LOGIC AS THE SCIENCE OF THE PURE CONCEPT 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 1917 [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. (A first ed. is available at Project Gutenberg. A second augmented ed. follows.) 2. Philosophy of the practical: economic and ethic. (In preparation) 3. Logic as the science of the pure concept. 4. Theory and history of historiography. (In preparation) Transcriber's note.] TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE The publication of this third volume of the _Philosophy of the Spirit_ offers a complete view of the Crocean philosophy to the English-speaking world. I have striven in every way to render the Logic the equal of its predecessors in accuracy and elegance of translation, and have taken the opinion of critical friends on many occasions, though more frequently I have preferred to retain my own. The vocabulary will be found to resemble those of the _Æsthetic_ and the _Philosophy of the Practical,_ thereby enabling readers to follow the thought of the author more easily than if I had made alterations in it. Thus the word "fancy" will be found here as elsewhere, the equivalent of the Italian "fantasia" and "imagination" of "immaginazione"; this rendering makes the meaning far more clear than the use of the words in the opposite sense that they occasionally bear in English; this is particularly so in respect of the important distinction of the activities in the early part of the _Æsthetic._ I have also retained the word "gnoseology" and its derivatives, as saving the circumlocutions entailed by the use of any paraphrase, especially when adjectival forms are employed. I think that this Logic will come to be recognized as a masterpiece, in the sense that it supplants and supersedes all Logics that have gone before, especially those known as formal Logics, of which the average layman has so profound and justifiable mistrust, for the very good reason that, as Croce says, they are not Logic at all, but illogic--his healthy love of life leads him to fight shy of what he feels would lead to disaster if applied to the problems that he has to face in the conduct of life. It is shown in the following pages that the prestige of Aristotle is not wholly to blame for the survival of formal Logic and for the class of mind that denying thought dwells ever in the _ipse dixit._ Indeed, one of the chief boons conferred by this book will be the freeing of the student from that confusion of thought and word that is the essence of the old formal Logic--of thought that rises upon the wings of words, like an aviator upon his falcon of wood and metal to spy out the entrenchments of the enemy.