Logic as the Science of the Pure ConceptCroce, Benedetto
Philosophy
Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept
Croce, Benedetto
Logic
The profound diversity of the concepts and of the pseudoconcepts
suggested (at the time when it was customary to represent the forms
or grades of the spirit as faculties) the distinction between two
logical faculties, which were called _Intellect_ (or, also, _abstract_
Intellect), and _Reason._ The first of these formed what we now call
pseudoconcepts; the second, pure concepts.
[Sidenote: _The abstract intellect and its practical nature._]
But the proper character of neither of the two faculties was realized
by those who postulated them; they fell into the error, which we have
already had occasion to criticize, of conceiving the Intellect as a
form of knowledge, which either lives in the false, or is limited to
preparing the material for the superior faculty, to which it supplies
a first imperfect sketch of the concept. But the faculty required
for this should be, not of a theoretical nature, but of a practical.
It is a terminological question of slight interest, whether the name
"Intellect" should be retained for the production of pseudoconcepts,
or whether the purely theoretic meaning, which it first had, should be
restored to it, and it should thus be made synonymous with "Reason."
It can only be observed that it will be very difficult to remove
henceforth from "Intellect," from "intellectual formations," and from
"intellectualism," the suspicion and discredit cast upon them by the
great philosophic history of the first half of the nineteenth century;
so much so, that only where a rather popular style is employed, can
Intellect and Reason be used promiscuously.
With greater truth, Reason was considered as unifying what the
Intellect had divided, and therefore as unifying abstraction and
concreteness, deduction and induction, analysis and synthesis. With
greater truth, although complete exactness would have demanded here,
not so much that to Reason should be given the power of unifying
what has been unduly divided, as that to the Intellect, that is to
say, to the practical faculty, should be given the power of dividing
extrinsically what for Reason is never divided: a power which the
Intellect, as a practical faculty, possesses and exercises, not in a
pathological, but in a physiological way.
[Sidenote: _The synthesis of theoretic and practical, and the
intellectual intuition._]
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