[Sidenote: _Reason for their perpetual recurrence._] Thus have all philosophers protested, and thus will all protest still, from age to age, because that intolerance, that immobility, that recalcitrance before the very painful effort of having to abandon the world of sense (though but for a single instant, and in order to reconquer and to possess it more completely) will perpetually be renewed. They are the birth-pangs of the Concept, to escape which no plans for virginity and no manœuvres to procure abortion are of any avail. They must be endured, because that law of the Concept ("thou shalt bring forth in suffering") is also a law of life. [Footnote 1: _System de Sittenlehre_ (in _Sämmtl. Werke_), iv. p. 26.] [Footnote 2: _Idealismo transcendentale,_ trad. Losacco, p. 19.] [Footnote 3: _Encyclopædia,_ Croce's translation, § 3, Observations.] IV DISPUTES AS TO THE NATURE OF THE CONCEPT [Sidenote: _Disputes of materialistic origin._] Disputes as to the nature of the concept have sometimes had their origin (notably in the recent period of philosophic barbarism, which "renews the fear of thought," whence we have with difficulty emerged) in materialistic, mechanical and naturalistic prejudices. Therefore, as already mentioned, discussion has arisen as to whether the concept should be considered logical or psychological, as the product of synthesis or of association, or of individual or hereditary association. But these are controversies which, for the reasons we gave before, we shall not spend time in illustrating. [Sidenote: _The concept as value._] Nor shall we pay attention to the other controversy, as to whether concepts are _values or facts,_ whether they operate only as _norms_ or also as _effective forces_ of the real; because the division between values and facts, between norms and effective existence (between _Gelten_ and _Sein,_ as it is expressed in German terminology), is itself surpassed and unified, implicitly and explicitly, in all our philosophy. If the concept or thought has value, it can have value only because it _is;_ if the norm of thought operate as a norm, that implies that it is thought itself, its own norm, a constitutive element of reality. There is not to be found in any form of spiritual life any value which is not also reality--not in art, where there is no other beauty than art itself; nor in morality, where no other goodness is known than action itself directed to the universal; nor in the life of thought. The concept has value, because it is; and is, because it has value. [Sidenote: _Realism and nominalism._]