The name is absent

The Breviary of Aesthetic 59
mists who, in consequence of that knowledge, assume this or
that attitude, adopt this or that form of life. And that very
fixing of acquired knowledge, that “retaining” after “under-
standing,” without which (still quoting Dante) “there can
be no science,” the formation of types and laws and criteria
of measurement, the natural sciences and mathematics, to
which I have just referred, were a surpassing of the act of
theory by proceeding to the act of action. And not only does
everyone know from experience, and can always verify by
comparison with facts, that this is indeed so; but on consider-
ation, it is evident that things could not proceed otherwise.
There was a time (which still exists for not a few uncon-
scious Platonicians, mystics, and ascetics) when it was be-
lieved that to know was to elevate the soul to a god, to an
Idea, to a world of ideas, to an Absolute placed above the
phenomenal human world; and it was natural that when the
soul, becoming estranged from itself by an effort against na-
ture, had attained to that superior sphere, it returned con-
founded to earth, where it could remain perpetually happy
and inactive. That thought, which was no longer thought,
had for counterpoise a reality that was not reality. But since
(with Vico, Kant, Hegel, and other heresiarchs) knowledge
has descended to earth, and is no longer conceived as a more
or less pallid copy of an immobile reality, but remains always
human, and produces, not abstract ideas, but concrete con-
cepts which are syllogisms and historical judgments, percep-
tions of the real, the practical is no longer something that
represents a degeneration of knowledge, a second fall from
heaven to earth, or from paradise to hell, nor something that
can be resolved upon or abstained from, but is implied in
theory itself, as a demand of theory; and as the theory, so the
practice. Our thought is historical thought of a historical

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