The Theory of Mind As Pure Act-Giovanni Gentile - (Actual Idealism)
The Theory of Mind As Pure Act-Giovanni Gentile - (Actual Idealism)
The Theory of Mind As Pure Act-Giovanni Gentile - (Actual Idealism)
, LIMITED
LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS
MELBOURNE
THE THEORY OF
MIND AS PURE ACT
BY
GIOVANNI GENTILE
PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ROME
CONTENTS
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION .
CHAPTER 1
THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE REAL
PAGE
1. Berkeley's idealism. 2. Berkeley's self-contradiction. 3.
CHAPTER 11
SPIRITUAL REALITY 10
CHAPTER 111
THE UNITY OF IVIIND AND THE MULTIPLICITY OF THINGS 18
CHAPTER V
THE PROBLEM OF NATURE
CHAPTER VI
THE ABSTRACT UNIVERSAL AND THE POSITIVE
68
dispute concerning universals. 2. Nominalism and realism. 3. Criticism of
nominalism. 4. Criticism of realism. 5. Criticism of the eclectic theories. 6. The
antinomy of the universals. 7. Metaphysics and empiricism in Descartes. 8.
What we owe to Kant and wherein his error lay. 9. The new nominalism of the
pragmatists. 10. The difference between the old nominalism and the new. 11. The
identity of the new and the old nominalism. 12. The practical char- acter of the
new nominalism and Kant's primacy of the practical reason. 13. Criticism of the
Kantian pragmatism. 14. Criticism of the new epistemological pragmatism. 15.
The unity of the universal and the particular. 16. The in dividual. 17. The
positive character of the individual. 18.
PAGE
The positive. 19. The subjective and the objective positive. 20. The
subject which posits the positive and the subject for whom it is
posited.
CHAPTER Vll
THE INDIVIDUAL AS EGO 89
CHAPTER Vill
THE Pos1T1vE AS SELF-CREATED 96
1. Abstract and concrete thotvht. 2. The abstractness of
Kant's classification of the judgments. 3. Empirical character
of the classification. 4. Kant's inconsistency. 5. Thowht as the
concreteness of the universal and the individual. 6. The true
positivity. 7. Intellectualism. 8. The universal and the
particular in the ego. 9. The truth of realism and the truth of
nominalism. 10. Reconciliation of realism and nominalism. 1
1. Emptiness of names as universals. 12. The mind as self-
positing individual. 13. The individual as a universal which
makes itself. 14. Nature the negation of individuality. 15. The
individual and the multiplicity of nature. 16. The necessity of
the manifold. 17. The concept of multiplicity. 18. A pure
multiplicity is not thinkable.
CHAPTER IX
SPACE AND TIME 11
5
1. Space and time as systems of the manifold. 2. Space as an
absolute and positive manifold. 3. The supposed ideal or possible
space. 4. Time as developed from space. 5. The relation and the
difference between space and time. 6. Pure spatiality and pure
temporality not thinkable. 7. In (yenuousness of the concept of an
independent objective world as a pure manifold. 8. The non-
subjective is included by the subject in its act. 9. Kant's
anticipation of the doctrine. 10. Space as spatializing activity. 1 1.
Unity as the ground of spatiality. 1 2. Analysis and synthesis of
spatial activity. 1 3. Space and PAGE time in the mind. 14.
Criticism of the concept of the spiritual act as temporal. 15. What
is temporal and what is not temporal in mind. 16. Coexistence
and compresence. 17. The infinite point and the eternal present.
18. The reality of space and time. 19. Space and time in the
synthesis of mind. 20. The error of naturalism and abstract
spiritualism. 21. Criticism of the monadism of Leibniz. 22.
Criticism of dualism.
CHAPTER X
IMMORTALITY 137
CHAPTER Xl
CAUSALITY, MECHANISM AND CONTINGENCY 156
1. Is mind conditioned ? 2. The necessary condition and
the necessary and sufficient condition. 3. The metaphysical concept
of cause. 4. The metaphysical unity of cause and effect. 5. The
metaphysical identity of the cause and the effect. 6. Empirical
causality and scepticism. 7. The necessary non-sufficient condition.
8. The compromise of occasionalism. 9. Either metaphysics or
empiricism. 10. The selfcontradiction of metaphysical causality. 1 1. Atomism as
the basis of empirical causality. 12. Mechanism. 13. The epistemology of
mechanism. 14. The philosophy of contingency and its motive. 15. The principle
of the philosophy of con tingency. r 6. Contingency or necessity. 17. The
empiricism and mechanism of the contingent. 18. The antithesis between
contingency and freedom. 19. Conclusion.
CHAPTER Xll
FREEDOM AND PREVISION 179
CHAPTER Xlll
202
THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY AND ETERNAL HISTORY .
1. What is meant by the historical antinomy. 2.
Explanations. 3. History and spiritual values. 4. Plato and
Protagoras. 5. Solution of the antinomy. 6. The abstract
historical fact and the real process. 7. The two concepts of
history. S. History without space and time. 9. Unity of the
history which is eternal and of the history in time. 10.
Philosophy and history of philosophy. 1 1. The circle of
philosophy and history of philosophy. 12. Identity and a solid
circle. 13. Objection and reply. 14. The history of philosophy
as eternal historv. 15. The problem of the special histories.
CHAPTER XIV
ART, RELIGION AND HISTORY 220
1. The character of art. 2. Art and history. The lyrical
character of art. 4. The impersonality of art. 5. The
individuality of artistic work. 6. History of art as history of
philosophy. 7. Religion. S. Impossibility of a history of
religion. 9. History of religion as history of philosophy.
CHAPTER X V
SCIENCE, LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY 230
1. Science and philosophy. 2. Characteristics of science.
3. Characteristics of philosophy. 4. The philosophy of science. 5.
Science and naturalism. 6. Impossibility of a history of science.
7. The history of science as a history of philosophy. 8. Analogies
between science and religion. 9. The opposition between theory
and practice. 10. Solution of the antithesis.
1 1. Meaning of the distinction. 12. Conclusion.
CHAPTER XVI
PAGE
REALITY AS SELF-CONCEPT AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 241
CHAPTER XVIII
IDEALISM OR MYSTICISM ? 265
29. " Il Concetto moderno della scienza e il problema universitario. Inaugural Lecture
at the University of Rome. Rome, 19ZL.
xxl
TO BENEDETTO CROCE
More than twenty years ago I dedicated to you a book which
bore witness to a concordia discors, a friendship formed by
discussions and intellectual collaboration. 1 have seen with joy a
younger generation look up to our friendship as an example to
follow.
In all these years our collaboration has become ever more
inward, our friendship ever more living. But my old book is no
longer alive in my soul, and this is why I feel the need to inscribe
your much-loved name in this.
G.
xxlll
THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE
so I print this small volume (as I hope to print others
in years to come) in order not to part company with my
students when their examination is over, and in order that I
may be ready, if my work be not lost, to repeat in these pages
mv reply, or my encouragement to make them seek their own
reply, when they feel the need ariseand that I hope will not
be seldomto meet the serious problems, so old yet ever
new, which I have discussed in the class-room.
PISA, 15th May 1916.
CHAPTER 1
THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE REAL
c
CHAPTER 111
THE UNITY OF MIND AND THE MULTIPLICITY OF THINGS
MULTIPLE PERSONALITY
(as they call it) of the mind as the common basis and unique
substance of the various faculties. The life, the realitv, the
concreteness of the spiritual activity, is in the unity ; and
there is no multiplicity except by nelecting the life and
fixing the dead abstractions which are the result of analysis.
Modern empiricism, with its natural bias towards
multiplicity, compelled to acknowledge that in any given
experience consciousness IS a unique centre
11. The em-
piricist argU- of reference for all the psychical phenoment
against mena, and that therefore there IS no multithe unity of
plicitv within the ambit of one conscious-
mind.
ness, supposes that in the phenomenon of
multiple personality, studied in abnormal psychology,
multiplicity is introduced into consciousness itself. For
though within the ambit of consciousness there is no
multiplicity, yet when expelled from the ambit, two or more
consciousnesses may exist In one and the same empirical
subject. But this empirical observation itself serves only to
confirm our doctrine of the non-multiplicity of mind because
the duplication consists in the absolute reciprocal exclusion
of the two consciousnesses, each of which is a consciousness
only on condition of its not being a partial consciousness, nor
part of a deeper total consciousness, but that it is itself total
and therefore itself unique, not one of two.
29
The unity of the mind is infinite. For the reality of the
mind cannot be limited by other realities and still 12. The
error keep its own reality. Its unity implies its of pluralism.
infinity. The mind is not a multiplicity : nor is the whole, of
which it is a part, multiple, the part being a unity. For if the
mind belonged to a multiple whole it would be itself
intrinsically multiple.
30 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY
HISTORICAL MATERIAL
NVhoever does not feel this identity of self with history,
whoever does not feel that history is prolonged and
concentrated in his consciousness, has not history
confronting him, but only brute nature, matter deaf to the
questionings of mind. A history so conceived cannot prove a
progress, because it cannot be conceived dialectically as a
process of formation. It cannot be so conceived for the same
reason as that which prevented Plato and Aristotle
perceiving the dynamical life of nature. A history which is
finished, self-contained, done with, is necessarily
represented as all gathered and set out on one plane, with
parts which are called successive, though they have no real
and substantial succession, that is, an intrinsically necessary
order, in which what comes after cannot go before because it
implies and therefore presupposes that whch comes first.
There can be no such order in the history which is simply
the matter of historical representation, for the order of an
historian's presentation of material is a nexus and unity
which belongs to his mind. Strictly, history is not the
antecedent of the historian's activity; it is his activity. This is
confirmed in the fact that every organization of historical
elements, although each element has its own colour and
meaning as positive historical fact, bears the imprint of the
historian's mentality (political, religious, artistic,
philosophical). There is not a material element of history
which remains point for point the same in the various
representations which different historians offer, nothing
54 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.
which when we have despoiled a history of all the historian's
subjective particularityaccording to the usual empirical
conceptionwe can fix in its skeletal objectivity.
What we have said of the concept of history, represented as
existing antecedent to the mind of the 16. The historian,
should suffice to clear away the absurdity in absurdity of the
evolutionist notion of a the concept of nature, conceived in the
same way, that nature. is, as a reality presupposed by the
mind which knows it and therefore independent of the
reality of that mind. Such is the nature which Darwin and
his followers strive to conceive as an evolution. It is not
posited as immediately and simultaneously present, but as
being formed and forming itself step by step, not in virtue of
a law governing the whole of nature as the process of one
spiritual reality, but according to the law of natural
selection, the survival of the fittest. It is called selection by a
lucus a non lucendo since no one selects. The selection
results from the inevitable succumbing of the feebler and the
adaptation of the stronger to the environment. From this
mechanical law, directing a reality which has been set
beyond the reach of mind, self-subsistent in its brute nature,
there is conceived to arise, as an effect of the mechanism
itself, the highest form of animal and its soul. This soul is
reason and will, a reality which puts it in opposition to all
other kinds of animal and to all nature, which it understands
and exercises lordship over. Now, subtract mind, suppose it
not yet to have come to birth, and evolution then stands to
nature, as Darwin conceived it, in the s e relation as that in
which dialectic stands to the world of Platonic ideas, that is,
it ceases any longer to be process because it implies a
55
system of relations all of which are already posited and
consolidated. Let us imagine that there really is a moment at
which one given species exists, and that at this moment
there does not yet exist the superior species which,
according to the
NATURAL SELECTION
evolutionist theory, must issue from it, then the least
reflexion will show us that the passage of the one grade of
nature into the other is unintelligible unless with the mind
we pass from that moment, in which as yet the second grade
does not exist, to the successive moment in which there is
the first and the second grade and their relation. So that in
general, in the whole chain of evolution, however long we
imagine it, the first link of it is always presented as together
with all the others even to the last: that is, even to man who
is more than nature and therefore, by his intervention alone,
destroys the possibility of conceiving nature in itself as an
evolution. This amounts to saying that an indispensable
condition of understanding nature, as we understand history,
in its movement, is that the object be not detached from the
subject and posited in itself, independent, in its unattainable
transcendence. AS transcendent object it can only be
effectively posited as object already thought and therebv it is
shown to be immanent in the thinking, but considered
abstractly in a way which separates it from the thinking
itself. And then it is obvious that what we find within the
object is what we have put there.
To Hegel belongs the merit of having affirmed the
necessity of the dialectical thinking of the real in its 17.
Criticism concreteness. He put to the proof and of the
56 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.
Hegelian showed the impossibility of the dialectical
dialectic. thinking of the real if we begin by separating it
from the act of thinking and regard it as in itself and
presupposed by the act of thinking it. Hegel saw clearly that
we do not conceive reality dialectically unless we conceive
it as itself thought. He distinguished the intellect which
conceives things, from the reaso;z which conceives mind.
Intellect abstractly represents things analytically, each for
itself, c. self-identical, different from all the others. Reason
comprehends all in the unity of mind, as each selfidentical
and at the same time different, and therefore both different
from and identical with all the others. And yet Hegel
himself, when he would define, in the moments of its
rhythm, the dialectical nature of thought, the thought which
understands itself as unity of the variety and things as
variety of the unity, instead of presenting this dialectic as the
archetypal law of thought in act, and thereby its presupposed
ideal, could not avoid fixing it in abstract concepts. Thence
his concepts are immobile, actually devoid of any dialectical
character, and we are left unable to understand how the
concepts by themselves can pass one into another and be
unified in a real continuous logical movement.
The difficulties which he and many who ventured on
his tracks had to meet in the deduction of those first
categories of his Logic, by which the concept of
becoming, the specific character of the dialectic, is
constituted, are classical. Becoming is an identity of being
and non-being, since the being which is not, becomes. And
so Hegel has to move from the concept of being, pure
being, free from every determination, which is indeed the
least which can be thought, and which we cannot not
think, in its absolute indeterminateness, whatever
57
abstraction is made from the content of thought. Is it
possible to pass from this concept of being, posited in this
way before thoyght, and defined by means of its own
indefiniteness, to the concept of becoming and so to prove
that nothing is but all becomes ? Yes, according to Hegel ;
because being as such is not thinkable, or rather it is only
thinkable as self-identical with and at the same time
different
HEGEL'S CRUX PHILOSOPHORUM
from itself. It cannot be thought, because when we attempt
to think it deprived of all content, absolutely indeterminate,
we think of it as nothing, or nonbeing, or being which is
not ; and the being which is not, becomes. But it has been
said, if the absolute indeterminateness of being equates it
with nothing, we are then without the unity of being and
non-being in which becoming consists : there is not that
contradiction between being and non-being of which Hegel
speaks, and which is to generate the concept of becoming.
For if being is on the one hand identical with, and on the
other hand different from, non-being, then there is a being
which is not non-being and a non-being which is not being ;
and there is wanting that unity of the different which gives
rise to becoming. Being, as pure being, in such case would
be extraneous to non-being, as pure non-being, and there
could not be that meeting together and shock of being and
nothing from which Hegel thought to strike the spark of life.
In the end we are left, from whichever side we approach,
with two dead things which do not amalgamate in the living
movement.
We might easily have brought forward other and
different kinds of arguments, for this is Hegel's crux 18.
58 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.
Reform of Philosophorum, round which battle has been the
Hegelian waged. Every one feels the necessity of dialectic.
giving an account of the concept of becoming, and yet no
one is satisfied with Hegel's deduction of it. l That deduction
is vitiated by the error already indicated in distinguishing the
dialectic which is understood as a dialectic of thing thought,
from
| have given a short critical exposition of the principal attempts at interpretation in the
MATERIA SIGNATA
Hence the scales of the Scholastics, leaning now to one
side, now to the other some affirming that 7. Thomas the
principium individui is the form, others Aq uinas's that it is
the matter each with equal attempt. ground in reason; each
shut in by the impossibility of definitely breaking down the
arguments of the opposite side. There is one doctrine,
however, which though unjustifiable on the basis of
scholasticism, brouwht into play a high speculative talent,
that of Thomas Aquinas. This doctrine takes its stand not on
matter abstractly conceived, quomodolibet accepta, but
rather on matter conceived as having in itself a principle of
determination, materia signata . matter impressed with a
signum which implies a certain preadaptation to the form, a
certain principle or beginning of it. An illogical doctrine, in
so far as it framed the problem whether form or matter is the
individualizing principle, it yet has the great merit that it
substantially denies even the possibility of solving the
66 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.
problem without changing its terms. Practically it amounts
to a rejection of the problem, which, like all problems
admitting of two contradictory solutions or, as Kant would
say, giving rise to antinomies, IS wrongly stated.l
It must not be thought that the problem of the principle
of individualization was abandoned with the 8. Survival of
disappearance of scholasticism, when the the Scholastic
authority of Aristotle was shaken and Inquiry. modern
philosophy entered on a new life. We have already shown
that Bruno, notwithstanding his Intense aspiration towards
unity, never rose above the Aristotelian conception, and,
were this the place, we
1
For the medieval solutions of the problem, see Gentile, I Problemi della scolastica,
Bari, Laterza, 1913, chap. iv.
might trace the history of the many attempts in the modern
era which have been made to solve this famous problem. It
involves the essential question of philosophy. It is not
merely a theme for intellectual gymnastics, such as we are
accustomed to consider most of the questions over which
medieval philosophers grew impassioned. The form is
fundamentally the idea of the world, its ground, its plan, the
Logos, God ; and the matter is, in its turn, that obscure term
which, irreducible to God's real essence, makes the world to
be distinct from God even though it be the actualizing of his
thought. All who think this world, in whatever way they
think it, see in it a design, an order, something rational,
which renders it intelligible in so far at least as it appears
such. Galileo reduces the intelligibility of nature, which for
him is the world itself in its totality, to mathematical
relations, and these relations present themselves as laws
conceivable in themselves, independently of their
verification in natural facts, as if there were a logic presiding
67
over the working, or rather over the realization of nature
itself. Hegel constructed a complicated pure logic, by which
the world is rendered intelligible to the philosopher, and this
logic, in its pure element, the Logos, is posited before
thought as the eternal plan, which is followed out in the
world.
It is impossible ever to see reality otherwise than by the
light of an idea, which, once we conceive the reality as a
positive and therefor contingent fact, must ideally work
loose from th t fact, and posit itself as a pure idea, and so
oblige us to ask : How does it become fact ? The question is
not substantially different from that with which the
principium individui is concerned. This
HEGEL'S LOGIC AND
supposes, as already noticed and as it should now be clear,
an original dualistic intuition. It could not be put in the
monistic philosophies which denied the transcendence of the
ideal to the real, of God to the world, and therefore of the
form to the matter. But a philosophy must do more than
merely propose to restore unity and reject transcendence, if
it would gain that absolute concept of immanence for which
monism strives, that in which alone it is possible to be rid of
the antinomy of the principle of individualization. Hegel in
this respect passes ordinarily for a more immanentist
philosopher than he really is. He is responsible for
pantheism being identified with immanentism and has
become the prototype of the pantheists. Certainly no one
before him had made such mighty efforts to free reality from
every shadow of a principle which transcends it. Yet, even
so, he found himself faced with the necessity of conceiving
the abstract form which is not matter, and therefore the
68 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.
universal which is not particular and the ideal which is not
real, exactly as all the other inquirers into the individualizing
principle were. He too has to ask : How or whence is the
individual ?
The most difficult problem perhaps which we meet in the
Hegelian philosophy is this : When we have 9. Hegel's
posited logic, or the nexus of all the problem. categories of
reality, how or whence is nature ? This nature is the
particular which must intervene where there is nothing but
the universal. It is the incarnating of the pure ideal in matter,
beginning with its simplest determination, space. It is, in
short, the Aristotelian individual. And this problem in Hegel,
however his own declarations in regard to it are to be taken,
remains, and must
66 CH.
PRAGMATIST THEORIES
abbreviated formulae. In the case of the mathematical
sciences they are conventional constructions and their
validity is willed. The validity is inconceivable as existing
in itself and in that sense true ; it is willed and might
therefore be not willed. Therc is a great variety of these
epistemological theories and they may all be denoted by
the name pragmatist which some of them adopt, because, in
opposing knowledge to action and truth to practical
volitional ends, they deny the cognitive character and
therefore the truth value of the universal concepts
belonging to the natural and mathematical sciences, and
they attribute to such concepts the character of actions
directed to the attainment of an end.
The difference between the old nominalism and this
modern form lies in this, that whilst the old maintained the
necessity of the concept
10. The
difference for the knowledge of the individual, between the
old the modern actually rejects the universal nominalism
character of knowledge, and posits the
and the new.
individual himself in his strict individuality,
confronted with his thought. The knowledge of
individuality, therefore, when it is knowledge is reduced to
simple immediate intuition. But such difference is itself
morc a postulate than a real deduction ; since it is most
difficult to prove that thought, even though it be through
simple intuition, can fix itself on an object actually
individual with no light whatever shed by universality. And
when, moreover, the object intuited is intuited as not yet an
79
existent (and yet also not as a non-existent) ; when too the
mind, entirely absorbed in contemplation, has not yet
discriminated the object at all it cannot invest it even with
the catecrory of the intuited without which there is no
intuition. For this category implies the concept of being or
object or however otherwise we choose to name it. So that
bare individuality is not intuitable.
But what is the individual which the new nominalism
opposes to the generic concept ? It is not strictly a Il. The
iden_ pure extreme individuality stripped of tity of the new
every determination. An individual surely and the old is
always determinate, formed. A dog,
nominalism.
for example, which may be here and now
beside me, is not the species dog which the zoologist
constructs by abstracting the differences from his ideas of
single individual dogs. Without these differences there is
no living dog but only an artificial type, useful for
systematizing observed forms and for learning about them.
Now it is clear that the individual is intuited in so far as it
is determined as true to type, however artificial this type
may be thought to be. We are just as vividly conscious of
the arbitrariness and inexactness of our intuition of the
single individual dog, which gives support to the type, as
we are of the arbitrariness and inexactness of the type
which is abstracted from living experience. And the more
our intuition perfects itself by acquiring precision and
necessity, the more perfect we see our concept become,
throwing off its artificiality and becoming ever more
adequate by approaching the inmost essence of the real. If
at last we are persuaded, philosophically, that the inmost
essence of this dog, as of this stone and of everything that
80 THE ABSTRACT AND THE POSITIVE CH.
is, is mind, the concept of the dog will make us intuit, and
that is, strictly speaking, think, the individual og.
But, if we insist on maintaining the presupposition that
there is no objectivity except that of the individual,
VI THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL
and that thinking must simply be adherent and cannot
interpenetrate it with its constructions, and with its
concepts, that is, with itself, then it is impossible to escape
the consequences, disastrous for knowledge, which
followed from the old nominalism and which will follow
just the same from the new.
On the other hand, to the old error of expecting to attain
the individual without the universal, the nominal-
ism of the modern epistemology of the 12.
The practical character sciences adds a new one. It has its
origm of nominalism the new and in the equivocation
which the pragmatist Kant's primacy conception harbours
within it, an equiof the practical vocation not really very
new.
reason. The well-known theory expounded by Kant in the
Critique of Practical Reason, the theory of the primacy of
the pure practical reason in its union with the speculative,
is pragmatistic. " If practical reason could not assume or
think as given, anything further than what speculative
reason of itself could offer it from its own insight, the latter
would have the primacy. But supposing that it had of itself
original a priori principles with which certain theoretical
positions were inseparably connected, while these were
withdrawn from any possible insight of speculative reason
(which, however, they must not contradict), then the
question is, which interest is the superior (not which must
81
give way, for they are not necessarily conflicting), whether
speculative reason, which knows nothing of all that the
practical offers for its acceptance, should take these
propositions, and (although they transcend it) try to unite
them with its own concepts as a foreign possession handed
over to it, or whether it is justified in obstinately following
its own separate interest, and according to the canonic of
Epicurus rejecting as vain subtlety everything that cannot
accredit its objective reality by manifest examples to be
shown in experience, even though it should be never so
much interwoven with the interest of the practical (pure)
use of reason, and in itself not contradictory to the
theoretical, merely because it infringes on the interest of
the speculative reason to this extent, that it removes the
bounds which this latter had set to itself, and gives it up to
every nonsense or delusion of imagination .
The speculative reason, it appears then, is nothing but
philosophy from the standpoint of the Critique of Pure
Reason, which aims at proving the possibility of
mathematics and physics, and supposes no other world
beyond that which these sciences propose to know,
nature. The practical reason, on the other hand, is
substantially philosophy from the standpoint of mind or of
the moral law, which requires us to affirm freedom,
immortality and God. Which of the two philosophies must
prevail ? Since, says Kant, the same reason which
speculatively cannot transcend the limits of experience,
practically can and does judge according to a priori
principles, and enunciates propositions which, whilst they
are not contrary to the speculative reason, are inseparably
bound up with the practical interests of pure reason itself,
that is, are such that in denying them it is impossible to
82 THE ABSTRACT AND THE POSITIVE CH.
conceive morality, reason in general, and therefore even
speculative reason, must admit these propositions. " Admits
them, it is true," he hastens to observe, " as something
extraneous which has not grown on its own
1
Kant's Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason, Bobk Il. ch. 11. sect. iii.,
Abbott's Translation. Kant had previously said, " To every faculty of the mind
we can attribute an interest, that is a principle which contains the condition on
which alone the exercise of that faculty depends."
CATEGORY
the subject of predication. The category, then (as Kant proved), is
a function of the subject of knowledge, of the actual subject
itself ; and the individual is the content of the intuition by which
the subject of knowledge issues from itself. But is it possible to
fix the subject of knowledge, the category, the universality ?
Fixing a category means defining it, thinking it. But the category
thought is the category made subject of a judgment and therefore
no longer predicated, no longer the subject's act. No one before
Kant had ever given thought to the category, though we all use it,
and many even after Kant still fail to render a clear account of it. l
We are still accustomed to take the category in its primitive,
Aristotelian meaning, as the most universal predicate which itself
can never be subject. 4It mav be the category of " being " which
we take as this most universal concept. Can this " being " be
thought, or let us say simply can it be fixed bv thinking, in the
position of a universal which does not function as subject ? But
fixing it means saying to oneself :
Being is being." That is, we affirm " being " by duplicating it
internally into a being " which is subject and a " being " which is
dual. So that if everything is " being " (meaning that " universal "
comprises all things under it), " being is not everything, since it
is only itself by distinguishing itself from every other possible
object of thought, as the unique being. And precisely the same
applies to substance, or cause, or relation, or any similar object of
thought on which we would confer the value of a category. The
category, so to say, is a category only so long as we do not stare it
straight in the face. If we do, it is individualized at once,
punctuated, posited as a unique quid, and itself requires light
from a predicate to which it must be referred. And then it is no
longer a category.
What has been said of the category or pure universal clearly
applies a fortiori to every universal, in so
8. Particu- far as it functions as such, and so assumes larity of
the the office of category. Each of the Platonic universal. ideas,
highest archetypes of single natural things, in order to be thought
of must be individualized. For if this horse is horse (universal),
the horse (universal) itself is horse ; and if following Plato in the
manner shown in the Phaedrus we transport ourselves on the
wings of fancy to the heaven where the real horse is to be seen,
that horse the sight of which will render possible here below the
single mortal horse, it is clear that the real horse in heaven is only
seen by affirming it, that is, by making it the subject of a
judgment, precisely in the same way as in the case of any sorry
nag we meet here on earth and stop to look at. So the celestial
horse IS unique in its incommunicable nature, and in itself,
omnimodo determinata, it can neither be intuited nor apprehended
100THE INDIVIDUAL AS EGO CH.
FUNDAMENTAL JUDGMENT
Kant makes is one the ground of which is in the empiricism
which sees the object of thought and does not see the thought
which makes it object.
This example is, as I have said, the more significant from the
fact that Kant is the author of transcendental 4. Kant's idealism.
The chief characteristic of traninconsistency. scendental idealism
is the forceful manner m which it rises above empiricism,
recalling experience from the object to the subject which
actualizes it. Kant himself in this as in many other cases goes
about laboriously expounding artificial and untenable doctrines,
because he fails to grasp firmly his own sound principle, which
may be called the principle of the indwelling of the abstract in the
concrete thought.
It is, then, in concrete thought that we must look for the
positivity which escapes abstract thought, be
it of the universal or of the individual. It 5. Thought
as the concrete- is by the abstract universal that thought ness of
the thinks, but the abstract universal is not universal and thought.
The abstract individual is only
the individual.
one of the terms of the thought which we want to
intuit, to feel, to grasp as it were in a moment, to take by surprise.
Neither universal nor individual is concrete thought, for taken in
its natural meaning the universal is not individualized as it must
be to be real ; nor is the individual universalized as even it
must be to be ideal, that is, to be truly real. When Descartes
wished to assure himself of the truth of knowledge, he said :
Cogito ergo sum ; that is, he ceased to look at the cogitatum
which is abstract thought and looked at the cogitare itself, the act
of the ego, the centre from which all the rays of our world issue
THE 105
and to which they all return. And then he no longer found in
thought the being which is only a
CH.
myself thinking. The " I," as we shall see more clearly later, only
is in so far as it is
v 1 11 SELF OF THE COGITO
self-consciousness. The " I IS not a consciousness which
presupposes the self as its object, but a consciousness which
posits a self. And every one knows that personality, definite
personality, can only be thought of as self-constituted by its own
inherent forces, and these are summed up in thought.
In the intellectualist theory the ideas, as Plato conceived them,
confront thought, and there is no 7. Intellect- way of passing
from the ideas to what is ualism. positive in the individual. The
individual is the discovery which thought makes when it suddenly
realizes that it has withdrawn from its original standpoint, and
instead of having before it the ideas which it has constructed and
projected before itself, has itself confronting its own self. The
individual is the realization of the process in which the ideas arise
and live the moment we turn from the abstract to the concrete. In
the concrete we must seek the positive basis of every reality. This,
as we know, Descartes did not do. He suddenly fell back into the
intellectualist position, and later philosophy has been no more
successful.
The positive nature of the being which is affirmed of the " I "
in the Cogito ergo sum consists in this. In 8. The the " I " the
particularity and the univeruniversal and sality coincide and are
identified by giving the particular place to the true individual.
Aristotle dein the ego.
fined the individual as the unity of form and of
matter, of the ideal element which is universal and of the
immediate positive element which is particular. They are
identified (and this is the point) not because they are terms which
THE 107
are originally diverse and therefore either of them conceivable
without the other, but because they can only be thought as
difference in
Cll.
ONENESS
in regard to concrete thought ever by any means to oppose it to
thought. On the other hand, the individual (even the individual
is posited not presupposed by thought) is equally everything
whatever which can be thought of as real, or which is simply
thinkable. Because thought in its general meaning, implying
here as always that it is concrete, is all - inclusive. The cogito is
positive, certain, individual. The world of Platonic ideas, the
system of concepts in Spinoza's ethics, the world of possibles in
the intellectualist system of Wolfwhat are all these, when we
turn them from abstract thought to the concrete, but definite
historical philosophies, the thought of individual philosophers,
realized by them, and realizing themselves in us when we seek
to realize them, in our individual minds ? They deal with the
cogitare which realizes Itself in a definite being who is
absolutely unique ; who is, not one among many, but one as a
whole, infinite.
The extreme nominalism, which leaves no place even for
names outside the concreteness of the in-
10. Recon- dividual, and the no less extreme realism,
ciliation of which will admit nothing outside the realism and
universal, each finds its own truth in the
nominalism.
truth of the other. Thus is ended the opposition in
which in the past they were arrayed against one another. Beyond
the universal which is thought there is not the individual. In
being the individual the universal is itself the true individual, the
fact being that outside the individual the universal is not even a
name, since the individual itself, in its genuine individuality,
must at least be named and clothed with a predicate, and indeed
110 THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED CH.
with the universality of thought. Names, rules, laws, false
universals, all the black sheep of the nominalists, are, in fact,
chimaeras of 11. Emptiness abstract thought, not existences.
They are of names as real in the same kind of way as when
universals. losing patience with our fellow-men in an outburst of
wrath and resentment we call them beasts, the beasts are real. In
such case it is obvious that were the men we so judge really
such as we judge them, we who pass judgment upon them
would also be the beasts to which we liken them. It is obvious
also that such angry denial to men of humanity and reason does
not even abstractly mean that we deny them a share of our
reason. The injustice of such denial leaps to view the moment
we reflect that there are many degrees and many different forms
of reason and that our own is real and imperious In so far as we
realize it. A common name !but every time a name sounds on
our lips it is a new name, for it responds to an act which by its
very definition, mental act, has no past. Fused in the unity of the
mental act to which it belongs, it has nothing in common with
all the other uttered sounds materially identical with it, used at
other times to denote other objects of our experience. The rule
does not include within it a multiplicity of instances, as the
genus includes an indefinite series of individuals, because the
rule abstracted from the instances is a rule which by definition is
always inapplicable. The true rule is that which applies to
instances singly turn by turn, by making them all one with it.
Hence modern aesthetic knows that every work of art has its
own poetry, and every word its own grammar.l It is the same
with and with all
1
'' Il concetto della grammatica," 1910, in Frammenti di Cf.
Gentile,
Estetica e di letteratura, Lanciano, Carabba, 1920.
111
NAMES ARE NOT EXISTENCES
universals, whether empirical or speculative, they are never
detached from the fact, from the individual. Moreover, universal
and individual adhere and coalesce so long as we think of
neither the one nor the other in the abstract, but in what they
singly and together signify to the mind every time they are
effectively thought. For then they are nothing but the logical
transparency, the thinkability of facts and individuals, which
otherwise would vanish beyond the outer limits of the logical
horizon. They come within this logical horizon not as abstract
objects of thought, but rather as moments of the life of thought,
and individuals in the meaning we have indicated.
The individual we have found is positive. It is the only
positive it is given us to conceive. But it is 12. The mind
positive not, it is now clear, because, as as self-positing used to
be supposed, it has been run to individual. earth along a path
from which there is no escape. It is not a positive posited for the
subject by some other it is posited by the subject and is the
very subject which posits it. For that subject has need to go out
of itself in order to entrench itself in the positive, and the
positive has not become for it fact, so long as it remains
unconscious of its true bcing which it has projected before itself,
and closed in an abstract reality. But, having acquired the
consciousness of the inwardness of being in the very act by
which it is sought, the mind sees it can no longer want a
positivity surer and clearer than that which it already possesses
in itself when it thinks and realizes itself. Common sense
believes that when a man wakes up, he puts to flight his dream
images, purely subjective, a world which is not the world, by
means of sensations of material objects, the rope of salvation
without which he would be unable to escape shipwreck in the
112 THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED CH.
ocean of the inconsistent reality of his own fantasy. The exact
contrary is true. SVhen, in fact, on awaking from sleep we look
at and touch the surrounding material objects in order to recover
and possess again a clear and distinct consciousness of the real,
it is not in the objects themselves and in external nature that we
find the touchstone of reality, but in ourselves. And the difficulty
of admitting as real that external nature which is not
immediately enshrined within our subjective life as it formed
itself in our dream, makes us touch our body and other bodies,
that is, add new sensations and develop our ideas of that
external nature which at first is as it were disturbed and pushed
aside and only with difficulty succeeds in affirming its reality.
And if reality conquers the dream, it is because in experience,
whence the dreamer draws the woof of the dream life, reality is
posited through experience and not through the dream, save
only in so far as it is only the reality of ourselves who have
dreamed. And if we are cut off from this centre of reference of
our experience as a whole, from the I, in regard to which
experience is organized and systematized, we shall juxtapose
reality to the things seen in fantasy and to all the life lived in the
dream, without any possibility of discrimination and valuation.
This comes to saying that the true and unique positive is the act
of the subject which is posited as such. In positing itself, it
posits in itself, as its own proper element, every reality which is
positive through its relation of immanence in the act in which
the I is posited in an evr richer and more complex way.
Withdraw, then, your subjectivity from the world you
contemplate and the world becomes
THE 113
TOUCHSTONE OF REALITY
a rve without positivity. Make your presence felt in the world
of your dreams (as happens when one dreams and there is no
clash between the genera] context of experience and what we
are dreaming) and the very dream becomes solid reality,
positive to an extent which disturbs our personality, makes us
passionate, makes us vibrate with joy or tremble with fear.
To sum up : the individual and its correlative universa], as
we are now able to understand them, are
13. The indi- clearly neither two objects nor two static
" Thought is drowned," because the one retires from the many
(which is never immeasurable but always bounded) and is
thereby withdrawn from the essential condition of its own being
which is to be actualized as the one in the many.
Infinite in regard to space, the mind is also infinite in regard
to time. How can it be otherwise if time 4. The is a kind of
spatiality ? But as spatial mind's infinity infinity is the infinity of
what is opposed in regard to to space, so temporal infinity is the
infinity time.
of what being opposed to temporal reality
is withdrawn from time. The want of an exact doctrine of time
has rendered impossible in the past a rational doctrine of the
infinity of mind in regard to time.
The problem of the immortality of the soul is not an invention
of philosophers ; and the question of the 5. The im- origin in
time of the belief in immortality manent faith is a meaningless
question if we are thinkin immortality ing, not of the
149
empiricized forms of the mind, but of its essential nature and
functions, for these are eternal.
INDISPENSABLE ACT OF THINKING
The affirmation of the immortality of the soul is immanent in
the affirmation of the soul. For this affirmation is the " I "
affirming itself, and it is the simplest, most elementary, and
therefore the indispensable act of thinking. The extreme
difficulty of describing the essence of this most primitive and
truly fundamental reality, and consequently the inadequate
conceptions with which for so long the human mind has been in
travail, have led to the formulation of many different ways, all
inadequate, of understanding the relation which binds the " I ' to
the object, and the soul to the body and through the body to all
which is spatial and which being spatial must also be temporal.
These have given rise to various, totally unsatisfactory, modes of
conceiving, and even modes of denying, immortality. Yet even
negation by the soul of immortality is an affirmation of its own
power and value which in a way affirms the immortality it
denies.
NVhat is the meaning of immortality ? The soul posits itself
as and to affirm its beinff as 6. The requires no support of
psychological and meaning of metaphysical doctrines, for every
such immortality doctrine, and indeed every breath of our
spiritual life, presupposes such affirmation. But the soul, the I "
which posits itself, in opposing itself to every reality, posits itself
as different from all other reality. NV hen, then, it is the natural
world with which the soul finds itself confronted, world and soul
are not the same thing. As the world is manifold, the soul is
joined with its multiplicity. Since this multiplicity is Nature,
spatial and temporal, where nothing is its other, in which
150 IMMORTALITY CH.
everything at first is not, then is, and after it has been is not,
where everythincr is born and dies,so the soul comes to be
conceived like all the other elements of the manifold as born and
destined to die, as sharing in the vicissitudes of all transient
things, to whose company it belongs. But the I " is not only a
multiplication, the positing of its other and the opposing of itself
to this other, it is also, and primarily, a unity, through which all
the coexistents in space are embraced in one single survey in the
subject, and all the events in time are compresent in a present
which is the negation of time. The I " dominates space and time.
It is opposed to nature, unifying it in itself, passing from one of
its terms to another, in space and in time, breaking through and
thrusting beyond every limit. The mind cannot marshal its forces
amidst the manifold without some glimmering of the fact that it
subdues, dominates and triumphs, by withdrawing itself from its
laws. It gets a glimpse of this (a glimpse which is essential to it
and original) as soon as ever it perceives the value of its positing
the object and contraposing itself to it, or rather when it
perceives that the value of every real affirmation is in its
discrimination between the true and the false, without which the
mere affirmation as such is unintelligible. If we think at all we
must think that what we think of is as it is thought of and not
otherwise ; that is, we cannot think of anything except as being
true in distinction from its contrary of being false. And the true is
not relative, as it were an element of a multiplicity in which there
are many elements. The true is one, absolute ; absolute even in
its relativity, for it cannot be except what it is. The element of the
manifold has the other elements surrounding itself, but the true,
if it is true, is alone. Truth, therefore, cannot be subject to the
spatiality and temporality of natural
THE 151
ETERNAL IN ONE'S SELF
things ; it transcends them even in being what must be thought
about them. It posits itself as eternal. The eternity of truth implies
the eternity of the thought in which truth is revealed. Speculation
in pursuing truth may detach from it this eternity, but only in so
far as it finds it. So that even when in making a speculative
induction the conclusion seems to transcend the eternal nature of
truth, it yet presupposes a certain presence of the eternal in mind,
and a certain identity of the two terms, thinking and eternal. And
this is why, having made truth transcendent we must make mind
transcendent, endowing it with the ultramundane, if not
premundane, life of the soul. Feeling truth in one's self can only
be feeling the eternal in one's self, or feeling that we participate in
the eternal, or however otherwise we like to express it.
In its origin and in substance the immortality of the soul has
no other meaning. All the grounds 7. The upon which faith in
immortality has absolute value rested, if we set aside reasons
prompted of the spiritual by desire to prove Its rationality, so
often
act.
attached to inadequate philosophical concepts,
resolve themselves into the affirmation of the absoluteness q/ the
value of all the affirmations of mind.
Philosophy of religion and natural religion have placed the
immortality of the soul among the con 8. Religion stitutive
principles of religion itself. But and immor- the contrary rather
is the truth. If it be tality. true, as Kant thought, that religion
within the limits of reason leads necessarily to the concept of
immortality, it is no less true that there have been religions
which have had no explicit doctrine of immortality. Moreover
religion within the limits of reason is not religion, but
152 IMMORTALITY CH.
philosophy. Religion, as we shall see later, is the position in
which the absolute is taken in its abstractly objective aspect, and
this involves the negation of the subject, and leads to mysticism,
which is the subject's self-negation of its individuality, and its
immediate self-identification with its object. Immortality, on the
contrary, is the subject's self-affirmation of its own absolute
value. From this it follows that there are certain forms of
naturalistic atheism which deny immortality because they deny
transcendence in any form, which yet become substantially
more positive than some mystical tendencies with regard to the
affirmation of the immanent value of the soul, than they would
be if they affirmed the concept of immortality. But we shall see
further on that religion in its extreme and ideal position is
unrealizable; because the very mysticism which is the denial of
the value of the subject is the activity of that subject, and
therefore the implicit affirmation of its value. Absolute
transcendence cannot be affirmed of mind without denying it.
God can only be God in so far as he is very man. And so the
development of the awareness of this immanent relation of the
object with the subject development due to the work of the
thought in which philosophical reflexion consistsleads on the
one hand to the contamination of the purity of religion with the
rationality of the subject, and on the other to the commingling
and integrating of the eternity of God with the eternity of mind.
Thus it is not the concept of God which posits the immortal
soul, but the concept of God in so far as it is our concept and
therefore a manifestation of the power of our mind. Or we might
even say it is the concept of our soul, which in turning to God
finds its own concept unknowable except as eternal. It implies
immortality. It
THE 153
ABSOLUTENESS OF VALUE
is therefore the concept of our own immortality, or of the
absolute value of our own affirmation, which generates that
concept of God with which is bound up the concept of an
immortal soul, or rather, the concept of a true and real God who
is eternal being.
SVhatever we valueour children, our parents, the God in
whom we trust, the property we have 9. The acquired as the
result of our labour, the religious art and philosophy which is the
work of character of our mind possesses value to the extent
all values.
that it triumphs over the limits of our natural life,
passes beyond death into immortality. The man who aspires to
be united with God, and to rejoin his dead in another world than
this world of experience, is united even in this world to those
whom he leaves behind, to his heirs to whom he bequeaths the
fruit of his labour, and to his successors to whom he commends
and trusts the creations of his mind, because his whole
personality becomes eternal in what he values as the reality of
his own life.
NVhatever the particular form which faith in immortality
may take, that faith is immanent, because 10. The
substantially, immortality is the mentality puzzle of the of mind,
the spirituality of spirit. It is just concept of ob- that absolute
value which is the essential jective values. character of every
form and of every moment of spiritual activity. All the
troublesome puzzles which surround immortality are derived
from the mind's projection of its own value into the object,
which is the realm of the manifold, the world of space and time.
These puzzles, consequently, are mirrored in the
embarrassments of those who in every age have travailed with
154 IMMORTALITY CH.
this concept of the absoluteness of value, in giving birth to the
scepticism inherent in all the
naturalistic and relativistic conceptions of knowing and of acting
and of whatever is conceived as spiritual act.
All these puzzles disappear when the problem of immortality
is set forth in its own terms. Immortality 11. Immor- belongs
to mind, and mind is not nature, tality as an and precisely for
that reason and only for attribute of that reason it is not included
within the mind.
limits of any natural thing, nor of nature generally,
which is never a whole. Nature is not infinite either in space or
in time. The same reason which, as we saw, proved that it is
indefinite in space applies equally to time. It is identical with
that in which Kant found his solution of the first of the
antinomies.l Nature is not temporally infinite but temporally
finite , its limits are displaceable ; and their essential
displaceability implies that time for nature is indefinite. But the
indefiniteness of time is the temporal infinity of mind in its
unity which remains one even in being multiplied, since
multiplicity always supposes unity. To inquire what was at the
beginning of nature and what there will be at the end is to
propound a meaningless problem, because nature is only
conceivable as a given nature, this nature, enclosed within
certain limits of time, only assignable in so far as they are not
absolute and as the mind passes beyond them in the very act of
supposing them. But this indefiniteness of nature, in its turn,
would not be intelligible were it not an effect of the infinity of
mind, which supposes all the limits of time, by passing beyond
them and therefore by gathering in itself and
1
The first antinomy said in the thesis, " The world in time has a beginning and as
regards space is enclosed within certain limits and in the antithesis, " The world has
THE 155
neither beginning in time, nor limits in space, but is infinite in regard to time as in
regard to space."
HIGHER PERSONALITY
reconciling in its own immanent unity all temporal multiplicity.
The conclusion is that if we think of ourselves empirically as
in time, we naturalize ourselves and imprison 12. Immortal
ourselves within definite limits, birth and personality. death,
outside of which our personality cannot but seem annihilated.
But this personality through which we enter into the world of
the manifold and of natural individuals, in the Aristotelian
meaning, is rooted in a higher personality, in which alone it is
real. This higher personality contains the lower and all other
empirical personalities, and as this higher personality is not
unfolded in space and time wc cannot say that it is before the
birth and after the death of the lower, because " before " and "
after applied to it would cause it to fall from the one to the
many, and by destroying it as the one we should thereby also
destroy the manifold. But this personality is outside every "
before and after." Its being is in the eternal, opposed to time,
which it makes to be. This eternity, however, does not transcend
time in the meaning that it stands outside time as one reality is
outside another. Is it not clear, then, that the eternity of mind is
the mortality of nature, because what is indefinite from the
standpoint of the many is infinite from the standpoint of the
one ? Life, the mind's reality, is in experience (in nature, the
experience of which is consciousness). But it lives within nature
without being absorbed in it, and without ever itself becoming
it ; moreover, it always keeps its own infinity or unity, without
which even nature with its multiplicity, that is, with space and
time, would be dissolved.
156 IMMORTALITY CH.
The only immortality, then, of which we can think, the only
immortality of which we have ever actually thought, when the
immortality of mind has been affirmed, is the immortality of the
transcendental I " ;not the immortality of the empirical
individual in which the mythical philosophical
interpretation of this immanent affirmation of mind has been
imaginatively entangled. In this way it has come to project
multiplicity, and consequently the spatiality and temporality of
nature, into the realm of immortality.
Nor does it leave unsatisfied the heart's desire. Only those
who fail to place themselves at the 13. The standpoint of our
idealism will think it heart's desire. does. That standpoint
requires that we shall in every case pass from abstract to
concrete thought, and so keep ever before us the reality whose
indispensable condition it is to be inherent in thought, in thought
as present reality, not in thought when we only mean it as an
abstract possibility, something distinct from its present activity.
But whoever attains this standpoint must take heed. He must, as
it were, keep his attention fixed and not divided, one eye on
concrete thought in which the multiplicity is the multiplicity of
the one and nature therefore is mind, and the other on abstract
thought in which the multiplicity is nothing but multiplicity and
nature is outside and beyond mind. This is the case of those who
protest and assure us that they understand and know the
transcendental I," that unity to which we must refer the world of
experience, and who then turn and seek in that world of
experience itself the reply to the problems which arise in the
depth of their soul, problems, that is to say, which arise precisely
in the activity of the transcendental
The heartfor by that name we are accustomed
THE 157
CHAOTIC MULTIPLICITY
to express the inmost and concrete concerns of our 14. The
im- spiritual individualitydoes, it is true, mortality of the
demand immortality for the empirical empirical I. rather
than for the transcendental It wants the immortality of our
individual being, in its concrete form of a system of particular
relations, depending on the positive concreteness of natural
individuals. My immortality is the immortality of all which for
me has absolute value. My immortality therefore includes, for
example, that of my children and my parents, for they with me
form a complex multiplicity of individuals. It comes to saying
generally that my immortality is only a real concrete thing in the
immortality of the manifold.
But, in the first place, we must remember that in so far as I
attribute to the manifold, or recognize in it, the value which
makes me feel the need of affirming its immortality, I am not
mvself one of the elements of the manifold, I am the One, the
activity which in itself is unmultipliable because it is the
principle of the multiplicity. And in the second place, we must
remember that the multiplicity which I prize, and in prizing
cannot but affirm its immortality, is the multiplicity which has
value, the multiplicity which is not abstracted from the activity
which posits it, and is not abstractly multiple. It is not a
multiplicity, for example, in the sense that I and my child are
numerically two and I and my parents are numerically three, for
it is a multiplicity actually realized in the present unity of the
mind. It is as though the multiplicity, fixed as it is, as we
analytically make it, issued forth from the eternal to be flung
into the abstract and self-contradictory time, which is chaotic
multiplicity : but mind, in so far as it does not fix the
multiplicity but lives in it, that is to say, from the immanent
158 IMMORTALITY CH.
standpoint, never abandons the empirical reality to itself. It
holds it, reconciles it eternally in itself, eternizes it in its own
eternity.
We have an example of this immanent eternity whenever,
without plunging into idealistic speculation, we have the
intuition and affirmation which is the recognition of a work of
art, for a work of art is immortal. But how is it immortal ? As
one among other works of art, chronologically fixed in a series ?
As a fact ? No, clearly not. Its immortality is in the mind which
withdraws it from the multiplicity. And the mind withdraws it in
understanding and enjoying it, that is, in re-creating it in itself
by a creative act. In this way, and in this way alone, the work of
art is present reality, reality with neither antecedents nor
consequents, unique with the unity which rules time and
triumphs over it by the judgment regarding the value of the
work itself, a judgment immanent in the creative act. But how if
it be not read, if it be not re-created ? The supposition itself
removes the problem ; for we are asking what is meant by the
immortality of art, that is, of art as it is, and art is only in so far
as it is known or is for us.
Will it not be said, however, that immortality is only of the
immortals, and even of these it is not 15. Immor- their whole
individuality which liyes in tality is not a memory, but only
those moments of privilege, supreme universal value, which
highly privileged souls have known how to live, and deeds such
as they have only once in their lives performed ? The case of art
which we have instanced is no more than an example, but since
what is material in it is an intuition of speculative truth to be
found in ordinary thought, it may aid us to rise at once to the
truth itself
THE 159
x MONIMENTUM MERE PERENNIUS 1 51
in its full universality. The immortalsthe poets, the
philosophers, all humanity's heroesare of the same stuff as all
men, and indeed of the same stuff as thin ('s. Nothing is
remembered and all is remembered. Nothing is immortal if we
recognize immortality only by its mark on empirical memory
everything is immortal if memory, by which the real is
perpetuated and triumphs over time, means what strictly it only
can mean. NVe have already shown that memory, as the
preservation of a past which the mind has mummified and
withdrawn from the very series itself of the elements of time, is
a myth. In this meaning nothing is remembered, nothing abides
or is repeated after having been, and the whole of reality is
inexorably clothed, by definition, with the innumerabilis
annorum series et fuga temporum," of which Horace speaks in
the well-known ode : 5
Exegi mommentum aere perennius regalique situ
pyramidum altius, quod non imber edax, non Aquilo
impotens possit diruere aut innumerabilis annorum series
et fuga temporum. non omnis moriar multaque pars mel
vitabit Libitinam : usque ego postera crescam laude
recens, dum Capitolium scandet cum tacita virgine
pontifex. dicar, qua violens obstrepit Aufidus et qua
pauper aquae Daunus agrestium regnavit populorum, ex
humili potens princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos
deduxisse modos. sume superbiam quaesitam meritis et
mihi Delphica lauro cinge volens, Melpomene, comam.
NECESSARY CONNEXON
the intuition of the real which sets its face towards the unity.
Causality, the necessary relation between two terms of thouht,
must, from the metaphysical standpoint, be conceived in the
light of the unity, or rather by means of a unity, which lies at the
base of the duality. How can the reciprocal necessity of
conceiving the one term tocyether with the other, by which the
realization of the effect is presented as the necessary realization
of the cause, be itself conceived, unless the duality of the two
terms is reconciled in a fundamental unity ? Now so long as the
167
condition is necessary to the conditionate but not the
conditionate to the condition, there is lacking that absolute
relation which we have already had occasion to expound as
having its roots in the unity. But when the concept of the
condition is such that we cannot conceive the condition without
conceiving the conditionate, or rather such that the essence of
the condition implies the essence of the conditionate, then the
two concepts are no longer two, they are merged in one single
concept. The pantheistic concept of the world, for example, is
the concept of God and the concept of the world bound together
or fused into one single concept, so that to conceive God is the
same as to conceive the world.
Necessity is the identity of the necessary term with the term
for which it is necessary. In the case of the necessary and
sufficient condition, 5, The
metaphysical the cause is necessary for the effect, the identity of
effect is necessary for the cause, and therethe cause and fore the
effect is identical with the cause the effect.
and vice versa. On the other hand, in the case of the
necessary and non-sufficient condition the conditionate is not
identical with the condition because it is not necessary for it, but
the condition is identical with the conditionate because the
conditionate is impossible without the condition. In so far as
there is necessity there is identity, and only when the relation of
necessity is not reciprocal is the identity not whole and perfect.
In the conditionate, therefore, besides the identity with the
condition there is required the difference. Thus the theistic
theory of creation makes the concept of God independent of the
concept of the world, but not the concept of the world
independent of that of God. God, in this theory, is the necessary
but not the sufficient condition of the world, because though
IMMORTALITY CH.
there were no world there could be God. But, on the other hand,
in so far as there could be no world without God, God is in the
world. Therefore, God is identical with the world without the
world being identical with God. Besides the being of God the
world must, in fact, contain the nonbeing of God, that which is
excluded from the divine essence. Were the world being, and
nothing else but being, it would be identical with God and
therefore indistinguishable from him. Such at least is the
outcome of theistic dualism, which makes God necessary and
the world contingent. In the same way psychophysical dualism,
when it would explain sensation, assumes movement to be the
necessary but not the sufficient condition of sensation. This
clearly implies a difference between movement and sensation ;
but also it implies an identity, not indeed of the soul with the
body, but of the body with the soul, because had the soul no
body it could not even be a term of physical movement.l
1
The other identity, that of soul with body, is required, when this psychophysical
psychology, in its theory of volitional process, comes to expound the will as a
principle of external movement, for it makes the will a necessary but not a sufficient
condition of the movement.
SIMPLE SUCCESSION
The passage from the necessary and sufficient condition to
the simply necessary condition introduces 6. Empirical an
empirical element into the metaphysical causality and intuition,
and this empirical element always scepticism. characterizes the
case of the intuition of necessary and non-sufficient condition.
The empirical element is statement of fact and affirmation of
simple contingency, of a positive datum of experience.
Necessity, in fact, has to disappear in order that the empiricist
conception, which admits no identity in the real but only an
absolute multiplicity, may set itself up in all the force of its
169
logic. In the absolute manifoldness of the real, the unity of
identity, according to the empirical principle, can onlv be an
intrusion of the subject, extraneous to the immediate reality. For
the concept of metaphysical causality there is substituted,
therefore, the concept of empirical causality. It received precise
form in Hume, but it existed before, however obscurely, in
Vico's sceptical doctrine of the knowledge of nature, expounded
in the De antiquissima Italorum sapientia.l Ordinarily, the
empirical concept of cause is distinguished from the
metaphysical concept by this difference, that the metaphysical is
the concept of efficient cause, the empirical the concept of
simple succession. 2 But the efficiency of the cause is an obscure
idea, which when cleared up is shown to be the unity or identity
of the cause with the effect because the efficient cause is that
which is conceived as necessary and sufficient, that is, as a
reality whose
1
See Gentile, Studi vichiani, Messina, 1915, pp. 101 ff.
2
It is sometimes thought necessary to say invariable succession. But the invariability is either
assumed as fact (the not varying) and the adjective is then a simple pleonasm, or it is assumed
as a law of the succession, and then there is an end of the empirical character of empirical
causality, which moreover can be nothing more than simple succession.
realization is a realization of the reality of which it is the
condition. This reality of the conditionate issuing from the
essential reality of its condition (which is nothing else but the
impossibility of conceiving the process of the condition
otherwise than as expanding into the conditionate) is the
efficiency of the causality. This is too obvious to be missed
in the intellectualistic and abstractly rationalistic position of a
metaphysic such as Spinoza's, which claims to construct the real
worldan object of the mind, though how or why we
know noton the basis of the substance, causa sui, whose
essence implies its existence. It must therefore say axiomatically,
IMMORTALITY CH.
ATTEMPTS AT COMPROMISE
sciousness of the subjectivity of time, the extreme limit to which
it is possible to push the empirical conception of the relation of
condition and conditionate, and the last support on which the
neation of unity can lean.
Between efficient or metaphysical causality and empirical
causality there stands, then, the concept of a
7. The necessary and non-sufficient condition, a S
necessary non- hybrid scheme of the intelligibility, or sufficient
rather of the unification, of the real, half condition.
171
metaphysical, half empirical. A two-faced Janus which from
without, from the effect to the cause, looks metaphysically at the
unity and at the necessity, and from within, from the cause to the
effect, looks empirically at the difference and at the fact. It is a
self-contradictory concept. On its metaphysical side it affirms
empiricism, and on its empirical side, metaphysical rationality.
For when working back from effect to cause it sees the necessity
of the cause, that necessity implies not only an identity of the
cause with the effect but also of the effect with the cause : or
rather, it is that absolute identity for which the cause is not only
the necessary but also the sufficient condition. Vice versa, when
working from the cause to the effect it sees the contingency of
the effect, the contingency means diversity, and there cannot be
diversity of the effect from the cause without there also being
diversity of the cause from the effect. And it is impossible to get
rid of the dilemma by refusing to choose either of the two ways,
from the effect to the cause or from the cause to the effect,
because if we should affirm the unity and identity of the two,
and, in short, consider that there is no difference between the
relation of cause to effect and that of effect to cause, then clearly
we restore entirely the metaphysical character of the condition as
not only necessary but sufficient.
There is another compromise between metaphysics and
empiricismone which has played an important 8. The com-
part in the history of philosophy from the promisc of beginning
of the modern era,the conoccasionalism. cept of occasional
causes, which we owe mainly to Geulincx (162769) and to
Malebranche (16381715). These philosophers sought by it to
cut the Gordian knot of psychophysical causality, in the
Cartesian doctrine of the two substances, soul and body.
Occasionalism denied that physical movement can be the
IMMORTALITY CH.
nevertheless accords with the other, just as if there were a mutual influence or as if Cod alwavs
put his hand thereto in addition to his general cooperation ' (Philosophical Works of Leibniz, G.
M. Duncan's translalation, chap. xv.). (Compare also the Troisime claircissement and the
Systme noucveau, Erdmann, p. 127.) We may remark that the comparison of the two clocks is
not Leibniz's own invention, for we find it being commonly cited by the Cartesians as a
scholastic illustration (v. Descartes, Passions de l'me, I, 5, 6, and L. Stein in Archiv fir
Geschichte der Philosophie, i. 59). We may remark, too, that Leibniz's distinction between
173
occasionalism and his system of the pre-established harmony has no great speculative importance
; for it is easy to see that to dispense with the work of God from the different moments of the
process of reality after it has been set going does not eliminate the speculative difficulty of the
miraculous character of God's extrinsic intervention. Without this intervention causality remains
just as unintelligible as the harmony, which is alreadv affirmed in occasionalism, and which
Leibniz cannot help extendin(' to his pluralism.
Geulincx, also (Ethica, i. sect. explains the agreement of the two substances, soul
and body, as that of two clocks : Idque absque ulla causalitate qua alterum hoc in
altero causat, sed propter meram dependentiam, qua utrumque ab eadem arte et simili
industria constitutum est." The body therefore does not think nor make think haec
nostra corpora non cogitant, licet nobis occasionem praebeant cogitandi ' ) . But
bodies not only do not think, they do not act, they do not move of themselves, for the
only mover is God. This most important doctrine was taught by Geulincx in his
Metaphysica (published in 1691) : Sunt quidam modi cogitandi in me, qui a mc non
dependent, quos ego ipse in mc non excito ; excitantur igitur in me al) aliquo alio
(impossibile enim est ut a nihilo mihi obveniant). At alius, quicumque sit, conscius
esse debet hujus necrotii ; facit enim, et impossibile est, ut is faciat, qui nescit
quomodo fiat. Est hoc principium evidentissimum per se, sed per accidens et propter
praejudicia mea et ante coeptas opiniones redditum est nonnihil obscurius ; jamdudum
enim persuasurn habeo, res aliquas, quas brutas esse et omni cogitatione destitutas
acrnoscebam, aliquid operari et agere. Existimavi v. gr. ignem, quod ad ejus
praesentiam sensum in me caloris produceretur, calefacere ; et hoc calefacere sic
interpretabar, ac si esset calorem facere. Similiter solem illuminare, juxta similcrn
interpretationem, lumen cfficcrc, lapides cadere, ut interpretabar, se ipsos praecipites
dare, et motum illum cfficere, quo dcorsum ruant ; ignem tamen,
solem, lapidesque brutos esse, sine sensu, sine cognitione haec omnia operari
existimabam. Sed cum intellectum intendo in evidentiam hujus principii . Quod nescis
quomodo fiat, id non facis, non possum non videre, me falsum fuisse, et mirari mihi
subit, cum satis clare agnoscam, me id non facere, quod nescio quomodo fiat, cur de
aliis aliquibus rebus aliam persuasionem habeam. Et qui mihi dico, me calorem non
facere, me lumen et motum in praeceps non efficere, quia nescio quomodo fiant, cur
non similiter, igni, soli, lapidi idem illud improperem, cum persuasum ha beam ea
nescire quomodo effectus fiant, et omni cognitione destitui ? " (Opera philosophica,
edition Land, ii. 150). It is remarkable that in this passage the negation of efficient
causality (operari et agere) is connected with the empiricist opposition between subject
and object affirmed in the principle indicated by Geulincx and so nearly resembling the
principle of Vico : Verum etfactum convertuntur. This in its turn is closely connected
with a sceptical theory of the knowledge of nature, analogous, as I have already pointed
out, to that of Hume.
That occasionalism and the pre-established harmony both arise from the need of
maintaining the unity of the manifold is evident in the proposition which is one of the
earliest accounts Leibniz has given of the doctrine (in 1677, in a note to a letter of
Eck-hard) : " Harmonia est unitas in multitudine ut si vibrationes duorum pendulorum
inter se ad quintum quemlibet ictum consentiant " (Philosophische Schriften, edition
Gerhardt, i. 232). For the genesis and the ancient and medieval precursors of
occasionalism consult Zeller, Kleine Schriften, i. p. 316 n., and two writings of Stein,
loc. cit. i. 53 and ii. 193.
BOUTROUX'S THESIS
that is to say, the existence of a necessary relation between
two thincys ? The most perfect type of necessary connexlon is
the syllogism, in which a particular proposition is proved as
the consequence of a general proposition, because it is
contained in it, and so was implicitly affirmed at the moment
the general proposition itself was affirmed. The syllogism, in
fact, is only the demonstration of an analytical relation
existing between the genus and the species, the whcle and the
part. So that where there is an analytical relation, there is a
necessary connexion. But this connexion, in itself, is purelv
formal. If the general proposition is contingent, the particular
proposition which is deduced from it is, at least as such,
equally and necessarily contingent. AVe cannot reach, by the
svllogism, the demonstration of a real necessity unless all the
conclusions are attached to a major premise necessary in
itself. Is this operation compatible with the conditions of
analysis ? From the analytical standpoint the only proposition
which is entirely necessary in itself is that which has for its
formula A = A. Every proposition in which the attribute
differs from the subject, and this is the case even when one of
the terms results from the decomposition of the other, leaves a
synthetic relation subsisting as the obverse of the analytic
relation. Can the syllogism reduce synthetically analytic
propositions to purely analvtic propositions ?
Starting from this principle it is not difficult to argue that
the necessity arising from absolute identity
S 16. Con- is not to be found in any proposition and tingency
or is not in the svllo crism. So that if necessity. mechanics is
615-16.
CHAPTER Xll
FREEDOM AND PREVISION
187
THE philosophy of contingency does not rise above the position
which Hume reached when he denied the I. The objective
value of causality by emphasizphilosophy of mg the difference
between cause and contingency effect, condition and
conditionate, thus and Hume. bringing into relief the uniqueness
of every fact as such. Hume's position, the position to which
natural science has now been brought and cannot get past, is
that of strict empiricism. As we have already shown,
empiricism regards reality as the antecedent of immediate
experience, and supposes that this reality is in itself manifold,
and only unified phenomenally in the ideal connexions which
the subject in one way or another forms of it in elaborating
experience.
The real, the antecedent of immediate experience itself, is
the fact, and empiricism is confident it does not 2. The
transcend it. This fact, in its bed-rock contingent as a position,
is the absolute necessity which necessary fact the theory of
contingency considers is at once got rid of when we leave the
scientific point of view ; yet there it stands as fact, the
fundamental postulate, we may say, of contingency. Whether
nature, this world of experience, be taken in its com-
179
plexity, or whether it be taken in each of its elements, it is fact
: fact which being already accomplished is bound by the iron
law of the past, and infectum fieri nequit ; fact of which the
Greek tragedian said :
Pdvov -yp aTov ees TP(TKETL,
d)'EVqTCL 7701cv av 777rpa71Lvct. 7
(Of this alone even God is deprived, to make what has been done not to have
been.)
1
" Caro l' incontro d' una testa di Medusa, che ci convertisse in un marmo o in
diamante." Opera, ed. Naz., v. 234-5, 260.
Xll 191
IMMUTABILITY OF THE FACT
E degli anni ancor non nati Daniel si ricord.
l
nunquid, quia hoc scis, ideo et dies est? An contra quia dies est,
ideo scis diem esse ? Eadem ratio est de praeterito. Novi, iam
octo horis, noctem fuisse ; sed mea cognitio non facit illud
fuisse ; potiusque ego novi noctem fuisse, quia nox fuit. Atque,
ut propius venram, praescius sum, post octo horas noctem fore ;
ideone et erit ? Minime ; sed quia erit, ideo praescisco : quod si
praescientia hominis non est causa ut aliquid futurum sit, utique
nec praescientia Dei " (I cannot see why the necessity of our
volitions and actions should seem to you to follow from God's
foreknowledge. For if foreknowing that something would be
makes it that it will be, then to know that something is makes
that something to be ! But, if I rightly judge your intelligence,
you would never say that something is but that you know it to
be. For example, you know it is now day ; is it day because you
know it ? Is it not, on the contrary, because it is day that you
know it ? The same reasoning applies to what is past. I knew
eight hours ago that it was night ; but my knowledge did not
make it night ; rather, I knew it was night because it was night.
But, I will come to the point, I foreknow that in eight hours it
will be night ; will that make it so ? Not in the least ; but
because it will be, I foreknow it. If, then, human foreknowledge
is not the cause of something future existing, neither is God's
foreknowledge.) To this the other speaker, who in the dialogue
presents the difficulties which are raised by the solution of
Boethius, objects with admirable clearness : " Decipit nos, mihi
crede, ista comparatio : aliud est scire, praescientia hac,
praeterita, aliud futura. Nam cum aliquid scio esse, id variabile
esse non potest : ut dies qui nunc est, nequit fieri ut non sit.
Praeteritum
Xll 195
VALLA'S ARGUMENT
quoque nihil differens habet a presenti . id namque non tum
cum factum est cognovimus, sed cum fieret et praesens erat, ut
noctem fuisse non tunc cum transit didici, sed cum erat. Itaque
in his temporibus concedo nor, ideo aliquid fuisse aut esse, quia
ita esse scio, sed ideo me ascire, quia hoc est aut fuit. Sed alia
ratio est de futuro, quod variabile est ; nec pro certo scirl potcst
quod incertum est. Ideoque, ne Deum fraudem praescientia,
fateamur certum esse quod futurum est, et 0b id necessarium."
(Your comparison, it seems to me, is deceptive. It is one thing to
know the past with this foreknowledge, another thing to know
the future. For when I know something is, that something
cannot be variable : for instance, the day which now is cannot
become that it is not. The past, indeed, is not different from the
present : 8 we knew it when it was making and present, not
when it was over, just as night was not then when you
discoursed of it but when it was. And so with these times I grant
that nothing was or is because I know it, but what it is or was, it
is or was, though I am ignorant. But concerning what is in the
future another account must be given for it is variable ; it cannot
be certainly known because it is itself uncertain. Hence, if we
are not to deny foreknowledge to God, we must admit that the
future is certain and therefore necessary.) The former speaker
having replied that the future, although future, can yet be
foreseen (for example, that in a certain number of hours it will
be night, that summer is followed by autumn, autumn by winter,
then spring, then summer again), the critic rejoins : " Naturalia
sunt ista, et eundem cursum semper currentia : ego autem
canst what befits thee. If thou goest to Rome thou art lost."
Sextus, unable to reconcile himself to so great a sacrifice,
leaves the temple and abandons himself to his appointed
destiny. But when he is gone, Theodorus, the priest, would
know why Jupiter cannot give Sextus a will different from that
which has been assigned to him as king of Rome. Jupiter refers
him to Pallas, in whose temple at Athens he falls asleep and
dreams he is in an unknown country, where he sees a huge
palace. It is the palace of the Fates, which the Goddess makes
him visit. And therein is portrayed not only all that happens, but
all that is possible, and he is able to see every particular which
would have to be realized together with and in the system of all
the other particulars in its own quite special possible world. "
Thou art aware," savs Pallas to Theodorus, that when the
conditions of a point which is in question are not sufficiently
determined and there is an infinity of them, they all fall into
what geometricians call a locus, and at least this locus (which is
often a line) is determined. So it is possible to represent a
regulated series of worlds all of which will contain the case in
point and will vary its circumstances and consequences." And
all these worlds existing in idea were exactly pictured in the
palace of the Fates. In each apartment a world is revealed to the
eyes of Theodore ; in each of these worlds he always finds
Sextus : always the same Sextus, and yet different in relation to
the world to which he belongs. In all the worlds, therefore, is a
Sextus in an infinity of states. From world to world, that is from
room to room, Theodore rises ever towards the apex of a great
pyramid. The worlds become ever more beautiful. " At last he
reaches the highest world, at the top of
Xll 199
Xll THE POSSIBLE WORLDS 191
the pyramid, the most beautiful of all for the pyramid had an
apex but no base in sight ; it went on growing to infinity, "
because, as the Goddess explained, among an infinity of
possible worlds there is the best of all, otherwise God would not
have determined to create any, but there is none which has not
less perfect ones beneath it that is why the pvramid descends
to infinitv." They enter, Theodore overcome with ecstasy, into
the highest apartment, which is that of the real world. And
Pallas says, " Behold Sextus such as he is and as he will in fact
be. Look how he goes forth from the temple consumed with
rage, how he despises the counsel of the Gods. See him going to
Rome, putting all in disorder, ravishing his friend's wife. See
him then driven out with his father, broken, wretched. If Jupiter
had put here a Sextus happy at Corinth, or a King in Thrace, it
would no longer be this world. And yet he could not but choose
this world which surpasses in perfection all the others and is the
apex of the pyramid ; otherwise Jove would have renounced his
own wisdom, he would have banished me who am his child.
You see, then, that it is not my father who has made Sextus
wicked he was wicked from all eternity and he was always
freely so. He has done nothing but grant to him the existence
which his wisdom could not deny to the world in which he is
comprised. He has made it pass from the realm of the possibles
to that of actual being." I
The conclusion is obvious. The proposal to re-
1
Leibniz, following an original concept of Augustine, according to which evil is justified as
an instrument of cyood, makes Pallas conclude, ' The crime of Sextus subserves great things. Of
it will be born a mighty empire which will produce splendid examples, but this is nothing in
regard to the value of the complexity of this world " (Theod. sec. 416).
nounce Rome which Jupiter makes to Sextus at Dodona 11.
Vanity is a cheat, because from eternity there has of the attempt.
200 FREEDOM AND PREVISION CH.
be beautiful as youth and so courteous in manner that you will take courage and
speak to her more freely and readily than you have ever spoken to her. And then
you will take her hand and look her full in the face, and you will be surfeited
with the sweetness that will fill your soul. And to-morrow whenever you think of
this dream you will feel your heart overflowing with tenderness.
Tasso. What consolation ! A dream in exchange for truth.
Spirit. What is truth ?
Tasso. I know no more than Pilate knew.
231
Spirit. Well, let me tell you. Between knowing the truth and the dream there is
only this difference, that the dream is always and many times sweeter and more
beautiful than the truth can ever be.
Tasso. Is a dreamed pleasure then as good as a real pleasure ?
Spirit. It is. Indeed I know a case of one who, when his lady has appeared to
him in a kindly dream, the whole next day he avoids meeting her and seeing her,
because he knows that the real lady cannot compare with the dream image, and
that reality dispelling the illusion from his mind, would deprive him of the
extraordinary delight the dream gave.
XIV ART ESSENTIALLY LYRICAL
it. The material of art has worth, means, is what it is, by
reason of the life it lives in the poet's soul. The matter is not
there for its own sake but for the soul's life, for its feeling. It
represents the as it stands in its subjective immediacy.
This is Croce's meaning when he says that art is always
and essentially lyrical. And it is what De 3. The Sanctis
meant when he said, with equal lyrical character truth, that
art is form In which the conof art. tent is fused, absorbed,
annulled. But philosophy also is form, as thought, in whose
actuality is the object's life. The difference is that art is the
form of subjectivity, or, as we also say, of the mind's
immediate individuality. Therefore in Leopardi we are not to
look for philosophical thought, a world concept, but for
Leopardi's feeling, that is, his personality, the very Leopardi
who gives concrete life and soul to a worldwhich is yet a
system of ideas. Take Leopardi's soul from his world, go to
his poems and prose not for the expression of his feeling but
for a philosophy to be discussed and made good by rational
arguments and you have destroyed Leopardi's poetry.
This individuality, personality, immediate subjectivity, is
not opposed to the impersonality which 4. The im- has
been rightly held to be an essential personality of character
of art. NV ithout this impersonart. ality where would be the
232 FREEDOM AND PREVISION CH.
universality, infinity or eternity bv virtue of which the work
of art at once soars above the empirical individual, becoming
a source of joy to all minds, conquering the force of ages and
endowed with immortality ? The impersonality of which
Gustave Flaubert 10 an exquisite artist who reflected deeply
on the nature of art, who had no doubt his exaggerations and
prejudices, speaks, was this universality of mind as a
transcendental constituting the present reality of every "
I." The personality which must be excluded from art is rather
that which characterizes the empirical I, the Self withdrawn
from the perfect light of self-consciousness, which in art
must prevail in all its effulgent power.
Self-consciousness is consciousness of self ; but with a
difference. Consciousness of self is one side 5. The indi_
only, the thesis, in the spiritual diaviduality of lectic in which
consciousness of the object artistic work. as other than self is
the antithesis. Art is consciousness of self, a pure, abstract,
self-consciousness, dialecticized it is true (for otherwise it
could not be realized), but taken in itself and in abstraction
from the antithesis in which it is realized. Thence it is
imprisoned in an ideal, which is a dream, within which it
lives feeding on itself, or rather creating its own world. Even
to common sense, for which the real world is not created by
mind, the art world appears a subjective creation. And the art
world is in fact a kind of secondary and intermittent creation
made possible by the creation which is original and constant,
that in which mind posits itself in spatializing itself, in the
absolute meaning of that term.
11
morale,
| Bari,
have dealt with this subject in A. Rosmini, Il principio
ABSTRACT CONCRETE
will has no characteristics which can (speculatively, not
empirically) make it a thing distinct from the intellect.
Theory is different from practice, and science is other than
life, not because intellect is not will, 1 1. Meanin(T or will is
not intellect, but because of the thought, the real and living act
of mind, distinction. is taken at one time in the abstract, at
another time in the concrete. As the proverb says, it is one thing
to speak of death, another to die. So too, the idea of a good
action is one thing, the (rood action another. But the difference
between the idea of the good action and the good action itself is
not that one is a simple idea, the other an idea actualized,
because indeed they are different both as ideas and as actions.
The difference consists in this, that in the one case the idea is
abstract, in the other concrete. In the first case we have in mind
the idea which is a content or abstract result of thought, but not
the act by which we think it, and in which its concrete reality
truly lies. And in the second we have in mind the idea, not as an
object or content of thought, but as the act which actualizes a
spiritual reality. An act IS never other than what it means. But
when we compare two or more acts we ought to notice that we
are not in that actuality of the mind in which multiplicity is
unity, for in that actuality the comparison is impossible. When
an act is an action which is opposed to an idea, the idea is not a
spiritual act, but merely the ideal term of the mind which thinks
AND 249
it : an object, not a subject. And equally when an action is
completed and we survey it theoretically, the action is no longer
an act of the subject but simply an object on which the mind
now looks, and which is therefore 240
resolved into the present act of awareness of the action. This
awareness IS now its real action.
The spiritual life, then, which stands opposed to philosophy
is indeed abstractly as its object a different 12. Conclu- thing
from philosophy, but it lives as sion. philosophy. And when it is
posited before consciousness as a reality already lived,
consciousness resolves it into knowledge in which it reassumes
it, and holds it as philosophy.
In such wise, then, philosophy is truly the immanent
substance of every form of the spiritual life. And as we cannot
conceive a history of philosophy on which philosophy turns its
back, it becomes clear that in the concept of the identity of
philosophy and its history, and of the eternal reconciliation of
one in the other, we have the most perfect and the most open
confirmation of the absoluteness of the spiritual reality,
inconceivable as limited in any one of its moments by
conditions which precede it and somehow determine it. In this
concept, if we are not misled, is the strongest proof and the
clearest illustration of spiritual freedom.l
1
In regard to the identity of knowledge and will, see also Gentile, Sommario di
pedagogia, i. part i. chap. 14, and part ii. chap. 1.
250 REALITY AS SELF-CONCEPT
CHAPTER XVI
REALITY AS SELF-CONCEPT AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
WE may sum up our doctrine as the theory that mind, the spiritual
reality, is the act which posits its object 1. The in a multiplicity of
objects, reconciling beginning and their multiplicity and objectivity
in its own end of the unity as subject. It is a theory which
doctrine.
withdraws from mind every limit of space and time and
every external condition. It declares that a real internal multiplication
which would make onc of its moments a conditionate of anterior
moments is inconceivable. Hence history is not the presupposition of
present spiritual activity but its reality and concreteness, the basis of
its absolute freedom. it starts with, and is summed up in, two
concepts, which may be regarded the one as the first principle, the
other as the final term, of the doctrine itself.
The first of these concepts is that, strictly speaking, there are not
many concepts, because there are not 2. The many realities to
conceive. VAThen the concept as self- reality appears multiple it is
because we concept. see the many and do not see the root of the
multiplicity in its concreteness in which the whole however many, is
one. Hence the true concept of a multiple reality must consist, not in
a multiplicity of concepts, but in one unique concept, which is
intrinsically determined, mediated, unfolded, in all the
241
real need is not that error and evil should 10. The
error
in truth and disappear from the world but that they the pain in
should be eternally present. Without pleasure. error there is no
truth, without evil there is no good, not because they are two
terms bound
XVI 257
CH.
1
Lucretius, De rerum natura, iii. 869, mortalem vitam mors cum immortalis
ademit."
CHAPTER, XVII
EPILOGUE AND COROLLARIES
already analysed. Nature and history are, in so far as they are the
creation of the " I " which finds them within itself, and produces
them in its eternal process of self-creation.
This does not mean, as those who trust to common sense
imagine in dismay, that reality is a subjective 12. Against
illusion. Reality is true reality, in the abstract sub- most literal
and unambiguous sense, in jectivism. being the subject itself, the
" I." The c ' I " is not self-consciousness except as a
consciousness of the self, determined as some thing. The reality
of the self- consciousness is in the consciousness, and the reality
of the consciousness in the self-consciousness. The
consciousness of a self-consciousness is indeed its own reality, it
275
is not imprisoned in the self as a result or conclusion, but is a
dialectical moment. This means that our intellect grows with
what we know. It does not increase by acquiring qualities and
preserving them without any further need of activity, but it is
realized, with that increase, in a new knowing. Thus it is that our
only way of distinguishing between the old knowledge and the
new knowing is by analysis and abstraction : for the self-
consciousness IS one, and consciousness is consciousness of the
selfconsciousness. Therefore the development of
selfconsciousness, or, avoiding the pleonasm, self-
consciousness, is the world process itself, nature and history, in
so far as it is a self-consciousness realized in consciousness. If
we give the name " history " to this development of mind, then
the history which is consciousness is the history of this self-
consciousness and what we call the past is only the actual
present in its concreteness.
CHAPTER XVIII IDEALISM OR MYSTICISM ?
TRUE ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM
and an immortal life of the individual beyond experience. And
what is this transcendent world but a real world which it does
not create, a world which objectively confronts the will, just as
phenomenal nature objectively confronts the intellect ? In
general, a will, which is not the intellect itself, can only be
distinguished from it on condition that, at least for the intellect,
there is conceived a reality not produced by mind but a
presupposition of it. And when the mind, be it even only as
intellect, presupposes its own reality, the reality created by the
will can never be the absolute reality, and therefore can never
have moral and spiritual value, free from every intellectualistic
defect.
There is only one way of overcoming intellectualism and
that is not to turn our back on it but to look 8. How in- it
squarely in the face. Only so is it tellectualism is possible to
conceive and form an adequate overcome. idea of knowledge.
It is our way and we may sum it up briefly thus : we do not
suppose as a 'logical antecedent of knowledge the reality which
is the object of knowledge ; we conceive the intellect as itself
will, freedom, morality ; and we cancel that independent nature
of the world, which makes it appear the basis of mind, by
recognizing that it is only an abstract moment of mind. True
anti - intellectualism indeed is identical with true
intellectualism, when once we understand intellectualism as
that which has not voluntarism opposed to it, and is therefore
no longer one of two old antagonistic terms but the unity of
both. And such is our idealism, which in overcommg every
vestige of transcendence in regard to the actuality of mind can,
287
as we have said, comprehend within it the most radical, most
logical, and the sincerest, conception of Christianity.
Now such a conception puts us at the very antipodes of
mysticism. It is hardly necessary to point out that 9. The anti-
in it all the rights of individuality find thesis between
satisfaction, with the exception of those idealism and which
depend on a fantastic concept of mysticism.
the individual among individuals. In modern
philosophy such a concept is absurd, because, as we have
shown, the only individual we can know is that which is the
positive concreteness of the universal in the "I." That absolute
"I" is the "I" which each of us realizes in every pulsation of our
spiritual existence. It is the I which thinks and feels, the I
which fears and hopes, the I which wills and works and which
has responsibility, rights, and duties, and constitutes to each of
us the pivot of his world. This pivot, when we reflect on it, we
find to be one for all, if we seek and find the all where alone it
is, within us, our own reality. I do not think I need defend this
idealism from the charge or suspicion of suppressing individual
personality.
The suspicion,l was about to say the fear, which casts
its shadow over the principle that the act 10. Idealism of
thought is pure act, is lest in it the disand distinctions. tinctions
of the real, that is of the object of knowledge as distinct from
the knowing subject, should be suppressed. Now whoever has
followed the argument to this point must see clearly that the
unification with which it deals is one than which there can be
nothing more fundamental, inasmuch as it affirms that in the
act of thinking nature and history are reconciled. We can wish
to feel no other. For such unification is at the same time the
conservation,
288 IDEALISM OR MYSTICISM ? CH.
THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION
or rather the establishing, of an infinite wealth of categories, beyond
anything which logic and philosophy have hitherto conceived. Bear
in mind that reconciling the whole of natural and historical reality, in
the act of thinking (and this is philosophy), does not mean that there
is, properly speaking, a single massive absorption of the whole of
reality, it means that the eternal reconciliation of reality is displayed
in and through all the forms which experience indicates in the world.
Experience is, from the metaphysical point of view, the infinite of an
infinite offspring, in which it is realized. There is neither nature nor
history, but always and only this nature, this history, in this
spiritual act.
So then the mind, which is the one in the substantiality of
its self-consciousness, is the manifold as 11. The an actual
reality of consciousness, and the categories and life of self-
consciousness In consciousness IS the category. the history
which is a unity of historical reality and of the knowledge of it.
Philosophy, thereforethis consciousness of itself in which
mind consistscan only be philosophy in being history. And
as history it is not the dark night of mysticism but the full mid-
day light which is shed on the boundless scene of the world. It
is not the unique category of self-consciousness it is the
infinite categories of consciousness. And then, in this
conception there cease to be privileges between different
entities, categories and concepts, and all entities in their
absolute determinateness are equal and are different, and all the
concepts are categories, in being each the category of itself.l
The abstractness of
1
This problem of the categories will be found treated in the second volume of Sistema di
Logica.
289
276
philosophy finds its interpretation in the determinateness
of history, and, we can also say, of experience, showing
how it is one whole a priori experience, in so far as every
one of its moments is understood as a spontaneous
production of the subject.
1 Determinations are not lacking, then, in our idealism, and indeed
there is an overwhelming wealth of them. 12. The But
whilst in empirical knowledge and in mysticism of every
philosophy which has not yet attained our opponents. to
the concept of the pure thinking, these complete
distinctions of the real are skeletonized and reduced to
certain abstract types, and these are then forced to do duty
for true distinctions, in idealism these distinctions are one
and all regarded in their individual eternal value. Mystics
are therefore rather the critics than the champions of this
idealism since in their philosophy all distinctions are not
maintained.
On the other hand, we must not reduce these
distinctions to the point at which we merely think 13.
Distinc- them as a number, and thereby conceive tions
and them as Spinoza's infinite of the imaginanumber. tion,
a series without beginning or end, extensible always and
in every direction, and so for ever falling short of
completion. In this mode realitv would be an ought - to-
be, and the reality of the I " would have its true reality
outside itself. The distinctions are an infinite of the
imagination, a potential infinite, if we consider them as a
pure abstract history of philosophy, as forms of
consciousness cut off from self-consciousness. Instead of
IDEALISM OR MYSTICISM ? CH.
this, in our idealism the distinctions are always an actual
infinite, the immanence of the universal in the particular :
all in all.
I am not I, without being the whole of the
THE ETERNAL THEOGONY
think ' and what I think " is always one in so 14. The far as it is '
I." The mere multiplicity idealist con- always belongs to the content
of the clusion. consciousness abstractly considered ; in reality it is
always reconciled in the unity of the I." The true history is not that
which is unfolded in time but that which is gathered up eternally in
the act of thinking in which in fact it is realized.
This is why I say that idealism has the merit without the defect of
mysticism. It has found God and turns to Him, but it has no need to
reject any single finite thing : indeed without finite things it would
once more lose God. Only, it translates them from the language of
empiricism into that of philosophy, for which the finite thing is
always the very reality of God. And thus it exalts the world into an
eternal theogony which is fulfilled in the inwardness of our being.
INDEX OF NAMES
Agathon, 180 Campa
Antisthenes, nella,
58 266
Aquinas, 63, Comte
70, 71 , 180
Ariosto, 203 Copernicus,
ff., 225 260
Aristotle, Croce, 217 ff.
42, 47, 48, m, 223, 226 n.,
51, 56, 60, 265 n.
61,
Dante, 12, 272
63, 67, 68,
83, 85, 93, Darwin, 52
Democritus, r 10,
100, 101, 107
251
ff., 1 14,
195, 270 Descartes, 49,
Augustine, 191 56, 72, 73, 99,
n. 100,
101, 135, 158, 17
Avenarms, 74 r, 172, 271
Avicenna, 70
Epicurus, 169
Bacon, 49,
73' 1 Fichte, 254
Bercrson, 74 Flaubert, 223
Berkeley, 1-6,
1 12, 201, 253 Galileo, 64,
Boethius, 185 171, 172, 181,
Boutroux, 172 ff. 182 Gaunilo, 100
Bruno, 49, Geulincx, 158,
164, 165 n.
61, 63, 248
Gioberti, H
4.0, 87 e
Gorgias, 109, r
1 19, 227 a
Hegel, 53 c
ff., 64 l
ff., 210, e
212 n., i
251, t
u
254
s
,
2
4
7
H
o
b
b
e
s
,
7
3
H
o
r
a
c
e
, Leopardi, 112,
139, 140, 220
ff., 223
1 Locke, 73
5 Lucretiu
1 s, 252
Mach, 74
f
f Malebranche,
. 158, 164
Humboldt, 17 Manzoni, 182,
Hume, 15, 73, 183, 222
161, 166 m,
179, 196 Parmenides,
109, 110, 119,
Kant, 4, 5, 158,
31, 63, 73, 227, 244
77 ff., 84, Plato, 41,
90, 93, 96 42, 44-48,
ff., 1 15, 51, 56, 60-
122 ff.,
143, 146, 62, 66, 68,
214, 243, 247, 70, 83-87,
253, 262, 263, 94, 100,
272 101,
107, 108, 110,
Lachelier, 172 116, 206, 209,
n. 234,
Lange, 214 247, 251, 253
Leibniz, 133, Plotinus,
134, 158, 195, 199
165 n. , n.
166, 185,
189 ff.
Poincar,
74
Protagora
s, 206,
251
Pythagora
s, 209
Rickert, 74
Rosmml, 29,
212
279
280 INDEX OF NAMES
Sanctis, de, 223,
226Valla, 185 ff.
Schelling, 242Vico, 15,
16, 161, 166 m, 196, 209,
Simplicius, 582 r 5 m,
244, 250
Soc
rat
es,
58,
109
,
247
Spaventa, 123 n.Wolf, 73, 103
Spi
noz
a,
29,
103
,
132
,
158
,
162
,
199, 243 m, 276Xenophon,
119
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