliminated, owing
to the continual changeability of the means, that is, of the actual
situation, which would posit the end as something fixed, as a _plan_
to be carried out. The difference between the finality of man and that
of nature has recently been made to reside in nature: which has seemed
to act upon a plan which she changes, remakes, and accommodates at
every moment, according to contingencies, so that the point of arrival
is not for her predetermined or predeterminable. But the same can be
said of the human will and of its finality. The will too changes at
every moment, as the movement of a swimmer or of an athlete changes
at every moment, according to the motion of the sea or of the rival
athlete, and according to the varying measure or quality of his own
strength in the course of the volitional process. Man acts, case for
case and from instant to instant, realizing his will of every instant,
not that abstract conception which is called a plan. Hence also arises
the confirmation of the belief that there do not exist fixed types and
models of actions. He who seeks and awaits such models and types does
not know how to will. He is without that initiative, that creativeness,
that genius, which is not less indispensable to the practical activity
than to art and philosophy.

[Sidenote: _The will and the unknown._]

It will seem that the will thus becomes will of the unknown and is
at variance in too paradoxical a manner with the sayings, so clearly
evident, that _voluntas quae non fertur in incognitum_ and _ignoti
nulla cupido._ But those sayings are true only so far as they confirm
the fact that without the precedence of the theoretical act, the
practical act does not take place. Apart from this signification, it
should rather be maintained that _noti nulla cupido_ and that _voluntas
non fertur in cognitum._ What is known exists, and it is not possible
to _will the existence_ of what _exists_: the past is not a content
of volition. The will is the will of the unknown, that is to say,
is itself, which, in so far as it wills, does not know itself, and
knows itself only when it has ceased to will. Our surprise when we
come to understand the actions that we have accomplished, is often
not small; we realize that we have not done what we thought we had
done, and have on the contrary done what we had not foreseen. Hence
also the fallacy of the explanations that present volitional man as
surrounded with things that he does or does not will; whereas things,
or rather facts are the mere object of knowledge and cannot be willed
or not willed, as it is unthinkable to will that Alexander the Great
had not existed, or that Babylon had not been conquered. That which is
willed is not _things_ but _changes_ in things, that is to say, the
volitions themselves. This fallacious conception also arises from the
substitution of abstractions and classes of volitions for the real will.

[Sidenote: _Critique of the concept of practical sciences and of a
practical philosophy._]

It is to be observed, finally, that the erroneous concept of a form
of science called the _practical_ or _normative_ has its roots in the
concept of _the end, of the good, of concepts and judgments of value_
as original facts. When practical concepts and judgments, as a special
category of concepts and judgments, have been destroyed, the idea
of a practical and normative science has also been destroyed. For
this reason, the _Philosophy of the practical_ cannot be _practical
philosophy,_ and if it has appeared to constitute an exception
among all philosophies and that above all others it should preserve
a practical and normative function, this has arisen from a verbal
misunderstanding that is most ingenuous and most destructive. For
our part we have striven to dissipate it, even in the title of our
treatise, which, contrary to the usual custom, we have-entitled not
_practical,_ but _of the practical._

[1] Bandello, _Novelle,_ i. 40, intro.

IV

INSEPARABILITY OF ACTION FROM ITS REAL BASE AND PRACTICAL NATURE OF THE
THEORETICAL ERROR

[Sidenote: _Coincidence of intention and volition._]

The connection between the actual situation and will, means and
end having been made clear, no distinction that it may be desired
to establish between general and concrete volition, ideal and real
volition, that is to say between _intention and volition,_ is
acceptable. Intention and volition coincide completely, and that
distinction, generally suggested with the object of justifying the
unjustifiable, is altogether arbitrary in both the forms that it
assumes.

[Sidenote: _Volition in the abstract and in the concrete: critique._]

The first form is that of the distinction between abstract and
concrete, or better, between general and particular. It is maintained,
that we can will the good in the abstract and yet be unable to will
it in the concrete, that we may have good intentions and yet behave
badly. But by our reduction of the thing willed to the volition,
to will the abstract is tantamount to _willing abstractly._ And to
will abstractly is tantamount to _not willing,_ if volition imply a
situation historically determined, from which it arises as an act
equally determined and concrete. Hence, of the two terms of the
pretended distinction, the first, volition of the abstract, disappears,
and the second, concrete volition, which is the true and real volition
and intention, alone remains.

[Sidenote: _Thought volition and real volition: critique._]

The second form abandons, it is true, the abstract for the concrete,
but assumes two different volitional acts in the same concrete: the
one real, arising from the actual situation, the other, thought or
imagined, side by side with the former: this would be the volition,
that the intention. According to such a theory, it is always possible
to _direct the intention,_ that is, the real volition can always join
with the volitional act imagined and produce a nexus, in which the
volition exists in one way, the intention in another; the first bad
and the second good, or the first good and the second bad. Thus the
honourable man approved by the Jesuit, of whom Pascal speaks, although
he desire the death of him from whom he expects an inheritance and
rejoice when it takes place, yet endows his desire with a special
character, believing that what he wishes to attain is the prosperity
of his affairs, not the death of his fellow-creature. Or the same man
may kill the man who has given him a blow; but in so doing he will fix
his thought upon the defence of his honour, not upon the homicide.
Since he is not able to abstain from the action, he at least (they say)
purines the intention. The worst of this is that the real situation,
the only one of which we can take account, is the historical, not the
imaginary situation. In the reality of the consequent volition, it is
not a question of his own prosperity and nothing more, but of his own
prosperity coupled with the death of another, or of false prosperity.
It is not a question of his own honour and nothing more, but of his own
honour in conjunction with the violation of the life of another, that
is, of false honour. Thus the asserted fact of prosperity and honour
is changed into two qualified bad actions, and what was honourable
in the imaginary case, becomes dishonourable in the real case, which
is indeed the only one of which it is question. It is of no use to
imagine a situation that differs from reality, because it is to the
real situation that the intention is directed, not to the other, and
therefore it is not possible to direct, that is to say, to change the
intention, if the actual situation do not change.

The antipathy that has been shown for good-hearted and well-intentioned
men in recent centuries, and for practical doctrines with intention
as their principle (the morality of intention, etc.), arises from the
sophisms that we have here criticized. But since it is henceforward
clear to us that those so-called well-intentioned and good-hearted
people have neither good hearts nor good intentions and are nothing
but hypocrites, and because we do not admit any distinction between
intention and will, we are without fear or antipathy in respect to
the use of the word "intention," understanding it as a synonym for
"volition."

[Sidenote: _Critique of volition with base either unknown or
imperfectly known._]

But it will be said that we have here considered the case, in which,
while the real situation is known, there is a hypocritical pretence
of not knowing it, in order to deceive others and maybe oneself, and
that we have justly here declared that in such a case the will and
the intention were inseparable. But there is another case, in which,
though the situation of affairs be not known, yet it is necessary both
to will and to act at once. Here the concrete will is separated at
the beginning from the intention: the will is what it _can_ be, the
intention is as the action _would wish_ to be.

But this instance is equally or even more inconceivable than the
preceding. It has been clearly established that if we do not know, we
cannot will. Before arriving at a resolution, man tries to see clearly
in and about him, and so long as the search continues, so long as the
doubt is not dissipated, the will remains in suspense. Nothing can
make him resolve, where the elements for coming to a resolution are
wanting; nothing can make him say to himself "I know," when he does not
know; nothing can make him say "it will be as if I knew," because that
"as if I knew" would introduce the arbitrary method into the whole of
knowledge, and would cause universal doubt to take the place of doubt
circumscribed. This would disturb the function of knowledge itself,
against which an act of real felony would be committed. From nothing
nothing is born.

[Sidenote: _Illusions among the cases that are cited._]

There are no exceptions to this law, and those that are adduced can be
only apparent. A man is cautiously descending the dangerous side of
a mountain, covered with ice: will he or will he not place his foot
on that surface, of which he does not and cannot know the resistance?
However, there is no time to be lost: he must go on and take the risk.
It seems evident that in a case like this he wills and operates without
complete knowledge. But the case is not indeed unique or of a special
order: every act of life implies risk of the unknown, and if there were
not in us (as they say) _potestas voluntatem nostram extra limites
intellectus nostri extendendi,_ it would be impossible to move a step,
to lift an arm, or to put into one's mouth a morsel of bread, since
_omnia incerta ac periculis sunt plena._ What must be known in order
to form the volition is not that which we should know if we were in a
situation different from that in which we are (in which case, also,
the volition would be different), but that which we can know in the
situation in which we really find ourselves. The man on the glacier has
neither time nor means to verify the resistance of the surface of the
ice; but since he is obliged to proceed further, he does not act in a
rash, but in a very prudent manner, in putting his foot trustfully on
the ice that may be unfaithful to him. He would be acting rashly if,
having the means and the time, he failed to investigate its resistance,
that is to say, if he were in _another and imaginary situation,_ not
in that real and present situation, in which he finds himself. If I
knew the cards of my adversary, as the cheat knows them, I should
play differently, but it cannot be argued that because, as an honest
player, I know only my own, I am therefore playing inconsiderately: I
am playing as I ought, with the knowledge that I possess, that is, with
full knowledge of the real situation in which I find myself.

With this very simple observation is also solved an old puzzle of
the theory of volition. How does it happen that a man can choose
between two dishes of food at an equal distance and moving in the
same manner,[1] or between two objects altogether identical, offered
for sale to him at the same time, at the same price, by the same
individual? First, we must correct the hypothesis, for as two identical
things do not exist in nature, so the two objects in question and the
two possible actions of the example are not identical.

[1] This was an example used by the Schoolmen and by Dante.

Indeed the refined connoisseur always discovers some difference between
two objects, which to the ignorant, the absent-minded, and the hasty
seem to be the same. The question, then, is not of identical objects
and actions, but of those as in which there is neither time nor mode
(_majora premunt_) of recognizing the difference. For this reason,
therefore, we take no account of this difference, or, as is said,
they are looked upon as equal in this respect. But the _adiophora,_
the indifferent, do not exist, and owing to that abstraction, we do
not take account of other differences that always exist in the real
situation, owing to which my volition becomes concrete in a movement
that causes me to take the object on my right, because (let us suppose)
I am wont to turn to the right, or because, owing to a superstition
that is not less a matter of habit, I prefer the right to the left,
or because, through sympathy due to dignity, I prefer the object that
is offered to me with the right hand to a similar object offered with
the left, which, if only for this reason, is, strictly speaking, not
the same, but different, and so on. These minute circumstances are
absent from consciousness and are not felt by the will, not because
they escape as a rule reflection. If we neglect them in analysis as
non-existent, this always occurs, because we substitute for the real
situation another unreal situation imagined by ourselves. Thus it has
also been remarked, as a proof of the irrationality believed to exist
in our volitions and to be the cause of our acting without precise
knowledge, that no reason nor any theoretic precedent can be adduced
as to why, when fixing legal punishments, or in the application of
sentences, we give forty and not forty-one days' imprisonment, a
hundred lire fine instead of a hundred and one. But here, too, it is
clear that the detailed facts are not wanting, the knowledge of which
causes us to will the punishment to be so and so. This knowledge is
to be found in traditions, in the sympathy that we have for certain
numbers, in the ease with which they can be remembered or calculated,
and so on.--To sum up, man forms the volitional act, not because he
possesses some portentous faculty of extending his will outside the
limits of the intellect, but, on the contrary, because he possesses the
faculty of circumscribing himself within the limits of his intellect
on each occasion and of willing on that basis and within those limits.
That he wills, knowing some things and ignorant of infinite other
things, is indubitable. But this means that he is man and not God,
that he is a finite and not an infinite being, and that the sum of his
historical knowledge is on each occasion human and finite, as is on
each occasion the act of will which he forms upon it. Psychologists
would say that this arises from _narrowness_ of consciousness, but
Goethe, on the contrary, remarked with metaphor more apt and thought
more profound, that the true artist is revealed in _knowing how to
limit himself._ God himself, as it seems, cannot act, save by limiting
himself in finite beings.

[Sidenote: _Impossibility of volition with a false theoretic base._]

If the intention cannot be separated from the volition, because this
belongs to the real and not to the imaginary, and proceeds from
the known and never from the unknown, there yet remains a third
possibility, which is, that the will results differently from the
intention, owing to a _theoretical error_; as when we are said to
err _in good faith_ as to the actual situation, that is, we do not
indeed substitute the unknown for the known, nor do we substitute the
imaginary for the known, but we simply make a mistake in enunciating
the historical judgment to ourselves: intending to perform one action,
we perform on the contrary another.

This third possibility is also an impossibility, because it contradicts
the nature of the theoretical error, which, precisely because it is a
question of error and not of truth, cannot be in its turn theoretical
and must be and is practical, conformably to a theory of error of which
many great thinkers have seen or caught sight and which it is now
fitting to restore and to make clear.

[Sidenote: _Forms of the theoretical error and problem concerning its
nature._]

We have elsewhere amply demonstrated how theoretical errors arise
from the undue transference of one theoretical form to another, or
of one theoretical product into another distinct from it. Thus, the
artist who substitutes for the representation of the affections,
reasoning on the affections, mingling art and philosophy, or he who
in the composition of a work, fills the voids that his fancy has left
in the composition, with unsuitable elements taken from other works,
commits the artistic error, ugliness. Thus too, the philosopher, who
solves a philosophical problem in a fantastic way, as would an artist,
or, instead of a philosopheme, employs the historical, naturalistic
or mathematical method, and so produces a myth, or a contingent fact
universalized, or an abstraction in place of concreteness, that is
to say, a philosophical error. It is also a philosophical error to
transport philosophical concepts from one order to another and to
treat art as though it were philosophy or morality as though it were
economy. This also happens in an analogous manner with the historian,
the natural scientist, and the mathematician, all of whom are wrong, if
they interweave extraneous methods with those that are their own, and
with the views, conceptions, and classification of one order, those of
another.--But if this be the way in which particular errors and general
forms of theoretical error arise, what is the origin of the theoretical
error in universal? We have not asked this question explicitly
elsewhere, because only now can it receive the most effective reply.

[Sidenote: _Distinction between ignorance and error: practical genesis
of the latter._]

Error is not ignorance, lack of knowledge, obscurity or doubt. An error
of which we are altogether without consciousness is not error at all,
but that inexhaustible field which the spiritual activity continues to
fill to infinity. True and proper error is the affirmation of knowing
what we do not know, the substitution of a representation for that
which we do not possess, an extraneous conception for the one that
is wanting. Now affirmation is thought itself, it is truth itself.
When an inquiry has been completed, a process of cogitation closed,
the result is the affirmation that a man makes to himself, not with
a new act added to the foregoing, but with the act itself of thought
that has thought. It is therefore impossible that in the circle of the
pure theoretical spirit error should ever arise. Man has in himself
the fountain of truth. If it be true that on the death-bed there is
no lying, because man transcends the finite and communicates with
the infinite, then man who thinks is always on his bed of death, the
death-bed of the finite, in contact with the infinite. We may know that
we are ignorant, but this consciousness of ignorance is the cogitative
process in its _fieri,_ not yet having attained to its end, certainly
not (as has been said) error. Before this last can appear, before
we can affirm that we have reached a result, which the testimony of
the conscience says has not been reached, something extraneous to
the theoretical spirit must intervene, that is to say, a practical
act which simulates the theoretical. And it simulates it, not indeed
intrinsically (one does not lie with the depth of oneself or on one's
death-bed), but in taking hold of the external means of communication,
of the word or expression as sound and physical fact, and diverting
it to mean what, in the given circumstances, it could not mean. The
erroneous affirmation has been rendered possible, because something
else has followed the true affirmation, which is purely theoretical,
something that is improperly called affirmation in the practical sense,
whereas it is only _communication,_ which can be substituted in a
greater or less degree for the truth and falsely represent it. Thus the
theoretical error _in general_ arises, as do its particular forms and
manifestations, from the substitution for, or the illegitimate mating
of two forms of the spirit. These cannot be both theoretical here, but
must be the theoretical and the practical forms, precisely because we
are here in the field of the spirit in general and of the fundamental
forms of its activity. We are ignorant, then, because it is necessary
to be ignorant and to feel oneself ignorant, in order to attain to
truth; but we err only because _we wish to err._

[Sidenote: _Proofs and confirmation._]

Like all true doctrines, this of the practical nature of the
theoretical error, which at first sight seems most strange (especially
to professed philosophers), is yet found to be constantly confirmed
in ordinary thought. For all know and all continually repeat that
(immoderate) passions and (illegitimate) interests lead insidiously
into error, that we err, to be quick and finish or to obtain for
ourselves undeserved repose, that we err by acquiescence in old ideas,
that is to say, in order not to allow ourselves to be disturbed in our
repose that has been unduly prolonged, and so on. We do not mention
those cases in which it is a question of solemn and evident lies,
the brazen-faced manifestation of interests openly illegitimate. Let
us limit ourselves to the modest forms of error, to the venial sins,
because if these be proved to be the result of will, by so much the
more will this be proved of the shameless forms, the deadly sins. It is
also said that we err in _deafening_ ourselves and others with words,
with the verse that sounds and does not create, with the brush that
charms but does not express, with the formulæ that seem to contain a
thought but contain the void. In this way we come to recognize that
will has been rendered possible, owing to the communication being a
practical fact, of which a bad use can be made by means of a volitional
act. For the rest, if this were not so, what guarantee would truth
ever possess? If it were possible to err even once in perfect good
faith and that the mind should confuse true and false, embracing the
false as true, how could we any longer distinguish the one from the
other? Thought would be radically corrupt, whereas it is incorrupt and
incorruptible.

It is vain, therefore, to except the existence or the possibility of
errors of good faith, because truth alone is of good faith, and error
is always in a greater or less or least degree, of bad faith. Were
this not so, it would be incorrigible, whereas it is by definition
corrigible. Consequently, the last attempt to differentiate intention
from volition fails, since it posits an intention that is frustrated in
the volition, as the effect of a theoretical error, a good intention
that becomes, through no fault of its own, a bad volition. The
intention, being volition, takes possession of the whole volitional
man, causing the intellect to be attentive and indefatigable in the
search for truth, the soul ready to accept it, whatever it be, pure of
every passion that is not the passion for truth itself, and eliminates
the possibility, or assumes the responsibility of error.

A proof of this is afforded by the fact that to exquisite and delicate
souls, to consciences pure and dignified, even what are called their
theoretical errors are a biting bitterness, and they blame themselves
with them. On the other hand, in the presence of the foolish and the
wicked, one is often in doubt as to whether their folly and wickedness
come from the head or from the heart, whether it be madness rather
than set purpose. The truth is that all this evil, which seems to
arise from defective vision, comes really from the heart, for they
have themselves forged those false views with their sophisms, their
illegitimate internal affirmations and suggestions, that they may be
more free in their evil inclinations, thus obtaining for themselves
and for others a false moral _alibi._ We must applaud the former and
exhort them to continue to persevere in their scruple, the condition
of theoretical and practical health: we must inculcate to the second
a return to themselves and the removal of the mask that they have
assumed' as a disguise from themselves, before assuming it towards
others.

[Sidenote: _Justification of the practical repression of error._]

A consequence of the principle established is the justification of the