and will neither appreciate the soul contained in that sublime poem, nor accomplish the work necessary to attain to the possibility of such an appreciation, nor will, on the other hand, humbly confess his own incapacity and lack of preparation,--how can we forcibly demonstrate to him that that song is beautiful? The critical wisdom of Francesco de Sanctis would be disarmed and impotent before such a situation. How can we demonstrate to one who deliberately refuses to believe in any authority or document, and breaks the tradition by which we are bound to the past, that Miltiades conquered at Marathon, or that Demosthenes strove all his life against the power of Macedonia? He will capriciously throw doubt on the pages of Herodotus and the orations of Demosthenes; and no reasoning will be able to repress that caprice. What more can be said? Even in arithmetic, for which calculating machines exist, compulsory demonstration is impossible. In vain you will lift two fingers of the hand, and then the third and the fourth, in order to demonstrate to one who does not wish for demonstration that two and two are four; he will reply that he is not convinced. And indeed he cannot be convinced, if he do not accomplish that inner spiritual synthesis by which twice two and four reveal themselves as two names of one and the same thing. Therefore, he who awaits a compelling demonstration of the existence of the pure concept, awaits in vain. For our part, we cannot give him anything but that which we are giving: a discourse, directed towards making clear the difficulties, and towards demonstrating how, by means of the pure concept, all problems concerning the life of the spirit are illuminated, and how, without it, we cannot understand anything. [Sidenote: _Prejudice concerning the representability of the concept._] But another prejudice, perhaps yet more tenacious than the first, accompanies this extravagant idea about demonstration. Accustomed as men are to move among things, to see, to hear, to touch them, while hardly or only fugitively reflecting upon the spiritual processes which produce that vision, hearing and touching; when they come to treat of a philosophic question, and to conceive a concept (and especially when it is necessary to conceive precisely the concept of the concept), they do not know how to refrain from demanding just that which they have been obliged to renounce in their new search, and which they have already renounced, owing to the very fact of their having entered into it: the representative element, something that they can see, hear and touch. It is almost as though a novice, on entering a monastery, and having just pronounced the solemn vow of chastity, should ask, as his first request upon taking possession of his cell, for the woman who is to be his companion in that life. He will be answered that in such a place his spouse cannot be anything but an ideal spouse, holy Religion or holy Mother Church.