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MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
THE THEORY OF
MIND AS PURE ACT
BY
GIOVANNI GENTILE
PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ROME
TRANSLATED FROM THE THIRD EDITION
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
H. WILDON CARR, D.LITT.
PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN S STREET, LONDON
1922
COPYRIGHT
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
PAGE
xi
CONTENTS
TRANSLATOR S INTRODUCTION .
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITINGS OF GENTILE . X xi
AUTHOR S DEDICATION TO BENEDETTO CROCK . . xxiii
AUTHOR S PREFACE .... xxv
CHAPTER I
THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE REAL ... i
i. Berkeley s idealism. 2. Berkeley s self-contradiction. 3.
Berkeley s naturalism. 4. The annulling of thought. 5. The
empirical and the transcendental ego. 6. Thinking in act. 7.
The actuality of every spiritual fact.
CHAPTER II
SPIRITUAL REALITY . . . . . .10
i. The subjectivity of the object in so far as it is mind. 2.
The mind s concreteness. 3. The subject as act. 4. Self and v-
others. 5. The empirical ego and the moral problems. 6.
The unity of the transcendental ego and the multiplicity of
the empirical ego. 7. The constructive process of the transcen
dental ego. 8. Mind as concrete development.
CHAPTER III
THE UNITY OF MIND AND THE MULTIPLICITY OF THINGS . 18
i. Verum factum quatenus Jit. 2. The incongruence of
being and mind. 3. Mind and nature. 4. Mind-substance
and mind-act. 5. The pitfalls of language. 6. The object of
psychology. 7. How to discover mind. 8. Warning against
definitions of mind. 9. The intuition of mind. 10. The
unity of mind. 1 1. The empiricist argument against the unity
of mind. 12. The error of pluralism. 13. The infinity of
consciousness. 14. The infinity of thought according to
Spinoza. 15. The multiplicity of objects. 16. The relation
between the unity of mind and the multiplicity of things. 17.
The mind s apparent limit as practical activity.
vi CONTENTS
CHAPTER IV
PAGE
MIND AS DEVELOPMENT . . . . -37
i. Development as unity of unity and multiplicity. 2.
The abstract concept of development. 3. The concrete con
cept of development. 4. Unity as multiplicity. 5. The unity
which is multiplied and the multiplicity which is unified. 6.
The dialectic of thought thought. 7. The dialectic of thought
thinking. 8. Dialectic and the principle of non-contradiction.
9. Fruitfulness of the distinction between the two dialectics.
10. Criticism of the Platonic dialectic, u. The Platonic
dialectic of Nature. 12. The Aristotelian becoming. 13.
Why ancient philosophy failed to understand history. 14.
Primacy of the concept of progress. 15. The ground of the
concept of process. 16. The absurdity in the concept of
nature. 17. Criticism of the Hegelian dialectic. 18. Reform
of the Hegelian dialectic.
CHAPTER V
THE PROBLEM OF NATURE . . . . -57
)
i. The Hegelian problem of Nature. 2. Nature as in
dividuality. 3. The Aristotelian doctrine of the individual.
4. The Scholastic inquiry concerning the principium indwidua-
tionis. 5. Giordano Bruno s difficulty. 6. The antinomy of
the individual. 7. Thomas Aquinas s attempt. 8. Survival
of the Scholastic inquiry. 9. Hegel s problem. 10. Why
Hegel s problem is unsolved.
CHAPTER VI
THE ABSTRACT UNIVERSAL AND THE POSITIVE . . 68
i. The 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.
^ v xj 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. n. 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.
CONTENTS
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 VII
THE INDIVIDUAL AS EGO . . gq
i. Criticism of the positive regarded as what is external to
the subject. 2. The intuition of what is external to the sub
ject. 3. Relation. 4. Absurdity of the concept of the positive
external to the subject. 5. Emptiness of the nominalistic
assumption. 6. The new standpoint of the problem of the
individual. 7. The universal as a category. 8. Particularity
of the universal. 9. The concreteness of the universal and the
particular.
CHAPTER VIII
THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED . . . .96
i. Abstract and concrete thought. 2. The abstractness of
Kant s classification of the judgments. 3. Empirical character
of the classification. 4. Kant s inconsistency. 5. Thought
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, n. 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 . . . . . .115
i. 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. Ingenuous
ness 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, n. Unity as the ground of spatiality.
12. Analysis and synthesis of spatial activity. 13. Space and
viii CONTENTS
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.
iAW~^ *J V*
CHAPTER X
IMMORTALITY . . . . . 137
i. Mind and the boundlessness of space. 2. The limit of
space. 3. The infinity of the mind as the negativity of the
spatial limit. 4. The mind s infinity in regard to time. 5.
The immanent faith in immortality. 6. The meaning of
immortality. 7. The absolute value of the spiritual act. 8.
Religion and immortality. 9. The religious character of all
values. 10. The puzzle of the concept of objective) values.
ii. Immortality as an attribute of mind. 12. Immortal per
sonality. 13. The heart s desire. 14. The immortality of
the empirical "I." 15. Immortality is not a privilege. 16.
The immortality of the mortal. 17. The immortal individual.
CHAPTER XI
CAUSALITY, MECHANISM AND CONTINGENCY . . .156
i. 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
concept of cause. 4. The metaphysical unity of cause and
effect. 5. The metaphysical identity of the cause and the ft?" if
effect. 6. Empirical causality and scepticism. 7. The necessary
non-sufficient condition. 8. The compromise of occasional- *
ism. 9. Either metaphysics or empiricism. 10. The self-
contradiction of metaphysical causality, ii. Atomism as the
basis of empirical causality. 12. Mechanism. 13. The epis-
temology of mechanism. 14. The philosophy of contingency
and its motive. 15. The principle of the philosophy of con
tingency. 1 6. Contingency or necessity. 17. The empiricism
and mechanism of the contingent. 1 8. The antithesis between
contingency and freedom. 19. Conclusion.
CHAPTER XII
FREEDOM AND PREVISION . . . . .179
i. The philosophy of contingency and Hume. 2. The
contingent as a necessary fact. 3. Foreseeability of natural
CONTENTS ix
PAGE
facts. 4. Laws and natural uniformity. 5. The past as
future. 6. The fact and the act. 7. The fact a negation of
liberty. 8. The antithesis between the concepts of a foresee
able future and freedom. 9. Valla s criticism. 10. Leibniz s
attempt, n. Vanity of the attempt. 12. The antithesis
between foreknowledge and freedom in God. 13. Unity of
the condition and the conditionate. 14. The tendency to
unity. 15. The abstract unconditioned. 16. The true un
conditioned. 17. The difficulties of metaphysics and of em
piricism. 1 8. The dialectic of the condition and conditionate^
19. Necessity and freedom. 20. The causa sui. 21. An
objection. 22. Reply. 23. The unconditioned and the con
ditioned " I."
CHAPTER XIII
THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY AND ETERNAL HISTORY . . 202
i. What is meant by the historical antinomy. 2. Explana
tions. 3. History and spiritual values. 4. Plato and Prota
goras. 5. Solution of the antinomy. 6. The abstract his
torical fact and the real process. 7. The two concepts of
history. 8. History without space and time. 9. Unity of the
history which is eternal and of the history in time. 10. Philo
sophy and history of philosophy, n. The circle of philo
sophy and history of philosophy. 12. Identity and a solid
circle. 13. Objection and reply. 14. The history of philo
sophy as eternal history. 15. The problem of the special
histories.
CHAPTER XIV
ART, RELIGION AND HISTORY . . . .220
i. The character of art. 2. Art and history. 3. 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. 8. Impossibility of a history of
religion. 9. History of religion as history of philosophy.
CHAPTER XV
SCIENCE, LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY .... 230
i. 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.
ii. Meaning of the distinction. 12. Conclusion.
x CONTENTS
CHAPTER XVI
PAGE
REALITY AS SELF-CONCEPT AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL . 241
i. The beginning and end of the doctrine. 2. The concept
as self-concept. 3. Its metaphysical value. 4. Absolute
formalism. 5. The form as activity. 6. The limit of mind.
7. Evil. 8. Error. 9. Error as sin. 10. The error in truth
and the pain in pleasure, n. Nature. 12. The immanence
of nature in the "I." 13. Reality of mind as reality of the
object. 14. Necessity of the object. 15. The spirituality of
the object. 16. The world as an eternal history. 17. The
meaning of our non-being. 18. The eternal past of the
eternal present.
CHAPTER XVII
EPILOGUE AND COROLLARIES . . ./ . .253
>
i. The characteristic of idealism. 2. The doctrine of
knowing. 3. The principle of actual idealism. 4. Deduction
of nature. 5. Nature as abstract thought. 6. Double aspect
of what is thought. 7. The nature of the "I." 8. History as
nature. 9. The spatiality of nature and of history as nature.
10. Time and mind. n. Nature and history as mind. 12.
Against abstract subjectivism.
CHAPTER XVIII
IDEALISM OR MYSTICISM ? . . . .265
i. The analogy between actual idealism and mysticism. 2.
The difference. 3. Mysticism and intellectualism. 4. Object
ivism of mystical thought. 5. The and -intellectualism of
idealism. 6. Criticism of the mystic presupposition. 7. The
defect of voluntarism. 8. How intellectualism is overcome.
9. The antithesis between idealism and mysticism. 10. Ideal
ism and distinctions, u. The categories and the category.
12. The mysticism of our opponents. 13. Distinctions and
number. 14. The idealist conclusion.
INDEX OF NAMES . . . . .279
TRANSLATOR S INTRODUCTION
THE book which I have translated is intended by its
author to be the initial volume of a series of his
Philosophical Works." Giovanni Gentile was born
at Casteltravano in Sicily the 29th May 1875. He
was ^educated at Pisa and later was appointed to the
Chair of Philosophy in the University of that city.
In 1917 he received the appointment he now holds
of Professor of the History of Philosophy in the
University of Rome. He has become famous in his
own _ country on account of his historical and philo
sophical writings and even more by the number and
fervour of the disciples he has attracted. The present
work is designed to give form to the maturity of his
philosophical thinking.
The reason which has led me to present an English
version is that in reading the book I have not only
found a philosopher propounding a theory which
seems to me to deserve the attention of our philosophers,
but one who has expressed with what seems to me
admirable clearness what I find myself desiring and
striving to express, the true inwardness of the
fundamental philosophical problem, and the extra
ordinary difficulty (of which many philosophers appear
unconscious) of the effort required to possess the only
concept which can provide a satisfactory solution.
The book is intended for philosophers and addressed
to philosophers. This does not mean that any one
may set it aside as being no concern of his. It does
mean that no one may expect to understand save
xii TRANSLATOR S INTRODUCTION
and in so far as he makes the problem his own.
Philosophy is not understood by simply contemplating
the efforts of others, each of us must make the effort
his own. In saying this I am saying nothing new.
Philosophy is not a pastime : it is a discipline or it
is nothing. As Kant once said, there is no philosophy
there is only philosophizing.
Gentile s philosophy is idealism and an idealism
which is absolute. That is to say, idealism is not
for him a choice between rival theories, an alternative
which one may accept or reject. The problem does
not present itself to him as a question which of two
possible hypotheses, the naturalistic or the idealistic,
is most probable. On the contrary, his idealism is
based not on an assumption which may or may not be
verified, but on a fundamental principle which is not
in any real sense open to doubt. The difficulty in
regard to it is simply a difficulty of interpretation.
It arises because, when we look back and review
philosophy in the history of philosophy, which is its
process and development, it seems then to resolve itself
into a series of attempts to systematize the principle,
each attempt falling short in some essential particular,
and if overcoming a defect in what has gone before,
always disclosing a new defect to be overcome. In
this meaning only are there idealisms and a classifi
cation of idealistic concepts. In this meaning, too,
Gentile can himself distinguish and characterize his
own theory. He names it " actual " idealism, and by
this term he would emphasize two distinctive marks.
" Actual " means that it is the idealism of to-day,
not only in the sense that it is latest in time, the most
recent and modern formation of the principle, but in
the meaning that the history of philosophy has itself
imposed this form on present thought. But " actual "
means also that it is the idealistic concept of the
present, the concept of an eternal present, which is
not an exclusion of times past and times future, but
TRANSLATOR S INTRODUCTION xiii
a comprehension of all history as present act deter
mined by past fact, eternal becoming. It is therefore
in one sense the most familiar concept of our common
experience, the concept of the reality of our conscious
life in its immediacy. Yet to follow the concept into
its consequences for theory of life and theory of
knowledge is by no means easy. The philosopher
who would avoid the Scylla of intellectualism (under
which are included both materialistic naturalism and
idealistic Platonism) on the one hand, and the
Charybdis of mysticism on the other, has a very
difficult course to steer.
There are two major difficulties which cling to all
our efforts to attain the concept of what in modern
philosophy is expressed in the terms " universal "
and " concrete " : two difficulties the one or other of
which seems continually to intervene between us and
the concept, and to intercept us whenever we feel
that at last we are attaining the goal. One is the
relation of otherness, which makes it seem impossible
to include in one concept the reality of knowing and
known. The other is the relation of finite and in
finite, which makes it seem impossible that the effective
presence of universal mind in the individual can be
consistent with the concrete fmiteness of individuality.
When once the nature of these two difficulties is
understood the course of the argument is clear. It
may be useful to the reader, therefore, if I try to give
precision to them.
The first difficulty concerns the nature of the
object of knowledge, and it is this. There can be
no knowing unless there is something known. This
something does not come into existence when it is
known and by reason thereof, for if it did knowing
would not be knowing. We must, then, as the ^ con
dition of knowing, presuppose an existence inde
pendent of and alien to the mind which is to know it.
Let us call this the thesis. The antithesis is equally
b
xiv TRANSLATOR S INTRODUCTION
cogent. In knowing, nothing can fall outside of the
subject-object relation. In the apprehension by the
mind of an object, that object is both materially and
formally comprehended within the mind. The con
cept of independent being confronting the mind is
self-contradictory and absurd. Independent being is
V\ by its definition unknowable being, and unknowa-
j bility cannot be the condition of knowledge. Such
is the antinomy of knowledge. Can it be over
come ? Yes. In one way and in one way only : it
can be overcome if it can be shown that the opposition
I which knowledge implies is an opposition within one
\reality, concrete universal mind, and immanent in its
nature, and that it is not an opposition between two
\ alien realities. If, however, such a solution is to be
more than a mere verbal homage to a formal logical
principle, it must put us in full possession of the
concept of this concrete universal mind ; a concept
which must not merely continue in thought what we
distinguish as separate in reality, mind and nature,
but must rationalize and reconcile the opposition
between them. Whether the theory of " Mind as
Pure Act " achieves this success, the reader must
judge.
The second difficulty is even more formidable,
for if the first concerns the nature of things, this
concerns the nature of persons. In theology and in
religion it has taken the form of the problem : Can God
be all in all and yet man be free ? The task of
philosophy is to show how the mind which functions
in the finite individual can be infinite, although the
activity of the individual is determined and restricted ;
and how the universal can become effective in, and
only in, the finite individual. His treatment of this
problem has brought Professor Gentile into friendly
controversy with his colleague Benedetto Croce, and
this controversy has been the occasion of an alteration
of the third edition of this " General Theory " by
TRANSLATOR S INTRODUCTION
xv
the addition of the two final chapters. The charge
of Croce is in effect that this " actual " idealism spells
mysticism. The author meets this charge directly
and makes it the opportunity of expounding further
the ^ distinctive character of his concept of ultimate
reality.
The main argument is unfolded in the first ten
chapters. It is developed continuously and reaches
its full expression in the theory of space and time and
immortality. The doctrine is that the unity of mind
is neither a spatial nor a temporal unity ; that space
and time are the essential forms of the multiplicity
of the real ; that the unity of mind is not superposed
on this multiplicity but immanent in it and expressed
by it. Immortality is then seen to be the characteristic
which belongs to the essence of mind in its unity
and universality ; that is, in its opposition to multi
plicity or nature which is its spatial and temporal,
or existential, expression. We may, and indeed we
must and do, individualize the mind as a natural
thing, an object among other objects, a person among
other persons, but when we do so, then, like every
other natural thing it takes its place in the spatio-
temporal multiplicity of nature. Yet our power to
think the mind in this way would be impossible were
not the mind, with and by which we think it, itself
not a thing, not fact but act, pure act which never is,
which is never factum but always fieri. Of the mind
which we individualize the author says, in a striking
phrase, its immortality is its mortality. Only mind
as pure act is immortal in its absolute essence. Only
to the doing which is never deed, activity in its com
prehension and purity, can such terms as infinity,
eternity and immortality be significant. When we
grasp this significance we see that these attributes
are not failures to comprehend but true expressions of
the essence of the real.
The later chapters of the book show the application
xvi TRANSLATOR S INTRODUCTION
of this principle and the criticism it enables us to
bring to bear on other philosophical attempts of the
past and the present.
With regard to the translation I have not aimed
at transliteration but have tried to express the author s
thought in our own language with as few technical
innovations as possible. There are, however, two
respects in which the Italian original must retain the
mark of origin in the translation. The first is that
the illustrations used are mainly from literature, and
though literature is international the instances are
drawn entirely from Italian sources. Now, however
famous to us as names Dante, Ariosto, Leopardi,
Manzoni and other well-known Italian writers may be,
their works cannot be referred to with the kind of
familiarity which Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth
and Scott would have for us. I have therefore
reproduced, wherever necessary, the actual passage
of the Italian author which is commented on. The
second is more important and requires a fuller explana
tion. The line of philosophical speculation in Italy
has been affected by influences which have not been
felt, or at least not in the same degree, in other
countries. By this I do not mean merely that the
individuals are different and form a national group ;
that Rosmini, Gioberti, De Sanctis, Spaventa are to
the Italians what J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, T. H.
Green, Caird are to English philosophers. I mean
v ofthat the line of philosophical speculation itself, whilst
it is and always has been organically one with the
general history of the development of thought in
Europe, has had a certain bias in its tendency and
direction due to conditions, political and social and
religious, peculiar to Italy.
There is one deep-seated source of the difference.
It goes back to the middle ages and to the Renascence.
It is the historical fact that the Protestant Reformation,
which produced the profound intellectual awakening
TRANSLATOR S INTRODUCTION
xvn
in Northern Europe in the seventeenth century and
stamped so deeply with its problems the philosophical
development of that century, left Italy practically
untouched. It hardly disturbed the even course of
her intellectual life and it created no breach between
the old learning and the new. And this was particu
larly the case with regard to the kingdom of Sicily.
The Cartesian movement had almost spent its force
when Vico raised his voice in the strong re-action
against its pretensions to scrap history and reject
authority and start science de novo and ab imis. And
to-day there is a reminder of this historical origin
in the lines of divergence in philosophical thought
in Italy.
In recent times there have been two philosophical
movements which have received in Italy the response
of a vigorous recognition. One is the Positive
philosophy, the leading representative of which is the
veteran philosopher Roberto Ardigo of Padua (born
1828 and still living at the time of writing). In
early life a priest who rose from humble origin to a
high position in the church, he was distinguished by
his political zeal and public spirit in pushing forward
schemes of social and municipal reform, and had
brilliant prospect of advancement. Suddenly, how
ever, and dramatically, he broke with the Church
and became the leader of a secularist movement, and
the expounder of the principles of the philosophy of
Auguste Comte. In consequence, this philosophy
has had, and still has, a great following and wide
influence in Italy. It is important to understand this,
because it explains the constant polemic against
positivism and positivistic concepts in the present
work.
The other movement is Hegelian in character and
idealistic in direction, and its leading exponents are
Benedetto Croce and his younger colleague and friend
the author of this book. The distinctive note and
xviii TRANSLATOR S INTRODUCTION
the starting-point of this movement is a reform of the
Hegelian dialectic, but it prides itself in an origin
and philosophical ancestry much older than Hegel,
going back to Vico and through him linking itself
up with the old Italian learning. Its characteristic
doctrine is a theory of history and of the writing of
history which identifies history with philosophy. It
finds full expression in the present book.
In the preparation of this translation I have
received great assistance from Professor J. A. Smith,
Waynflete Professor of Philosophy in the University
of Oxford. He has read the proofs and very carefully
compared the translation with the original. But I am
indebted to him for much more than is represented
by his actual work on this volume. Among repre
sentative philosophers in England he has been dis
tinguished by his sympathetic appreciation of the
Italian idealistic movement in philosophy, and he
felt its influence at a time when very little was known
of it in this country. I would especially recommend
to readers of this book his acute critical account of
The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile " in an article
in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. xx.
I have appended a Bibliography of Gentile s prin
cipal writings. He is known among us mainly by his
long association, which still continues, with Benedetto
Croce. This began in 1903 with the initiation of
Critica, a bi-monthly Review of Literature, History
and Philosophy. The Review consists almost entirely
of the writings of the two colleagues. In 1907 the
two philosophers initiated the publication of a series
of translations into Italian of the Classical works of
Modern Philosophy. The series already amounts
to thirty volumes. During this time, too, Gentile
has himself initiated a series of texts and translations
of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. In 1920
he started his own Review, Giornale critico della
filosofia italiana^ really to receive the writings of the
TRANSLATOR S INTRODUCTION xix
many students and scholars who owe their inspiration
to him and desire to continue his work. The new
series of Studi filosofici, now being published by
Vallechi of Florence, is mainly the work of his
followers. It is doubtful if there is a more influential
teacher in the intellectual world to-day.
H. W. C.
LONDON, October 1921.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
OF THE WRITINGS OF GIOVANNI GENTILE
1. " Rosmini e Gioberti." Pisa, 1898.
2. " La Filosofia di Marx." Studi critici. Pisa, 1899.
3. " L Insegnarnento della filosofia nei Licei." Saggio pedagogico. 1900.
4. " Dal Genovesi al Galluppi." Ricerche storiche.
5. " Studi sullo Stoicismo romano." Trani, 1904.
6. " Storia della filosofia italiana " (still in course of publication). Milan,
1902.
7. " Scuola e filosofia : concetti fundamental! e saggi di pedagogia della
scuola media." Palermo, 1908.
8. " II Modernismo e i suoi rapporti fra religione e filosofia." Bari, 1909.
2nd Edition, 1921.
9. "Bernardino Telesio, con appendice bibliografica." Bari, 1911.
10. " I Problemi della Scolastica e il Pensiero italiano." Bari, 1913.
11. "La Riforma della Dialettica hegeliana." Messina, 1913.
12. "Sommario di Pedagogia come scienza filosofica." Vol. I. Pedagogia
generale. Bari, 1913- 2nd Edition, 1920. Vol. II. Didattica.
Bari, 1914-
13. "L Esperienza pura e la realta storica." Prolusione. Florence, 1915.
14. " Studi Vichiani." Messina, 1915.
15. "Teoria generale dello Spirito come Atto puro." (The work here
translated.) Pisa, 1916. 3rd Edition. Bari, 1920.
16. " Sistema di Logica come teoria del conoscere." Pisa, 1917. 2nd
Edition. 1918.
17. " II Tramonto della cultura siciliana." Bologna, 1917.
18. " I Fondamenti della filosofia del diritto." Pisa, 1917.
19. " Le Origini della filosofia contemporanea in Italia." 3 Vols. Bari,
1917-1921.
20. " II Carattere storico della filosofia italiana." Prolusione. Ban, 1918.
21. " Guerra e Fede." Frammenti politici. Naples, 1919.
22. " La Riforma dell Educazione." Bari, 1920.
23. " II Problema scolastico del dopo guerra." 1919. 2nd Edition.
1920.
24. " Dopo la Vittoria." Nuovi frammenti politici. Rome, 1920.
25. " Discorsi di Religione." Florence, 1920.
26. " Giordano Bruno e il pensiero del Rinascimento." Florence, 1920.
27. " Frammenti di Estetica e di Letteratura." Lanciano, 1921.
28. " Saggi critici." First Series. Naples, 1921.
29. " II Concetto moderno della scienza e il problema umversitario.
Inaugural Lecture at the University of Rome. Rome, 1921.
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. I
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.
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 arise and that I hope will
not be seldom to meet the serious problems, so
old yet ever new, which I have discussed in the
class-room.
The first edition of this book had its origin in^a
course of lectures given at the University of Pisa, in
the Academic year 1915-16. It was exhausted in a
few months. The continued demand, seeming to
prove that the interest in the work is not diminishing,
has induced me to reprint the book as it first appeared,
without waiting for the time and leisure necessary for
the complete revision I wished to make. I should
like to have given another form to the whole treatment
and more particularly to expound several subjects
hardly noticed.
I have, however, devoted as much care to the
revision as the shortness of the time at my disposal
made possible. I have replaced the original lecture
form of the book with chapters, revising as far as
possible the exposition, making it as clear as I was able
to, introducing here and there notes and comments
XXV
xxvi THE AUTHOR S PREFACE
which I hope will be of use to students, and I have
added at the end two chapters, originally the sub
ject of a communication to the Biblioteca filosofica of
Palermo in 1914. In these two chapters the doctrine
is summed up, its character and direction defined and
a reply given to a charge which originated in a specious
but inexact interpretation of it.
The book can be no more than a sketch, fitted
rather to raise difficulties and act as a spur to thought
than to furnish clear solutions and proofs. Yet had
I developed it in every part with minute analysis,
without taking from it every spark of suggestion, it
would still have needed well-disposed readers willing
to find in a book no more than a book can contain.
For, whatever other kinds of truths there may be, the
truths I ask my readers to devote attention to here
are such as no one can possibly receive complacently
from others or acquire easily, pursuing as it were a
smooth and easy path in pleasant company. They are
only to be conquered on the lonely mountain top, and
they call for heavy toil. In this task one toiler can do
no more for another than awaken in his soul the taste
for the enterprise, casting out the torment of doubt
and anxious longing, by pointing to the light which
shines on high afar off.
This General Theory is only designed to be a simple
introduction to the full concept of the spiritual act in
which, as I hold, the living nucleus of philosophy
consists. And this concept, if my years and forces
permit, I intend to expound in special treatises. I
have this year published the first volume of my System
of Logic, which is in fulfilment of this design. The
reader of this Theory of Mind, who finds himself
dissatisfied with it, may know then beforehand that
the author is himself dissatisfied, and wants him to
read the sequel, that is, if it seem to him worth
while.
PISA, October 1917.
THE AUTHOR S PREFACE xxvii
In this third edition the only modifications I have
introduced are formal, designed to remove the
obscurity which some have found in my book, due to
want of clearness in expression.
As for myself, in re-reading my work after three
years I have found nothing I desire to alter in the
doctrine, although here and there I find in it several
buds which I perceive have since opened out in
my thoughts and become new branches, putting
forth new leaves and new buds in which I now feel the
life is pulsating. But what of this ? I have never led
my readers or my pupils to expect from me a fully
defined thought, a dry trunk as it were encased in a
rigid bark. A book is the journey not the destina
tion ; it would be alive not dead. And so long as
we live we must continue to think. In the collec
tion of my philosophical writings which my friend
Laterza has proposed to publish, beginning with this
Theory of Mind there will follow forthwith the com
plete System of Lo%ic.
G. G.
ROME, April 1920.
" Par Pespace, 1 univcrs me comprend et m engloutit
comme un point ; par la pensee, je le comprends."
PASCAL.
CHAPTER I
THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE REAL
BERKELEY in the beginning of the eighteenth century
expressed very clearly the following concept. Reality is
i. Berkeley s conceivable only in so far as the reality con-
idealism, ceived is in relation to the activity which
conceives it, and in that relation it is not only a possible
object of knowledge, it is a present and actual one.
To conceive a reality is to conceive, at the same time
and as one with it, the mind in which that reality is
represented ; and therefore the concept of a material
reality is absurd. To Berkeley it was evident that the
concept of a corporeal, external, material substance,
that is, the concept of bodies existing generally outside
the mind, is a self-contradictory concept, since we can
only speak of things which are perceived, and in being
perceived things are objects of consciousness, ideas.
Berkeley with his clear insight remarked that "there
is surely nothing easier than to imagine trees in a park,
or books existing in a closet, and nobody being by to
perceive them ; but in such case all that we do is to
frame in our mind certain ideas, which we call books
and trees, and at the same time omit to frame the
idea of any one who may perceive them." x It is not
therefore really the case that no mind perceives them,
the perceiver is the mind which imagines them. The
1 Principles of Human Knowledge, sect. 23.
I B
2 THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE REAL CH.
object, even when thought of as outside every mind, is
always mental. This is the point on which I desire to
concentrate attention. The concept of the ideality of
the real is a very difficult one to define exactly, and it
did not in fact prevent Berkeley himself from con
ceiving a reality effectively independent of mind.
For Berkeley, notwithstanding that happy remark,
came himself to deny the ideality of the real. In
2 . Berkeley s declaring that reality is not properly an
self-contra- object of the human mind and contained
diction. therein, nor, strictly speaking, a thought of
that mind, but the totality of the ideas of an objective,
absolute Mind, whose existence the human mind pre
supposes, he contradicted the fundamental principle
of his whole thought. Berkeley, indeed, even while
saying esse est percipi, even while making reality
coincide with perception, distinguished between the
thought which actually thinks the world, and the
absolute, eternal Thought, which transcends single
minds, and makes the development of single minds
possible. From the empirical point of view, at which,
as a pre-Kantian idealist, Berkeley remained, it is
obvious, and appears incontrovertible, that our mind
does not think all the thinkable, since our mind is a
human mind and therefore finite and the minds of
finite beings exist only within certain limits of time
and space. And then, too, we are able to think there
is something which exists, even though actually it
may never yet have been thought. It seems undeni
able, then, that our mind has not as the present object
of its thought everything which can possibly be its
object. And since whatever is not an object of human
thinking at one definite, historical, empirical, moment,
seems as though it may be such an object at another
EMPIRICAL IDEALISM 3
such moment, we come to imagine another thinking
outside human thinking, a thinking which is always
thinking all the thinkable, a Thought which transcends
human thought, and is free from all the limits within
which it is or can be circumscribed. This eternal,
infinite, thinking is not a thinking like ours which
feels its limits at every moment. It is God s thinking.
God, therefore, is the condition which makes it possible
to think man s thought as itself reality, and reality as
itself thought.
Now it is evident that if we conceive human thinking
O
as conditioned by the divine thinking (even though the
3. Berkeley s divine thinking does not present itself to
naturalism. us as an immediate reality), then we repro
duce in the case of human thinking the same situation
as that in which mind is confronted with matter, that is
with nature, regarded as ancient philosophy regarded
it, a presupposition of thought, a reality to which
nothing is added by the development of thought. If
we conceive reality in this way we make it impossible
to conceive human thought, because a reality which is
already complete and which when presented to thought,
does not grow and continue to be realized, is a reality
which in its very conception excludes the possibility
of conceiving that presumed or apparent new reality
which thought would then be.
It was so with Berkeley. He had given expression
to a clear, sound, suggestive theory, strikingly analogous
4 The to m dern idealistic doctrine, declaring
annulling of that when we believe we are conceiving a
thought. reality outside the mind, we are actually
ourselves falsifying our belief by our simple presence
in the act of perceiving ; and when we presume our
selves absent, even then we are intervening and
4 THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE REAL CH.
powerless to abstain from intervening, in the very
act by which we affirm our absence. When he had
given expression to this doctrine he himself returned
to the standpoint of the ancient philosophy, with the
result that he failed to conceive the thinking which
truly creates reality, the thought which is itself reality.
This was precisely the defect of the ancient thought.
For it, thinking, strictly conceived, was nothing.
Modern philosophy, after full consideration, puts
forward simply, with all discretion, the very modest
requirement that thinking shall be something. No
sooner, however, does modern philosophy acknowledge
this modest requirement than it feels the necessity of
going on to affirm thinking, as not simply something,
as not only an element of reality or an appurtenance
of reality, but as indeed the whole or the absolute
reality.
From Berkeley s standpoint thinking, strictly, is not
anything. Because in so far as the thinking thinks,
what it thinks is already thought ; for human thought
is only a ray of the divine thought, and therefore not
something itself new, something other than the divine
thought. And even in the case of error, which is
o *
indeed ours and not God s, our thinking, as thinking,
is not anything ; not only is it not objective reality, but
it is not even subjective reality. Were it something
new, divine thought would not be the whole.
The Kantian philosophy places us at a new stand
point, though Kant himself was not fully conscious
of its significance. With Kant s concept
5. The em-
pirical and the of the Transcendental Ego it is no longer
transcendental possible to ask Berkeley s question : How
is our finite thinking thinkable ? Our
thinking and what we think are correlative terms ;
TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM 5
for when we think and make our own thinking an
object of reflexion, determining it as an object by
thinking, then what we think, that is, our very thinking
itself, is nothing else than our own idea. Such thinking
is finite thinking ; how is it possible for it to arise ?
It is our present actual thinking. It is, that is to
say, the actualization of a power. A power which is
actual must have been possible. How is it possible ?
Berkeley, in perceiving that this thinking is actual,
feels the need of transcending it : and he is right. It
is the question which sprang up in the inmost centre
of the Kantian philosophy, and to answer it Kant had
recourse to the concept of the noumenon. But this
concept has really no ground, once we have mastered
the concept of thinking as transcendental thinking,
the concept of mind as self-consciousness, as original
apperception, as the condition of all experience. Be
cause, if we conceive our whole mind as something
finite, by thinking of it as a present reality, a present
with a before and an after from which its reality is
absent, then what we are thinking of is not the
transcendental activity of experience but what Kant
called the empirical ego, radically different from the tran
scendental ego. For in every act of our thinking, and in
our thinking in general, we ought to distinguish two
things : on the one hand what we are thinking ; on the
other the we who think and who are therefore not the
object but the subject in the thinking act. Berkeley
indeed drew attention to the subject which always
stands over against the object. But then the subject
which Berkeley meant was not the subject truly con
ceived as subject, but rather a subject which itself was
objectified and so reduced to one of the many finite
objects contained in experience. It was the object
6 THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE REAL CH .
which we reach empirically whenever we analyse our
mental act and distinguish therein, on the one hand,
the content of our consciousness, and on the other the
f consciousness as the form of that same content. Just
as in vision we have two objects of the one experience,
the scene or the term which we may call the object
and the eye or the term which we may call the
subject, so also in our actual living experience not
only is the object of that experience an object, but
even the subject by the fact that it is made a term of
the experience is an object. And yet the eye cannot
see itself except as it is reflected in a mirror !
If then we would know the essence of the mind s
transcendental activity we must not present it as
6. Thinking spectator and spectacle, the mind as an
in act - object of experience, the subject an outside
onlooker. In so far as consciousness is an object of
consciousness, it is no longer consciousness. In so far
as the original apperception is an apperceived object,
it is no longer apperception. Strictly speaking, it is
no longer a subject, but an object ; no longer an ego,
but a non-ego. It was precisely here that Berkeley
went wrong and failed and for this reason he could
not solve the problem. His idealism was empirical.
The transcendental point of view is that which we
attain when in the reality of thinking we see our
thought not as act done, but as act in the doing.
\ This act we can never absolutely transcend since
I it is our very subjectivity, that is, our own self : an
act therefore which we can never in any possible
manner objectify. The new point of view which we
then gain is that of the actuality of the I, a point of
view from which the I can never be conceived as its own
object. Every attempt which we make we may try
i SUBJECT WHICH IS NEVER OBJECT 7
it at this moment to objectify the I, the actual
thinking, the inner activity in which our spiritual
nature consists, is bound to fail ; we shall always find
we have left outside the object just what we want to
get in it. For in defining our thinking activity as a
definite object of our thinking, we have always to
remember that the definition is rendered possible by
the very fact that our thinking activity remains the
subject for which it is defined as an object, in what
soever manner this concept of our thinking activity is
conceived. The true thinking activity is not what is
being defined but what is defining.
This concept may appear abstruse. Yet it is the
concept of our ordinary life so long as we enjoy a
certain feeling of life as spiritual reality.
7- The . r /
actuality of It is common observation that whenever
every spiritual we want to understand something which
has a spiritual value, something which we
can speak of as a spiritual fact^ we have to regard it not
as an object, a thing which we set before us for
investigation, but as something immediately identical
with our own spiritual activity. And it makes no
difference that such spiritual values may be souls, with
whom our own soul may not be in accord. The
apprehension of spiritual value may be realized both
through agreement and disagreement, for these are
not two parallel possibilities either of which may be
realized indifferently ; they are rather two co-ordinate
and successive possibilities, one of which is necessarily
a step to the other. It is clear that the first step in
spiritual apprehension is the assent, the approbation,
for we say that before judging we must understand.
When we say that we understand without exercising
judgment, it does not mean that we exercise no
8 THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE REAL CH.
judgment ; we do not indeed judge approval or dis
approval, but we do judge provisionally for appre
hension. A fundamental condition, therefore, of under
standing others is that our mind should penetrate
their mind. The beginning of apprehension is con
fidence. Without it there is no spiritual penetration,
no understanding of mental and moral reality.
Without the agreement and unification of our mind
with the other mind with which it would enter into
relation, it is impossible to have any kind of under
standing, impossible even to begin to notice or perceive
anything which may come into another mind. And
we are driven by our thinking activity itself into this
apprehension of others. Every spiritual relation, every
communication between our own inner reality and
another s, is essentially unity.
This deep unity we feel every time we are able
to say that we understand our fellow - being. In
those moments we want more than intellectual unity,
we feel the need of loving. The abstract activity
we call mind no longer contents us, we want the
good spiritual disposition, what we call heart, good
will, charity, sympathy, open-mindedness, warmth of
affection.
Now what is the meaning of this unity ? What is
this fellow-feeling which is the essential condition of all
spiritual communication, of all knowledge of mind ?
It is quite different from the kind of unity which
we experience when, for example, we touch a stone,
altogether different in kind from the knowledge of
simple nature, of what we call material nature. We
find a need to be unified with the soul we would know,
because the reality of that soul consists in being one
with our own soul : and that other soul likewise
cannot meet in our soul what is not essentially its own
subjectivity. Life of our life, it lives within our soul,
where distinction is not opposition. For, be it noted,
within our own soul we may find ourselves in pre
cisely the same spiritual situation as that in which
we are when face to face with another soul which
we fain would but do not yet understand. This
means that the disproportion and incongruence which
we find between our soul and other souls, when they
appear to us as mute and impenetrable as the rocks
and blind forces of nature, is no other than the dis
proportion and incongruence within our own soul
between its own states, between what it is and what
we would have it be, between what we can think but
yet fail to realize ; between what, as we shall see, is our
state and what is our act.
CHAPTER II
SPIRITUAL REALITY
To understand, much more to know, spiritual reality,
is to assimilate it with ourselves who know it. We
may even say that a law of the knowledge
i. The sub- r - i v , 7 7 7
jectivity of the or spiritual reality is that the object be
object in so far resolved into the subject. Nothing has for
us spiritual value save in so far as it
comes to be resolved into ourselves who know it.
We usually distinguish the spiritual objects of our
knowledge into two classes : either they are subjects
of experience, men, intelligent beings ; or they are not
themselves subjects of experience but the spiritual fact
or mental work which such subjects presuppose. This
is an empirical distinction which vanishes the moment
we reflect on it ; not indeed if we only bring to bear
on it the reflexion proper to empiricism, but if we
reflect with the reflexion proper to philosophy, that
which begins with sceptical doubt of the firm beliefs
of common sense. The moment we examine the nature
of the spiritual facts which we distinguish from true
and proper subjects of experience, we see that the
distinction is inadmissible. Thus there is no science
which is not particular in the sense that it is what
particular, historically-determined individuals possessed
in thinking it, yet we distinguish the science of men
from science in itself. So, too, with language : although
LANGUAGE 1 1
it is an historical product we begin by detaching it
from every particular person who uses it, who is
himself unique, and for whom the language he uses
is, moment by moment, a unique language ; we
extend it to a whole people. And mentally we even
detach it from all and every people, and no longer
speak of a definite language, but of language in general,
the means, as we say, of expressing states of mind, a
form of thought. Language, so conceived and fixed
by our mind, is then freed from all contingency
or particular limitation, and hovers in the world of
concepts, which is not only the world of the actual,
but also the world of the simply possible. Language
has now become an ideal fact. And lo ! On the one
hand there is the language sounding from a man s
lips, the speech of one particular man, a language
whose reality consists in the personality of the speaker,
and, on the other hand, language in itself, which can
be spoken, but which is what it is even though no
one should speak it.
But the truth is that if we would know language in
the concrete, it must present itself to us as develop
ment. Then it is the language which
2. i he 11-1
mind s con- sounds forth from the mouths of the men
creteness. w fr o use fa \\ T e no longer detach it from
the subject, and it is not a spiritual fact which we can
distinguish from the mind in which it exists. The
spiritual act which we call language, is precisely the
mind itself in its concreteness. So when we speak
of a language and believe that we mean not an
historical language but a language conceived as a
psychical or ideal fact apart from history, a fact as it
were inherent in the very nature of mind and ideally
reconstructed whenever its principle is meant ; and
12 SPIRITUAL REALITY CH.
when we believe that in this case we have completely
detached it from the particular individual who from
time to time speaks a particular language ; what we
are then really doing is forming a concept of language
by reconstructing a moment of our own consciousness,
a moment of our own spiritual experience. Detach
from language the philosopher who reconstructs it
and language as a moment of mind disappears ; since
language, hovering loose, transcendent and freed from
time and space, is language as it is conceive^ by the
man, the individual, who can only effectively represent
it by speaking it, and who speaks it just to the extent
that he represents it. Yet do we not distinguish the
Divine Comedy from Dante its author and from our
selves its readers ? We do ; but then even in making
the distinction we know that this Divine Comedy is
with us and in us, within our mind thought of as
distinct from us. It is in us despite the distinction ;
in us in so far as we think it. So that it, the poem,
is precisely we who think it.
To detach then the facts of the mind from the real
life of the mind is to miss their true inward nature
by looking at them as they are when realized.
When we speak of spiritual fact we speak of mind,
and to speak of mind is always to speak of con-
3. The sub- crete, historical individuality ; of a subject
jectasact. which is not thought as such, but which
is actualized as such. The spiritual reality, then,
which is the object of our knowing, is not mind and
spiritual fact, it is purely and simply mind as subject.
As subject, it can, as we have said, be known on one
condition only it can be known only in so far as its
objectivity is resolved in the real activity of the subject
who knows it.
THE IDEALITY OF OTHERS 13
In no other way is a spiritual world conceivable.
Whoever conceives it, if he has truly conceived it as
4. Self and spiritual, cannot set it up in opposition to
others. his own activity in conceiving it. Speak
ing strictly, there can be no others outside us, for in
knowing them and speaking of them they are within
us. To know is to identify, to overcome otherness
as such. Other is a kind of stage of our mind
through which we must pass in obedience to our im
manent nature, but we must pass through without
stopping. When we find ourselves confronted with
the spiritual existence of others as with something
different from ourselves, something from which we
must distinguish ourselves, something which we pre
suppose as having been in existence before our birth
and which even when we are no longer there to
think will always remain the possession, or at least,
the possible possession, of other men, it is a clear sign
that we are not yet truly in their presence as spiritual
existence, or rather that we do not see the spirituality
of their existence.
This doctrine that the spiritual world is only con
ceivable as the reality of my own spiritual activity,
would be clearly absurd were we to seek
5. The , J
empirical ego to interpret it in any other light than that
and the moral o f the distinction, explained in the last
chapter, between the transcendental ego
and the empirical ego. It is only rational when we
clearly and firmly apprehend the concept of the reality
of the transcendental ego as the fundamental reality,
without which the reality of the empirical ego is not
thinkable. Applied to the empirical ego the doctrine
is meaningless. Empirically I am an individual and
as such in opposition not only to all material things,
i 4 SPIRITUAL REALITY
but equally to all the individuals to whom I assign
a spiritual value, since all objects of experience,
whatever their value, are not only distinct but separate
from one another in such a manner that each of them
absolutely excludes from itself, by its own particularity,
all the others. In the empirical domain moral problems
arise entirely and precisely in this absolute opposition
in which the ego empirically conceived stands distinct
from other persons. The supreme moral aspiration of
our being as empirical individuals is to acquire a
harmony, a unity, with all the others and with all that
is other. This means that moral problems arise in so
far as we become aware of the unreality of our being
as an empirical ego opposed to other persons and
surrounding things and come to see that our own life
is actualized in the things opposed to it. Though on
such ground the moral problems arise, they are only
solved when man comes to feel another s needs his
own, and thereby finds that his own life means that he
is not closed within the narrow circle of his empirical
personality but ever expanding in the efficacity of a
mind above all particular interests and yet immanent
in the very centre of his deeper personality.
Let it not be thought that the concept of this
deeper personality, the Person which has no plurality,
6. The unity m an y way excludes and effectually annuls
of the tran- the concept of the empirical ego. Idealism
and thTmuhi- ^ oes not mean mysticism. The particular
plicity of the individual is not lost in the being of the
empirical ego. I " which is absolute and truly real. For
this absolute " I " unifies but does not destroy. It
is the one which unifies in itself every particular and
empirical ego. The reality of the transcendental ego
even implies the reality of the empirical ego. It is only
ii FERUM ET FACTUM CONVERTUNTUR 15
when it is cut off from its immanent relation with the
transcendental ego that the empirical ego is falsely
conceived.
If we would understand the nature of this subject,
the unique and unifying transcendental I, in which
the whole objectivity of spiritual beings
7. The con- . J J
structive process is resolved, confronted by nothing which
ofthetran- can assert independence, a subject there-
scendental ego. fore ^^ nQ othemess opposed to it,
if we would understand the nature of this reality
we must think of it not as a being or a state, but as a
constructive process. Giambattista Vico in his De
antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1710) chose as his
motto : " Verum et factum convertuntur." It showed
profound insight. The concept of truth coincides
with the concept of fact.
The true is what is in the making. Nature is the
true, according to Vico, only for the divine intellect
which is creative of nature ; and nature cannot be
the true for man, for nature is not made by us and
into its secrets it is not given to us therefore to
penetrate. All we can see of these secrets is the pheno
mena in their extrinsic de facto modes of linkage (as
Hume will say a little later), but we cannot know why
one phenomenon must follow on another, nor in general
why what is, is. When we look within nature itself
all is turbid, mysterious. On the other hand, in regard
to everything which we understand because it is our
own doing, the criterion of truth is clearly within us.
For example, what is a straight line ? We know
because we ourselves construct it in the inmost recess
of our own thinking by means of our own imagination.
The straight line is not in nature ; we understand it
thanks to our imagination, and not immediately but
1 6 SPIRITUAL REALITY
by constructing it. So later in his Scienza nuova
(1725) Vico tells us that the human mind can
know the laws of the eternal historical process,
conceived as spiritual development, because the cause
and first origin of all historical events is in the human
mind.
The greatest effort we can make, still following
Vico, to get within the processes of nature is experi-
8. Mind as *<?#/, and in experiment it is we ourselves
concrete who dispose the causes for producing the
development. effects. But even in the case of experiment
the efficient principle remains within nature itself,
whose forces we use without any means of knowing
the internal mode of their working. And even in ex
periment our knowledge stops at the simple discovery of
the de facto connexions, so that the inward activity of
the real, which ought to be the true and proper object
of knowledge, escapes us. Our experiments being
operations extrinsic to nature can only yield a super-
\ ^ ficial knowledge of it. Its superficiality, or its defect
as truth, is most clearly seen when natural science is
compared with mathematics, and even more so when
it is compared with the science of the human world,
with what Vico called the world of the nations. For
numbers and magnitudes, the realities studied by
mathematics, are constructed by us, they are not
realities in their own right but fictions, suppositions,
merely postulated entities ; whereas history is true and
effectual reality. When we have understood history
by mentally reconstructing its reality, there remains
nothing outside it, no reality independent of history
by which we can possibly test our reconstruction and
decide whether it corresponds or not.
What then is the meaning of this doctrine of Vico ?
FACTUM AND FIERI 17
It teaches us that we can only say we know an object
when there is in that object nothing immediate^ nothing
which our thought finds there already before we begin
to know it, real therefore even before it is known.
Immediate knowledge is contradictio in adjecto. Would
you know what language is ? There is no better
answer than the remark of von Humboldt (1767-
1835): true language is not epyov (opus) but evepyeia
(opera). It is not the result of the linguistic process,
but is precisely that process which is developed in act.
Whatever language is then, we know it, not in its
definite being (which it never has), but step by step in
its concrete development. And as with language so
with all spiritual reality, you can only know it, so to
say, by resolving it into your own spiritual activity,
gradually establishing that self-sameness or unity in
which knowledge consists. Destroy the degrees or
steps of the development and there is no longer the
development, you have destroyed the very reality whose
realization and understanding is in question.
The truth is that the fact, which is convertible with
the truth (verum et factum convertuntur\ in being the
same spiritual reality which realizes itself or which is
known in its realizing, is not, strictly speaking, a fact
or a deed but a doing. We ought then rather to
say : verum et fieri convertuntur.
CHAPTER III
THE UNITY OF MIND AND THE MULTIPLICITY OF THINGS
THE subject in this constructive process, the subject
which resolves the object into itself, at least in so far
i Verum as tne OD j ect * s spiritual reality, is neither
factum a being nor a state of being. Nothing but
quatenusfit. fa Q constructive process is. The process
is constructive of the object just to the extent that it
is constructive of the subject itself. And therefore
instead of saying verum et factum conver -fun fur, we ought
to say verum et fieri convertuntur, or even, verum est
factum quatenus fit. In so far as the subject is con
stituted a subject by its own act it constitutes the
object. This is one of the vital concepts. We
must acquire firm possession of it if we would avoid
the equivocal blunders of some of the ostentatious
and only too easy criticisms of this idealism.
Idealism is the negation of any reality which can
be opposed to thought as independent of it and as the
2. The incon- presupposition of it. But more than this,
gruence of it is the negation of thought itself as an
being and mind. act i v i t y ? if that thought is conceived as a
reality existing apart from its developing process, as a
substance independent of its actual manifestation. If
we take words in their strict meaning we must say
that idealism is the denial of being either to a mind
or to mind, the denial that a mind is, because " being "
18
CH.III BEING VERSUS MIND 19
and " mind " are mutually contradictory terms. If,
speaking of spiritual reality, we say of a poet that he
is, or of a poem that it is, in affirming being we are
denying mind. We can say indeed that it is what the
mind opposes to itself as a term of its transcendental
activity. If we would say, however, what it now itself
is, we can only mean, if we have a philosophical concept
of it, what its development is, or more strictly, what
this development is actualizing.
A stone is, because it is already all that it can be.
It has realized its essence. A plant is, an animal is,
3. Mind and in so far as all the determinations of the
nature. plant or animal are a necessary and pre
ordained consequence of its nature. Their nature is
what they can be, and what cannot be altered at will,
cannot break out into new unforeseeable manifesta
tions. All the manifestations by which their nature is
expressed is already there existing implicitly. There
are processes of reality which are logically exhaustible,
although not yet actually realized in time. The
existence of these is ideally actualized. The empirical
manifestations of their being come to be conceived,
therefore, as closed within limits already prescribed as
impassable boundaries. This restricted nature is a
consequence which follows from the fact that every
thing is represented in its relation to mind, as a reality
confronting it, whose being therefore is presupposed
in the fact that the mind knows it. The mind itself, on
the contrary, in its actuality is withdrawn from every
pre-established law, and cannot be defined as a being
restricted to a definite nature, in which the process of
its life is exhausted and completed. So to treat it is
to lose sight of its distinctive character of spiritual
reality. It is to confuse it and make it merely one of
20 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY
the objects to which instead it ought to be opposed ;
one of the objects to which in so far as it is mind, it
is in fact opposed. In the world of nature all is by
nature. In the world of mind neither person nor thing
is by nature, all is what it becomes through its own
work. In the world of mind nothing is already done,
nothing is because it is finished and complete ; all is
always doing. Just as all which has been understood
is nothing in regard to what we want to and as yet are
unable to understand, so likewise in the moral life all
the merits of the noblest deeds hitherto performed do
not diminish by a hair s-breadth the sum of duties there
are to fulfil and in the fulfilment of which the whole
value of our conduct will lie, so long as we continue
to have worth as spiritual beings.
Mind according to our theory is act or process not
substance. It is very different therefore from the
4 Mind- concept of mind in the old spiritualistic
substance and doctrine. That theory, in opposing mind
mmd-act. to ma tter, materialized mind. It declared
it to be substance, by which it meant that it was the
subject of an activity of which it was independent, an
activity therefore which it could realize or not realize
without thereby losing or gaining its own being. In
our view mind has no existence apart from its
manifestations ; for these manifestations are according
to us its own inward and essential realization. We can
also say of our mind that it is our experience, so long
as we do not fall into the common error, due to faulty
interpretation, of meaning by experience, the content
of experience. By experience we must mean the act
of experiencing, pure experience, that which is living
and real. 1
1 See L esperienza pura e la realta storica, Firenza, Libreria della Voce, 1915.
m THERE IS NO INACTIVE SOUL 21
Let us be on our guard that we are not ensnared
in the maze of language. Mechanistically analysed,
5. The pit- not only is the noun distinguished from
falls of language, the verb but it is detached from it and
stands for a concept separable and thinkable apart.
As love is loving and hate is hating, so the soul which
loves or hates is no other than the act of loving or
o
hating. Intellectus is itself intelligere, and the gram
matical duality of the judgment intellectus intelligit
is an analysis of the real unity of mind. Unless we
understand that unitv there is no understanding. If
J o
the living flame in which the spiritual act consists be
quenched there is no remainder ; so long as the
flame is not rekindled there is nothing. To imagine
ourselves simple passive spectators of our soul, even
after a spiritual life intensely lived, full of noble deeds
and lofty creations, is to find ourselves inert spectators
in the void, in the nought which is absolute. There is
just so much mind, just so much spiritual wealth, as
there is spiritual life in act. The memory which does
not renew, and so create ex novo, has nothing, absolutely
nothing, to remember. Even opening our eyes to look
within, when it requires no effort to do so, brings work,
activity, keenness, in a word, is life. To stop is to
shut our eyes ; not to remain an inactive soul but to
cease to be a soul.
This soul, it is hardly necessary to point out,
is not the object of psychology. Psychology claims
6. The object to be the natural science of psych-
of psychology, ical phenomena, and accordingly adopts
towards these phenomena the same attitude which
every natural science adopts towards the class of
objects it chooses for special study. The class of
objects presented to the psychologist, like the classes
22 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY
of natural objects presented to the naturalist, is taken
just as what it purports to be. It is not necessary
therefore that the psychologist, before he can analyse
the soul which is the object of his science, should have
to re-live it. He can be olympically serene in its
presence. What he has singled out for observation
may be a tumult of emotions, but he must preserve
before it the same imperturbability which the mathe
matician preserves before his geometrical figures. It
is his business to understand, he must be perfectly
impassive even before a real passion. But is the
passion, when the psychologist analyses it without
being himself perturbed by it, a spiritual reality ?
It is certainly a phenomenon which to exist must be
given a place in the world of objects we can know
about ; and this is the ground of the science of
psychology. Its particular claim to be science we will
examine later. But if we are now asked : Can we
think that this reality which confronts the mind and
which the mind has to analyse, a reality therefore
which is a presupposition of the mind whose object
it is, is spiritual reality ? We must answer at once :
No. If the object is a spiritual reality and if our
doctrine of the knowledge of spiritual reality be true,
the object must be resolved into the subject ; and this
means that whenever we make the activity of others
the object of our own thought it must become our
own activity. Instead of this the psychologist, in the
analysis which he undertakes from an empirical or
naturalistic standpoint, presupposes his object as other
than and different from the activity which analyses it.
Understanding his object means that the object is not
the activity of the subject for which it is object. The
anthropologist who specializes on criminal anthro-
THE ANALYSABLE SOUL 23
pology does not even for one single moment feel the
need to be the delinquent and so resolve the object
into the subject ! Just so ; precisely because the
reality he studies is psychology (in the naturalistic
meaning) it is not spiritual reality. This means
that whatever appearance of spirituality it may have,
the reality in its fulness, in what it truly is, escapes
the analysis of the psychologist. And every time we
consider any aspect whatever of spiritual reality simply
from the empirical standpoint, the standpoint of
empirical psychologists, we may be sure from the start
that we only see the surface of the spiritual fact, we
are looking at some of its extrinsic characters, we are
not entering into the spiritual fact as such, we are not
reaching its inmost essence.
To find spiritual reality we must seek it. This
means that it never confronts us as external ; if we
7 . How to would find it we must work to find it.
discover mind. And if to find it we must needs seek
it, and finding it just means seeking it, we shall
never have found it and we shall always have found
it. If we would know what we are we must think
and reflect on what we are ; finding lasts just as long
as the construction of the object which is found lasts.
So long as it is sought it is found. When seeking is
over and we say we have found, we have found
nothing, for what we were seeking no longer is.
Nolite judkare says the Gospel. Why ? Because when
you judge a man you no longer regard him as man, as
mind, you take a standpoint from which he is seen as
so much material, as belonging to the natural world.
He has ceased to be the mind which subsists in doing,
which can only be understood when seen in act : not
in the act accomplished, but in the act in process.
24 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY
We may say of spiritual reality what the great
Christian writers have said of God. Whoever seeks
Him shall find Him. But to find spiritual reality one
must be willing to put his whole being into the search,
as though he would satisfy the deepest need of his own
life. The God you can find is the God whom in seeking
you make to be. Therefore faith is a virtue and
supposes love. In this lies the folly of the atheist s
demand that the existence of God should be proved
to him without his being relieved of his atheism.
Equally fatuous is the materialist s denial of spiritual
reality : he would have the philosopher show him
spirit, in nature ! Nature which by its very definition
is the absence of mind ! Wonderful are the words of
the psalmist. Dixit insipiens in corde suo non est Deus.
Only in his foolish heart could he have said it !
To have grasped the truth that mind is a reality
which is in self-realization, and that it realizes itself as
8 Warning self-consciousness, is not enough in itself
against defini- to free us from the illusion of naturalism,
tions of mind. p or S pi r i tua i re ality seems itself to be in
continual rebellion against such definition, arresting
and fixing itself as a reality, an object of thought. All
the attributes we employ to distinguish mind tend,
however we strive against it, to give it substance.
Verum est factum quatenus fit is in effect a definition
of mind as truth. What then is truth but some
thing we contrapose to error ? A particular truth is
a truth and not an error, and a particular error is an
error and not a truth. How then are we to define
and conceive truth without shutting it within a limited
and circumscribed form ? How are we to conceive
truth, not Truth as the sum of all its determinations,
object of a quantitatively omniscient mind, but some
TRUTH AND DEFINITION 25
definite truth (such as the theory of the equality of the
internal angles of a triangle to two right angles), any
truth in so far as it is an object or fixed in a concrete
spiritual act, how are we to conceive such a truth
except by means of a fixed and self-contained concept,
whose formative process is exhausted, which is therefore
unreformable and incapable of development ? And
how can we think our whole spiritual life otherwise
than as the continual positing of definite and fixed
moments of our mind ? Is not spiritual concreteness
always spiritual being in precise, exact and circum
scribed forms ?
This difficulty, when we reflect on it, is not different
from that which, as we saw, arises in the necessity we
are under of beholding men and things in the medium
of multiplicity. And it can only be eliminated in the
same way, that is, by having recourse to the living
experience of the spiritual life. For neither the
multiplicity nor the fixedness of spiritual reality is
excluded from the concept of the progressive unity of
mind in its development. But, as the multiplicity is
subordinated and unified in the unity, so the deter-
minateness is subordinated in the concreteness of the
system of all the determinations, which is the actual
life of mind. For determinateness is essentially and
fundamentally multiplicity, it is the particularity of
the determinations by which each is what it is and
reciprocally excludes the others. It is only by abstrac
tion that even such a truth as that instanced, of the
equality of the internal angles of a triangle to two
right angles, can be said to be closed and self-contained.
In reality it is articulated into the process of geometry
in all the minds in which this geometry is actualized in
the world.
26 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY
This shows us why the concept of mind as process
is a difficult concept. Against it all the fixed abstrac-
9. Theintui- tions of common sense and of science
tionofmind. (which by its very nature always moves
in the abstract) are continually working, incessantly
crowding our intellect, drawing it hither and thither,
not suffering it without bitter exertion to keep its
hold on the immediate intuition of the spiritual life.
By that intuition alone it attains, in its vivid moments,
its norm and its inspiration towards science and virtue,
which the more they fill the soul the more strongly
vibrate the tense cords of our internal forces.
The unity of mind, which lives in such intuition,
has been more or less clearly pointed out by all
10. The philosophers, but no one yet perhaps has
unity of mind, brought out with definite clearness its
distinctive mark unmultipliable and infinite unity.
The unity of mind is unmultipliable because,
although psychology may compel us to analyse and
reconstruct spiritual reality, it is impossible ever to think
that mind is decomposable into parts, each conceiv
able by itself as a self-contained unity, irrespective of
the rest. Empirical psychology, while it distinguishes
the various concurrent psychical facts in a complex
state of consciousness and declares different elements
to be ultimate terms in its analysis, yet goes on to
point out that all the elements are fused in one whole,
and that all the facts have a common centre of reference,
and that it is precisely in virtue of this that they assume
their specific and essential psychological character.
Even the old speculative psychologies (as empirical as
the modern in their starting-point), when they dis
tinguish abstractly the various faculties of the soul,
always reaffirm the indivisible unity or the simplicity
MULTIPLE PERSONALITY 27
(as they call it) of the mind as the common basis and
unique substance of the various faculties. The life,
the reality, the concreteness of the spiritual activity, is
in the unity ; and there is no multiplicity except by
neglecting 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- f reference for z n ^g psychical pheno-
piricist argu- L J . .
ment against meiia, and that therefore there is no multi-
the unity of pHcity within the ambit of one conscious
ness, supposes that in the phenomenon
of multi-pie -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 observa
tion itself serves only to confirm our doctrine of the
non-multiplicity of mind because the duplication con
sists 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.
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.
28 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY CH.
The negation of intrinsic multiplicity is therefore
enough to make clear the absurdity of the concept
that the mind is part of a multiplicity. Atomists and
monadists alike, however, have thought it possible to
conceive the composite and also at the same time to
conceive the simple as a constitutive element of the
composite. We need not in this place discuss the
strength of this thesis, we may for our present purpose
even admit that it has all the value which common
sense attributes to it, for, independently of every
consequence of the concept of the unmultipliable or
intrinsic unity of consciousness, there is a much more
effective way of showing its infinity.
When we present the concept of our consciousness
to ourselves we can only conceive it as a sphere whose
5 The radius is infinite. Because, whatever effort
infinity of we make to think or imagine other things
consciousness. or otner consciousnesses outside our own
consciousness, these things or consciousnesses remain
within it, precisely because they are posited by us, even
though posited as external to us. The without is
always within ; it denotes, that is to say, a relation
between two terms which, though external to one
another, are both entirely internal to consciousness.
There is for us nothing which is not something we
perceive, and this means that however we define it,
whether as external or internal, it is admitted within
our sphere, it is an object for which we are the subject.
Useless is the appeal to the ignorance in which, as
we know by experience, we once were and others may
now be of the realities within our subjective sphere.
In so far as we are actually ignorant of them, they are
not posited by consciousness and therefore do not come
within its sphere. It is clear that our very ignorance is
(X
in UNITY AND INFINITY 29
not a fact unless at the same time it is a cognition.
That is to say, we are ignorant only in so far either as
we ourselves perceive that we do not know or as we
perceive that others perceive what we do not. So that
ignorance is a fact to which experience can appeal only
because it is known. And in knowing ignorance we
know also the object of ignorance as being external to
the ambit of a given knowing. But external or internal
it is always in relation to, and so within, some conscious
ness. There exists no means of transcending this
consciousness.
Spinoza conceived the two known attributes of
substance, thought and extension, to be external to one
another. He opposed idea and res, mens
infinity of an( ^ cor P us > but he was not therefore able to
thought think that ordo et connexio idearum idem est
according to ac or ^ Q et Connex j rerum^ because, as he
tells us, res (and primarily our own body)
is no other than objectum mentis? The body is the
term of our consciousness or the content of its first act.
It is what Rosmini later called the basal feeling
(sentimento fundamental^ the sense which the soul
has in its feeling of what is primarily the object felt,
the object beneath every sensation, the body. The
objectum mentis of Spinoza is indeed different from the
mind, but it is bound to the mind and seen by the
mind itself as something different from it. In the very
position then which the mind assigns to the body
(and to all bodies) the mind is not really transcended.
Spinoza therefore conceived mind as an infinite
attribute of the infinite substance. Substance, from
the standpoint of thought, is altogether thought.
And as we move with thought along all that is
1 Ethics, ii. 7. 2 Ibid. ii. 13. 21.
30 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY CH
thinkable, we never come to our thought s margin,
we never come up against something other than
thought, the presence of which brings thought to a
stop. So that the mind is not only in itself psycho
logically one, it is one epistemologically and it is one
metaphysically ; it is never able even to refer to an
object which is external to it, never able therefore to
be conceived as itself a real among reals, as a part only
of the reality.
But this is not enough. So far we have looked at
only one side of the question. A deep and invincible
i c The repugnance has in every age made the
multiplicity human mind shrink from affirming this
unmultipliable and infinite unity of the
mind in its absolute subjectivity. The mind cannot
issue from itself, it can detach nothing from itself, its
world is within it. And yet this concept of the self,
of a centre around which every one necessarily gathers
all the real and possible objects of his experience,
seems to hint at something different from it, something
which is its essentially correlative term. In affirming
a subject we at the same time affirm an object. Even
in self-consciousness the subject opposes itself as
object to itself as subject. If the activity of conscious
ness is in the subject, then when in self-consciousness
that same subject is the object, as object it is opposed
to itself as the negation of consciousness, even as
unconscious reality, relatively at least to the conscious
ness which belongs to the subject. The object is
always contraposed to the subject in such wise that,
however it may be conceived as dependent on the
subject s activity, it is never given it to participate in
the life with which the subject is animated. So that
the subject is activity, search, a movement towards
m OMNIS DETERMINATE EST NEGATIO 31
the object ; and the object, whether it be the object
of search or the object of discovery or the object of
awareness, is inert, static. Consequently to the unity
realized by the, subject s activity there stands opposed
in the object the multiplicity which belongs to the real,
hardly separated from the synthetic form which the
subject imprints on it. Things, in fact, in their
objectivity, presupposed as the term of the mind s
theoretical activity, are many : essentially many, in
such wise that a single thing is unthinkable save as
resulting from a composition of many elements. A
unique and infinite thing would not be knowable,
because to know is to distinguish one thing from
another. Omnis determinatio est negatio. Our whole
experience moves between the unity of its centre, which
is mind, and the infinite multiplicity of the points
constituting the sphere of its objects.
What we have then to do here is to bring clearly into
relief the character of this relation between the unity
16. The rek- of the mind and the multiplicity of things,
tion between It escaped Kant. It refers to the exact
the unity of nature o f t he mind s theoretical activity.
mind and the . r . r
multiplicity of Let us note first of all that if the unity ot
things. mind and the multiplicity of things were
together and on the same plane, as Kant thought when
he presupposed the uncompounded manifold of data
coming from the noumenon to the synthesis of
aesthetic intuition, then the unity of the ego would
be no more than a mere name, because it could be
summed up with the other factors of experience and
so would participate in the totality which includes the
multiplicity of the data. In such case it would be
seen to be a part. To be one among many is not
really to be one since it is to participate in the nature
32 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY
of the many. But the multiplicity of things does not
stand in the same rank with the unity of the ego, for
multiplicity belongs to things in so far as they are
objects of the ego, or rather in so far as all together
are gathered into the unity of consciousness. Things
are many in so far as they are together, and therefore
within the unity of the synthesis. Break up the
synthesis and each is only itself without any kind of
reference to the others. And therefore consciousness
cannot have one of them as object without being
enclosed within it and imposing on itself the absolute
impossibility of passing to another. Which comes to
saying that the thing no longer is one thing among
many, but unique. In so far therefore as there is
multiplicity there is a synthesis of multiplicity and
unity.
The multiplicity of things, in order to be the
multiplicity which belongs to the object of conscious
ness, implies the resolution of this very multiplicity,
and this is its unification in the centre on which all
the infinite radii of the sphere converge. The multi
plicity is not indeed added to unity, it is absorbed in
it. It is not n + i, but n = I. The subject of experi
ence cannot be one among the objects of experience
because the objects of experience are the subject. And
when we feel the difference, and only the difference,
between ourselves and things, when we feel the affinity
of things among themselves, and seem ourselves to be
shut up as it were within a very tiny part of the
whole, to be as a grain of sand on the shore of
an immense ocean, we are regarding our empirical
selves, not the transcendental self which alone is the
true subject of our experience and therefore the only
true self.
THINKING AND ACTING 33
We have not, however, eliminated every difficulty.
The mind is not only bound to the multiplicity of the
s i The ob J ect or f the things. There is the
mi n d> s multiplicity of persons. There is, it will
apparent limit be said, not only a theoretical activity by
acdvit UCal wn i cn we are in relation with things, there
is also a -practical activity by which we
are in relation with persons, and thereby constrained
to issue from our unity and to recognize and admit
a reality transcending our own.
It is of the greatest importance to bring this
difficulty clearly to light, for it has immediate con
sequences in regard to the moral conception of life.
Let us note then that the mind is never properly the
pXire theoretical activity which we imagine to stand
in opposition to the practical activity. There is no
theory^ no contemplation of reality, which is not at the
same time action and therefore a creation of reality.
Indeed there is no cognitive act which has not a
value, or rather which is not judged, precisely in its
character of cognitive act, according to whether it
conforms with its own law, in order that it may be
recognized or not as what it ought to be. Ordinarily
we think that we are responsible for what we do and
not for what we think. We suppose we could not
think otherwise than as we think, that though indeed
we may be masters of our conduct, we are not masters
of our ideas. They are only what they can be, what
reality makes them. This common belief, held even
by many philosophers, is a most serious error. Were
we not the authors of our ideas, that is, were our ideas
not our pure actions, they would not be ours. It would
be impossible to judge them, they would have no
value ; they would be neither true nor false. They
D
34 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY
would be, altogether and always, whatever a natural
and irrational necessity had made them. The human
mind, wherein they would be, altogether and always,
running confusedly, would be powerless to exercise
any discrimination and choice. It is absurd. For
even in thinking the sceptical thesis itself we must
think it, whether we will or no, as true, that is, as
clothed with truth value, for which it must be thought
and its opposite rejected.
Every spiritual act, then (including that which we
regard as simply theoretical), is practical in as much as
it has a value, practical in being or in not being what
it ought to be. It is therefore our act and it is free.
Every act is spiritual, moreover, in so far as it is
governed by a law, by which an account is required
from men not only of what they do but of what they
say or of what they would say if they expressed
what they think. This law which governs the
spiritual act has nothing in common with the
laws characterizing natural facts. Natural laws are
no other than the facts themselves, whereas a law
of the mind is, so to say, an ideal, or rather an ideal
which the mind presents to itself in distinction from
the fact of its own working. We are accustomed
to think that the mind is one thing, the laws which
govern it another. Mind is freedom ; but also, and
just on that account, it is law, which it distinguishes
from itself as an activity higher than its own.
Yet again, the law of the mind is rational, and in
that alone it is distinguished from the law of nature.
The law of nature is what is, not something we are
seeking behind what is. It is vain to seek the why of
what is. If we ask, Why ? of an earthquake or of any
other -physical evil we ask it not of nature, but of God,
THE SPIRITUAL LAW
35
who can make nature intelligible as the work of mind
or act of will. The spiritual law, on the contrary, in
all its determinations, has a definite why, and speaks
its own language to our soul. The poet correcting his
poem obeys a law which speaks the language of his
own genius. To the philosopher nothing is more
familiar, more intimate, than the voice which
admonishes him continually, preventing him from
uttering absurdities in regard to what he discovers.
Every law which others, our teachers or governors,
impose on our conduct, is only imposed truly and
effectively when it is rendered transparent in its
motives and in its intrinsic rationality, perfectly fitted
to our concrete spiritual nature.
In conclusion, if the mind be free, in so far as it is
limited by laws it can only mean that these laws are
not a different reality from that which it is realizing,
but the reality itself. The mind cannot be conceived
in freedom, with its own value, except by seeing it
from the point of view of other minds, just as the
" I," as subject of pure abstract knowledge, has need
of the "not-I," freedom has need of another "I."
And so we have man thinking of God as author of the
laws imposed on him and on all other particular men.
So too we have man girding himself with duties
and positing around him as many minds, as many
persons, as subjects are required for the rights which
his duties recognize. And when we look within our
own consciousness and consider the value of what we
are doing and of what we are saying to ourselves,
it is as though innumerable eyes were looking in
upon us to judge us. The very necessity of the
multiplicity of things, as we have already made clear,
forces us to conceive manifold duties, many subjects
36 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY CH.IH
with rights, many persons. Such a concept could
never arise in a pure theoretical experience, for a pure
theoretical experience could not be made to think of
another world than that of things. But we are not a
pure theoretical experience. And therefore our world
is peopled with minds, with persons.
How then are we to maintain the infinite unity of
mind in the face of this necessity of transcending it by
a multiplicity of persons ?
CHAPTER IV
MIND AS DEVELOPMENT
THE difficulty instanced at the end of the last chapter
concerns, as we can now clearly see, not simply the con
cept of mind but the concept of the real.
S i. Develop- L . r
ment as unity For it is only a difficulty in the concept of
of unity and mind in so far as the real in its totality
multiplicity. i j j o- T
comes to be conceived as mind, bmce, if
we take our start in the present actuality of conscious-
ne ss in which mind is realized, then to posit the infinite
unity of mind is to posit the unity of the real as mind.
The solution of this difficulty, which we have tried
to present in all its force, is to be found in the concept
already expounded that the mind is not a being or a
substance but a constructive process or development.
The very word development includes in its meaning
both unity and multiplicity. It affirms an immanent
relation between unity and multiplicity. But there is
more than one way of understanding such a relation.
It is necessary therefore to clear up precisely the exact
mode in which in our view mind is to be conceived as
development.
One mode of conceiving development is that by
which we posit abstractly the unity outside the multi-
2. The ab- plicity. The unity of the development is
stract concept then imagined as the ground or basis of
of development. ^ development, either as its principle or
as its result. The germ of a plant, for example, is
37
38 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT
represented as the undifferentiated antecedent of the
vegetative process, and the growth of the plant as
consisting in a progressive differentiation and multi
plication of the primitive unity. In such case we may
believe we are conceiving the growth of the plant but
really we are making it impossible to conceive. The
plant lives and grows not only in so far as there is a
succession of different states, but in so far as there is
the unity of all its states beginning with the germ.
And when we oppose the germ to the plant, the tender
seedling springing from the soil to the big tree with
its wide-spreading branches, we are letting the living
plant escape and setting side by side two images, two
dead photographs as it were, of a living person. We
have multiplicity it is true, but not the reality which
comes by the multiplication into different forms of
what throughout the development is and always re
mains one. Another example, taken not from vague
fancy but from scientific and philosophical systems,
is that of the old vitalist physiology and the mechan
istic physiology which arose in the last century as a
reaction against it. Both fell into an identical error, for
extremes meet. Vitalism posited life as the necessary
antecedent or principle of the various organic functions,
as an organizing force, transcending all the single
specifications of structure and function. Mechan
ism abolished this unity antecedent to the different
organic processes, and these became simply physico-
chemical processes. It dreamed of a posthumous
unity consequent on the multiple play of the physico-
chemical forces which positive analysis discovers in all
vital processes. Life was no longer the principle but
the result, and it appeared as though, instead of a meta
physical explanation starting from an idea or from a
iv THE LIVING THING AND ITS STATES 39
purely ideal entity, there was now substituted a
strictly scientific and positive explanation, since the
new point of departure is in the particular phenomena,
in the object of experience. In reality for a spiritual
istic and finalistic metaphysic there was substituted
a materialistic and mechanistic one. The one meta
physic was worth as much as the other, because
neither the unity from which the vitalists set out nor
that at which the new mechanists arrived was unity.
They both adopted an abstraction in order to under
stand the concrete. Life is not an abstract unity but
the unity of an organism, in which the harmony, fusion
and synthesis of various elements, exist in such wise
that there is neither unity without multiplicity nor
multiplicity without unity. The unity cannot yield
the multiplicity, as the old physiology supposed, and
the multiplicity cannot yield the unity, as the new
physiology supposed, and for the following simple
reason. So far as the unity and the multiplicity are not
real principles but simple abstractions, there can never
result from them true unity and true multiplicity, for
these, far from being outside one another, are one and
the same, the development of life.
There is then another mode of thinking the relation
between unity and multiplicity. It can be termed
3 The con- concrete in opposition to the former which
crete concept of clearly is abstract. This is the mode which
development. w jj on ] v j et us CO nceive unity as multi
plicity and vice versa : it shows in multiplicity the
reality, the life of the unity. This life just because
it never is but always becomes, forms itself. As we
have said, it is not a substance, a fixed and definite
entity, but a constructive process, a development.
From this theory that the mind is development, it
40 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.
follows that to conceive a mind as initially perfect, or
4. Unity as as becoming finally perfect, is to conceive
multiplicity. it no longer as mind. It was not in the
beginning, it will not be in the end, because it never
is. It becomes. Its being consists in its becoming,
and becoming can have neither antecedent nor con
sequent without ceasing to become.
Now this reality which is neither the beginning
nor the end of a process but just process, cannot be
conceived as a unity which is not a multiplicity ;
because as such it would not be development, that
is, it would not be mind. Multiplicity is necessary
to the very concreteness, to the very dialectical reality
of the unity. Its infinity which is the essential attribute
of the unity is not denied by its multiplicity but is
confirmed by it. Infinity is realized through the
multiplicity, for the multiplicity is nothing but the
unfolding which is the actualizing of the reality.
The dialectical concept of mind, then, not only does
not exclude, it requires spiritual multiplicity as the
5. The unity essential mark of the concept of the
which is muld- infinite unity of mind. Infinite unity
plied and the j g therefore infinite un i ncat i on o f the
multiplicity
which is multiple as it is infinite multiplication
unified. o f the one. Let us be careful to note,
however, that there are not two methods as the
Platonists, with their usual abstractness, suppose :
one of descent from the one, or multiplication, the
other of ascent or return to the one, or unification.
Such are, for example, the two famous cycles of Gioberti s
formula : Being creates the existing and the existing
returns to Being. 1 This is to fall back into the error
already criticized, into the false mode of understanding
1 " L Ente crea 1 esistente, e 1 esistente ritorna all Ente."
WHAT BECOMES NEVER IS 41
development. Neither term (one, many) ever is, either
as starting-point or end reached. The development
is a multiplication which is a unification, and a unifica
tion which is a multiplication. In the growing germ
there is no differentiation which splits up the unity
even for one single moment. The mind therefore does
not posit, or confront itself with, an other by alienating
that other from itself. It does not break up its own
intimate unity through the positing of an otherness
which is pure multiplicity. What is other than we is
not so other as not to be also our self. Ever bear in
mind that the " we " which we mean when we use it
as a convention in speech is not the empirical self, and
is not the scholastic compound of soul and body, nor
even pure mind, it is the true, the transcendental " we."
It is especially important to make clear that the
concept of dialectical development only belongs rightly
to this transcendental " we," for only in
6. The .... . /
dialectic of it is it given to us to meet the spiritual
thought reality. For there are two modes in which
dialectic may be understood, and it is
necessary once again to make a clear distinction.
One of these modes is that of Plato. It was he
who introduced the concept of dialectic into philo
sophy, and he meant by it sometimes the role
which philosophy fulfils and sometimes the intrinsic
character of the truth to which philosophy aspires.
Dialectic therefore is the fundamental meaning of
philosophy in Plato s system. Indeed for Plato, it is
the philosopher s inquiry, his research. Dialectic
is not what makes the philosopher aspire to the ideas
but what makes the ideas, to the knowledge of which
he aspires, form themselves into a system. They are
interconnected by mutual relations in such wise that
42 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT
the cognition of the particular is the cognition of the
universal, the part implies the whole, and philosophy is,
to use his own expression, a Synopsis?- It is clear that
this concept of the role of philosophy must depend on
the dialectic which belongs to the ideas ; it must depend,
that is, on the system of relations by which all are
bound together among themselves in such wise that,
as Plato argues in the Parmenides, every idea is a unity
of the one and the many. Now, it is clear that a dialectic
so conceived implies the immediateness of thought,
because it is the whole of thought from all eternity.
It is clear therefore that such a dialectic is the negation
of all development. 2
It is not of this Platonic dialectic that we are now
speaking. The radical difference between it and the
modern may be seen in the fact that dia-
7- The J
dialectic of lectic in the Platonic meaning, is thought in
thought so far as it is self-identical (the thought to
which Aristotle attributed, as its funda
mental laws, the principles of identity and non-contra
diction) ; whereas in our meaning thought is dialectical
because it is never self-identical. For Plato every idea
in the totality of its relations is what is, what it is im
possible to think of as changing and being transformed.
We can pass from one idea to another, and in passing
we can integrate an initial idea with the cognition of
relations with which formerly it had not been thought,
but this movement and process in us supposes rest,
fixity and immutability in the idea itself. This is the
Platonic and Aristotelian standpoint, and from this
standpoint the principle of non-contradiction is the
1 Rep. viii. 375 c.
2 See Gentile, La Riforma della Dialectica hegeliana, Messina, Principato,
1913, pp. 3-5 and 261-3 ; and Sistema di Logica, Part I. chap. viii. s. 6.
iv OLD DIALECTIC AND NEW 43
indispensable condition of thought. For us on the
other hand true thought is not thought thought, which
Plato and the whole ancient philosophy regarded as
self-subsistent, a presupposition of our thought which
aspires to correspondence with it. For us the thought
thought supposes thought thinking ; its life and its truth
are in its act. The act in its actualization, which is
becoming or development, does indeed posit the
identical as its own object, but thanks precisely to the
process of its development, which is not identity,
which is not, that is to say, abstract unity, but unity
and multiplicity, or rather, identity and difference
in one.
This concept of dialectic judged by the principle of
noh-contradiction, which it seems flagrantly to violate,
is a paradox and a scandal. For how can
8. Dialectic . . .
and the prin- we deny that the principle of non-contra-
ciple of non- diction is a vital condition of all thought ?
contradiction. y^ when ^ ^^ ^^ ^ ^ profound
dissidence between the concept of thought thought, for
which the principle of non-contradiction has a meaning,
and the concept of thought thinking, the act of the
transcendental ego, to which it can have no relevance,
we see that the dialectic is a strictly correct concept.
It is only when we descend from thought thinking,
which is activity, to thought thought, which is the limit
of the activity it presupposes and itself abstract, that
the principle of non-contradiction applies. The world
thought cannot be except as it is thought : however
it is thought, it is immutable (in the thought which
thinks it). But our modern aspiration to conceive mind
as the transcendental activity productive of the objective
world of experience, places us within a new world, a
world which is not an object of experience, since it is
44 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT
not a world thought, but the ground and principle
of experience, the thinking. The new world cannot be
governed by the law which was quite right for the old
world, and those who continue to point to the principle
of non-contradiction as the pillars of Hercules of philo
sophy show that they still remain in that old world.
The distinction here emphasized between dialectic
as Plato understood it, thought in its immediacy or
. . . thought thought, and our modern dia-
9. Fruitrulness . t
of the distinc- lectic, thought as act or process, thought
don between the thinking, throws light on the meaning and
two dialectics. i j c
value and inner nature or many concepts,
which approximate to our concept of development.
They are met with in Plato himself and before and
after him, and even in our own time. They are
concepts springing from the same soil in which
dialectic as Plato understood it has its roots, yet
they are quite distinct from the dialectic which makes
spiritual reality intelligible to us, and which in its turn
can only be understood in regard to spiritual reality.
The Platonic dialectic is only dialectic in appear
ance. If we consider it with regard to the man s mind
10. Criticism w ^ ^ oes not possess the system of the
of the Platonic ideas and aspires to possess it, then
indeed there is a development of the unity
running through the multiplicity. There is an in
definite approach to the realization of dialectical unity
in the ever-widening inquiry into the relations by which
the ideas are inter-connected. But since the value of
this inquiry presupposes that an eternal dialectic is
immanent in the ideal world, or since the reality which
it is sought to know by dialectic is a presupposition of
the thought, the dialectic belongs to the ideas, and
though it is possible to conceive a mind sharing in it,
iv THE GENESIS OF NATURE 45
still it is not the dialectic of the mind. The ideas do
not realize unity, because they are unity ; and they
do not realize multiplicity because they are multi
plicity. Neither in the one case nor in the other have
the ideas in themselves any principle of change and
movement. Therefore the true dialectic is that which
is no longer that of the ideas. The Platonic principle
evidently depends on referring the dialectic, which is
originally development and process of formation, to
an antecedent which transcends it, and in which its
value is thought to lie. It resolves, that is to say, the
mediacy which belongs to mind in so far as it is
development into the immediacy of the reality which
it presupposes and which it cannot conceive therefore
except as self-identical (at least in regard to the
thought which thinks it), according to the laws of the
Aristotelian logic.
Now, if this be the fundamental character and the
intrinsic defect of the Platonic dialectic, it will cling to
all the conceptions, however dynamical and dialectical
we make them, which have reference to a reality
opposed to the thought which thinks it and pre
supposed by it.
So in Plato, besides the dialectic of the ideas, we
have another dialectic. Plato does not indeed speak
n The f it un der that name, but he conceives it
Platonic dia- apparently in a manner analogous to what
lectic of Nature. we mean by the dialectic of development.
It is the movement, the process of continual formation,
the yeveo-L?, as he calls it, of nature. It is not, or at
least he certainly does not intend it to be, immediate
like the eternal world of the ideas. But Plato s Nature,
if it presuppose the eternal ideas, is itself a presupposi
tion in regard to thought, as it was for all the philo-
46 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.
sophers before him. Nature is not a presupposition in
regard to thought in general, for Greek philosophy
throughout its whole history cannot be said to have
ever succeeded in withdrawing from the ambit of the
laws of nature ; on the contrary nature is for it an
abstract entity, whose position, whatever it be, has no
real importance for those who look only at the inner
and concrete meaning of philosophical systems. Can
we then say of nature so conceived, a nature which
in itself, abstractly thought of, becomes^ but in so far as
it comes to be thought, is, and in so far as it is, comes
to be thought, can we really say of this nature that
it moves and generates and regenerates itself con
tinually ? In so far as we do not think it but only
feel it, yes : but in so far as we think it (and how
have we come to speak of 7ei/eo-t? if we do not
think it ?) it does not move and can no longer be
moved ; it becomes rigid and petrified in the very
fact that it is object of thought. And indeed Plato as
the result of his criticism of sensations, and of the
consequent opinions, finds no other elements intelligible
except the ideas, archetypes, the images of which lying
in the depths of the soul are awakened by means of
the stimulus of those very sensations. So that though
we begin by seeing confusedly the movement which
is in travail with all natural things, we are not
arrested by this first giddy intuition, but pass thence
to the contemplation of the fixed and immutable and
intelligible ideas. They are the deepest reality of
nature, precisely because they are withdrawn from the
restlessness of the sensible appearances, or rather
because they have not, like these, a character which
actually contradicts the reality which thought conceives
as already realized. Yet even for Plato there is a
iv NATURE FOR ARISTOTLE 47
material element which in nature is added to the pure
ideal forms without disturbing their motionless perfec
tion. But this matter is precisely what from the Platonic
standpoint is never made intelligible. Plato says it is
non-being. It is something for which in thought s
paint-box there are no colours, since whatever is pre
sented to thought and therefore exists for it, is idea.
And what can genesis itself be, in its eternal truth, but
idea ? It would not be, were it not idea. To be, then,
means that from this lower world of birth and death we
are exalted into the hyperuranion of the eternal forms.
And we know that when Plato had posited the trans
cendence of the ideas it was no longer possible for
him to redescend into the world of nature.
Aristotle, although he has been called the philo
sopher of becoming, had no better success. He denies the
12 The Platonic transcendence. The ideal forms
Aristotelian immanent in the matter form nature. They
are subjected to the movement by which
alone it is possible for the ideas to be realized in matter.
There is no substance which is not a unity of form
and matter. He thinks of the world therefore as mass
animated by eternal movement which brings the
eternal thought into act. Yet even for him thought
thinks nature as its antecedent : thinks it therefore
as an already realized reality which as such can be
defined and idealized in a system of fixed and un
changeable concepts. Indeed there is no science for
him which is not the act of the intellect. It is the
human intellect corresponding, a static correspondence
moreover, to the eternal intellect, which is incarnate in
the material world in virtue of the purpose which rules
the movement. So that nature for Aristotle, as for
Plato, is not an object of science in so far as it is nature ;
48 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.
and in so far as it is an object of science at all it is no
longer nature, no longer movement, but pure form.
It is a concept and a system of concepts. The Aris
totelian becoming, in so far as it is not and cannot be
the becoming of thought, remains a mere postulate.
As thing thought of, it is not becoming ; as becoming,
it cannot be thought.
In saying that the whole ancient philosophy stopped
at the concept of reality as presupposed by thought,
we mean that this was inevitable because
ancient philo- throughout the whole period it never
sophy failed to became possible to conceive, and in fact
understand ancient philosophy never did conceive,
history. .
history, -progress. It never conceived a
reality which is realized through a process, which is not
a vain distraction of activity but a continual creation of
reality, a continual increase of its own being. Nature,
as Plato and Aristotle conceive it, supposes a perfec
tion of being which must be realized in it, but this
perfection of being lies behind its back. Man s
thinking presupposes the reality of its own ideals,
and can strive towards them ; but only if it is alienated
from them. In the beginning there shines a light,
and this must be the goal of human efforts : the
golden age, the </>vo-t? (as opposed to the v6/j,o<i) of
the Sophists, the Cynics and the Stoics, lies behind
us, as in the Platonic idealism the ideal world precedes
our corporeal life.
The idea of history, the idea of the life of the
human mind, as seriously entering into the formative
14. Primacy process and development of reality itself,
of the concept was never so much as suspected through-
of progress. out fa e whole course of the ancient
philosophy nor even in the medieval so far as that
WE ARE THE OLD 49
continues the ancient. Even at the beginning of the
modern era we find Bacon speaking of an instauratlo
ab imis which is to cancel the past of science as
lost labour. We find Descartes equally denying the
value of tradition, and conceiving reason abstractly
as the power of the empirical individual, who must
commence or recommence scientific inquiry by himself
alone and start from the beginning. Yet we may
hear one voice entirely new, though never understood
by his contemporaries, that of Giordano Bruno. In
the Cena de le Ceneri (1584) he championed the
freedom of the new scientific thought against the
authority of Aristotle. We have need indeed, he
remarked, to trust the judgment of the old ; but
the old are not the ancients, it is we who are the
old, we who come later and are therefore wiser by
the experience and reflexion of the ages lived
through. 1 Bruno is perhaps the first to affirm that
the mind has a development which is an increase
of its power, and therefore its true and proper realiza
tion. It is the first indication of the modern concept,
wholly idealistic and Christian, of the importance of
history.
How many are there even to-day who appreciate
this concept of history as progress, gradual realization
of humanity itself ? The dialectical con-
15. The . . .
ground of the ception is possible on one condition only,
concept of an( } that is that in history we see not a
past but the actual present. This means
that the historian does not detach himself from his
material and set up res gestae as the presupposition
and already exhausted antecedent of his historia
1 Cf. my article " Veritas filia temporis," 1912, in Giordano Bruno e
lafilosofia del Rinascimento, Florence, Vallecchi, 1920.
E
50 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.
rerum gestarum. If he does and trusts to what is
called the positive element of historical events,
instead of to their organic spirituality, he comes
to consider history in the same way as that in which
the naturalist considers nature. It is commonly
supposed that historical positivism stands on the same
basis as naturalistic positivism. But it is not the same,
for the naturalist, in so far as he is such, is necessarily
positivist. He must set out with the presupposition
that nature is and that it can be known ; and its
knowability depends on its being, whether its being is
known or not. We mean by nature something the mind
finds confronting it, something already realized when
we are brought into relation with it ; and positivism
is nothing but the philosophy which conceives reality
as fact, independent of any relation to the mind which
studies it. History presents, indeed, in the positive
character of its events, an analogy with nature ; but
its intelligibility consists in the unity of the real to
which it belongs on the one side and in the mentality
of the historian on the other. The history of a
past is impossible if it is found unintelligible (if, for
example, it is attested by undecipherable documents).
Between the personages of history and ourselves
there must be a common language, a common men
tality, an identity of problems, of interests, of thought.
This means that it must pertain to one and the\
same world with ourselves, to one and the same
process of reality. History, therefore, is not already
realized when we set out on our historical research ;
it is our own life in act. If then nature is nature in
so far only as it precedes the thought of nature,
history is history in so far only as it is the thought of
the historian.
HISTORICAL MATERIAL 51
Whoever 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 pre
vented Plato and Aristotle perceiving the dynamical
life of nature. A history which is finished, self-con
tained, 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
which 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 presenta
tion 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, philo
sophical). There is not a material element of history
which remains point for point the same in the various
representations which different historians offer, nothing
which when we have despoiled a history of all the
historian s subjective particularity according to the
usual empirical conception we can fix in its skeletal
objectivity.
What we have said of the concept of history, repre-
52 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT
sented as existing antecedent to the mind of the
historian, should suffice to clear away the
16. The . . J
absurdity in absurdity of the evolutionist notion of a
the concept of nature, conceived in the same way, that
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 selec
tion, 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 con
ceived 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, sup
pose it not yet to have come to birth, and evolution then
stands to nature, as Darwin conceived it, in the same
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 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
iv NATURAL SELECTION 53
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 thereby 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 concretcness. He put to the proof and
of the Hegelian showed the impossibility of the dialectical
dialectic. thinking of the real if we begin by separat
ing 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 reason which conceives mind. Intellect
54 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.
abstractly represents things analytically, each for itself,
self-identical, different from all the others. Reason
comprehends all in the unity of mind, as each self-
identical 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 pre
senting 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 determina
tion, which is indeed the least which can be thought,
and which we cannot not think, in its absolute inde-
terminateness, whatever abstraction is made from the
content of thought. Is it possible to pass from this
concept of being, posited in this way before thought,
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
iv HEGEL S CRUX PHILOSOPHORUM 55
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 non-
being, 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 contra
diction 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.
O
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. Reform of philosophorum^ round which battle has been
the Hegelian waged. Every one feels the necessity of
giving an account of the concept of becom
ing, and yet no one is satisfied with Hegel s deduction
of it. 1 That deduction is vitiated by the error
already indicated in distinguishing the dialectic which
is understood as a dialectic of thing thought, from
1 I have given a short critical exposition of the principal attempts at
interpretation in the volume already alluded to : La Riforma della Dialettica
hegeliana, chap. i.
56 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.IV
the true dialectic which can only be conceived as a
dialectic of the thinking outside which there is no
thought. The being which Hegel must prove
identical with non-being in the becoming, the being
which alone is real, is not the being which he defines
as the indeterminate absolute (how can the indeter
minate absolute be other than the indeterminate
absolute ?), but the being of the thought which
defines and, in general, thinks. As Descartes saw,
thought is in so far as we think. If thought were
something that is, it would not be what it is act.
It is in not-being, in self-positing, in becoming, that
it is. 1 So that all the difficulties met with in the
Hegelian dialectic are eliminated as soon as we acquire
a clear consciousness of the immense difference
between the reality which Plato and Aristotle con
ceived dialectically, the reality also which in the ordinary
notion of history and the evolutionist notion of nature
are conceived dialectically, and the reality which
modern idealist philosophy defines as dialectic. For
the one, reality is thought of, or thinkable, which is
the same thing ; for the other, reality is thinking.
Get rid of the ordinary and unconscious abstraction
according to which reality is what you think, and
which yet, if you think it, can be nowhere but in
your thought. Look with steady gaze at the true
and concrete reality of the thought in act. The
dialectical character of the real will then appear as
evident and certain as it is evident and certain to each
of us that in thinking we are conscious of what thinks,
just as in seeing we are conscious of what sees.
1 Such is the concept I have expounded in my book just referred to,
as a reform of the Hegelian principle.
CHAPTER V
THE PROBLEM OF NATURE
HAVING posited a purely ideal dialectic, and a Logos,
distinct from mind or thought thinking, which is the
i The Hegel- consciousness of it, the road lay open to
ian problem of Hegel to deduce mind from the Logos by
Nature. passing through nature. For by conceiving
the dialectic of thing thought as a pure thinkable, he
had found a way of conceiving nature dialectically, for
nature is thing thought and not a thinking. But it
proves to be only a road painted on a wall. For he
kept open the possibility of conceiving nature dialecti
cally only because he had not yet discovered the true
dialectic and continued to use the old, unserviceable
Platonic dialectic. When we make dialectic coincide
with thought we cannot, as we saw in the last chapter,
even propose the problem of the dialectic of nature : it
becomes an absurdity. If in place of the false concep
tion of history which opposes history to the mind which
thinks it, we have been able to indicate and put in its
place the true conception of history, and if that dialecti
cal concept eliminates the opposition and reveals the
infinite unity of mind consolidated in its actuality, then
the criticism we are now bringing against the dialectical
concept of nature digs still deeper the abyss which
yawns between mind and the concept of a reality which
is resistant to all dialectical thinking. Granted the
57
58 THE PROBLEM OF NATURE
dialectical nature of mind, a limitation of its dialectic
seems to carry with it a limitation of the reality of
mind and so to force us to deny to it that infinity
which we declared immanent in the concept of mind.
Hence the problem arises : What is this nature which
stands confronting the mind and is not susceptible of
being presented dialectically ? What is this nature which
the mind finds outside itself as its own antecedent ?
Until we reply to this question it is clearly impossible
to maintain our fundamental affirmation of the infinite
unity of mind.
Before we can say what nature is we must first know
whether the nature meant is thought of as general
2. Nature as or universal, or as individual. Plato,
individuality, following Socrates, who first originated the
clear distinction between the general and the individual,
was induced by the speculative transcendental tendency
of his philosophy to think of nature as general, and so
he turned the immediacy and positiveness of natural
reality into the idea of the nature. The true horse is
not for him the single, particular, individual horse but
the species horse (not of course using the term in the
empirical meaning of the naturalist). It is tVTroTT;?,
horseness, and he tells us that it provoked the mirth
of his opponent Antisthenes. 1 Plato could not con
ceive otherwise a nature which could be an object
of science, or which could simply be, without an
idea. But such a conception of nature fell under
the criticism which Aristotle brought to bear on
the Platonic transcendence. The Platonic doctrine
makes the individual inconceivable, and it was the
individual which, pressing upon thought with the
demand that it be taken in its full actuality,
1 Simplicius, in Arist. Cat. 66 b 45 Br.
THE ARISTOTELIAN INDIVIDUAL 59
had generated the problem of the Socratic uni
versal. For Aristotle, nature, in its opposition to
thought, is posited as the unity of the form or idea
with matter its opposite (Plato s non-being) : for
Aristotle s substance is precisely the individual which
is that unity. And with Aristotle nature begins to be
opposed to the universality of the idea, or of the pure
thought with its own individuality, which brings the
incarnation of the form into the matter : an incar
nation, which is the actualizing of a power, due
to the realization of the form itself, of which in
the matter there is nothing but the abstract and inert
possibility.
The concept of the individual has great importance
in the Aristotelian philosophy. It affirms the necessity
of overcoming the abstract position of the
3. The . . & . r
Aristotelian idea, which is actual thinking as thought,
doctrine of the g u t rather than a concept we should say it
is a demand, or that it is the aspiration, of
the Aristotelian thought to attain the immanent concept
of the universal. The concept, indeed, is not attained;
and it could not be attained so long as philosophy
sought reality, and the reality of the individual, in
thing thought instead of in thinking. It is shown
indeed, that the individual we would distinguish
from the idea, is distinguished as the process of
realization from the reality which the idea will be.
But this process of realization, as we have seen,
from the Aristotelian standpoint, which coincides
with the Platonic in making the reality thought of
a presupposition of the thinking, is inconceivable
except in so far as it has yet to begin (potency,
matter), or is already exhausted (act, form). So that
in analysing the individual it is necessary first to find
60 THE PROBLEM OF NATURE
the two elements which constitute it, and there is
no possibility of understanding their relation, for it is
just the process of actualization of the individual itself ;
and that is precisely the nature it would affirm in
opposition to the transcendental reality of the pure
Platonic ideas.
The thousand years history of the problem concern
ing the -prindpium individuationis^ which had its rise in
the Aristotelian concept of the individual,
4. The Schol- . r , ,
astic inquiry serves to prove how insuperable were the
concerning the difficulties to which Aristotelianism was
prindpium ^ condemned, unwilling to stop at the
inaiinauakonis. . . , r X-, . ,
abstract universal or rlatonism, and yet
completely unable to seek the immanence of the
universal or rather its individuality, where alone it is
possible to find it, in the reality which is not the
antecedent of thought, but thinking itself. The inter
preters of Aristotle asked themselves : Of the two
elements which constitute the individual, matter
and form, which must be considered the principle
of individualization ? For if, as Plato had con
ceived, the form is universal, the matter likewise must
itself be universal, as that from which all the forms
which are displayed in the endless series of the in
dividuals, however disparate themselves, issue ; a
matter which in itself has none of the determinations
which are realized in it by the intervention of the
forms. So that form and matter, the one as much as
the other taken by itself, each excludes the very
possibility of any determination or individualization.
Individuality arises from their meeting. But in this
meeting which of the two determines the indeterminate,
making it individual ?
If we start with the abstract original duality of
v THE PRINCIPIUM INDIFWUATIONIS 61
matter and form as given, it is impossible that we
5 . Giordano should find the ground of their unity, or
Bruno s the true principium individui. Giordano
difficulty. Bruno in the fuller maturity of the Re
nascence saw this clearly, yet he could only do what
Aristotle, coming after Plato, had done before : turn
and affirm the need of unity. It was not given even
to Bruno to perceive what he called the point of the
union (// punto delf unione}} He remained, even to
the end, at the standpoint of ancient philosophy,
imagining reality as a presupposition of thought : a
standpoint from which it is impossible to conceive
movement and development. For if we start with
unity, unity remains abstract and unproductive, unable
to give the ground of duality ; and if we start with
duality, the duality cannot but be eternal duality,
because it cannot but be identical with itself and there
fore incapable of being unified.
The medieval philosophers started with duality
and inquired which of the two terms generates that
s 6 The unity which is the individual. They were
antinomy of divided into two opposite camps, and their
the individual. conmct was interminable since they found,
on the one side and on the other alike, unchallengeable
reasons, the one for maintaining that the principle of
the individual is in the form, and the other for main
taining that it is in the matter. They opposed and
contraposed, thesis to antithesis, antithesis to thesis,
without ever succeeding in extricating themselves
from the antinomy. The problem is in fact insoluble
because, whoever posits duality and then seeks to
understand the relation of the two terms, must, since
i De la causa, principle e uno (1584), in Opere Italians, ed. Gentile, vol. i.
p. 256.
62 THE PROBLEM OF NATURE
it is not an a -priori relation (that is, a relation on the
existence of which each of the two terms depends),
decide in favour of one of the two. Either he thinks
matter is primordial and matter only ; or he thinks form
is primordial and form only. To think both matter and
form as together is excluded by the hypothesis of the
duality, according to which each of the two terms is
what it is without the other and by itself excludes the
other. Now, to think matter by itself is to think a
pure indeterminateness, which cannot produce deter
mination from itself, and which cannot therefore appear
individualized save by reason of its opposite, form,
which will then be the individualizing principle.
But this deduction is legitimate only so far as it
admits the contrary. It is rendered possible in fact
by the concept of the abstract matter which supposes
the concept of abstract form. For to deny the concept
of abstract form would involve also the denial that
matter is really indeterminate, and this is the very
basis on which the deduction rests. Suppose then
we begin by thinking of form by itself. Lo and
behold, the very term, which from one aspect appeared
the origin of determinateness, now, looked at from the
opposite aspect, is transfigured into the pure deter-
minable which is absolutely indeterminate. In its
pure ideality the form is the possibility of all particular
individuals and not any one of the particular individuals.
It must be incorporated and determined as a single
existent ; but this incarnation cannot be a transforma
tion and generation from within. There must intervene
something which (precisely as Plato said) is the negation
of the ideal, actually universal being. And then it is
evident that the individualizing principle can only be
in the matter which is opposed to the form.
MATERIA SI GNAT A 63
Hence the scales of the Scholastics, leaning now
to one side, now to the other ; some affirming that
7. Thomas t ^ ie principium individui is the form, others
Aquinas s that it is the matter ; each with equal
ground in reason; each shut in by the
impossibility of definitely breaking down the argu
ments of the opposite side. There is one doctrine,
however, which though unjustifiable on the basis of
scholasticism, brought into play a high speculative
talent, that of Thomas Aquinas. This doctrine takes
its stand not on matter abstractly conceived, quo-
modolibet 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 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. 1
It must not be thought that the problem of the
principle of individualization was abandoned with the
s. 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.
64 THE PROBLEM OF NATURE CH.
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 philo
sophy. It is not merely a theme for intellectual gym
nastics, 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 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 therefore contingent
fact, must ideally work loose from that fact, and
posit itself as a pure idea, and so oblige us
to ask : How does it become fact ? The ques
tion is not substantially different from that with
which the prindpium individui is concerned. This
HEGEL S LOGIC AND NATURE 65
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 im-
manentism 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
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
F
66 THE PROBLEM OF NATURE CH.
remain, unsolved. There is in fact repeated for it the
difficulty of the Platonic idealism. The Logos is the
thinkability, or thinking as a whole. There are there
fore two alternatives, either there is nothing else than
the Logos, or there is something else but it is not
thinkable (intelligible). In the first case, there is no
nature outside the Logos, in the second case there is
nature but no philosophy of it. And if the Logos has
been excogitated in order to understand nature, then
the Logos is no longer Logos or rather no longer what
it ought to be. So, then, the standpoint of the Logos
excludes nature. And if the universality of the Logos
does not satisfy us and we are athirst for actuality,
for natural positiveness and particular determinateness,
then there is nothing for it but to abandon the Logos,
to deny the Idea, and indeed Hegel himself says so.
But this negation (completely analogous to the opposi
tion of the Platonic non-being to being), the negation
which the idea itself makes of itself, can have value
only if it be itself a logical act, and is therefore within
the sphere of the Logos, and not an act which the Idea,
remaining within that sphere and developing the whole
of its logical activity, can never fulfil. It fulfils it just
when it overcomes pure logicity and breaks through
the enclosing bark of the universal, pushing itself forth
as particular. Such a rupture is inconceivable.
Even Hegel, then, propounds the problem of the
principle of individualization without solving it. He
10. why propounds it and cannot solve it, because,
Hegel s problem as we have seen, the true concept of the
dialectic (its own Logos) cannot be reached
as a thing thought of, or as a reality which is a pre
supposition of thinking, that abstract reality which had
already been idealized by Plato into universals, from
HEGEL S PROBLEM UNSOLVED 67
which, as Aristotle clearly saw, it is impossible to
redescend to the individuals of nature.
By this way, then, the individual has not been
and is not to be found. For a nature which with
its individuals is contraposed to thought cannot be
grasped.
CHAPTER VI
THE ABSTRACT UNIVERSAL AND THE POSITIVE
ANOTHER famous controversy which engaged medieval
philosophers and had not indeed come to an end when
i. The dispute tne m dern era began, is the dispute con-
concerning cerning the value of universals. Even in
universals. fais the concept of the individual is at
stake ; because, according to the way in which we
interpret the value of the universal, we shall corre
spondingly conceive the individual. And if we fail to
understand the universal in a way which enables us
thereby to understand the individual, the need of
conceiving the individual will necessarily remain
unsatisfied.
Who has not heard of the famous dispute which
divided the Scholastics of the thirteenth century ?
2. Nominal- ^ ne nominalists, compromising the reality
ism and of every ideal principle which is mediated
in more than one individual, and therefore
even the reality of the Christian dogmas (for they
affirm such principles), denied that the Aristotelian
philosophy supposed universals existing as universals,
in the way that Plato had conceived them. Substance,
according to Aristotle, must be conceived as individual,
as a-vvo\ov, a concrete whole of form and of matter :
not therefore a simple universal but a particularized uni
versal. And it matters not that in knowing the intellect
68
CH.VI NOMINALISTS AND REALISTS 69
is concerned with the form only of the individual
and that it has as its proper object the universal alone.
The intellect knows the universal in the individuals.
In the individuals the ideality of the universal is
incorporated with the matter, and outside the in
dividuals the universal is nothing but a pure name.
The realists, developing the permanent Platonic
motive in Aristotelianism, objected, in their turn, that
if the universal is not real, the individual cannot be
real, for the individual is a determination of the uni
versal, and only in the universal can attain the principle
of its own being. The individual is real, in so far and
only in so far as it participates in the universal. And
precisely because we must say alike of each and every
individual, that the reality of the individual is ephemeral
and transient, inasmuch as it must be concurrent with
the reality of all the other individuals, so we must say
of the universal that in its unity it has a constant and
eternal reality. So that the individual both is and is
not real. The individual is not truly real if as in
dividual it is distinguished from and opposed to the
universal. The individual is real in so far as over
flowing the limits of its own individuality, it coincides
with the universal. For the universal is real in the
absolute meaning.
Nominalism is clearly a naturalistic and material
istic theory. In confining reality to the individuals,
3. Criticism it tends to suppress their intelligibility, for
of nominalism, it denies the absolute value of the universals
through which they are intelligible. It tends also
thereby to deny that there can be value in thought by
itself, for thought contrasted with what alone is real
in the individuals is indistinguishable from nothing.
The universal, a pure name in so far as it is present in
70 THE ABSTRACT AND THE POSITIVE CH.
the individuals, does not universalize them, but par
ticularizes itself. The conceptualists who called the
universal a concept are substantially one with the
nominalists, for their concept is no more than a name,
a universal shorn of the reality which only the indi
viduals possess. Nominalism means, therefore, that
the form of each individual, since it is not identical
with the form of all other individuals, inasmuch as
we can conceive the form of each independently of
each of the individuals, is no longer universal but
particular. It is the form given hie et .nunc^ which
in its being omnimodo determinatum comes to be in
apprehensible by thought, ineffable, non-intuitable.
Reality despoiled of its form is deprived of the illumina
tion of thought. It is no more than the pure abstract
presupposition of the terms of that thought. The
individual, in short, as pure individual is not even
individual : it is nothing.
Realism, on the other hand, falls into the opposite
fault. So true is it that in vitium ducit culpae fuga
4. Criticism & caret arte. If the universal be already
of realism. re al and the individual can add nothing
to its reality, in what then does the individuality of
the individual consist ? We come back to the great
difficulty of Plato, who remained imprisoned within
the circle of the ideas, unable to return from them to
the world, although it had been in order to understand
the world that he had excogitated the ideas.
The eclectic theories succeeded no better. One of
these was that of Avicenna, afterwards adopted and
5 Criticism largely developed and disseminated by
of the eclectic Thomas Aquinas. With the nominalists,
Thomas Aquinas admitted the universalia
in re^ but from these, with the conceptualists, he dis-
vi THE ECLECTIC THEORIES 71
tinguished the universalia post rem, the universals man
extracts from sensible experience in forming concepts ;
but also with the realists he maintained the value of
the universalia ante rem, the divine thoughts which are
realized in the world of natural individuals although
they are real in God before they are realized in the
world. As a solution it combines in one the difficulties
of the opposed theses it would reconcile. Because, if
the universals post rem are not one and the same with
the universals in re, their difference signifies precisely,
that in abstracting the universals from the individuals
in which they inhere, we are withdrawing them from
the reality which they have only while they adhere to
the individuality. The concept, therefore, is an altera
tion of the object and renders more remote the real
being of things which it is proposed to know by means
of the concept. And it comes to this, that for Thomas
Aquinas, as for every nominalist, things in their
individuality are unknowable.
And the knowability of things cannot be founded
on the concept of the universale ante rem. Because this
universal also is completely different from the other
two, and they therefore cannot guarantee the value of
the third which is realized in the mind of man. Be
sides, granting to the individual thing the reality of
the universal which it actuates, but which is already
realized in the mind of God, the reality of this universal
makes it impossible to understand in what its ulterior
actualization can consist, since it is already full reality,
in all its possible determinations, not one of which can
be lacking in the idea which God resolves to realize.
And the conclusion is that even the universale ante rem,
notwithstanding the company of its brethren in re and
post rem, remains quite alone, imprisoned in its pure
72 THE ABSTRACT AND THE POSITIVE CH.
ideality, impotent to explain the being of the individual.
If the idea of the world precedes the world, and the
idea is real, the world is impossible. And thus we
see that even in the dispute concerning universals we
are confronted with an insoluble antinomy. The
reality of the individual cannot be made intelligible
without the reality of the universal ; but the reality
of the universal renders unintelligible the reality of
the individual.
This antinomy is even more insistent and per
plexing than that which springs from the inquiry
6. The concerning the individualizing principle :
antinomy of because universalizing the individual is an
the umversals. indispensable condition of conceiving it,
it is indeed the very act of thinking it. And without
the individual, hie et nunc^ there is no nature. Every
thing concrete, even the life by which we live, flies
off and vanishes. But to universalize is also to
idealize, and therefore to see escaping from us, in
another direction, everything real, for the real is always
particular, determinate and individual.
Modern philosophy began to free itself from the
bondage of this antinomy when with Descartes it said :
7 . Metaphysics c S ito er S sum - Jt was a beginning in so
and empiricism far as in the cogito the concreteness of the
in Descartes. individual, the " I " who thinks, coincides
with the universality of thought. But it is only a
beginning, inasmuch as in Descartes the coincidence
between the individual and the universal is only to the
extent that the thinking is my thinking, mine who say
" cogito," and I who think am ; that i^, in so far as the
reality which is thought is the thought which thinks.
So that, even in Descartes, no sooner is the thought
turned away from the subject which is realized in its
vi THE KANTIAN NOUMENON 73
own thinking, to the reality which is posited before
the subject in virtue of his thinking, than the co
incidence disappears, and the abyss between the
individual and the universal reopens, and philosophy
is constrained anew to oscillate between a world which
is intelligible but not real (the rational world of the
metaphysicians, from Descartes to Wolf) and a world
real indeed, and substantial, but not intelligible,
although obscurely felt and able to shine through
sensible impressions, unconnected and manifold (the
" nature " of the empiricists from Bacon to Hobbes,
from Locke to Hume). Either a metaphysic of empty
shadows, or a prostration of reason before an unknown
and unknowable Absolute !
In Kant we meet a much more vigorous effort than
Descartes s to understand the immanence of the
universal in the individual, and to compre-
8. What we "
owe to Kant hend how thereby the concept of the
and wherein individual is made possible. This is the
his error lav. ,1 i i i j ,1 .
a -priori synthesis which binds the intuition
to the concept in a relation on which both the one and
the other depend, and without which neither the one
nor the other is. Yet Kant distinguishes the phenome
non from the noumenon, and for him it is the
noumenon which is the true root of the individual
object of experience, and without experience thought
would remain closed within the universal mesh of its
pure forms (which are the Scholastic universals
expressed in Kantian terminology). And when in
Kant s successors the noumenon was dispensed with,
and the individual was sought in thought itself, which
is the universal, as an element or moment of it, specula
tion, even in affirming the impossibility of conceiving
an individual other than self-consciousness, can only
74 THE ABSTRACT AND THE POSITIVE CH.
make self-consciousness intelligible by transcending
it in nature and in pure logic. We find once again
the kingdom of universals, on which, as on the empire
of Charles V., the sun never sets and from which there
is no going forth. The universal has indeed separated
itself from the individual, by revolting against it and
devouring it.
In our own time the dispute concerning universals
has come again into the arena in the doctrine of the
9. The new practical character of mathematical and
nominalism of naturalistic laws and concepts. This merits
the pragmatists. p art i cu i ar consideration, because, while it
renews the old nominalism, it appears to indicate,
although distantly, that doctrine of the immanence of
the universal in the particular which, as we shall see
more clearly in the sequel, explains the individual who
is only individual, but is not nature.
Several modern epistemologists, approaching philo
sophy for the most part from the side of the natural
and mathematical sciences, and inspired by observations
which spring from the criticism of those sciences
(Avenarius, Mach, Rickert, Bergson, Poincare and
others), have pointed out that the concepts of the
naturalists, like the definitions of the mathematicians,
derive their value purely from the definite ends which
they serve. They .do not mirror the real, for the
real is always diverse and therefore merely individual ;
and consequently, in the true and proper meaning of
the term, they are not knowledge. In the case of the
natural sciences they are to be considered symbols,
tickets, arbitrary and mnemonic schemes, devised by
man in order to guide experience, regulate with the
least effort the great press of single perceptions, and
communicate their own experience to others in
vi PRAGMATIST THEORIES 75
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. There 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
o
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
difference 6 ^ or t ^ le knowledge of the individual,
between the old the modern actually rejects the universal
nominalism character of knowledge, and posits the
and the new. .,.., ... ir . ... . j
individual himself in his strict indi
viduality, confronted with his thought. The know
ledge of individuality, therefore, when it is knowledge
is reduced to simple immediate intuition. But such
difference is itself more a postulate than a real deduc
tion ; 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, more
over, the object intuited is intuited as not yet an
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 cateo-orv of the intuited without
76 THE ABSTRACT AND THE POSITIVE CH.
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
Th d P ure extreme individuality stripped of
tity of the new every determination. An individual surely
and the old i s always determinate, formed. A dog,
nominalism. r i i i 11 j
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 is, is mind, the
concept of the dog will make us intuit, and that is,
strictly speaking, think, the individual <iog.
But, if we insist on maintaining the presupposition
that there is no objectivity except that of the individual,
THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL 77
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-
12. Theprac- * sm ^ t ^ le m dern epistemology of the
tical character sciences adds a new one. It has its origin
o
of the new j n fa e equivocation which the pragmatist
nominalism and ... ....
Kant s primacy conception harbours within it, an equi-
of the practical vocation not really very new.
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 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
78 THE ABSTRACT AND THE POSITIVE CH.
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 ? " x
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 proposi
tions which, whilst they are not contrary to the specu
lative 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 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, Bo^k II. ch. II. 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."
KANT S PRACTICAL REASON 79
soil, but which is yet sufficiently attested ; and it must
seek to confront them and connect them with every
thing it has in its power as speculative reason, even
allowing that they are not its cognitions, but extensions of
its use under another aspect, that is, under its -practical
aspect" So that the conflict between the two reasons
is avoided in so far as the speculative submits to
the practical. It submits, according to Kant, not
because reason in passing from its theoretical to its
practical purpose extends its own cognitions and sees
more in them than it saw before ; not because the
practical reason has nothing to teach the speculative ;
but because the practical reason rivets the chain which
holds the speculative reason confined within the bounds
of experience, where alone its use is legitimate according
to the Critique of Pure Reason.
Yet, if the propositions, to which the interest of
reason in its practical use is inseparably bound, are not
13. Criticism cognitions, but simply postulates or articles
of the Kantian of faith on which only the practical interest
pragmatism. can con f er va l UCj they cannot be compared
with the propositions of the speculative reason, and in
that case there is neither the possibility of conflict, nor
of suppressing them by subordinating them to the
speculative reason, and the theory of their primacy
is incomprehensible. For if we are to conceive a
conflict and the primacy which puts an end to it,
we must put the postulates of the practical reason
(simple postulates, not cognitions, from the stand
point of the mere speculative reason) on the same
plane as the cognitions of the speculative. And this
is what Kant really does when he appeals from the
two reasons to the one unique reason which is always
reason, as much in its theoretical as in its practical
8o THE ABSTRACT AND THE POSITIVE CH.
use. And then not only are the propositions of
the practical reason postulates for the speculative
reason, but all the propositions of the speculative
reason are no more than postulates for the practical
reason. The one unique reason cannot declare only
the propositions of the practical reason and not those
of the speculative to be mere postulates. To do so is
to cheat it with words and in fact to take the side of
the speculative.
In reality, the higher reason, which is philosophy,
when first of all it speculates on nature, can only
justify it as causality, and is compelled therefore to
reject the possibility of a science of freedom. When
in the second place it speculates on morality, which is
spiritual reality, it discovers freedom. It does not
come upon it as something already discovered in its
practical use, it discovers it in its higher speculative
use, which leads it to seek to give the ground of that
spiritual activity whose presence has already been
found in the Critique of Pure Reason. And when Kant
confines himself to the purely practical value of the
principles of the will, he equivocates between practical
reason as will which concerns the object of the Critique
of Practical Reason and practical reason according to
the concept which it acquires in the Critique itself ;
between what we may call the fact, and what we may
call the philosophy, of morality. From the standpoint
of the practical reason as philosophy, the postulates
are cognitions in the true and proper meaning, they
cannot be thought of as simple postulates, not even
from the standpoint of the practical reason which is
truly such (for practical reason is not the object of a
speculation but itself a speculation) nor even from that
of the so-called speculative reason, or rather of that
THE USEFUL AND THE TRUE 81
reason which in the Critique of Pure Reason is enclosed
within the limits of experience, or as we should say
to-day is simply within the limits of science. In
declaring such principles postulates science discredits
them and does not preserve them. And, more
over, science does not submit itself to morality, but
rather includes morality in itself, by naturalizing
the moral act, which then comes to be considered
as a simple fact conditioned by definite principles
to which no necessary and absolute value is to be
attributed.
Pragmatism in so far as it characterizes Kant s
doctrine of the primacy of the practical reason is a
kind of naturalistic scepticism. Every
14. Criticism . ...
of the new form of pragmatism is scepticism in so far
epistemological as it depreciates an act of cognition in
order to appreciate it as a practical act.
There cannot be a practical act with no cognitive
value, that is, an act which does not posit before the
mind an objectively and universally valid reality.
So far as philosophy is concerned the Kantian
moral has no (moral) value unless the postulates, to
which the practical use of reason is inseparably bound,
are true and proper cognitions. So likewise with
regard to philosophy, the economic character of the
concepts of science, according to the new pragmatists,
is not really and truly economic, unless the schemes
and symbols of science in order to be useful are true.
We ought, therefore, rather to say that they are useful
in so far as they have a truth. Pragmatic truth is
different from the truth of the ideas or perceptions
of the individual mind, and yet it is only by virtue of
these that pragmatic truth is possible.
It is said indeed that the purpose these schemes and
G
82 THE ABSTRACT AND THE POSITIVE CH.
Av J
symbols, which are fashioned by the will, serve, is
that of directing, and imposing order on, the mass of
single and particular facts of experience ; but is it
not quite clear that they could not render this service
were the cognitive character of these particular
experiences cancelled ? Moreover, each of these
particular experiences may be thought of as useful,
however superseded its usefulness may be ; but it
can only be useful on the condition that it is true,
that it has its own proper value as experience. So
in very truth is every naturalistic concept useful in
so far as it effectively permeates the intuition of the
particular with itself, for it is precisely in so doing
that it is itself made possible as a true and proper
concept.
The source of error in this matter is always in
not looking at the unity of universal and particular,
T , for it is in that unity that individuality
unity of the consists. We think of the universal as
universal and the antecedent or consequent of the
particular, as posited outside it and pre
sented to thought. This in its turn is due to our
o
thinking abstractly of the two abstract moments,
which analysis discovers in the individual. They
then become elements of the individuality thought
(which by itself is inert and inorganic) rather than
moments of the individual thinking.
Thus in philosophy to-day as in Aristotle s time
there is keenly felt the need of individuality as a
16. The concreteness of the real. In the philo-
individual. sophies of pure experience, of intuition-
ism and of aestheticism there is a struggle against
the abstractions of the thought which universalizes
experience by including it in itself. But philosophy
vi THE NEED FOR THE INDIVIDUAL 83
has never succeeded in ridding itself of the ancient
alternative between the empty concept and the blind
intuition. On the one hand we are offered the light,
the transparency of thought to itself, the subjective
elaboration of the immediate data ; an elaboration
which leaves the data far behind and loses all trace
of them. On the other hand we are offered the
datum, the immediate, the positive, the concrete,
that which is hie et nunc but never succeeds in
attaining the individual. To-day all are athirst for
individuality ; but what sort of thing is this in
dividuality to which we must cling if we would
escape from the fathomless ocean of thought and
from its schemes devoid of any theoretical bearing ?
Any one who reflects will see that it is the same
question which Aristotle was driven to ask when
dissatisfied with the Platonic idealism. It remains
to-day unanswered.
If we would reply to this question we must first
direct attention to the origin of the idea of this
need for the individual in the Socratic
positive char- and Platonic doctrine. The conscious-
acter of the ness o f thought as reality detached from
the pure immediate object of experience,
for so it began to take shape for us in the Platonic
speculation, made the want felt of that individual
element which had wholly slipped through its meshes.
What was lacking in this thought ? It is clear from
the Aristotelian polemic against the theory of the ideas,
and from the efforts which Plato himself made in
his speculation to conceive the relation of the ideas
to nature, that the defect of the ideas, apparent at
once, and apparent always whenever in the history
of philosophy thought has been alienated from
)C
84 THE ABSTRACT AND THE POSITIVE CH.
empirical reality, is this : the ideas have been con
ceived as ideas of the reality and not as the
reality itself, just as the idea of a house which an
architect is going to construct is not the house. Now
the idea of an architect is a self-consistent reality in
the architect s mind which may never be even trans
lated into reality ; and to understand its being we
have not got to go to the constructed house. We say
that so far as the idea is concerned it can arise in
any one s mind who conceives it. In the house,
instead of ideas and reality in general there already
is the reality. We leave out the actual house when
we think the ideas. We think of the idea as the
beginning or cause of it. So that when ideas are in
question they are actually thought of as the principle
of the reality, which means that the concept of the
ideas is integrated in the concept of the reality. This
reality, when the ideas are posited as the thinking of
it, is no other than the ideas themselves but with one
difference only : the ideas are not real ; the ideas
realized are the reality. The real, which for Plato
and so many after him is the characteristic of nature,
is opposed to the ideal, which is the characteristic
of thinking, and they are conjoined only in so far
as the ideal has existence and the real is existence.
When Plato says that what really exists, or, to speak
precisely, is, is rather the idea than the thing, he
means the existing or being in thought, not the being
which Kant, and so many with him, distinguished by
the fact that it has not the mark of the concept. The
distinction is one which Plato himself allows when he
opposes ideas to things. Neither Plato nor any one
else has ever affirmed that the idea of a horse is a
horse one can ride.
WHAT POSITIVE MEANS 85
Now for Aristotle nature, the individual, is pre
cisely that which is to be and not only ought to
18. The be. It is the positive. The positive is
positive. no l on g er j n fi er ^ \^ i s an e ff ec t O r con
clusion of a process. It is conceived, not as the
principle only nor as the process always going on and
never complete, but as the already formed result. The
doing, which unfolds it, has given place to the fact ;
the process of its formation is exhausted. This is
what we all mean by positive. The historical fact
is positive when it is no longer the ideal of a man or
of a race but a de facto reality which no one can
make not be. It impresses itself, therefore, with a
force which allows the mind no choice. It appears
as what the mind in the purely theoretical form of its
working must accept. Every fact of nature in so far
as it is an observed fact is positive. It is not what will
be, but what is, or to be precise, what has been.
Consequently we describe a man as positive, not in
so far as in his speculation and action he attains an
ideal end, which might not have existed had he not
brought it to pass, but in so far as he is already an
effect of the past, what no one can unmake. The
positive is the terra firma on which we can walk securely.
Thought, as Plato conceived it, and as it has ever
since been conceived, as the universal which is not
the simple particularizing of single things, lacks,
not all reality, but that reality realized which is the
positive. It lacks it we already know, and it cannot
generate it ; since the idea while it is unreal in regard
to that other reality the individual, is in itself completely
realized. And the individual of which the idea goes
in search is precisely the positive.
There are, however, two different ways in which
86 THE ABSTRACT AND THE POSITIVE CH.
even the positive itself may be understood. Because,
if the positive be what has been posited,
19. The sub
jective and the it may be either what is posited by the
objective subject for whom it is positive, or posited
for the subject by others. The positive of
which thought as pure universal has need cannot be
the positive posited by the subject. And for this
reason the Platonic ideas (and the same is true of the
Cartesian ideas and even of the Hegelian Logos) are
themselves already positive, inasmuch as they are only
thinkable in so far as they are already real (real as ideas)
and have not to be realized. Yet they have not
the same title to be called positive that the things
which are to arise from them have, nor are they real
therefore in regard to these. That is to say, the
mind which thinks of ideas, and of ideas alone, thinks
the ideas already real : it thinks them, therefore, as
a positive reality (it imagines them, we may say, as
the objects of a real positive experience in the hyper-
uranion). When the mind, however, thinks the ideas
in relation with things it is then the things which are
positive and not the ideas, in such wise that in relation
to the things themselves the ideas in spite of their
transcendence can no longer be thought of as already
effected fact, something positive to which the sub
jective process of the mind which refers to them is
posthumous. The ideas in so far as they serve for the
knowledge of things, and fulfil therefore their peculiar
function in thinking, are intrinsic to the mind and
are valued for what they are worth to it. They are
reproduced by avd^vrjcn^ without which their existence
within the mind would be actually useless and null.
In other words, the ideas so far as they are immanent
in the mind are not in any sense positive, they imply
THE TRUE POSITIVE 87
and require a mental process which begins with the
immanence of the ideas themselves, still implicit
and obscured by the shadows of immediate sensible
experience (by the darkness, as Plato imaginatively
puts it, of the prison into which the soul falls). Their
immanence is nothing else but the immediate presence
of the truth to the mind which must acquire complete
consciousness of its own content. And generally as
in Plato so with all who hold the theory of a -priori
cognition or innate ideas, the universal is never positive
in so far as it fulfils its function in knowledge. It is
not something external to the subject and presupposed
by it. It is the subject s positing and real exposition
of its own activity. It is equally true of the theory of
empiricism, for when empiricism opposes sensation or
immediate experience to the concept, it is the subject
which makes the concept its own by the very positing
of it as an abstraction, a construction, or a presup
position. The positive when it is presented to the
subject, already is, it only needs to be presented.
This is its only title to be described as for the subject.
And this is the true positive. It is posited for us, but
not by us ; like the individual in his particularity.
Moreover, the universal either is what we make it, as
the empiricist says ; or else, though its reality is
independent of us, it is only in so far as we re
fashion it, as the apriorist says. Thus the Italian
philosopher Gioberti while he presupposes the direct
intuiting of the universal (or of the necessary cogni
tion) holds that the intuition must be revived and
absorbed in the reflexion by which the consciousness
of it is acquired through the gradual work of the
subject. He thereby makes the activity of the subject
the support of our knowledge.
88 THE ABSTRACT AND THE POSITIVE CH. vi
The positive, then, is posited by us, but it is only
in so far as we oppose it to ourselves that we can
20. The show its character of positivity. A fact is
subject which historically positive in so far as it is not
, our work but that of others, or if it be
live and the sub- >
ject for whom ours, that it is the work of a " we "
it is posited. which is posited in the fact and which
we cannot undo. When instead of thinking of the
difference between our present self and our past we
think of their identity, as we do in the moral life when,
for example, we are ashamed of something we have
done and repent it and disown it, and so morally
undo it, disowning the self which wrought the deed,
then the fact loses its positivity. Morally speaking, it
has no more reality than a stain which has been washed
out.
The subject, we conclude then, finds himself, it
seems, confronted with the positive, when he finds
himself confronted with a reality realized which is
not his own work. He is then in presence of the
individual.
But is such a positivity really thinkable ?
CHAPTER VII
THE INDIVIDUAL AS EGO
THE concept that the individual is the real positive,
when we reflect on it, is seen to be absurd. It is
i. Criticism absurd, notwithstanding that it imposes
of the positive itself on thought as the only true reality
which thought can find for its own sup-
what is ex
ternal to the port, because it is posited for the subject
subject. without being posited by the subject.
This is a contradiction in terms which every one who
pays attention to the meaning of the words " posited
for the subject " must admit.
" Posited for the subject " simply means object.
When we deny that the positive individual depends
in any way on the subject, and affirm that the subject
must presuppose this object in order to get its insertion
into the real, we despoil or try our best to despoil the
positive individual of every element in it which can
bear witness to the action of the subject. We aim at
purifying and strengthening its individuality when we
withdraw it from every form of universality which the
subject s thinking confers on it. The subject assumes
it as matter which has its own independent elaboration.
But there must be a limit to this subtraction and
purification, beyond which the individual would cease to
be the spring-board which enables the subject to leap
90 THE INDIVIDUAL AS EGO
from the pure ideas which imprison it in the sphere of
subjectivity, and to communicate with the real. And
this limit, it is obvious, is that within which the
object is a term of consciousness, something relative
to the ego and beyond which it ceases to be object
for the subject. To despoil the object of this absolute
relation, by which it is bound to the subject, is to
destroy any value it can have as an object. So that
the positive individual cannot be conceived otherwise
than as relative to the subject.
To-day, and indeed ever since Kant, there has been
much insistence on the value of the intuition as a
necessary antecedent of thought and as the
2. The mtui- ,,,.,, , . , -
tion of what is path by which thought enters into relation
external to the w ith reality. Aristotle was equally insistent
on the necessity of sensation, which is
the same as the intuition of the moderns, as an
immediate presence of the object, not the consequence
of a subjective act, and therefore not in consequence
of a proportion and symmetry between itself and
the object which the subject has generated. But
this intuition or sensation, by eliminating from the
relation between the two terms of knowing, subject
and object, everything that can be thought of as
secondary and derived from the action of the subject,
cannot destroy the relation itself, cannot posit a pure
object confronting the subject, absolutely external
to the subject, fantastically conceived as originally
belonging to it. The object with absolutely no re
lation to the subject is nonsense. The originality and
the immediacy of intuition, therefore, cannot rob the
individual of the truly original and immanent relativity
it has to the subject.
Now what does relation mean ? To say that two
vii THE EXTERNAL OBJECT 91
terms are related implies that they are different but also
affirms that there is identity. Two terms
3 . Relation. different ^ nd abso i ute l y different could
only be thought of in such a way that in thinking the
one we should not be thinking the other. The
thought of the one would absolutely exclude the other.
Such pure difference could only hold, therefore, between
two terms which are unrelatable ; so that if terms are
in relation, however different they are, at least in
thinking one we think the other. The concept of one
even contains in some form the other.
In the intuition, then, the subject is indeed different
from the object, but not to the extent that there is
nothing whatever of the subject in the
4 Absurdity j, That is tQ the ob j ect ig i ncon _
of the concept J J 1-11
of the positive ceivable apart from something which t
external to the } on g s to it in virtue of its being intuition,
by which it is in relation to the subject.
Accordingly the relation of object and subject through
which the object is posited for the subject, necessarily
implies the concept of the object as posited by the
subject. And so the concept of the positive as that
which is not posited by the subject is clearly shown
to be intrinsically contradictory.
On the other hand, this does not release us from
the necessity grounded in reason of integrating the
universal in thought, whence the particular
S <. Emptiness . , ,
of the nominal- gets its meaning, with what is positive in
istic assump- the individual. We have only shown that
tion when we oppose the individual to the
universal we make the universal synonymous with
the subjective. If, then, we separate from the indi
vidual everything subjective, including the positing
by the subject for the subject, and suppose the posi-
92 THE INDIVIDUAL AS EGO
tivity something outside the subject altogether, then
we are also outside the intuition itself and can only get
back by suppressing that " outside of subjectivity " in
which we have supposed the essence of individuality
to consist. And all the attempts which, under the
guise of nominalism, have been made to retain this
meaning of individuality have failed and will always
fail.
But are we in any better case ? Have we, if we
cannot attain the individual which we oppose to
the universal, succeeded in securing the
6. The new \ ,
standpoint of universal which we want to integrate r
the problem of Qr are we merely vexing ourselves in
the individual. t j 3 T ^.L J
pursuing an empty shadow r Is the indi
vidual we require in order to endow the universal with
the substantiality of effective reality an illusive appear
ance ever disappearing behind us ?
This is the point to which we must now give
careful attention, and we shall see that it is not a case
of running forward or of turning back, but of stopping
and embracing the true individual which is in us.
The universal is the predicate with which in the
judgment the subject is invested. Every cognitive act
7. The i s an a pri synthesis, and the universal
universal as a is one of the terms of that synthesis. Even
category. fa e i n tuition is, as we have seen, unin
telligible except as a necessary relation. And this
relation is an a -priori synthesis between the ideal
element whereby the subject illumines for itself the
term intuited, and the subject of the judgment made
explicit, which is the term intuited. So, then, the true
universal, or the category, is the universal which can
only work by being predicated of\ the subject ; the
individual is the subject which can only work by being
VII
THE CATEGORY 93
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 know
ledge 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. 1 We are still accustomed to take the category
in its primitive, Aristotelian meaning, as the most
universal predicate which itself can never be subject. 2
It may 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 by 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 afErm " being " by
duplicating it internally into a " being " which is
subject and a " being " which is predicate. And then
in regard to the " being " which is subject, and which
alone can really be said to be fixed, it is not universal
at all, but absolutely particular and definitely indivi-
1 Cf. my remarks on this subject in my essay, Rosmini e Giobertt, Pisa,
Nistri, 1898.
2 It should be remarked that the Aristotelian category, the most universal
predicate, does not differ fundamentally from the Kantian category, a
function of the judgment, when the predicate of the judgment, according
to the Aristotelian logic, is given the full meaning which Aristotle intended.
It is a universality which interpenetrates and so determines and illumines
the subject that it becomes the whole matter of knowledge and the mode
by which thought thinks. Whence the concept of the predicate is always,
in substance, not an idea thought, but an act by which a given content is
thought.
94 THE INDIVIDUAL AS EGO CH.
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 qutd^ 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 uni
versal clearly applies a fortiori to every universal, in so
8. Particu- ^ ar as ^ 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 incom
municable nature, and in itself, omnimodo determinate
it can neither be intuited nor apprehended in thought
without using terms which encircle it with the light of
a predicate which universalizes it\ We must say, for
vn THE INDIVIDUALIZED UNIVERSAL 95
example, " The horse is " and then " being " is the
category and horse the individual.
We may conclude, then, that the universal has, even
when interpreted in the most complete form by the
nominalists, the need of being particularized in the
individual. When, then, there is no individual and
it is still to seek, the universal posits itself as indi
vidual, if by no other way, then by confronting itself
with itself so making itself at one and the same time
individual and universal. And the effort, therefore,
to integrate the universal as pure universal which it is
believed is necessary, is vain, because the universal as
pure universal is never found.
We can now say that the individual and the
universal in their antagonism to one another are two
abstractions. Think the individual and
9. The con- ... . T >-r>i
creteness of the m thinking it you universalize it. Think
universal and t ne universal and in thinking it you in-
the particular. dividualize it> SQ that the i nqu i ry con -
cerning the concept of the individual has always been
orientated towards an abstraction, for it starts from
an abstraction, namely, the concept of the universal
as idea to be realized or as category to be individualized.
In treating the two terms between which thought
moves, the individual which has to be brought under
the category, the category which has to interpenetrate
the individual, no account whatever has been taken of
the thought itself, in which the two terms are immanent.
From the universal which can be thought of but does not
think, and from the individual which can be intuited but
does not intuit, we must turn to the concreteness of
thought in act, which is a unity of universal and par
ticular, of concept and intuition ; and we shall find that
the positive is attained at last, and clear of contradiction.
CHAPTER VIII
THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED
THE distinction between abstract and concrete thought
is fundamental. The transfer of a problem from
i. Abstract abstract to concrete thought is, we may
and concrete say, the master-key of our whole doctrine,
thought. Many and various doctrines, which have
thrown philosophy into a tangle of inextricable
difficulties and have blocked the path of escape from
empiricism, have in our view arisen entirely from
looking at the abstract in unconsciousness of the
concrete in which it is engrafted and by which it is
conceivable. For empiricism itself is an abstract view
of reality, and all its difficulties arise from the restric
tion of its standpoint. It can only be overcome when
we succeed in rising to the speculative standpoint.
Of doctrines which spring from the soil of abstract
thought we can find perhaps no more notable and
significant example than that of the
L tJctnessof table of judgments, from which Kant in
Kant s classifi- the Critique of Pure Reason deduces the
cation of the categories. He distinguishes to take one
judgments. , r . . i j 1 r
example or his method three species or
modality in the judgment, according to whether the
judgment is assertorical, problematical, or apodeictical ;
or according to whether the relation of the predicate
to the subject is thought to be actual or possible
9 6
cii.vm CLASSIFICATION OF JUDGMENTS 97
or necessary. And in classifying the judgments which
are thus set in array for our thought and regarded
as the content of our mind, inherent in it but de
tachable from it, a content communicable to others
because conceivable in itself, he is right in holding that
there are all these three, and no more than these
three, species of modality. But when judgments are
regarded in this way and found to be so diverse, the
one true judgment on which, as Kant himself taught,
all the others depend and from which they are in
separable, the / think, is falsified. For example, the
true_ judgment in its concreteness is not " Caesar
conquered Gaul," but " I think that Caesar conquered
Gaul." It is only the second of these judgments
which is truly a judgment we can make, and in the
first or abbreviated form of it the principal proposition
is not absent but apparently understood and not
expressed, and it is only in the full form that we find
the modality of the function of judgment, and the
true relation which holds between the terms which
this function brings together in an a priori synthesis.
The former of the two judgments, if taken as
a distinct judgment, is clearly no more than an
object of thought, abstracted from the subjective
act which posits it within the organic whole of its own
synthesis. It has no modality in itself since in itself
it is not conceivable. And inasmuch as it is only by
being presupposed as conceivable by itself that it
can be posited beside other judgments different
from it, so it is assertorical while the others may
be problematical or apodeictic. But when, however
actualized, it is not presupposed, but really thought,
as alone it can be thought, as a content of the
/ think, then its differences from the other judgments
9 8 THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED CH.
(in so far as they are judgments] disappear. For all
judgments are alike acts of the thinking I, the form
of whose acts is constant. The / think is not assert-
orical, because it cannot be apodeictical nor even
problematical. Or, if you call it assertorical then it is
necessarily so ; you must say it is apodeictically assert
orical. For it is impossible to think what we cannot
think we think, just as it is impossible to think that
by thinking we can make it true or false that Caesar
conquered Gaul. 1
And it is not a mere question of words. Indeed
it did not escape Kant himself that in all the twelve
3 Empirical c l asses f judgments, which he distin-
character of the guished under the heads of quality,
classification. quantity, relation, and modality, we always
bring judgments back to the common original form
of the / think. We have to understand, then, that
every judgment (be it assertorical, problematical,
or apodeictic) is contained within a fundamental
judgment which itself is outside any such classi
fication. The serious consequence to be drawn from
this criticism of the Kantian theory is that it is not
judgments but dead abstractions which are classified.
Judgments are spiritual acts, but judgments and
all spiritual acts become natural facts when they are
thought of abstractly outside their concrete actuality.
In reality in Kant s assertorical judgment the real
relation, which is not a necessary but a merely con
tingent one, is not a part of the judgment but of
the natural fact, apprehended empirically, and con
sidered in its abstract objectivity, independently of
the mind which represents it. So that the distinction
1 With regard to this matter of the\ classification of judgments, cf.
Sistema di Logica, vol. i. part ii. ch. 5.
vm THE FUNDAMENTAL JUDGMENT 99
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 tran-
inconsistency. scendcntal idealism is the forceful manner
in which it rises above empiricism, recalling experi
ence 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 . , h abstract un i v ersal that thought
as the concrete-
ness of the thinks, but the abstract universal is not
universal and thought. The abstract individual is only
the individual.
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 and to which they all return. And then he no
longer found in thought the being which is only a
ioo THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED CH.
simple idea, a universal to be realized, a being like
that of God in the ontological argument, at least as
the critics of that argument, from the eleventh-century
monk Gaunilo to Kant, represented it. He found
the positive being of the individual. He found in
thought the individuality which can only be guaranteed
by intuition, as Kant and all the nominalists, ancient,
modern, and contemporary, are agreed. It is indeed
only by an intuition that Descartes sees being, but
by an intuition which is not immediate, such as the
nominalists need, and as Kant also needs, with his
theory of the datum^ the term or matter of empirical
intuition. The intuition is the result of a process :
Cogito. I am not except as I think, and I am in so
far as I think ; and I am therefore only in so far as
and to the extent that I think.
Here, then, is the true positivity which Plato sought,
and without which it appeared to Aristotle there could
6. The true be no sure basis of the ideas : the positivity
positivity. which is a realization of the reality of which
the idea is the principle, and which integrates the
idea itself by what is intrinsic in it. For if the idea
is the idea or ground of the thing, the thing must be
produced by the idea. The thought which is true
thought must generate the being of what it is the
thought, and this precisely is the meaning of the
Cartesian Cogito. I this reality which is "I," the
surest reality I can possess, and which if I let it go all
possibility of assuring myself of any reality whatever
is gone, this one and only firm point to which I can
bind the world which I think this "I am " is in
so far as I think. I realize it in thinking, with a
thought which is myself thinking. The " I," as we
shall see more clearly later, only is in so far as it is
THE SELF OF THE COGITO 101
self-consciousness. The " I " is not a consciousness
which presupposes the self as its object, but a con
sciousness 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
uaiism. positive in the individual. The individual
is the discovery which thought makes when it suddenly
realizes that it has withdrawn from its original stand
point, 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 t ^ ie " ^ " t ^ ie particularity and the univer-
universal and sality coincide and are identified by giving
the particular pj ace to tne true individual. Aristotle de
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 are originally diverse and therefore
either of them conceivable without the other, but
because they can only be thought as difference in
102 THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED CH.
identity. In fact, I, who am in so far as I think,
cannot transcend the punctual act of the thinking
without transcending myself ; no greater oneness than
this can be thought. But if my oneness depends on
my thinking, my thinking must itself be the highest
universality there can be. For the thinking by which
I think myself is precisely the same thinking by which
I think everything. What is more, it is the thinking
by which I think myself truly, that is, when I feel
that I am thinking what is true absolutely and therefore
that I am thinking universally. The act of thinking,
then, through which I am, posits me as individual
universally, as, in general, it posits all thinking or,
indeed, all truth, universally.
From this standpoint, whilst we are able to answer
the ancient and vexed question which divided the
realists and the nominalists, and at the same
9. The truth . . .
of realism and time to solve the problem or the principle
the truth of o f individualization, we are also able to see
that both realists and nominalists have
had more reason in their respective contentions than
they ever suspected. For not only is the universal
real, as the realists affirmed, but there is no other
reality ; and not only is the individual real, as the
nominalists affirmed, but outside the individual
there is not anything, not even a name, an abstract
or arbitrary scheme, or the like. The universal, not
presupposed by thought, but really posited by it, is
all that can be thought real. When, then, we make
distinctions, as indeed we must, all distinctions fall
within it. If anything could issue^ from thought it
could not be thought. And universality therefore
invests every principle or entity however diverse
which we would oppose to thought, it being impossible
vni ONENESS 103
in regard to concrete thought ever by any means to
oppose it to thought. On the other hand, the indi
vidual (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 Wolf what are all these, when we turn
them from abstract thought to the concrete, but
definite historical philosophies, the thought of indi
vidual 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 realizesTitself 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
dividual, and the no less extreme realism,
10. Recon- . . , ,
ciliation of which will admit nothing outside the
realism and universal, each finds its own truth in the
nominalism. Thus ig 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 indi
vidual 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 with the universality of thought.
Names, rules, laws, false universals, all the black
io 4 THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED .
sheep of the nominalists, are, in fact, chimaeras of
ii. Emptiness abstract thought, not existences. They are
of names as real in the same kind of way as when
universal. 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 ab
stractly 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. 1 It is the same with la\Vs, and with all
1 Cf. Gentile, " I] concetto della grammatica," 1910, in Frammenti di
Estetica e di letteratura, Lanciano, Carabba, 1920.
NAMES ARE NOT EXISTENCES 105
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. eart j 1 a i on g a p at k f rom wn ich 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
being 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 sub
jective, a world which is not the world, by means of
sensations of material objects, the rope of salvation
io6 THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED CH.
without which he would be unable to escape shipwreck
in the ocean of the inconsistent reality of his own
fantasy. The exact contrary is true. When, 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 dis
turbed 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 ever richer and more
complex way. Withdraw, then, your subjectivity from
the world you contemplate and the world becomes
vni THE TOUCHSTONE OF REALITY 107
a reve without positivity. Make your presence felt in
the world of your dreams (as happens when one dreams
and there is no clash between the general 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 uni
versal, as we are now able to understand them, are
clearly neither two objects nor two static
13. I he mdi- J c
vidualasa positions of thought. The category or
universal which being does not properly belong to them,
since, strictly speaking, there is no indi
vidual and no universal. Nor can we even say, purely
and simply, that the individual, the need of which
Aristotle saw, is not nature, but thought. Because
although nature w, it is only in so far as it is a term of
the thought which presupposes it ; and for the same
reason Plato affirmed the being of the universal. But our
universal is the universalizing, the making universal,
or rather, since the universal is the thought itself which
makes it, the self-making of the universal. In exactly
the same way the individual is act rather than the
principle or the term of an act ; it consists in the indi
vidual making itself or being individualized. And the
conclusion is that we can speak of universal and indi
vidual, in so far as we have in mind the subject, the I
which thinks and in thinking is universalized by
individualizing and individualized by universalizing.
Here the deeper meaning of the positive becomes
apparent. It is not posited as the result of a process
already completed and perfect, and this result does not
stand confronting thought as a mystery. It is a
mystery, for it is posited and we ask in vain : Who
io8 THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED CH.
posits it ? The positive is posited in so far as it
actually posits itself, re-entering into that being which
is in so far as it is thought. The positive rather than
something posited is really the self-positing of being.
Such a standpoint is secure just because it is the
absolute transparence of thought as self-identical in
its own act. And thought is made clear in its act
because there is no surer proof of fact than being
perceived ; and the sureness does not depend on its
being fact but on its being perceived, or rather on its
being resolved into a real act of the thought which
actuates and thinks itself.
When we oppose nature to mind we appear to be
limiting mind. Nature is individual, and as such it
14 Nature particularizes and thereby determines and
the negation of realizes the universal which is mind. But
individuality, fae specific character of nature by which
we discriminate it is not in the concept of the in
dividual. For we have shown that the individual as
nature, the individual individualized, is unintelligible.
The only conceivable individual is mind itself, that
which individualizes.
It is true that we have not satisfied all the require
ments on account of which in the history of philosophy
the concept of the individual as nature
15. 1 he indi
vidual and the arose. The individual stands for positivity
multiplicity as against the ideality of thought, but it
also stands for multiplicity as against the
unity of thought. And the positivity itself is integrated
and fulfilled in the multiplicity, because the ideality
arises as the intelligibility of the manifold. To over
come pure ideality, therefore, it is not only necessary
to grasp the real but the real which is manifold.
Indeed, for Plato as for Aristotle, and also for the
THE SCEPTICISM OF GORGIAS 109
pre-Socratic philosophers, the positive is nature as
becoming, in which all is transformed, and whereby
the forms of being and the objects of experience, or
the individuals, are many.
The Eleatics alone were unifiers, as Aristotle
remarks in a vigorous sentence. But the objective
monism of Parmenides led to the agnostic scepticism
of Gorgias, and this, carrying to its logical conclusion
the doctrine of Parmenides concerning the identity of
thinking with being, denied the possibility of the
opposition of the one to the other which is an indis
pensable moment in the concept of knowing, and
therefore denied the possibility of knowing. To know
is to distinguish, and therefore knowing implies that
there are more terms than one and that we are not
confined to only one. Socrates discovered the concept
as the unity in which the variety of opinions concurs.
The Platonic idea is the type of the manifold sensible
things, and by its unity it makes their multiplicity
thinkable. And what is the whole of ancient philosophy,
from Thales and the first searchers for the original
principle of things onwards, but one continual effort
to reach unity by starting from the indefinite plurality
of the existence presented in experience ? This sums
up the history of thought, which has always aspired to
unity in order to render intelligible, without destroying,
the multiplicity of individual and positive things. And
this sums up logic. For if to the unity of the universal
we should oppose a unique individual, the individual
itself in its unity would be universal, a whole, and
therefore it would in itself repeat the ideal position of
the universal, and not yield the positive. Just as,
were we able to think horse (^77-0x779) as thought of
horses, then had nature produced no more than one
no THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED CH.
single horse, this one horse could not be distinguished
from the ideal horse, and could not therefore serve
our thought as its fulcrum for the thinking of the
universal. It would not be the positive of that idea.
The universal is a mediation of the particulars and
must therefore develop through the more positive.
We, on the other hand, have found a positivity which
implies the identity of the individual with the universal.
16. The I think, and in thinking I realize, an in-
necessity of dividual which is universal, which is there-
the manifold. fore ^ a un i versa l oug h t to be? absolutely.
Other than it, outside it, there cannot be anything. But
can I say, then, that I have realized something ? The
being which I affirm seems in its unity to reproduce
the desperate position of Parmenides, for to pass from
it to anything else is impossible. Is it something
positive ? Do I really think the " I " if I can think
no other than the " I " ? In making the individual
conceivable, and in freeing it from the difficulties in
which it was thrown by its opposition to the uni
versal, have we not destroyed the very essence of
individuality ?
Against Parmenides there stands Democritus.
And Aristotle s doctrine of the individual is a homage
rendered to Democritus. The Democritan theory
stamps the Aristotelian conception as the Eleatic
theory stamps the idealistic conception of Plato.
Aristotle does homage to the experience on which
Plato, the great Athenian idealist, had turned his back,
although continually forced to return to it. The idea
is, indeed, the intelligibility of the^world ; but it must
be the intelligibility of a world which is a multiplicity of
individuals.
We also are rendering homage to the profound
vm REAL THINGS AND DREAM THINGS 1 1 1
truth of the Democritan atomism, which is the need of
17. The difference, when we expound the concept
concept of of mind as process. The unity of mind
multiplicity. excludes only abstract multiplicity, since
the unity of mind is in itself a multiplicity, a concrete
multiplicity unfolded in the unity of the spiritual
process. Here, however, the need of multiplicity
assumes a new aspect and this needs to be explained.
It concerns the multiplicity which is imposed on
mind from within, in so far as it is consciousness
of things and persons. And, indeed, there is no
other multiplicity than this, a multiplicity which we
see arising to confront us from within our own inmost
being. But to the atomist (and every one is an atomist
to the extent that he feels the need of the individual
as something by which he must integrate and realize
thought) it appears that the multiplicity, in so far as
it is positive, lies beyond this subjective multiplicity.
It is not enough to conceive a world diversified and
rich in particulars, because this world exists : it may
be a dream. And according to the atomist it would
be a dream were we unable to explain our ideas by
transcending the subject and attributing the origin
of ideas to the real multiplicity of things. It would
be no use to point out, as we have pointed out, that
real things and dream things do not possess in them
selves the marks by which they are discriminated, they
need a subject to discriminate them, without which
even waking life itself would be one whole dream from
which we should never awaken. It would be no use,
because the atomist will always reply that the real
things which the subject opposes to the dream things
are not real because we have ideas of them, for ideas
presuppose real things which generate ideas in us.
ii2 THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED CH.
It is rather, he will say, that we can have ideas because
the things which are represented by ideas are real in
themselves with a reality which is at bottom that which
we attribute to them, a reality in itself, which is the
true reality, the only positive reality, nature. In
nature there are individuals which are real individuals,
the atoms, in themselves unknowable. There we
find the true positivity on which thought must lean
if we are not to gasp for breath in the void, whirled
among vain shadows of one s self. And there we
find not the multiplicity which is only our thought
(the multiplicity we cannot think without unifying),
but multiplicity in itself, the familiar ground of all the
individual differences and oppositions and thereby of
the complex life of the reality.
So that by means of the concept of the individual,
multiplicity returns to camp with the claim to pitch
its tent beyond the multiplicity we have acknowledged
as immanent in the process of mind, and postulating
accordingly a nature in itself, the basis of the whole
life of mind and a condition of an exact concept of the
individual as the integrating positivity of thought.
We have got, then, to scrutinize this concept of the
multiplicity. It is a multiplicity which, it is evident
at once, must be obscure, for it transcends the mind.
It must be chaotic, for we have withdrawn it from any
unity which could hold it together as a spiritual act.
Like Leopardi s Infinite?- in which even thinking itself
is drowned, it is fearsome. Yet we must scrutinize
it, for, in spite of its transcendence let us recall
Berkeley s warning it seizes a \place among our
concepts, and even atomism is a philosophy. We
cannot maintain a concept if it be inconsistent with
1 See the reference to this ode in Chapter X. 3. (Trans. Note.)
THE SHOCK OF THE ATOMS 113
other concepts which must co-exist with it in our
mind.
A pure multiplicity is not only unknowable, it is
not thinkable. The many are always a totality.
is. A pure ^ eacn f the many were not one among
multiplicity is the others, it would be one, not as a part,
thinkable.
unity, the unity which atomism denies. It is not
such a unity. Given the multiplicity a, b, c, d, . . .,
a must not be b, nor c, nor d, so likewise with b and
c and d ; but that one thing should not be the other
is impossible, absolutely, unless we deny all relation
between them, since relation implies some identity.
Multiplicity, then, necessarily carries with it the
absolute non-relativity of the many which go to make
it. So that a not only must not be b but must not
even be relative to b. And this is absurd, because
the very words " not be " affirm a reciprocal exclusion,
and that is a relation.
Again, multiplicity posited as pure cannot be
absolute without being composed of absolutely simple
elements, otherwise every composite would be an
exception to the multiplicity by organizing and
unifying it. But the simple (ciropov, aVo/io? ova-la)
becomes in its turn a flagrant violation of the law of
multiplicity, because the simple is one. The atomist,
starting from the unity of experience, denies it, splits
it up, divides it ; this is the logic of his thought.
Wherever he finds unity he must divide. He cannot
stop at the atom but must divide the atom even to
infinity, and then there is multiplicity no longer, for
multiplicity must have its elements.
Again, even granting the atomist his multiplicity,
how can he form an image of it, and what use will the
n 4 THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED cn.vm
image be ? The atoms like the ideas are excogitated
as a principle of reality. In the reality there is the
unity, but there is also the multiplicity (and hence the
uselessness of the ideas, as Aristotle clearly showed).
In the reality there is the multiplicity, but there is
also the unity, the relation, the shock of the atoms
and the aggregation of matter. But if we grant
the absolutely unrelated simples then the shock is
impossible, because the shock is relation however
extrinsic the relation be. And if we grant the shock
there is an end alike of the non-relativity, of the
simplicity and of the multiplicity.
The difficulty is not new. It has been more or
less clearly, more or less vigorously, urged continually
against atomism, and mutatis mutandis against every
form of pluralism. But this has not prevented
philosophers, however adverse they may be to pluralism,
from representing the world as in space and time, and
from thinking of every positive individual as deter
mined hie et nunc t as existing, in so far as it exists, in
space and in time. We must now consider space and
time.
CHAPTER IX
SPACE AND TIME
SPACE and time are the two systems of the manifold.
It is as such that they come to be thought of as the
s i s xice and S reat depository of what is positive, effec-
time as tively real, concrete, individuality. To be
systems of the rea l ? [ n the positive meaning, is to exist ;
manifold. j i . , i
and what exists, exists in space and in time.
Nature, the realm of the existing, when contraposed to
thought, is represented as just the totality of individuals
co-existing in space and successive in time. Even
Kant, who held that space and time are two a priori
forms of experience, or rather two modes by which
the unifying activity of mind works on the data of
immediate sensibility, believed that the only way to
guarantee the positive objectivity of sensible intuition
was to presuppose that beneath the spatially and
temporally unified manifold there was another mani
fold, not yet unified by the subject, but the basis of
such unification. Such manifold, as any one who
reflects may see, is not really deprived nor indeed can
ever be deprived of all spatiality and temporality, because
to affirm a manifold is at the same time to affirm space
and time. So that the pure subjective intuitions of
Kant, the a priori forms of sense, held to be insufficient
in themselves, and dependent on a matter external to
them, end by presupposing themselves to themselves,
and so being, even before as yet there is being.
115
n6 SPACE AND TIME CH.
Suppose the manifold to be a positive actual mani
fold (not simply possible and therefore merely ideal) ;
suppose it absolutely manifold (never mind
2. bpace as an r r J . . x
absolute and that the absolutely manifold is an absurdity),
positive and absolutely positive (not realizing or
realizable but realized, which as we have
clearly shown is another absurdity) ; and you will have
the space in which we all represent things. Space
in all its determinations, and apart from any question
of the number of its dimensions, implies the reciprocal
exclusion of all the terms of actual or possible experi
ence.
All that we distinguish or can distinguish, and
therefore all that we can posit in an actual experience,
is spatial ; or rather, it is resolved into elements, and
in the last analysis into points, each of which is outside
all the others and has all the others outside it. We
may not distinguish the elements of space ; and we
do not, in fact, distinguish the ultimate elements, the
points. But this does not prevent us regarding them
as distinguishable elements in the object of an actual
experience ; or, what is the same thing, distinct
elements in the object of a possible experience.
This amounts to saying that the spatial elements are
distinct with a distinction which no experience can
abolish. Thence their positive objectivity, which has
the appearance of being imposed on the subjective
activity which generates experience.
>$, possible or ideal space is meaningless, although
it has many times been affirmed. Thought is not
3. The sup- spatial. The hypdmranion, of which
posed ideal or Plato discourses, has no resemblance to
possible space. thg tnje and proper ^^ the ^ pa Q{
which he speaks in the Timaeus (50-52) as a
THE WHERE AND THE WHEN 117
receptacle of forms without which the ideas would
remain ideas and would not have the wherewithal
and the how to be realized. The ideas, however many
they are, make one ; they are co-ordinated and resolve
dialectically all their multiplicity. The thought of
space, the idea of space, has in itself no more multi
plicity than any other idea. The unresolved and
unresolvable multiplicity is that of the spatial elements
in so far as they are given in their positivity. I can
indeed represent to myself a body not given, and that
body will be spatial, but it will be spatial in so far,
and only in so far, as I think of it as given, that is so
long as I have not the consciousness that it is merely
a possibility or ideality. For when this consciousness
arises, the reality is no longer the body but the idea
of the body, devoid, as idea, of all spatiality.
And this, indeed, is the reason why the material
world, or rather the spatially given world, is for common
sense the touchstone of the existent, of what is sure
and positive, and it is why, when the existence of
anything is not evident, we ask, Where is it ?
But not only do we require the where of what
exists, we also require the when. Simply in space
4 Time as an< ^ without time experience would not
developed be actual and the real would not be
from space. positive. For the real to be positive there
must be multiplicity, and multiplicity is not absolute
perfect multiplicity so long as it is only spatiality.
Each point in space is a centre, to which the system of
all other points is fixed, and this destroys multiplicity.
The point as such is a limit of space and therefore itself
devoid of spatiality. Yet just as reason compels us
to divide the extended into its elements and to break
up the unity of everything into multiplicity, so a
n8 SPACE AND TIME CH.
point as such, limiting and thereby annulling space,
is inconceivable without the concept of an ulterior
multiplication which becomes a new spatialization.
We may take a point as one among the points.
This is the point of the multiplicity, and it gives rise to
the concept of space. But there is also the point of
the unity, which cannot be fixed in its unity without
making the multiplicity which depends on it fall to
nothing. Thereby it spatializes itself. Let us take,
for example, any element of space, any " here," what
soever. In taking it in its definite elementariness, and
withdrawing it from the elements together with which,
and as one of which, it forms a whole, we withdraw it
from spatiality. But does it then persist as something
unique ? No, because from its own being there
arises again spatiality as a reciprocal exclusion of the
elements of experience. Let us suppose it to remain
always the element as defined, let us say a point, yet
experience brings reciprocal exclusion in the succession
of instants, it becomes without spatial change a " now "
excluding other " nows."
It may be said, then, that time is the spatialization
of the unity of space?- And therefore time and space
can be represented schematically as two intersecting
straight lines having only one point in common. It
is one unique point of space which cannot be a point
in space without being one of the infinite points of
time. But let us beware lest our own fancy blocks our
conception of this simple imaginative system of space.
Let us for the moment simply keep in view the fact
that there is a multiplicity of spatial points, and among
1 This unity, being always a unity, may be like the unity of the point,
that is of a spatial element, or like the unity of space in its totality, for space
itself is always a relative totality.
THE HERE AND THE NOW 119
these find the unity which is multiplied in time.
We notice, that is to say, that we are dealing with a
multiplicity which is given, or rather which is real and
absolute, independently of every mental unification.
And then we shall recognize that for one point of space,
time is its spatialization : time as every one intuits it.
Space, then, we conclude, completes itself in time
by positing itself as an absolute multiplicity, every
element of which is itself a multiplicity.
tionand 6 ^ Not ^at time is the following out of the
difference same process as the multiplication of
between space S p ace> Were it so there would be no
and time. r 1 ~ . . ,
point or space, nor any definite spatial
unity at all. We have to arrest the spatial process by
fixing an element of space, a point, in order to under
stand the other element, an instant, which is generated
by the multiplication of the first. It also is spatializa
tion in so far as, like the first, it is a reciprocal exclusion
of distinct elements, and therefore a multiplicity, but
it is only a new spatialization of the first space. And
herein is the difference of time from space.
Space is a pure multiplicity immediately given.
But you cannot withdraw from this multiplicity
one of its units without seeing this unit in a second
pure multiplicity, given in the first : and this is time.
To think nature as one as the One of Parmenides,
or as the spherical whole, identical in all its parts,
which Xenophon imagined and to think this one
outside of time in an eternity, immobile, is to think
nothing, and this it seems is what Gorgias pointed
out. The object is spatially manifold ; and because
it is absolutely so, it is also temporally manifold. A
pflance be it no more than a glance cast on the
O D
world, holds in it a spatial multiplicity. Yet we
120 SPACE AND TIME
cannot fix this multiplicity before us, neither in its
whole such as it is, nor in any one of its parts. From
beginning to end it is multiplied into a multitude of
images of its whole or of its part and so is prolonged
into the past and into the future. Either the multi
plicity is spatial, or it is temporal.
In every case, then, we have a multiplicity and a
multiplicity not unified. This was precisely what Kant
presupposed as the antecedent of his
6. Pure spa- r . r .
tiality and pure subjective functions of space and time,
temporality Instead, it is the whole content of
not thinkable. r j A j
our concept or space and time. And
to this concept every kind of empiricism has recourse
in order to determine what by nature is positive in the
richness of its individuals. So that without maintain
ing the concept of multiplicity in its absolute inde
pendence of every synthetic unity, it is impossible to
stop short of conceiving reality as spatial and temporal.
And, in fact, it is so ; because the pure manifold oscil
lates between two extremes equally absurd without
being able to rest at an intermediate point. We have
already seen that either the multiplicity is thought as
a whole, and then the unity of the whole comes into
conflict with the multiplicity and contradicts it ; or
it is thought of in each of its parts, detaching a part
from the whole, and then the part is itself a unity
which equally comes into conflict with and contradicts
the multiplicity.
It comes really then to saying that when we think
of the world as spatial and temporal, and mean thereby
a world in itself, what we call nature, existing before
mind and independently of mind, we are thinking of
nothing. The meaning of the spatiality and temporality
of the real must be something different from this, and
ix CAN UNITY BE EXCLUDED ? 121
we must inquire what this meaning is, keeping hold
of what is positive in space and time and rejecting the
supposed transcendence of their multiplicity.
Of what we have said so far in illustration of the
ordinary idea that space and time are systems of the
absolute multiplicity of positive reality we may now
say that while it is true it is not the whole truth.
For the absurdity arises from the abstractness in
which philosophical speculation has fixed an idea which
is immanent in consciousness where it is integrated
in the condition indispensable to its concreteness.
The inconceivability of pure multiplicity, repre
sented by the absolute spatiality, which, as we see,
7 Ingenuous- * s both space and time, consists in the
ness of the claim to exclude the unity from that multi-
concept of an pii c i t v The unitv, if admitted, would lay it
independent , J . . / r i .
objective under the suspicion or the intrusion or an
world as a ideal element, the suspicion that mind was
pure manifold. p resen t. The aim is to keep the positive
element in existing reality separate from the identity
with which thought is supposed to invest it, and by
idealizing it, to change it from a world of things into
a world of ideas. The claim comes down to us from
the ancient illusion that we can place reality before
thought, untouched by any subjective action, at least as
a postulate of the knowledge, through which the same
reality would then be presented more or less informed
by the logical principles and cognitive forms of the
subject. But we have repeatedly called attention to
the fact that this non - subjective reality itself is
a reality posited by the subject, therefore itself
subjective, in the absolute sense, and non-subjective
only relatively to the degree or mode of subjectivity
of a reality in all other respects subjective. The
122 SPACE AND TIME CH.
stimulus of a sound-sensation, as an example of a non-
subjective movement, is itself something conceived by
the mind, intelligible only as a function of the mental
activity which reconstructs the antecedents of the
sensation by means of physiology and abstract physics.
When we analyse the concept of abstract reality
according to this ingenuous interpretation of its non-
subjectivity, or objectivity as we generally
8. The non- . c .
subjective is but inaccurately term it, we are left in no
included by the doubt that its essential character is multi-
subject m its plicity devoid of any synthetic principle.
We are left in no doubt, because the
hypothesis of the object, obtained by such abstraction,
is that there shall remain in what is abstracted
nothing which can in any way be assigned to the
subject s activity, and that every universal and syn
thetic principle, as an ideality which unites the
multiplicity of the manifold, comes from the subject.
But having made the abstraction, and having so
fixed the multiplicity, we must not then go on
and claim that we have shown it living by the very
logic according to which it can only live in the
integrity of the living organism from which we have
abstracted it. It would be like cutting with a
surgeon s knife a limb from the living body and sup
posing we could still keep it alive, in the same physio
logical and biological meaning, as when it was part
of the whole vital system.
Absolute multiplicity is the character of the
positive in so far as it is posited, or of the object in
9. Kant s so f ar as it i s object ._But, as we have shown,
anticipation of the positive is posited for the subject in so
the doctrine. far ^ s it is pos i ted by it< Neither does the
object transcend the subject nor can it be immanent
ix GENETIC AND NATIVIST THEORIES 123
in it save in virtue of the action of the subject itself.
All the infinite elements into which the world con
fronting me is multiplied, and all the infinite moments
into which every one of its elements, and itself as a
whole, are multiplied within me, in confronting me are
in me, through my work. Multiplication by which
one thing is not another, is my act. And this is the
great truth which Kant in his dissertation De mundi
sensibitis atque intelligibilis forma et -principiis (1770),
and more clearly still, eleven years later, in the Critique
of Pure Reason, perceived when he maintained the
subjectivity of the forms of space and of time, under
standing these forms as functions ; a concept entirely
lost sight of by the empiricist psychologists and
epistemologists of the nineteenth century who sought
to prove that even these forms of experience are a
product of experience ; and no less lost sight of by
the champions of the psychology called nativist, who
denied that Kant was right because these forms are,
in fact, a necessary antecedent of experience!
The forms of space and time are neither antecedent
nor consequent. If the forms are the functions by
10. Space as which the object of experience is con-
spatializing stituted, their activity and effective reality
activity. can j-jg nowhere else but in experience.
Space and time are inconceivable as empty forms which
have to be filled, as one would fill an empty vessel, with
single presentations of sensible experience. Space,
1 The only one who saw clearly the common error in the genetic and
nativist theories in psychology in regard to Kant was Spaventa in his
article Kant e I empirismo (1881). By taking space to signify spatiality he
indicated the only way in which the doctrine of Kant can be interpreted and
verified. We have followed the same plan in this chapter. See Spaventa,
Scritti filosofici, ed. Gentile, Napoli, Morano, 1900, p. 85 ff. In that article
it seems to me we are given a glimpse of the concept of space as act.
i2 4 SPACE AND TIME CH.
and time, so conceived, would be multiplicity already
posited independent of the mind s activity. Instead,
it is the mind s spatializing activity which generates
multiplicity. It does not presuppose it. And in so
far as mind has that multiplicity confronting it (or we
might say in so far as there is multiplicity, since to
be is always to be for mind), in so far it generates it.
It is not multiple but multiplication. Multiplication is
the concrete reality which gives place to multiplicity.
It is only abstractly that multiplicity can be thought
of as something which subsists, withdrawn from the
movement which belongs to, and is, the presupposition
of thought.
But if we would understand in its pure spirituality
this doctrine that the reality of space is spatialization,
ii. Unity as we must abandon the Kantian standpoint
the ground of of the datum of immediate sensible experi-
spauality. ence. The manifold of sense is in Kant a
presupposition of empirical intuition, and this intuition
is a logical antecedent of the actualization of the spatial
function, and is concerned with a non-subjective multi
plicity, the multiplicity obscurely imagined by Kant as
outside the whole cognitive process, in the manner of the
atomists and in agreement with the vague philosophical
intuitions implicit in the scientific conceptions of his
time. Spatiality, as we have said, is not so much order
and synthesis as differentiation and multiplication.
Kant insists on the unifying and order-imposing func
tion because he presupposes (we have seen why) the
manifold. He makes space the formal unity into
which the mind receives the multiplicity, gathering
it into a synthesis. But the multiplicity itself, if it
exist, presupposes unity, for it cannot exist except as
it is assembled, ordered, unified. The unity is first
THE ACT OF MULTIPLICATION 125
and spatiality consists in the multiplication of the one.
So that strictly it is not the many which is synthesized,
it is the one which is analysed.
Analysis, on the other hand, here as in every other
moment of spiritual life, cannot be separated from
synthesis. For the act which multiplies the
12. Analysis J .... .
and synthesis one does not destroy it ; it is in multiplying
of spatial that it realizes it, and thence the multi
plicity which follows from the act is a multi
plicity of the one. And analysis does not disperse the
individuality, rather does it enrich it, make it concrete,
give it power ; indeed, it strengthens it and confers
on it a fuller and healthier reality. Space is, in fact, the
harmonious whole of the world which we represent
spatially, and what makes it one in the horizon of our
consciousness. As a whole, it is unbounded in so far
as our imagination enables us indefinitely to extend its
limits, but it is imprisoned in us, an object of present
experience, given (in so far as we make it such for our
selves) and held together by the seal of time. So that
every element of it, and itself as a whole, is articulated
in the series of its states, connected together and
forming an adamantine chain within which all that is
positive in the facts is stretched out in the reality of
the world. All is in us : we are all.
We, then, are not in space and in time, but space
and time, whatever is unfolded spatially and has
13 Space and successive stages in time, are in us. But
time in the the " us " which is here intended is not
mmd.
em pi r i ca l b u t the transcendental ego.
It is not meant that space is located in us. It is im
portant to make this clear. The ego is not the space
in which space is, meaning space as we commonly
understand it. Space is activity ; and for what is
V!
126 SPACE AND TIME en.
spatial to be in the " I," means that it is spatial in
virtue of the activity of the " I," that its spatiality is
the explication, the actuality of the " I."
Kant said that space is a form of external sense, time
a form of internal sense. He meant that if we represent
nature, that is, what we call the external
14. Criticism ,, j .r i r L u
of the concept wor ld an d think or as having been in exist-
of the spiritual ence before our knowledge and spiritual
act as tem- ]j e b e pr an in space, then we represent the
poral. i f. r i 1 r
multiplicity or the objects or our internal
experience, or what we distinguish as diverse and mani
fold in the development of our spiritual life, not in space
but in time. But we have insisted on the substantial
identity of the scheme which is at the foundation of
the idea of time and of the idea of space, and we have
expounded time as the spatialization of the spatial
element. Clearly then we cannot accept the Kantian
distinction as a sufficient indication of the substantial
diversity between nature and mind. We are not speak
ing of the error committed by the psychophysicists
who propose to solve experimentally the problem of the
measurement of psychical time, and who measure only,
what alone is measurable in regard to what is psychical,
the physiological phenomena held to be concomitant
with the true and proper psychical act. In this case
there is no more than the fallacy of double meaning.
But the process of spiritual development itself, as
every one allows, is subject to the form of time ;
chronology we know is an indispensable element of
history in its more spiritual meaning ; and also the
! ? very basis of personality lies in the memory by which
the mind prolongs its present reality and is rooted
in the past.
But even here we have to consider attentively what
PAST FACT AND PRESENT ACT 127
it is which is rightly temporal, and what it is which
is spiritual in the reality, which in its wide
15. What is F . , . J \ f , , . .
temporal and meaning we crudely speak or as both spint-
what is not ual and temporal. Time as Kant s form
temporal m Q f internal experience has regard to the
mind. . . . , , ....
empirical ego, that is, not the ego which is
empirically (the I in so far as it is a subject of a
simple experience) but the ego which is known empiric
ally (the I in so far as it is an object of simple
experience). And Kant distinguishes from experience
the transcendental ego which by its activity makes
experience possible. So that what is temporal in
experience is not temporal in the absolute knowledge
which understands that experience as the display of
the activity of the transcendental " I," the true " I " and
the act which is properly spiritual. This " I " does not
come within the horizon of empiricism, for empiricism
must be true to itself ; but it is revealed and attracts
attention when we become conscious of empiricism.
This consciousness of empiricism is not itself empirical
but absolute knowledge, for it has to give an account
of empiricism. What is temporal as an abstract object
of the real " I " is not an " I," is not something which
has freedom or any spiritual value, because it is what
is done, not what is doing. It is the positive in so far
as it is posited.
An historical fact as regards time is a past fact but
our judgment concerning it can only have meaning if
we take as its valuation, not the accomplished fact, but
the historian s consciousness and personality, of which
indeed the idea of the historical fact is an inherent
part. Only spiritual acts have value, we do not judge
pure facts such as fair or foul weather, deformity or
fine stature. Now it is true that each of us is his past,
128 SPACE AND TIME
just as civilization and learning are what is retained and
remembered, but what we retain is in fact what we
now understand, and it is obvious that the intellect
with which we now understand is no longer identical
with that with which we formerly understood, were it
for no other reason than that our intellect having once
understood is thereby made more intelligent. When
we bring to mind in a present act the past fact of our
spiritual life, a past coloured in our soul, now with a
sad regret, now with a sweet and tender yearning, now
with joy and now with sorrow, we are not really com
paring two realities, one present one past, but two
empirical representations both equally present as the
actuality of the " I " which compares and judges :
equally present because, although variously assorted in
the time series, all our past states are compresent in the
temporalizing act of the mind.
We are now able to see what is in the true meaning
spiritual in regard to time. The temporal as mere
positive fact is not spiritual, but the act by which the
temporal is temporal, the act through which the
temporal fact acquires its positive character ; this act
is spiritual. It is natural in living our experience to
multiply our states and see ourself as a many. But
the " know thyself " of philosophy ought to open
our eyes, revealing to us the act of experiencing
and multiplying, which is the root of temporal
multiplicity.
The coexistence of the elements of space has its
exact counterpart in the compresence of the elements
16. Co- f time. The compresence of the time
existence and elements gives us the exact significance and
compresence. enables us to understand the coexistence of
the spatial elements. Compresence is the convergence
ix THE INTELLIGIBILITY OF TIME 129
of all the moments of time (past, present and future in
their infinite distinctions and consequent multiplica
tions) in a -present which is no longer a present situated
between a past and a future, but a negation of all
temporal multiplicity and of all succession. It is not
duration^ as time deprived of spatiality has been some
what fancifully defined (in so far as it is time it cannot
be deprived of spatiality, since time is already space),
but eternity, which is the principle and therefore a
negation of time. The eternal present on which all
the rays of time converge and from which all irradiate,
is the intelligibility of time. Time is unintelligible
only so long as we are anxious to set it above us as
pure time, without eternity : pure nature without
mind, multiplicity without unity.
Coexistence is convergence of all the points of
space in a -point which is outside all the points and so
a negation of their multiplicity : a point which is the
" I " itself, a spatializing activity from which all points
irradiate and on which all are centred. This merely
ideal, or as we should say transcendental point, by its
spatializing activity posits all the points of space and
all the moments of time, thus generating the positive
character of the real in space and time.
It is clear that without coexistence and corn-
presence there cannot be space and time. And both
are unintelligible if we seek to understand
17. 1 he in-
finite point and them as the actual multiplicity which each
the eternal i s? except on one condition, namely, that
space is the spatiality of the point and the
point is non-spatial, and time is the temporality of the
instant and the instant is non -temporal. Both
therefore are contained in one reality, by which they
attain their being, and this is eternal in regard to time,
K
130 SPACE AND TIME
in so far as it is absolutely instantaneous ; and it
is one in regard to space, which is the fundamental
process of its multiplication. Nature, in short, even
in this aspect, is only intelligible as the life of mind,
which however it is multiplied remains one.
This doctrine of space and time as absolute
spatialization, which is only multiplicity in so far as
18 The multiplicity is absorbed in the unity of
reality of space mind, does not mean that the multi-
and time. plicity of the coexistent things in space
and of the compresent series of the events in time is
reduced to a simple illusion. If we say, as we certainly
can and ought to say, that reality is neither spatial
nor temporal, because reality is mind and mind is
neither in space nor in time, this need not imply
that no form of reality can be represented rightly as
space and time. We only mean and we cannot
insist too strongly on its importance that space
and time are not adequately conceived when they are
assumed to exist in their pure and abstract manifold-
ness, immobile and irreducible. They have a real
multiplicity, however, but only in so far as it is posited,
in the mobility, in the life, in the dialectic of the actual
position which mind makes for them by realizing in
them its own unity.
We may say, indeed, that what we ordinarily think
of space and time, as we effectively conceive them
before we attain the view-point of the pure act, is
quite true, but not the whole truth. It is as it were
no more than the half-truth, which for its completion
must find the other half. It does not indicate a real
division, but only the half-truth of immature philo
sophical reflexion, incapable of apprehending in its
integrity the spiritual act which is posited as space
ix THE FALSITY OF THE HALF-TRUE 131
and time. This other half is that which reconciles
the abstractness of positive reality in the naturalistic
meaning, in a positive reality which renders possible
the first by actualizing it.
In logical language, spatiality is the antithesis of
which mind is the thesis. Mind, however, in so far
, as it is simple thesis opposed to its
19. Space and . . r . .
time in the antithesis is no less abstract than spatial-
synthesis of ity. The concreteness of each consists
in its synthesis. The synthesis is not a
tertium quid supravening on mind or unity and nature
or spatiality, and reconciling their opposition by
unifying their terms. The synthesis is original, and
this means there is neither thesis without antithesis
nor antithesis without thesis. Just as there is no
opposition without opponents, though it be of the
one to itself as different and identical. And this
duality of the terms is thrown into relief and made
to appear an absolute duality which is not unity
when we bring an abstract analysis to bear on the
unique living spiritual process, in which the thesis
is the antithesis, and the antithesis is the thesis.
Our conclusion is, then, that not only is the
naturalism which thinks that space and time are pre
suppositions of the mind, false, or, what
20. The error rl
of naturalism is the same thing, half true, but also that
and abstract an idealism which should deny space would
spiritualism. ^ ^^ Because j ust as <. ig false to
think the antithesis without the thesis which is the
ground of it, so it is false to think the thesis without
the antithesis which is the structure raised upon it.
All philosophies which have failed to attain the
concept of mind as pure act, the concept which alone
makes it possible to understand spatiality as mind,
1 32 SPACE AND TIME CH.
have been naturalistic, even those which hold that there
is no way of conceiving nature without a mind which
creates it and explains it. Because a mind which is
supposed to stand outside nature and be antecedent
to nature as the idea is antecedent to the creation,
must be conceived as outside of, and antecedent to, the
mind which knows this nature. Such a mind is both
pre-mental and pre-natural, the ground both of nature
and of the mind whose idea nature is. Now this mind
can only be posited by and for the present mind, the
mind which it is urgently necessary to understand, the
mind which in no other way but that of understanding
can guarantee the truth of what it thinks. And this
extra-mind is posited for present mind just as nature
is posited for it. It is posited as a reality, which is all
reality, already realized, while the mind which now is
has yet to arise and be.
When mind is assigned this place in regard to the
transcendent reality, space can only be the abstract
multiplicity, absolutely inconsistent with any unity,
which has been shown to be unintelligible and absurd ;
and this notwithstanding any effort philosophy may
make to conceive it as subjective and as unity. On
the other hand, it cannot be said that there has ever
been an idealism really opposed to such naturalism.
We may see in Spinoza a true and distinctive negation
of the multiplicity which is spatiality. It is the
basis of his system, as it was generally of the neo-
Platonic pantheism with which Spinoza s speculation
is akin, as seen in his reconstitution of Stoicism and
Eleaticism. But that negation does not annul the
multiplicity of nature in the unity of mind, but rather
in an immediate natural unity. It may be regarded
as an anomaly of naturalism, and it becomes in fact a
ix SPINOZA AND LEIBNIZ 133
kind of mysticism, which is the negation of nature as
such, and a retracting of the mind within itself, by
cancelling all the determinations of its object and so
blocking the way of knowing it as a positive object,
or as a true and proper natural object.
No abstract idealism has ever been absolute, nor
is such an idealism possible, because from the absolute
21. Criticism standpoint it would be aware of its own
of the monad- abstractness. Yet we are not without a
ism of Leibmz. re i at i ve abstract idealism, relative because
we find it in the end, as I shall show, turning
into a pure naturalism. This is the philosophy of
Leibniz, who held that mind cannot be conceived
except as a pure unity cut off from all multiplicity.
The mona^ as Leibniz called it, is absolutely simple,
a substance which exists in so far as it is separate
from all relation with the manifold. The monadism
of Leibniz is the most significant and conspicuous
instance of the abstract idealism which I have called
relative. It is a real compromise between the reason
ing of the mind and the plain and ingenuous natural
istic intuition of reality. Leibniz is idealist and monist
in his conception of the quality of substance, because
for him there is no other substance but mind, but he
is pluralist in his mode of conceiving the being of
substance according to the most rigidly naturalistic
conception, that of the atomists. Atomist or mechan
ist he is not, inasmuch as he denies that the phenomena
spring out of inter-atomic actions, or, in his own
language, out of actions exercised by one monad on
the others. All that happens resolves itself for him
into the internal life of each monad which is appetition
and perception, or rather mind and nothing other
than mind. But this mind is both self-sufficient and
134 SPACE AND TIME CH.
insufficient. It is self-sufficient since the monad has
no windows and receives nothing from without ; but
it is insufficient in so far as the monad originally mirrors
the universe in itself, and therefore all the other monads
as others, are originally and substantially others. They
are not the monad yet they condition it, through
the monad of monads, God, who presides over all and
is himself the condition of each. So that each monad
is, in so far as all the others are, which others it cannot
make exist. And therefore the monad is not self-
sufficient. Moreover, as free, it is nothing, because
appetition is its essential being and it develops in so
far as it acquires ever clearer and distincter perception,
not of itself, but of all the others, the consciousness of
which can never be self-consciousness in it, and there
fore true and proper realization of the monad in its
autonomy, because the others are outside it. The
monad therefore, I repeat, is self-sufficient and in
sufficient. In so far as it is self-sufficient it is mind,
/ &
in so far as it is insufficient it is no longer mind but
changed into the plurality of its objects, natural-
istically. The monad, in fact, as true monad, as the
unity which to be mind it must be, cannot be a monad
among the monads. Together with the others the
monad ends by being multiplicity (a multiplicity
which in its turn postulates a unity, which it interprets
by making it one sole multiplicity) and the multi
plicity will be the true unity. The Leibnizian monad
is only a monad relatively to a subjective point of
view. And even this, according to Leibniz, there
is power to transcend, by rising to the absolute or
divine point of view which recognizes the infinite
multiplicity of the monads, more absolutely unrelated
than any atomist had ever had the courage to con-
ix DUALISM OF SOUL AND BODY 135
ceive his material elements. Its absolute irrelativity
makes the monadology, in this respect, a more
naturalistic conception even than that of materialistic
atomism.
There is an equal abstractness in the idealism of
the dualists, an idealism also relative and leading
22. Criticism fatally towards naturalism. The dualism
of dualism. o f SO ul and body, or of spirit (a divine
transcendent personality) and nature (man being
included in nature, through what he is naturally], is
idealistic so long as it is a question of conceiving
mind in itself, without putting it in relation with its
opposite ; but no sooner does it seek to integrate the
concept in the whole than the rights of mind are
suppressed and nature alone becomes compact, uni
form and infinite. The soul, which is not body,
simply is, and by its pure being excludes from itself
all spatial multiplicity, and therefore is free. Yet
the soul which is not body is with the body ; and
with the body it makes two. But as the body is a
great multitude of parts, the soul, situated in the heart
or in the brain or in a particular point of the brain
such as the pineal gland (to which even so great a
philosopher as Descartes assigned it), is added to the
number of all the parts, together composing the
multiplicity which is explicitly or implicitly spatial.
So there may be as many souls as there are bodies ;
and they may form companies as souls, although
by means of bodies. They will constitute a spatial
manifold because they must be distributed on the face
of the earth with intervals between them, and having
relations with the various natural and local conditions
which will be mirrored in the diverse natures of the
souls themselves. So in a thousand ways naturalism
136 SPACE AND TIME CH.K
invades the spirituality of the soul conceived in this
dualistic way.
Analogous considerations can be set forth in regard
to the dualism of God and nature, the conjoining of
which is impossible without assimilating one term to
the other. In every case the error is not in the duality
but always in the abstractness of the duality. In the
concrete the duality rules only on the basis of the unity.
CHAPTER X
IMMORTALITY
IF mind is the principle of space and has that principle
in itself, there is not a space which contains the mind
i. Mind and an ^ therefore it is impossible to attribute
the boundless- to mind any of those limits by which every
! of space. S p at i a i rea lity i s circumscribed. And in
this we may see both the ground of the fmiteness
of space and the profound meaning of the infinity of
mind.
Space is indefinite, not infinite. It has no assign
able limits, yet it is not the negation of every limit,
for it cannot be conceived otherwise than limited.
Space as an object of the mind is a datum : it represents
that positive multiplicity which the mind itself posits.
It is not an undefined or indefinite object because to
be an object of the mind really means that it is some
thing the mind has defined. Space is antithesis as
such, as we have already said, and the antithesis
stands confronted by the thesis, not as something
which may be, but as a definite position. This positive
and effectual determinateness of space (and of every
thing which is posited before us as spatial) implies
the limit of space, implies that it is precisely a certain
space. But, on the other hand, as it is posited by the
mind, and only subsists as the mind posits it, it has
no independent being of its own but a being which
137
138 IMMORTALITY CH.
depends on a continuous and inexhaustible spiritual
activity. Spiritual activity, therefore, posits space not
by positing it finally once for all but by continuing
in the actuality of positing it. Or rather in the
very act which posits space, space is never posited,
but always is to be posited. And the limits of
space, like its own being, are not something fixed
but a boundary which is mobile, always living and
present.
The conclusion is that space exists only in so
far as there is and at the same time as there is not a
2. The limit spatial limit. Or, we might even say,
of space. space exists in so far as the limit which
determines spatiality is displaceable to infinity. The
limit can never be lacking and yet it can never be
fixed ; because, it does not belong to an object which
exists for itself and is originally independent like an
absolute substance. It is the attribute of an object
produced by the immanent act of a subject, whose
reality consists in the production and therefore in the
limitation of its own object.
Space accordingly is finite without being a fixed
finite thing. This negativity of every definite limit,
3. The in- with the consequent impossibility of assign-
finityofthe ing to it an absolute limit, constitutes its
mm ast e indefinitcness. This indefiniteness of space
negativity or _ \
the spatial is a consequence of the infinity of the mind.
limit - For the negativity of the spatial limit is the
intrinsic character of the limit, not in so far as it is
posited by an act which completes it, but in so far as
it comes to be posited by the act in fieri ; by the act,
that is, which is always act, a pure act, and which
here is the act of limitation. If we could free the
limit from the spiritual act, it would rest fixed, but it is
INFINITE AND INDEFINITE 139
not fixed, and is displaced because limit means limita
tion and is conceivable only through its immanence
in the mind s act. This act does not fix the limit once
for all, and then cease to act. The unfailing absolute
ness of the act implies the immanence of the limita
tion, and thence the negativity of the limit, the ever
positing and at the same time the never being posited
of the limit.
It follows that space how vast soever it be is always
within the mind, the mind, that is, is superior to it,
can look beyond its limits towards remoter limits ;
and only in so far as every space is contained within
a greater space, is the contained space determinate,
that is, a representable space. Now infinity is pre
cisely this immanent negation of every spatial limit,
which whilst subjecting every spatial reality to limits,
overrules or transcends these limits by spiritual
activity. Not that there is a space without limit, but
that there is no limit which is not negated. It is
the mind which always negates and never recognizes
the limit, which, in positing it, removes it and thus
manifests its own absolute infinity. This absolute
infinity, on the other hand, does not imply abstention
from all limitation (because limitation, which is its
own multiplication in spatiality, is its very life), but
only the transcending of every limit and therefore the
impossibility of being stopped at any assignable limit
however remote. The infinite, in short, is the exclusion
of every limit ; an exclusion which coincides with the
immanent assigning of the limit to the object, in its im
mediate positivity. Leopardi in his ode L Infinite has
very finely expressed that dizziness which comes over
the mind when it is withdrawn from all limits not only
of the infinite but even of the indefinite. It leads, he
1 40 IMMORTALITY
shows us, not to the exaltation but to the annihilation
of the mind.
Mirando interminati
Spazi di la da quella, e sovrumani
Silenzi, e profondissima quiete
lo nel pensier mi fingo ; ove per poco
II cor non si spaura.
Cosi tra questa
Immensita s annega il pensier mio ;
E il naufragar m e dolce in questo mare.
(Contemplating the boundless spaces beyond, and superhuman
silences and profoundest rest, there in thought I bring myself where
the heart has so little to fear.
So midst this immensity my thought itself is drowned and even
shipwreck is sweet to me in this sea.)
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
Th 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
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 think-
in immortality. ing> not Q f the em piricized forms of the
mind, but of its essential nature and functions, for
these are eternal.
x INDISPENSABLE ACT OF THINKING 141
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 indis
pensable act of thinking. The extreme difficulty of
describing the essence of this most primitive and
truly fundamental reality, and consequently the inade
quate 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 im
mortality is an affirmation of its own power and value
which in a way affirms the immortality it denies.
What is the meaning of immortality ? The soul
posits itself as " I," and to affirm its being as " I :
s 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. When, 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 multi
plicity is Nature, spatial and temporal, where nothing
is its other, in which everything at first is not, then is,
and after it has been is not, where everything is born
and dies, so the soul comes to be conceived like all
142 IMMORTALITY
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 co-
existents in space are embraced in one single survey
in the subject, and all the events in time are corn-
present 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 be
tween 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 ETERNAL IN ONE S SELF 143
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 pre
supposes 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 tran
scendent 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
upon which faith in immortality has
7- The f
absolute value rested, it we set aside reasons prompted
of the spiritual by desire to prove its rationality, so often
attached to inadequate philosophical con
cepts, resolve themselves into the affirmation of the
absoluteness of the value of all the affirmations of mind,
Philosophy of religion and natural religion have
placed the immortality of the soul among the con-
s Religion stitutive principles of religion itself. But
and immor- the contrary rather is the truth. If it be
true, as Kant thought, that religion within
the limits of reason leads necessarily to the concept of im
mortality, 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 philosophy. Religion, as we shall see
i 4 4 IMMORTALITY CH.
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. Im
mortality, on the contrary, is the subject s self-affirma
tion of its own absolute value. From this it follows
that there are certain forms of naturalistic atheism
which deny immortality because they deny transcend
ence 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 con
cept 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 consists leads 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 unknow
able except as eternal. It implies immortality. It
THE ABSOLUTENESS OF VALUE 145
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.
Whatever we value our children, our parents,
the God in whom we trust, the property we have
<. T , acquired as the result of our labour, the
religious art and philosophy which is the work of
character of our m ind possesses value to the extent
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.
Whatever the particular form which faith in im
mortality may take, that faith is immanent, because
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. i r r j r
character or 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 this concept of the absoluteness of value,
in giving birth to the scepticism inherent in all the
L
146 IMMORTALITY CH.
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
belongs to mind, and mind is not nature,
ii. Immor- .
talityasan and precisely for that reason and only for
attribute of that reason it is not included within the
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. 1 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 begin
ning and as regards space is enclosed within certain limits " ; and in the
antithesis, " The world has neither beginning in time, nor limits in space,
but is infinite in regard to time as in regard to space."
THE HIGHER PERSONALITY 147
reconciling in its own immanent unity all temporal
multiplicity.
The conclusion is that if we think of ourselves em
pirically 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 per
sonality is not unfolded in space and time we 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 stand
point 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.
The only immortality, then, of which we can think,
the only immortality of which we have ever actually
148 IMMORTALITY
thought, when the immortality of mind has been
affirmed, is the immortality of the transcendental
" I " ; not the immortality of the empirical individual
" I," in which the mythical philosophical interpreta
tion 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 im
mortality.
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 multi
plicity 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 tran
scendental "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 " I."
The heart for by that name we are accustomed
CHAOTIC MULTIPLICITY 149
to express the inmost and concrete concerns of our
14. The im- spiritual individuality does, it is true,
mortality of the demand immortality for the empirical " I,"
empirical I. rather than for the transcenc iental " I." 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 myself 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 multi
plicity 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 numeric
ally 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-contradic
tory time, which is chaotic multiplicity : but mind, in so
far as it does not fix the multiplicity but lives in it, that is
1 50 IMMORTALITY CH.
to say, from the immanent 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 lives 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
MONIMENTUM AERE PERENNIUS 151
in its lull universality. The immortals the poets,
the philosophers, all humanity s heroes are of the
same stuff as all men, and indeed of the same stuff as
things. 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. We 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 inex
orably clothed, by definition, with the " innumerabilis
annorum series et fuga temporum," of which Horace
speaks in the well-known ode : l
Exegi monimentum 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 mei
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.
What escapes the grasp of the goddess Libitina and
abides, a monument more lasting than bronze, is
1 Horace, Odes, iii. 30.
1 52 IMMORTALITY
the song in the poet s imagination, with its eternal
value by which it will always rise and live again
in the human imagination, not because it is always
the same written poem, but because every poem is
always a new poem, real in the act of its restoration,
in a way which will always be new because always
unique. Horace s ode, which we can localize at a
particular point in the series of years, is swept away
by the " fuga temporum." Horace as the man who
was born and died is indeed dead, and his monu
ment rises up in us, in an " us " who, in so far as we are
subject and immanent act, are not different from Horace
himself. For Horace, besides being an object among
the other manifold objects compresent in history as
we know it when we read it, is presented to us, not as
something different from us, but as our brother and
father, even as our very self in its inner transparence,
in its self-identity. What is real, then, in memory
does not come to us from the past but is created in the
eternity of our present, behind which there is no
past and in front of which there is no future.
The poet s true eternity, then, is not the poet in so
far as he belongs to the manifold, but the poet in so
far as he is one with the unity of the transcendental
"I," with the immanent principle of every particular
experience, in so far, that is to say, as the poet and we
ourselves are one. But if this be the meaning of
eternity, who or what is not eternal, dissolved in the
One that abides ? What word is there, though
it sound for an instant only in the secrecy of our
soul ; what grain of sand is there, buried it may be
in the ocean depths ; what star is there, imagined to
exist beyond every possible limit, beyond all astronomi
cal observation ; which does not concur with, and which
THE PRESENT IS THE ETERNAL 153
is not concentred in, that One in relation to which all
is thinkable ? What would our body be, our body as
we represent it empirically, could we not think of it as
a point around which the whole of a nature which is
indefinite gravitates ? And what would it be if we
detached it in its spatial and temporal multiplicity
from the I, from that transcendental energy which
posits it and is posited by it ? And how could a word
sound in our inner being without being a determina
tion of our own soul, and therefore a reality gradually
propagating itself, or concentrically resounding in and
across our life, in the universal reality, which even
empirically represented cannot be thought except as
forming one whole system ? And who is there
who in such an hour has not been or is not a
poet and cannot say with Horace, " Exegi moni-
mentum acre perennius " ? Nothing which happens
can be represented empirically except as flowing,
as compresent with the future in the actuality of
the present. Understood in the speculative mode
of philosophy it means that there is no present poised
between the two opposed terms past and future. The
present is the eternal, a negation of all time.
The part of us and of those dear to us which dies
is a materiality which has never lived. For real
1 6. The materiality is not the simple abstraction
immortality of from the spiritual act which appears as
the mortal. materiality. When, as in ordinary thought,
we have this abstract materiality in mind, we are un
conscious of the spirit which gives it life and makes it be.
Abstract materiality is not immortal, for the simple
reason that it does not exist. The materiality which is
a multiplicity of the mind is in the mind ; it is in it,
and has value just so far as it is its realization. Its
154 IMMORTALITY
immortality consists in its mortality. Because the unity
of mind is the intelligibility of the multiplicity of
nature. And this multiplicity, when not taken in the
abstract, is the nature of mind (the manifoldness of
the one). It participates, therefore, in its immortality.
But it cannot participate in mind s immortality by
destroying mind, but by itself being destroyed as
nature. It is just this which happens, in virtue, let
us clearly understand, not of nature itself which is
the externality of the spiritual act, but of the spiritual
act which, as we have shown, does not posit the
manifold without unifying it in the very act which
posits it, and therefore does not give life which is not
also death. Were the life of the object posited by the
mind not also its death, it would imply the abandon
ment of the object by the mind itself. Life would be
a petrified life, which is absolute death. True life, on
the other hand, is made one by death, and therefore the
immortality of the manifold (things and men, for men
in so far as they are a many are things) is in their
eternal mortality.
Is the individual, then, mortal or immortal ? The
Aristotelian individual, who is the individual in the
17. The ordinary meaning, is mortal ; that is, its
immortal immortality is its mortality, because its
individual. reality is within the mind which is im
mortal. But the individual as spiritual act, the
individual individualizing, is immortal. The mind s
act as -pure act^ outside which there is nothing which
is not an abstraction, is the realm of immortality.
If a man were not this act and did not feel, however
obscurely, in his very being that he is immortal, he
could not live, because he could not escape that
absolute practical scepticism which is not simply an
CAN WE BE AND NOT THINK? 155
attempt not to think (which the theoretical or abstract
scepticism, that so often has made inroads on the
human soul, has always been), but the effective arrest
of thought, of the thought by which alone we can
perceive truth in the world of the eternal. Can we be
and not think, if being is essentially thinking or rather
thinking itself ? The energy which sustains life is
precisely the consciousness of the divine and eternal,
so that we always look down on the death and vanish
ing of everything perishable from the height of the
immortal life.
CHAPTER XI
CAUSALITY, MECHANISM AND CONTINGENCY
OUR doctrine of time and space has brought us back
to the concept with which we started of the infinite
i. is mind and unmultipliable unity of mind. As
conditioned ? positive the individual is posited in a spatial
multiplicity which is also temporal, but without ever
destroying the mind s unity, or ever being able to
transcend it. From the womb of space we have seen
infinite mind reborn, and from the womb of time
immortal mind.
And now some one may object. You tell us that
the past of time and the spatial form of nature are
annulled in the unity of the spiritual act ; and yet
you say that the past is confluent in the present. The
present, then, is conditioned by the past, without which
accordingly it cannot be conceived. And you say also
that the multiplicity of coexistents is made one and
reconciled in the unity of the spiritual act. Even the
act, then, is conditioned by the multiplicity of the co
existents. And even if both these multiplicities be a
production of the mind it is no less true that their
ultimate unification, and in this the development of
mind consists, is conditioned by the antecedents.
These antecedents cannot be thought to be immedi
ately identical with the consequent unity."
Here too we might very easily dispose of the
156
CH. xi CONDITION AND CONDITIONATE 157
objection by referring to what we had said on the
inconsistency of the manifold in its abstract opposition
to unity, and simply call attention to the principle
that the condition is not to be conceived abstractly
as separated from the conditionate and standing by
itself, limiting as it were the conditionate itself. Our
rejoinder would in truth miss its effect if we did not
in this case also submit to a strict examination the
concept of condition on which not only empiricism but
also transcendentalism rely as their second plank of
safety. These two modes of philosophizing are, as we
know, much more akin than is commonly supposed.
" Condition " may have two quite different mean
ings. It may mean what is simply necessary or it
2 The ma y mean what is necessary and sufficient.
necessary con- The necessary condition of a real thing
dition, and the /j in the met aphysical and in the
necessary and v , , . . ,
sufficient empirical sense) is another real thing, the
condition. realization of which makes the realization
of the first possible. The sufficient condition of a real
thing is another real thing, realization of which makes
its realization necessary and infallible. In the first
case the conditionate cannot be thought without at
the same time thinking its condition, but the condition
can be thought without thinking the conditionate. In
the second case an absolute relation holds between
condition and conditionate, and neither can be thought
without the other.
The absolute character of the relation between the
two terms, and the necessity that the conditionate
The meta- follow the condition, are the constitutive
physical con- elements of the metaphysical concept of
cept of cause. cause . We can in fact define cause as
the real thing whose realization renders necessary the
158 CAUSALITY AND CONTINGENCY CH.
realization of another real thing. This causality has
been called metaphysical from the necessity of the
relation which it posits between condition and con-
ditionate, cause and effect. It is a necessity which
cannot be learnt by experience, for if experience bears
witness to relations at all, it is only to contingent
relations of facts. It is an a -priori necessity, only
knowable a -priori by analysis of concepts. For this
reason in the metaphysics of Descartes and Spinoza it
is reduced to mere logical deduction based on the
principle of identity.
But the strictly metaphysical character of such a
causality lies deeper. It lies in a principle of which
the necessity of the relation between cause
4. The meta- {
physical unity and effect is a consequence. It needs a
of cause and verv clear exposition because the prevalence
of empiricism as a result of the writings of
Locke and Hume, and the insinuation of it into meta
physics in the works of Geulincx, Malebranche, and
even of Leibniz, led in modern philosophy to the
supersession of the concept of metaphysical causality.
Metaphysics is a conception of the unity underlying
the multiplicity of experience (meaning by experience,
, what may be thought). The " water " of Thales is
a metaphysical reality, in so far as it has in itself the
possibility of all the forms displayed by nature to
sensible observation and is the principle of them.
The " being " of Parmenides is metaphysical, for it is
the unity to which thought reduces all things by
willing to think them. Plato s " idea " is metaphysical
in so far as it unites in itself the dispersed and flowing
being in the many and transient objects of space and
time. Empiricism is the intuition of the real which
sets its face towards the multiplicity ; metaphysics is
NECESSARY CONNEXION 159
the intuition of the real which sets its face towards the
unity. Causality, the necessary relation between two
terms of thought, must, from the metaphysical stand
point, 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 con
ceiving the one term together 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 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 v/e 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 1 r n-
metaphysical tj ie cause ls necessary for the effect, the
identity of effect is necessary for the cause, and there-
the cause and f ore t fa e ff ect j s identical with the cause
the effect. , . 111-,
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
160 CAUSALITY AND CONTINGENCY CH.
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 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 non-
being 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 out
come of theistic dualism, which makes God necessary
and the world contingent. In the same way psycho-
physical 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. 1
1 The other identity, that of soul with body, is required, when this psycho-
physical 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 161
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 logic. In the absolute manifold-
ness of the real, the unity of identity, according to the
empirical principle, can only 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 Vice s sceptical doctrine of the know
ledge of nature, expounded in the De antiquissima
Italorum sapiential 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.
M
1 62 CAUSALITY AND CONTINGENCY CH .
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 world an object of the mind, though how or
why we know not on the basis of the substance,
causa sui, whose essence implies its existence. It
must therefore say axiomatically, ex data causa deter-
mtnata necessario sequitur effectus, since everything is
reduced finally to a conceptual relation and effectus
cognitio a cognitione causae dependet et eandem involvit}-
The efficiency is a logical deduction which implies
and supposes identity and adds nothing to the identity.
And empiricism rending the network of concepts
which the metaphysical intellect weaves around itself,
and bent on breaking through to the immediate reality,
can meet nothing but absolute multiplicity. When
for the logical relation of necessity it substitutes the
chronological relation of the succession of antecedent
and consequent, it can do so only because it has no
consciousness of the unity, which is all the while present
in the simple relation of time, which implies a subject
ive elaboration of the presupposed sensible material.
Should it become conscious of the subjective unity
in the true relation, the causal chain in the pure multi
plicity would be broken and empiricism would lose
every criterion and every means of making the real
intelligible. But empiricism remains, in its uncon-
1 Eth. i. axioms 3 and 4.
ATTEMPTS AT COMPROMISE 163
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 negation 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
necessary non- hybrid scheme of the intelligibility, or
sufficient rather of the unification, of the real, half
condition. , . . . r
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, meta
physical 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
1 64 CAUSALITY AND CONTINGENCY CH.
to cause, then clearly we restore entirely the meta
physical character of the condition as not only necessary
but sufficient.
There is another compromise between metaphysics
and empiricism one which has played an important
c g The com _ part in the history of philosophy from the
promise of beginning of the modern era, the con-
occasionahsm. ce p t o 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 efficient cause of ideas, or ideas the efficient
cause of physical movement. The parallelism between
them was explained as an agreement between soul and
body depending on God. It was analogous to that
which we may see between two clocks constructed by
the same artificer, an agreement brought about, not
through the action of one on another, but through
their common dependence on the clockmaker s skill. 1
1 " Imagine two clocks or watches which agree perfectly. Now,
this may take place in three <ways. The first consists in a mutual
influence ; the second is to have a skilful workman attached to them
who regulates them and keeps them always in accord ; the third is to
construct these two clocks with so much art and accuracy as to assure
their future harmony. Put now the soul and body in place of these two
clocks ; their accordance may be brought about by one of these three
ways. The way of influence is that of common philosophy, but as we can
not conceive of material particles which may pass from one of these
substances into the other this view must be abandoned. The way of the
continual assistance of the creator is that of the system of occasional causes ;
but I hold that this is to make a deus ex machina intervene in a natural
and ordinary matter, in which, according to reason, he ought not to co
operate except in the way in which he does in all other natural things. Thus
there remains only my hypothesis : that is, the way of harmony. From the
beginning God had made each of these two substances of such a nature
that merely by following its own peculiar laws, received with its being it,
THE TWO CLOCKS 165
The occasional cause, when we reflect on it, is not a
cause at all, except in so far as we transcend it and
pass from it to God, in whom is the real principle of
its causality, through the relation which it always
implies between movement and sensation. And when
nevertheless accords with the other, just as if there were a mutual influence
or as if God always put his hand thereto in addition to his general co
operation " (Philosophical Works of Leibniz, G. M. Duncan s transla-
lation, chap. xv.). (Compare also the Troisieme Eclaircissement and the
Systeme nouveau, 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 ( c u. Descartes, Passions de
I dme, i, 5, 6, and L. Stein in Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie, i. 59).
We may remark, too, that Leibniz s distinction between occasionalism and
his system of the pre-established harmony has no great speculative importance 5
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 inter
vention. Without this intervention causality remains just as unintelligible
as the harmony, which is already affirmed in occasionalism, and which
Leibniz cannot help extending to his pluralism.
Geulincx, also (Ethica, i. sect. ii. 2), 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 me non
dependent, quos ego ipse in me non excito ; excitantur igitur in me ab
aliquo alio (impossibile enim est ut a nihilo mihi obveniant). At alius,
quicumque sit, conscius esse debet hujus negotii ; 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 persuasum habeo, res
aliquas, quas brutas esse et omni cogitatione destitutas agnoscebam, 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 similem inter-
pretationem, lumen efficere, lapides cadere, ut interpretabar, se ipsos praeci-
pites dare, et motum ilium efficere, quo deorsum ruant ; ignem tamen,
1 66 CAUSALITY AND CONTINGENCY CH.
Leibniz extended occasionalism, giving it a profounder
meaning and making its anthropomorphic bond
between the physical and psychical substances the type
of the universal relations of all substances or monads, it
became in the system of the pre-established harmony the
concept of the reciprocal unrelatedness of the monads
in their common dependence on God. But through
God the occasional cause necessarily conditions its
correlative term, although, on the other hand, such
condition may be non-sufficient, and for this reason
occasionalism can retain a certain metaphysical value,
and need not end once and for all in empiricism. That
is, the occasion and the occasionate in themselves, the
one in opposition to the other, are a mere contingent
concomitance, actually like the succession to which
solem, lapidesque brutos esse, sine sensu, sine cognitione haec omnia operari
existimabam. Sed cum intellectual intendo in evidentiam hujus principii :
Quod nescis quomodo fiat, id non fads, 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 habeam ea nescire quo
modo 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 con<vertuntur.
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 Eckhard) : " 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.
OCCASION AND OCCASIONATE 167
the empiricist reduces causality. But the occasion is
an occasion in so far as we do not think of it only
in itself and in respect of the occasionate, but in
relation to God who makes one term the occasion, the
other the occasionate. And when this system of
" occasion = God = occasionate " is constituted, then
the reciprocal relation of the two extreme terms
participates in the necessity of the relation between
God and the occasion, no less than between God and
the occasionate. The relation is that of a necessary
but non-sufficient condition. Whence the occasion
becomes a necessary and non-sufficient condition of
the occasionate, and inversely this of that, even
obliging us to think of each of the two terms, the
one either as the occasion of the other or as occasioned
by the other.
So that the characteristic of occasionalism is to
unfold the relation of necessary and non-sufficient
9 . Either condition by duplicating it, in so far as
metaphysics or between the occasion or the occasionate
empiricism. ^e conditioning is reciprocal. Through
this duplication the relative contingency of the effect
in regard to the cause, in its character of necessary and
non-sufficient condition, can be turned into the relative
contingency of the cause in regard to the effect. And
therefore the empiricism of the occasionalists is more
accentuated than that to which we have called atten
tion in the system of the simply necessary and non-
sufficient condition, since with the double contingency
the multiplicity appears actually loosened from every
chain of metaphysical unity.
I say appears, because the so-called duplication, if
on the one hand it duplicates and confirms the con
tingency, on the other it duplicates and strengthens
1 68 CAUSALITY AND CONTINGENCY CH.
the necessity of the cause in regard to the effect.
The body necessarily supposes God who creates the
soul, and the soul necessarily supposes God who
creates the body. And in the system of the monad-
ology every monad supposes God, the creator of
all the monads, and therefore supposes all the other
monads. In such reciprocity of conditioning between
occasion and occasionate, the relative necessity of the
cause in regard to the effect becomes reciprocal relative
necessity, or rather it becomes necessity which excludes
all contingence and therefore all empirical multiplicity.
Between the unity, then, of metaphysics and the
> multiplicity of empiricism all attempts to fix a
relation of condition and conditionate, as a relation
which mediates between unity and multiplicity, are
destined to fail.
Setting aside the possibility of stopping at an inter
mediate point between the metaphysics of efficient
if causa ^ty an d the empiricism of causality
contradiction intended as simple contingent concomi-
of metaphysical tance, is it perhaps possible to stop at the
concept of metaphysical causality or at its
extreme opposite, that of empirical causality ?
It is obvious that the concept of metaphysical
causality as necessary and sufficient condition is
absurd. The concept of condition implies the duality
of condition and conditionate, it implies therefore the
possibility of conceiving each of the two terms without
the other, yet this possibility is negated by the concept
of metaphysical causality, which is an a -priori relation,
and implies the unity and identity of the two terms.
To use the word causality, therefore, in the meta
physical meaning, if we would give an exact account of
what we have in mind, is to mean what has no meaning.
xi ATOMISM AT THE CROSS ROADS 169
We are left with empirical causality. Let us not
insist now that, whilst all causality implies a relation,
empiricism excludes every relation by
ii. Atomism y .
as the basis of postulating a multiple reality or things
empirical unrelated. Let us even admit the hypo
thesis that there may be such a manifold
and that causality may take place in it. Let us simply
inquire whether on the basis of pure atomism it may
nevertheless be possible to maintain the concept of
causality as plain empirical causality. Atomism is
always rinding itself at the cross roads. It has either
to maintain rigidly the original and absolute multi
plicity of the unrelated, and in that case it must give
up the attempt to explain the phenomenon which it
has resolved into the unrelated atoms ; or it has to
explain the phenomenon by making it fulfil effectively
for the atoms the purpose for which they are destined,
by the principle of the reality given in experience.
Now to do this it must endow the atoms with a
property which renders possible a change in their
primitive state, that is, in their state of unrelatedness
and absolute multiplicity, in order to bring about
their meeting and clash. Movement (the effect of
weight) as a property of the atoms is already a
negation of their absolute unrelatedness, because we
can only speak of movement in terms of the relation of
one thing to another, and movement itself, as Epicurus
remarked, must be different in the different atoms
(through the differences which the new relations and
correlation imply) if by means of movement the
atoms are to be aggregated and so generate the
O O O c?
phenomenal things. For if all the atoms move in
the same manner, and in the same direction, and
with the same velocity, it is clear that their meeting
170 CAUSALITY AND CONTINGENCY CH.
is for ever impossible, and the atomic hypothesis is
useless.
Atomism, therefore, has always of necessity been
mechanism, one of the most coherent logical forms
12. Mechan- of the conception of reality, conceived as a
ism. presupposition of mind. Mechanism in
resolving all reality into matter and force (atoms and
movement) starts with the postulate that nothing of
this reality can be lost and nothing can be added to
it. Qualitatively and quantitatively, therefore, being
is immutable, and all change is no more than an
alteration of the disposition in the distribution of the
elements of the whole. The intelligibility of the new
is a perfect mathematical equation of the new with its
antecedents. The sum of matter and force at the
moment n is equal to the sum of matter and force at
the moment n - i, and also to that at the moment n + i .
Whether it resolves force into matter with the old
materialism, which saw in movement the external
g The manifestation of the intrinsic property of
epistemology matter ; or whether with the chemists and
of mechanism. phy s id s t s to-day, who think they have got
away from materialism because they no longer speak
about matter, it resolves matter into force or energy ;
mechanism, apart from any imaginative representation
of the atom and of movement, consists in the conception
of absolutely manifold being, the result of elementary
units. These units can be variously added up, but
always give the same result, so that the possibility of a
novelty which is not merely apparent, and of a creation
which is really new existence, is absolutely excluded.
In its particular application it is clear that in mechanism
a relation of condition to conditionate is only thinkable
as empirical causality. If a ball struck by another ball
THE MECHANISM OF SCIENCE 171
moves, mere empiricism must be limited to the dis
covery that the ball after having been struck had moved,
without supposing any other relation between the
antecedent stroke and the movement which followed
it. And this, indeed, is the assumption of empiricism
when it insists on what it would have us understand is
the true character of causality. But empiricism, when
from the particular it passes to the universal and has
to make its own metaphysics of reality, in order to
enable it to explain the particular itself according to
its own scheme of intelligibility, and thereby make
credible the mechanism according to which there
cannot be a movement which had not a previous
movement to account for it, cannot observe the
temporal contiguity of the movement of the ball with
the stroke received by it without thinking that the
movement of the struck ball is one and the same with
the movement of the striking ball, the one communicat
ing to the other just as much as it loses itself. And lo
and behold, the duality of the facts of experience is
resolved into a unique fact, whereby in a whole the
new is equalized with the old. And when empirical
causality wants to affirm concomitance between pheno
mena, and, in general, multiplicity without unity,
what it comes to is that by empiricizing the causality
it attains to mechanism, or rather to the crudest form
of metaphysical monism it is possible to conceive.
Against the mechanism necessarily prevalent in
modern science since Descartes, Galileo and Bacon,
there has arisen in the latter part of the
14. The
philosophy of last century in France a philosophy, the
contingency leading concept of which has been termed
and its motive. c /- j-
contingency^ ramous for its vigorous vindi
cation of freedom. Modern science, following Bacon,
J
172 CAUSALITY AND CONTINGENCY CH.
has pronounced itself empirical, and even if, following
Galileo and Descartes, it has been mathematical, it has
always been conceived with the logic of empiricism.
Reality for it is a presupposition of thought, and self-
identical in its already perfect realization. The new
philosophy of contingency, conscious of the freedom
of the mind in its various manifestations, has opposed
to the concept of a reality always self-identical that of
a reality always diverse from itself. 1 Contingency is,
in fact, an attempt to conceive freedom by denying the
unity or identity in which mechanistic empiricism
ends, without, on the other hand, abandoning the
concept of conditioned reality, that is, of that multiple
reality which is empirically given.
In order to understand the starting-point of the
philosophy of contingency, let us begin by quoting
the first page of Boutroux s thesis on The
15. The 3
principle of the Contingency of the Laws of Nature,
philosophy of " By what sign do we recognize that a
tmgency. ^^g j s ne cessary ? What is the criterion
of necessity ? If we try to define the concept of
an absolute necessity we are led to eliminate from
it every relation which subordinates the existence
of one thing to that of another as to its condition.
Accordingly, absolute necessity excludes all synthetic
multiplicity, all possibility of things or of laws. There
is no place, then, in which we could look for it if it
reigns in the given world, for that is essentially a
multiplicity of things depending more or less one on
another. The problem we have to deal with is really
this : By what sign do we recognize relative necessity,
1 There are several indications of this doctrine in Lachelier, but it was
first definitely formulated by Emile Boutroux in De La contingence des
lots de la nature, published in 1874, republished in 1895, and in many
subsequent editions.
BOUTROUX S THESIS 173
that is to say, the existence of a necessary relation
between two things ? The most perfect type of
necessary connexion 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 whole and the part. So that where there is an
analytical relation, there is a necessary connexion. But
this connexion, in itself, is purely formal. If the
general proposition is contingent, the particular pro
position which is deduced from it is, at least as such,
equally and necessarily contingent. We cannot reach,
by the syllogism, 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 pro
position 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 re
lation. Can the syllogism reduce synthetically analytic
propositions to purely analytic propositions ? "
Starting from this principle it is not difficult to
argue that the necessity arising from absolute identity
is not to be found in any proposition and
tingencyor is not in the syllogism. So that if
necessity. mechanics is mathematically conceivable,
physics is no longer simple mechanics, and biology is
1 Op. tit. pp. 7-8.
174 CAUSALITY AND CONTINGENCY CH.
not physics, and neither is biology psychology, nor
psychology sociology ; and in short, whenever science
with its mechanical interpretations is forced to bring
a new order of phenomena into line with another,
it lets the difference between the one order and the
other escape. Therefore, while remaining within
the limits of simple experience, the world cannot but
appear a hierarchy of different worlds each of which
has something irreducible to what is found in the
antecedent. The world, then, is not necessary if
necessity mean necessary relation, and if necessary
relation mean identity.
To begin with being. In its greatest universality
and abstractness, can we say that it is necessary ? Can
we deduce the existence of being analytically from its
possibility, just as from the premises of a syllogism
we deduce the conclusions ? " In one sense no doubt
there is no more in being than in the possible,
since whatever is was possible before it existed. The
possible is the matter whose being is fact. But being
when thus reduced to the possible remains purely
ideal, and to obtain real being we must admit a new
element. In themselves, indeed, all the possibles make
an equal claim to being, and in this meaning there is no
reason why one possible should be realized rather
than another. No fact is possible without its contrary
being equally possible. If then the possible is given
over to itself, everything will be eternally floating
between being and non-being, nothing will pass from
potentiality to actuality. So far, then, from the
possible containing being, it is being which contains
the possible and something besides : the realization
of one contrary in preference to the other, actuality
properly so called. Being is the synthesis of these
9
xi FREEDOM WITHIN NATURE 175
two terms, and the synthesis is irreducible." 1 And
this is the contingency of being. If being is contin
gent, everything is radically contingent, inasmuch as
it is being. And if from the abstractness of being
we rise gradually to the greater concreteness of the
reality presented in experience, we see the range of
necessity becoming ever more restricted, that of
contingency growing ever larger, and thereby mak
ing ever wider way for that freedom, which in the
mechanical and mathematical conception of the world
is absurd.
It is evident then that the philosophy of contingency
is an empiricism incomparably more empirical than
the naturalistic and positive mechanism
17. The . V . .
empiricism and of the ordinary empiricism. Should it
mechanism of succeed in making freedom, or a possi-
mgent. f^-j^y o f f ree d orrl) spring up within nature,
which for empiricism alone is real, we should be able
to say that it had conquered empiricism with its own
weapons. Contingency, in fact, does no more than
affirm the reality of the differences or rather of the
multiplicity of the real. In it #, b, <:, d^ do indeed
constitute a system, but a is not $, nor , nor d. To
make each term the conditionate of the preceding term
and the condition of the following term is not to
make the preceding term originate the following term
because between the one and the other there is no
equivalence such as there is between a and a.
Suppose there were such equivalence and that
b = a^ as mechanism requires, the relation between
b and a would then be necessary, as necessary as the
relation of a with <2, and representable in a purely
analytical judgment. But if we suppose only a given,
1 Op. tit. pp. 15-16.
176 CAUSALITY AND CONTINGENCY CH.
by making abstraction from the multiplicity and from
every external relation, then it is only a in itself
which is absolutely necessary. So if b is not identical
with a, it is different ; and in so far as it is different
and irreducible the juxtaposition of a and b can
never give rise to an analytical relation. (Strictly,
it could not give rise to any relation whatever,
because, as we know, relation is already identity.) It
cannot give place to it because a = a and b = b. No
term is contingent in regard to another (that is, re
latively not necessarily) except on condition that it is
absolutely necessary in regard to itself. And all the
terms one by one are only contingent relatively to
points of view external to their definite and particular
essence, whereas, considered absolutely, they are com
pletely necessary. But the necessity which clothes
them is only that which mechanism affirms, except
that, instead of being monochrome, it is many-coloured
like a harlequin s dress.
Being" is not deducible from "possible." The
proposition is self-evident, but why ? Because being
is being, and the possible is possible,
antithesis 6 shorn of the realization of itself which
between con- is purely the exclusion of its contrary,
tingencyand g ut jf behind the realized being which
freedom. . , ., , . .
is not the possible, we know not how to
think any other than this possible, toto caelo different,
it is clear that being is thinkable only in so far as it is
thought as immediate ; not as realizing itself but as a
reality already established. As such it is self-identical,
immutable, in such wise that self-identical must not
even mean identical with itself, since even identity
is a relation of self with self. And with one term only
which can have no other confronting it, even though
IS FREEDOM MADE POSSIBLE? 177
that other be only itself unfolded and contraposed to
itself (and this is precisely the spiritual relation, the
basis of every other relation), there is no possibility of
relation. 1 And even when we come to the perfection
of being in man and mind, and recognize that " the
human person has an existence of its own, is to itself
its own world ; that more than other beings it can
act without being forced to make its acts enter into
a system which transcends it ; and that the general
law of the conservation of psychical energy breaks
up into a multitude of distinct laws each of which
belongs to each individual " ; that moreover, " for one
and the same individual the law is subdivided again
and turned into detailed laws belonging to each
different phase of psychical life, and the law tends
to approximate to the fact . . . and the individual
having, from being alone, become the whole kind to
which the law applies, is master of it " ; 2 it still
remains true that the individual in his concrete
individuality is what he is, just what " being " is in
regard to " possible," what life is in regard to physical
and chemical forces, what psychological fact is in
regard to physiological fact ; in short, what every
reality is in regard to that with which experience
compares it : not contingent except relatively, in itself
absolutely necessary. Nothing behind the individual
in his positive concreteness can be considered as
his principle, since, whatever can be thought as distinct
from him is another with which he has no necessary
relation. And, consequently, he is thinkable just in
so far as he is and not as that self which is not and
is to be, which makes itself what it ought to be rather
1 Compare my Sistema di Logica, i. pp. 152-5, 175 et seq.
" Boutroux, op. cit. p. 130.
N
178 CAUSALITY AND CONTINGENCY CH.
than what it ought not to be, in which freedom really
consists.
The philosophy of contingency, in short, by accept
ing the purely naturalistic standpoint of empiricism,
19. Con- may seem to make freedom possible by
elusion. insisting on the differences which mechan
ism cancels. In reality it does no more than smash
the compact nature of the mechanist, keeping the
inert materiality and the qualitative, abstractly con
ceived, identity which is the fundamental law of the
unity of nature to which mechanism has regard.
And if this be true, the philosophy of contingency
falls back into the mechanical intuition of the reality
which is the characteristic of empiricism. Its con
tingency has no value which is different from that of
the concept of empirical cause, and it lands it in the
same absurdity as that which we have exposed in that
concept.
Neither metaphysical causality nor empirical caus
ality, neither occasionalism nor contingency, are
successful, then, in overcoming the unsurmountable
difficulties which arise from the concepts of condition
and conditionate.
CHAPTER XII
FREEDOM AND PREVISION
THE philosophy of contingency does not rise above
the position which Hume reached when he denied the
objective value of causality by emphasiz-
philosophy of ing the difference between cause and
contingency effect, condition and conditionate, thus
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 sup
poses 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. ^ Q 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
i8o FREEDOM AND PREVISION CH.
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 :
p avrov KO.L
Troie.lv acrcr av y 7reirpay/j.eva. 1
(Of this alone even God is deprived, to make what has been done
not to have been.)
Fact precisely is that absolute identity of being
with itself which excludes from being even the
possibility of reflecting on itself and affirming its own
identity. It is natural, unmediated, identity.
The necessity which characterizes fact, which is
the extreme opposite of freedom, is a concept com-
3 Fore- mon to empiricism and to contingency,
seeability of if we keep to the real meaning of
natural facts. the so _ ca ll e d natural laws with which
empiricism, apparently in contradiction of its own
principle, invests the natural event and appears so far
to differentiate itself from contingency. Contingency
conceives reality to be a continual creation, or rather
to be something new continually taking place which
is different from its antecedents, whereas scientific
empiricism, which mechanizes nature, in formulating
laws by which nature becomes knowable, denies the
differences and conceives the future as a repetition of
the past, and says therefore, with Auguste Comte,
that knowing is foreseeing. It is true that in recent
criticism of the epistemology of the sciences, the
objective value of natural laws, as concepts of classes
of phenomena, has been denied, and thereby the
foundation on which the concept of the foreseeability
1 Agathon, quoted by Aristotle, Eth. Nic. vi. 2, p. 1139 b 19.
xn THE IRON LAW OF THE PAST 181
of the future rests has been shaken. But it is also
true that this criticism does not in the least prevent
the empirical sciences from formulating laws and
foreseeing, so far as it is foreseeable, the future. Nor,
as we have seen, can we accept the merely economical
interpretation of such logical processes, on which,
without exception, science would insist.
The problem which such criticism has sought to
solve, is wrongly formulated. The law cannot be
4. Laws and thought, nor do we in fact think it,
natural in separation from the fact of which
uniformity. it j s the ^ ^ ^^ ^^ indude
the fact by imposing on it a necessity extrinsic to
its own being. Empiricism has never acquired a
clear consciousness of its own logic. It has been
said that its logic depends on the postulate of the
uniformity of nature. Galileo, one of the most
sagacious inquirers into the logical foundation of the
sciences, used to say that nature is " inexorable and
immutable and caring nothing whether its recondite
reasons and modes of working are or are not open
to human capacity ; because it never transgresses the
limits of the laws imposed upon it " : l a sure con
fidence which yet did not prevent him disputing the
supposed immutability of the celestial substance, which
the Aristotelians held to be free from the continuous
vicissitude of the generation and corruption which
belong to natural things, the objects of our experi
ence on earth. With clear insight he remarked that
the life both of the body and of the soul consists in
1 " Inesorabile e immutabile e nulla curante che le sue recondite ragioni e
modi d operare sieno o non sieno esposti alia capacita degli uomini ; per
lo che ella non trasgredisce mai i termini delle leggi imposteli." Letter to B.
Castelli, Dec. 21, 1613.
1 82 FREEDOM AND PREVISION CH.
change, without which we should be as though we
had " met a Medusa s head which had turned us into
marble or adamant." J Immutability, then, is continual
change, the one does not contradict the other. Natural
law is not the negation of change (as Plato thought,
and Aristotle after him, with the consequent immuta
bility of their heavens, from the forms of which
[ideas, laws] the norm of terrestrial nature must come)
but the negation of the mutability of the change.
Change is fact, and if it is fact, it is immutable. It
is fact, since we propose to know it ; and there it is
ready for us, and nothing caring, as Galileo said, that
the reasons and modes for and by which it has come
to pass should be open to our capacity. That is to say,
it confronts us, not posited by us, and therefore is
independent of us.
Now the distinction between the two moments,
past and future, by which we are able to speak of
5. The past " foreseeing," does not imply that fore-
as future. seeing is a different act from simple
knowing and added to it. We foresee in so far as
we know, because in the very past of the fact which
stands before us as accomplished fact the future is
present. A fact is immutable when it is such that
thought cannot think it as not yet accomplished but
in course of accomplishment (for then it would not
be factum but fieri]. The future, indeed, is foreseen,
but only in so far as it is present in the object as we
empirically conceive it ; it exists not as what is not
yet and will be, but as what is already (the past).
Marvellous in their insight, therefore, are Manzoni s
words :
1 " Caro 1 incontro d una testa di Medusa, che ci convertisse in un marmo
o in diamante." Opera, ed. Naz., v. 234-5, 2 ^-
xn IMMUTABILITY OF THE FACT 183
E degli anni ancor non nati
Daniel si ricordo. 1
(And Daniel remembered the years not yet born.)
In astronomy we have the typical case of prevision.
There it is nothing but the result of a mathematical
calculation on facts which have already taken place.
Calculation, for the astronomer, is actual objective
knowledge of already given positions, distances,
masses, velocities, so that what appears as prevision
is nothing but projection into the future of what is
really antecedent to the act of foreseeing : a projection
of which the logical meaning is simply the concept of
the immutability of the fact as such, a concept which
annuls the future in the very act in which it posits it.
The movement of the comet which at a certain moment
will arrive at a certain point of the sky, is continual
change ; but the fact of its changing is unchangeable ;
and it is in so far as it is unchangeable that the move
ment is defined and the prevision takes place. The
prevision (this foreseeing of the past in the future)
would be impossible if in the movement itself we could
admit a variation which did not form part of the
picture we have formed of its properties, by means of
which the movement is thought of as determined. For
in that case the movement would not be determined,
as by the hypothesis it is, from the standpoint of the
empiricist who apprehends it as a fact.
" Judge no man till he is dead " says the proverb.
1 In his poem La Resurrezione. The stanza is
Quando Aggeo, quando Isaia
Mallevaro al mondo intero
Che il Bramato un di verria ;
Quando assorto in suo pensiero
Lesse i giorni numerati,
E degli anni ancor non nati
Daniel si ricordo.
184 FREEDOM AND PREVISION CH.
Because man makes himself what he is and is not
6. The fact made. Yet we need not wait till a man
and the act. i s dead to speak of him as having
been born, for being born of particular parents is a
fact. The movement of a comet is a fact like the
birth of a man ; it is not an act like a man s moral
or intellectual life. And when we suppose the course
of a man s moral life can be determined a -priori^ like
that of a celestial body, we are denying the freedom
or power of creation belonging to him as spirit,
debasing him to the level of natural things which are
what they are, and supposing his destiny to be already
formed in a character which can never produce any
thing unforeseeable, since all that it will produce is
already fatalistically determined in its law.
The law of the empiricist, therefore, is the fact in
so far as it is immutable (even if the fact consists in
7. The fact a change). Fact, in so far as the mind
a negation of affirms it in presupposing it as its own
liberty. antecedent, is immutable, necessary, and
excludes freedom. To reject and destroy this attribute
of fact, it is no use appealing to the novelty of
facts, as the theory of contingency does, we must
criticize the category of fact itself, we must show its
abstractness and how it implies an even more funda
mental category, the spiritual act which posits fact.
This character of the past which belongs, as it were,
to the future in so far as it is foreseen, and the
s. The ami- consequent impossibility of conceiving a
thesis between foreseeable future to be free, have been
the concepts of marked j n hijjt b the constant but
a foreseeable . J J
future and always vain attempts of theodicies to
freedom. reconcile the two terms of divine fore
knowledge and human freedom. The terms are a
THEODICIES 185
priori unreconcilable when we recognize the identity
of the concept of the freedom of the mind with the
concept of its infinity. But when we conceive God
as outside the activity in which the human spirit is
actualized, we are denying this infinity. The problem
tormented Boethius, in prison, seeking consolation
for his misfortunes in a philosophical faith. From
Boethius the Italian humanist Valla took the problem
as his theme in the dialogue De libero arbitrio. He
stated it with such clearness that Leibniz, in the
Theodicy?- took up the problem at the point to which
Valla had brought it, and desiring to reach a full
justification of God from the moral evil which must
be imputed to Him were mankind, by Him created,
not free, could find no better means than that of
continuing the lively dialogue of the sharp-witted
humanist. It is hardly worth while even to indicate
his solution, for, as Leibniz says, it rather cuts the
knot than unties it.
It is instructive and entirely to the point, however, to
read what Valla says concerning the necessity of the fore-
9. Valla s seen future, and his comparison of it with
criticism. the necessity which is attributed to the past
known as past. The reader may enjoy it the more if
I reproduce a little of it in his witty Latin. One of
the interlocutors, who is attempting the reconciliation,
taking up an argument of Boethius says : " Non video
cur tibi ex praescientia Dei voluntatibus atque actioni-
bus nostris necessitas defluere videatur. Si enim
praescire aliquid fore, facit ut illud futurum sit,
profecto et scire aliquid esse, facit ut idem sit. Atqui,
si novi ingenium tuum, non diceres ideo aliquid esse,
quod scias illud esse. Veluti, scis nunc diem esse ;
1 Leibniz, Theodicy, 405 et seq.
1 86 FREEDOM AND PREVISION
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
veniam, praescius sum, post octo horas noctem fore ;
ideone et erit ? Minime ; sed quia erit, ideo prae-
scisco : quod si praescientia hominis non est causa ut
aliquid futurum sit, utique nee 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 potesf : ut dies
qui nunc est, nequit fieri ut non sit. Praeteritum
xii VALLA S ARGUMENT 187
quoque nihil differens habet a present! : id namque
non turn cum factum est cognovimus, sed cum fieret
et praesens erat, ut noctem fuisse non tune cum
transit didici, sed cum erat. Itaque in his temporibus
concede non 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 ; nee pro
certo sciri potest quod incertum est. Ideoque, ne
Deum fraudem praescientia, fateamur certum esse quod
futurum est, et ob 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 : l 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 :
1 Because in reality the present as an object of cognition is past and not
present.
1 88 FREEDOM AND PREVISION CH.
ego autem loquor de voluntariis." (The instances you
cite are natural things ever flowing in an even course :
but I am speaking of events dependent on will.) And
the volitional thing, he remarks, is quite different
from the fortuitous thing (what in the philosophy of
contingency would be called the contingent). " Ilia
namque fortuita suam quandam naturam sequuntur ;
ideoque et medici et nautae et agricolae solent multa
providere, cum ex antecedentibus colligant sequentes ;
quod in voluntariis fieri non potest. Vaticinare tu
utrum ego pedem priorem moveam ; utrumlibet
dixeris, mentiturus, cum alterum moturus sim." (For
fortuitous things follow their own nature; and there
fore physicians and sailors and farmers are used to
foreseeing many things, when they are the sort of
things which follow from their antecedents, but this
can never be the case with voluntary things. You may
foretell which foot I shall move next when you have
done so you will be found to have lied because I shall
move the other.) This may be so when it is man
who foretells but when God foresees the future, since
it is impossible He should be deceived, it is equally
impossible that it should be granted to man to escape
his fate. Imagine, for example, that Sextus Tarquinius
has come to Delphi to consult the oracle of Apollo
and has received the response : Exul inopsque cades^
irata pulsus ab urbe. (You will die an exile and
wretched, driven in wrath from the city.) To his dis
tress and complaint, Apollo can reply that though he
knows the future he does not make it. But suppose
from Apollo, Sextus has recourse to Jupiter, how will
Jupiter justify to him the hard lot the poor wretch
has to expect ? By the haughty pride of Tarquinius
and the future misdeeds it entails ? Apollo, perhaps,
VALLA S MYSTICAL SOLUTION 189
will say to him : " Jupiter, ut lupum rapacem creavit,
leporem timidum, leonem animosum, onagrum stoli-
dum, canem rabidum, ovem mitem, ita hominum alii
finxit dura praecordia, alii mollia, alium ad scelera,
alium ad virtutem propensiorem genuit. Praeterea
alteri corrigibile ingenium dedit, tibi vero malignam
animam nee aliena ope emendabilem tribuit." l (Jupiter,
as he created the wolf ravenous, the hare timid, the
lion bold, the ass stubborn, the dog savage, the sheep
gentle, so he formed some men hard-hearted and some
soft-hearted, some with a propensity to crime, others
to virtue. Whilst to others he has given a mind which
is open to correction, he has endowed thee with an evil
soul which can by no outside help be made good.)
This is clearly to take all responsibility and all value
from Sextus, and to attribute his conduct to Jupiter.
It makes man a natural being and his future actions
nothing but facts in so far as they are foreseeable. It
makes him, in regard to Apollo who can foretell and
generally in regard to a foreknowing God, a reality
already realized, that is, a past.
Leibniz, not content with Valla s mystical and
agnostic solution, which has recourse finally to the
10. Leibniz s inscrutable divine wisdom, continues the
attempt. fiction and supposes that Sextus has come
to Dodona to the presence of Jupiter to inquire what
will give him a change of lot and a change of heart.
And Jupiter replies to him : " If thou art willing
to renounce Rome the Fates will spin thee other
destinies, thou mayst become wise and be happy."
Then Sextus asks, " Why must I renounce the hope
of a crown ? Can I not be a good king ? " " No,
Sextus," the God replies, " I know better than thou
1 Opera, eel. Basilea, pp. 1002-3, 1006.
190 FREEDOM AND PREVISION
canst what befits thee. If them goest to Rome thou
art lost." Sextus, unable to reconcile himself to so
great a sacrifice, leaves the temple and abandons him
self to his appointed destiny. But when he is gone,
Theodorus, the priest, would know why Jupiter can
not 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," says 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 circum
stances 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
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 pyramid descends to
infinity." 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." 1
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 good, 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).
1 92 FREEDOM AND PREVISION CH.
nounce Rome which Jupiter makes to Sextus at Dodona
ii. Vanity is a cheat, because from eternity there has
of the attempt, been assigned to Sextus his own destiny
in this possible world to which Jupiter has given
existence. And the conclusion, so far as it concerns
our argument, is, that the knowledge of the empirically
real supposed to pre-exist the mind (whether really
or ideally pre-existing is the same thing) is knowledge
only of facts ; and when we attain to foreknowledge we
know nothing except fates which are facts : systems
of reality wholly realized in their knowability. The
future of the prophets, and of Apollo who can inspire
them, is exactly like the future of the astronomer,
an apparent future which in the concrete thought in
which it is represented is a true and proper past.
One other remark we may make in confirmation
of what we have said. It is that when Jupiter chooses
12. The the best of the possible worlds, that which
antithesis stands at the apex of the pyramid, he not
between Qn j canno t leave Sextus free to choose his
foreknowledge J , r i ir
and freedom own lot, but neither is he tree nimselr to
in God. choose it for him. The world which he
realizes is in reality already realized, and precisely
because it is realized he can know it, and choose it.
That world is in itself before Jupiter wills it ; and
it is the best of all possible worlds. The willing
it adds nothing to its goodness. It is in its very
absoluteness incapable of development and growth.
It is like the Platonic ideas, which are in them
selves, and bound dialectically by a law which is their
very being, when they can be known or, it may be,
willed.
In short, the divine foreknowledge not only
renders impossible the freedom of the human mind,
xii NATURALISTIC CONCEPT OF GOD 193
but even the freedom of the divine mind ; just as
every naturalistic presupposition not only binds the
object of the mind in the iron chain of nature, but
also the subject, the mind itself. The mind can no
longer conceive itself except as bound up with its
object, and therefore naturalistically. The concept,
then, of the divine foreknowledge is a mark of the
naturalistic conception of God.
Reality, we can now say, cannot be distinguished
into condition and conditionate except on the clear
understanding; : that the two realities are
13. Unity of ... v
the condition conceived as in every way one reality only ;
and the con- a reality which, in its turn, being the
negation of the freedom of the mind, is
unintelligible save in relation to it.
Reality is not duplicated but is maintained in its
unity even when distinguished into condition and con-
14. The tend- ditionate ; because neither metaphysics nor
ency to unity, empiricism can present the condition in its
immanent relation with the conditionate, nor the con
ditionate in its immanent relation with the condition,
except as a unity of the two terms.
Metaphysics with its efficient causality, empiricism
with its empirical causality, one as much as the other,
both tend to the identification rather than to the
distinction which is essential to the concept of condition
ally. So that, taken strictly, the concept of meta
physical causality aims at considering the cause, from
which the effect is not really differentiated, as alone
absolutely real ; while, on the contrary, empiricism
represents the absolute as the simple effect (fact)
into which the cause itself is resolved. And the
philosophy of contingency is a manifestation of the
empirical tendency to free the effect from its relation
194 FREEDOM AND PREVISION
to the cause without making it thereby acquire any
other right to freedom. But neither can metaphysics
stop at the cause without an effect, nor empiricism
at the effect without a cause ; not only because the
cause is not a cause unless it is cause of an effect,
and an effect without a cause is a mystery which the
mind cannot admit, but for a deeper reason, which
we have already indicated more than once. It is
that undifferentiated reality is inconceivable, even as
self-identical, for identity implies a relation of self with
self and therefore a moment of opposition and duality,
which the pure undifFerentiated excludes.
The abstract unity, with which metaphysics as well
as empiricism ends, in absorbing the conditionate
15 The in tne condition, or the condition in the
abstract un- conditionate, is what is called the uncon-
condmoned. ditioned, not in the meaning of freedom
but in that of necessity : the necessity which the
doctrine of contingency dreads, and into which it
falls headlong. Now this unconditioned cannot be
affirmed without being denied, in accordance with
our usual appeal from the abstract to the concrete
thought. Because in so far as we think it, the un
conditioned comes to be thought, not as the purely
thinkable, but precisely as the thing thought, or rather
as that which we posit in thought. Unconditioned it
is, then, but, so far as it is such, thought, or in thought,
which is therefore the condition of it. In other words,
it is unconditioned for the thought which abstracts
from itself, and thinks its object without thinking
itself, in which its object inheres. It is conditioned
in so far as the object thus unconditioned is thought
in its immanence in the subject, and as this subject is
conscious of positive activity which belongs to that
xii ARISTOTLE S IMMOBILE MOVER 195
unconditioned. In short, the object is conditioned
by the subject even when the object, as pure abstract
object, is unconditioned.
The relation, then, of the subject with the object
is that of conditionality. It can only be effectively
16. The conceived by bringing together the unity
true uncon- and the duality, and therefore by requir
ing thought neither to shut itself within
unity, which is absurd, nor yet to end in abstract
duality, which is equally absurd, because it reproduces
in each of the elements the same position of unity.
Evidently it is the relation of the a -priori synthesis
belonging to the act of thinking, which is realized in
the opposition of subject and object, of self and other
than self.
The ignorance of such a relation is the explanation
of the origin of all the difficulties of metaphysics and
Th d ffi ^ em pi r i c i sm with which we have been
culties of meta- dealing. The conditionate of metaphysics
physics and of must in fact, when accurately thought out,
be merged in its condition, since the con
dition is not a true and proper condition, it being itself
the conditionate. Aristotle, in the well-known argu
ment based on the absurdity of the process to infinity,
believed indeed he could make God an immobile mover,
an unconditioned condition or first cause ; but his
God cannot explain the world as other than Himself ;
and from Aristotle, therefore, we must necessarily pass
to Plotinus. God as the mover is no other than the
movement which it is required to explain. He is
the very form, whose reality philosophy studies in
nature and so finds already realized before nature.
He is indeed nature itself, thought and hypostasized
beyond immediate nature ; that is, the opposite of
196 FREEDOM AND PREVISION CH.
thought. This opposite is always pure fact in so far
as it is never apprehended in the making through the
process of thought. In empiricism, on the contrary,
the condition must be resolved into the conditionate,
because a condition which is not thought itself but the
presupposition of thought (and this is what it must be
for the empiricist) is nothing else but an object of
thought, a conditionate of the activity of thought.
The condition of metaphysics cannot explain its own
efficiency and productivity, since it is not productive,
being rather itself a simple product of thinking :
a thought which supposes the activity of the think
ing which realizes it. And the empiricist Hume
was right in his opposition to metaphysics because he
saw the full consequence of the metaphysical point
of view. Metaphysics contraposes the cause (the
only true cause is God, alike for the Scholastics and the
Cartesians) and the thought which thinks it as cause ;
and, granted the opposition, it is impossible that
thought should penetrate into the working of the cause,
as it must in order to understand it, and perceive thereby
the necessity of the relation by which the cause is
connected with the effect. To that extent it is true
that the empiricist criticism of the principle of
causality is the profound consciousness of the implicit
scepticism in the transcendent metaphysical intuition.
As we have already pointed out, we find the con
sciousness of this, even before Hume, in Vico, a
metaphysicist who denied the certainty of knowledge
concerning the working of the natural cause, precisely
because that cause is an object of thought and not
thought itself.
The empiricist, on the other hand, if he would
endow his empirical causality with a minimum of
xii SELF-ENGENDERING PRINCIPLE 197
logical value, must maintain some connexion between
condition and conditionate. Having no other way
he thinks it permissible even for empiricism to main
tain the chronological chain of succession, which
indicates a kind of synthesis, and therefore a principle
of unification, chargeable to the work of the subject.
Even then he does not realize his concept of pure
de facto conditionality ; and it is impossible for him
to do so because, just as the metaphysicist posits the
condition, so he posits the conditionate as confronting
the thinking. Therefore for the empiricist the unity
of the manifold is inconceivable, it presents itself to
him as mere temporal connexion, as to the meta
physicist it presents itself as efficiency.
The a -priori synthesis of condition and conditionate
is dialectic, and it is obvious from our standpoint
that a dialectic outside thought is incon-
18. The . . ^
dialectic of the ceivable. When, instead, we look at the
condition and dialectic in thought, then the thinking
conditionate. i i i- r
or metaphysical causality, as or every
other form of the concept of conditionality, is relieved
of all the difficulties we have enumerated. For the
fundamental difficulty of metaphysics is to understand
in what way the one can generate another than itself,
in what way the identical can generate the different.
But when by the " one " metaphysics means the " I,"
this " I " is precisely found to be the self-engendering
principle of the other, of difference from self. So,
when empiricism acquires the consciousness of the
immanent relation of the other, precisely as other, in
its condition, which is the " I," it will still continue
to see the other and the manifold, but with the unity
and in the unity.
So, then, just as metaphysical reality and empirical
198 FREEDOM AND PREVISION
reality are each (in the unconsciousness of abstract
19. Necessity thought) posited as conditioned, that is
and freedom. a s necessity without freedom, so the reality
of concrete thought posits itself as condition of
that unconditioned which is then shown to be con
ditioned. And thereby it posits itself in the absolute
ness of its position, as the Unconditioned which in
being necessary is free. The first unconditioned
we may call Being, the second unconditioned, Mind.
The one is the unconditioned of abstract (and there
fore false) thought, the other is the unconditioned
of concrete (and therefore real) thought. Being (God,
nature, idea, fact, the contingent) is necessary without
freedom, because already posited by thought. It is the
result of the process : the result which is y precisely
because the process has ceased. That is, we conceive
it as having ceased by fixing and abstracting a moment
of it as a result. The necessity of the future, object
of the divine foreknowledge, comes by conceiving
the future itself as " being," or as something which
confronts thought. (So that we know what " can be "
only by reason of thought which when it posits it
confronting itself, in so far as it does so, posits itself
confronting itself.) This necessity is the necessity of
natural fact, of fate, of death, necessity thought of
naturalistically. It excludes the miracle of the resur
rection which mind alone can work, and does work
when nature obeys it, and that is when nature is no
longer simply nature but itself also mind.
The necessity of being, however, coincides with
the freedom of mind, because being, in the act of
20. The thinking, is the act itself. This act is the
causa sui. positing (and thereby it is free), presuppos
ing nothing (and thereby it is truly unconditioned).
CAUSA SUI 199
Freedom is absoluteness (infinity of the unconditioned),
but in so far as the absolute is causa suil Sui, we
must notice, supposes the self, the subject, the self-
consciousness, whence the being caused is not an
effect, but an end, a value, the term to which it strives
and which it gains. Such freedom is not a negation
of the necessity, if we do not mean a necessity which
competes with the abstract objectivity of being, but a
necessity which coincides with the necessity of being,
which in the concrete is the mind s dialectic.
Such a dialectic, in resolving all multiplicity and
thereby every condition into its own unity, in positing
21. An itself as the principle of every synthesis
objection. o f condition and conditionate, eliminates
even the category of conditionality from the concept of
mind, once more re-establishing the infinite unity of it.
Moreover, as the criticism of individuality enabled us
to discover the concept of individualization, and the
criticism of space and time gave us the concept of the
infinity of the mind in opposition to the indefiniteness
of nature, and gave us also the concept of the eternity
and true immortality of mind, so now, through the
criticism of the category of condition, we have gained
the real concept of freedom.
Metaphysicists and empiricists will not be com
pletely satisfied with this concept of freedom which
we have now given. Restricted to their false view,
and the concept which follows from it, of a reality pre-
1 The expression is Spinoza s ; but Spinoza retains the meaning which
Plato s ab To KIVOUV (Phaedrus, 245 c) and Plotinus s eavrov eW/ry^/xa (Enn.
vi. 8, 1 6) must have. Compare my edition of the Ethica, Bari, Laterza,
1915, pp. 295-296. Spinoza s substance, like Plato s idea and Plotinus s God,
is the abstract unconditioned, which cannot be causa sui, because it is not
mind but its opposite. The sui therefore is a word deprived of its proper
meaning 1 .
200 FREEDOM AND PREVISION CH.
supposed by the subject, they will maintain that by
the a -priori synthesis of the condition and conditionate
in the dialectic of mind, which is posited as subject
of an object and so as unity of condition and con
ditionate, all that we have succeeded in finding is an
epistemological relation. Beyond this, they will say
there always remains the metaphysical or real relation,
at which the metaphysicist aims with his causality,
and which even the empiricist has in view when he
conceives mind conditioned by a nature in itself. It
may even be, they will say, that the subject s cognitive
activity posits its own object in positing itself, in
knowing, as the unconditioned condition of the
phenomenon. This cannot mean that it is uncon
ditioned realiter ; that it is realiter is a condition of
every thinkable object. Mind is dialectic on the
basis of the condition to which it is really bound.
That the basis of mind cannot possibly be nature
is clear from what we said in proof of the purely
epistemological value of the reality which
22. Reply. -, J , .
we call nature. Nature as space and time,
for example, is no more than an abstract category of
thought. Mind abstracts from its own infinity which is a
root of space, and from its own eternity which is a root
of time. As a basis of mind, to take another example,
nature cannot be race, another naturalistic concept,
which so many historians and philosophers of history
suppose it necessary to assume as a principle of the
historical explanation of human facts. This is evident to
every one who recognizes that the individuality of a race
is realized and characterized in its history. The history
of a race is not the spiritual activity conditioned by the
race, but the very meaning of the concept of race when
withdrawn from the abstractness of the naturalistic
THE REAL SYNTHESIS 201
position in which it is an empty concept, and carried
into the realm of spiritual reality where alone it can
have meaning : a realm in which it is no longer the
race, but the history, the mind. What is it in general
you wish to prove ? Is it that you can think something
which is a condition of your mind, your mind which
is actualized in you in thinking its condition ? The
condition must be, if you succeed in thinking it, a
reality unthought (not entering into the synthesis of
your thought). That is, it must be thought to be
unthought. Berkeley will laugh at you. We will be
content to point out to you that it is an abstraction
which can only live in the synthesis of thought.
To escape the tangle we must keep before
our mind that the transcendental " I " is posited as
empirical, and as such it is conditioned.
23. The *
unconditioned And if by reality we are not meaning
and the con- on ly what is in the object of experience
L (pure experience), then undoubtedly our
synthesis, in which the " I is an unconditioned
absolute, free, and therefore a condition of every
thing, is a purely epistemological and not a real
synthesis. But in meaning by reality the object alone
cut off from the subject, we must by this time be
convinced that we are meaning something which is
meaningless. The only remedy is to look deeper, to
go to the root of the reality wherein the object is
the life of the subject, whose synthesis is therefore
absolutely real.
We see here at last how the oscillating of thought
between the concept of mind as pure act and the con
cept of mind as fact, as object of experience, generates
the historical antinomy of mind which only in the exact
concept of the pure act can find its adequate solution.
CHAPTER XIII
THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY AND ETERNAL HISTORY
WHAT we call the historical antinomy is the antinomy
which arises from the concept of mind as pure act
when we consider it in its essential relations
i. What is
meant by the with the concept of history. We can
historical formulate it in the thesis : " Mind is history,
because it is dialectic development," to
which is opposed the antithesis : " Mind is not history,
because it is eternal act." It is the antinomy in which
at every moment we find ourselves entangled in study
ing and understanding man, who presents always two
aspects, each of which appears to be the negation of the
other. For we cannot understand man apart from his
history in which he realizes his essence ; yet in history
he can show nothing of himself which has that spiritual
value entirely on account of which his essence comes
to be conceived as realizing itself in history.
In what way and why is man history ? Man is
history because the essence in virtue of which he is con-
traposed to the necessity of nature is freedom. Nature
is, mind becomes. Mind becomes, in so far as it is
free. This means that it realizes its end. Its life is
value, it is what ought to be. It is knowing truth,
creating images of beauty, doing good, worshipping
God. The man who is man for us is one who knows
truth and to whom we can therefore communicate our
CH. xiii THE POET AND THE MAN 203
truth (which we cannot do to the brute). When he
errs we believe he can be turned from his error in as
much as he can correct himself, that is, knows the
truth, not completely realized at a moment (that, strictly
speaking, would not be a realizing but an already
realized being) but in realizing it. This is the man
into whose society we enter and who in history is
our neighbour, since our society is not limited to
those few men of our time who come within the
sphere of direct personal relationship.
The language we speak, the institutions which
govern our civil life, the city in which we live, the
2. Explana- monuments of art which we admire, the
tions. books, the records of our civilization, and
the religious and moral traditions which, even if we
have no special historical interest, constitute our
culture, bind us by a thousand chains to minds not
belonging to our own time, but whose reality is present
in us and intelligible only as free spiritual reality. Our
historical consciousness is peopled with names of nations
and of men, the actors in this reality of civilization, its
prophets, artists, men of science, statesmen, generals.
With the energy of their minds they have created the
spiritual world which is the atmosphere in which our
soul breathes. To take an example, let us suppose it
is Ariosto s Orlando Furioso we are reading and enjoying,
finding in it food for our imagination and re-living it.
History can tell us the origin of this poem. It can
tell us that there was a man, Ariosto, who was the
author, whose mind, which created this work of art,
we can only know in the poem itself. Ariosto,
then, is a man for whom we can only find a place
in the world when we think it in the form of time and
in the form of space. In the series of years he was
204 THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY CH.
living from 1474 to 1533 of our era, and his life was
spent in the part of the spatial universe we name Italy,
and in various different localities of that peninsula.
But the Ariosto who wrote the Orlando Furioso does
not fill the fifty-nine years which elapsed between the
poet s birth and his death ; that Ariosto belongs only to
those years during which the composition and correction
of the poem occurred. And no more than we can say
that Ariosto is his own father can we call the Ariosto
of the years in which his poem was written the Ariosto
of his earlier years. The Ariosto of the years before
the poem, in the life he then lived, in his reading and
in the first essays of his art, is indeed the antece
dent which renders historically intelligible the author
of the poem, or rather, the reality of his divine poetry.
We see, then, that in knowing Ariosto we know
two quite different men : one is a mind, the un
conditioned, a condition of every conditionate, an
act which posits time and all temporal things ; the
other is a reality like any which is conditioned by its
antecedents. The one Ariosto is eternal, the other
historical. One an object of aesthetic criticism when
we see in Ariosto solely the eternal beauty of his art ;
the other an object of historical criticism, when we see
in Ariosto solely fact, conditioned in time and in space,
and intelligible, like every other fact, in relation to its
conditions.
If instead of a poet we take a philosopher, he will
in exactly the same way duplicate himself before us
into two personalities. One will be the personality of
the philosopher in reading whose works (if we under
stand them) we make his thought our thought.
Thereby we know it as mind, appreciate and judge it ;
it is his true personality in the strict meaning of the
xni THE PROCESS AND ITS STAGES 205
word. The other personality is that by which he is
fixed in the particular age in which he lived, and his
thought is determined by the conditions of the culture
of that age, or rather, by the historical antecedents of
his speculation. This being given he could not think
but as he did think, just as the animal born a cat does
not bark but mews.
In general, when the mind is historicized it is
changed into a natural entity ; when its spiritual
s History value only is kept in view, it is withdrawn
and spiritual from history and stands before us in its
values. eternal ideality. This presents no difficulty
so long as the eternal reality of mind comes to be con
ceived as a hypostasis of the content of mind, in the
way that Plato conceived the idea, which, in its tran
scendence, is, by definition, withdrawn from contact
with the historical flux. But when the transcendence
is demolished, and we conceive spiritual reality in its
eternity no longer as something fixed but as process
in act, then we no longer have history outside the
eternal, nor the eternal outside history. The difficulty
then consists precisely in the concept of reality which
is both eternal and historical. It consists in the concept,
by which, in the example of the Orlando Furioso, the
poem itself, even while we distinguish it in knowledge
from its antecedents, yet in itself is a process which
develops by degrees, each degree presupposing those
which have gone before and being what it is by reason
of them, and in that way conditioned by them. And
the philosophy of a philosopher, when we regard it in
its maturest and most perfect expression, can only be
understood as a system of ideas developed stage by
stage just as the poem is.
It was this difficulty of conceiving the eternity in
2o6 THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY
the history and the history in the eternity, which led
4. Plato and Plato to deny value to history and to
Protagoras. imprison all being in a transcendent reality.
And it leads the empiricists of all times (from
Protagoras onwards) to deny any absolute value,
any value raised above the plane of particular and
contingent conditions. And the antinomy arises from
the impossibility of confining ourselves either with
Plato to a transcendent value which is not mind
(a negation of history), or with Protagoras to the
purely historical fact of mind (a negation of its value).
It arises of necessity, for Plato and for Protagoras
alike, in their contradiction.
How is the antinomy solved ? It is solved, as all
antinomies are solved, by bringing the spiritual reality,
5. Solution of value and history, from abstract thought
the antinomy, to the concrete. The spiritual reality
actually known is not something which is different
from and other than the subject who knows it. The
Ariosto whom we know, the only Ariosto there is to
know, author of Orlando Furioso, is not one thing and
his poem another. And the poem which we know is
known when it is read, understood, enjoyed ; and
we can only understand by reason of our education,
and that is by reason of our concrete individuality. So
true is this, that there is a history not only of Ariosto,
but of criticism of Ariosto, criticism which concerns
not only the reality which the poem was in the
poet s own spiritual life, but what it continues to
be after his death, through the succeeding ages, in
the minds of his readers, true continuators of his
poetry. The reality of Ariosto for me then, what I
affirm and what I can refer to, is just what I realize
of it. So then, to realize that reality to the best of
THE POET AND THE POEM 207
my ability, I must at least read the poem. But what
does reading mean ? Can I read the poem unless I
know the language in which it is written ? And what
is the language ? Can I learn it from the dictionary
for all the writers of the same literature ? And can
I know the language of any writer as his language,
unless I take into account what there is individually
real in the process of a spiritual history, which no longer
belongs only to the empirically determined individual
but lies deep in the spiritual world in which the mind
of the writer lived ? And so we must say that reading
Ariosto means in some way reading what Ariosto had
read and re-living in some way the life which he lived,
not just when he began to write
Le donne, i cavalieri, 1 arme e gli amori ;
but before, long before, so long as we can trace back
the whole course of his life of which Orlando was the
flower. And this in substance is not two things, the
poem and its preparation taken together ; it is one
concrete thing, the poem in its process of spiritual
actuality. It will exist for us, always, in so far and
just so far as it is realized as the life of our own " we."
If we want to have the conditioned Ariosto we must
abstract him from this reality. When we have made the
abstraction we may then proceed, or try to
abstract his- proceed, to introduce him mechanically
torical fact and into the process to which he belongs.
the real process. Thg ^^ ^ ^ ^ process> fiut can
this process, in its actuality in which the reality of
the poem and its valuation lie, posit itself at every
moment as conditioned by its preceding moments ?
Evidently not, for the very reason that such condi
tioning supposes the pulverization of a process which
208 THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY
is real in its unity. It does indeed posit itself as
multiplicity, but as a multiplicity which is resolved
into unity in the very act in which it is posited, and
which cannot, except abstractly, be thought as a pure
multiplicity. So in like manner I can always distin
guish empirically my present from my past, and posit
in my past the condition of my present, but, in
so doing, I abstract from that true me, for whom past
and present are compresent in the duality by which
the relation of condition and conditionate is made
intelligible ; whereas the true me immanent in each
temporally distinct me, the past me and the present me>
is the root of this as of every other conditionality.
There are, then, two modes of conceiving history.
One is that of those who see nothing but the historical
7. The two f act in i ts multiplicity. It gives a history
concepts of which cannot treat mind without degrading
history. j t from a spiritual to a natural reality. The
other mode is ours, rendered possible by the concept
expounded above, of the spatialization of the One,
which posits the fact as act, and thereby, being posited in
time, leaves nothing at all effectively behind itself. The
chronicler s history is history hypostatized and deprived
of its dialectic ; for dialecticity consists precisely in the
actuality of the multiplicity as unity, and as unity alone,
which is transcended only in transcending actuality.
When, then, we say " historical process," we must
not represent the stages of this process as a spatial and
8 History temporal series in the usual way in which,
without space abstractly, we represent space and time as
a line, which, in the succession of its points,
stands before us as we intuit it. It is in the intuition
of the line, an intuition which constructs the line, by
always being and never being itself, that is, never being
xni THE TWO CONCEPTS OF HISTORY 209
the complete intuition it would be, that we ought
rather to say progress consists. The process is of the
subject ; because an object in itself cannot be other
than static. Process can only be correctly attributed
to the object in so far as in being actualized it is re
solved into the life of the subject. On the other hand,
the subject is not developed by realizing a stage of itself
and moving therefrom to the realization of a further
stage, since a stage from which the subject can detach
O O -J
itself, a stage which is no longer actuality or act of mind
in fieri, falls outside mind : a kind of Lucifer, a fallen
angel. Such a stage is an abstraction. It is a past which
the mind detaches from itself by making abstraction
from itself, and all the while the very abstraction is an
act affirmative of itself, and so an embrace by which the
mind clasps to itself this fallen Lucifer.
The antinomy, therefore, is solved in the concept of
the process of the unity, which in being multiplied
remains one. It is the concept of a history
the history which is ideal and eternal, not to be con-
which is eternal fused With VlCo s Concept, for that leaves
and of the outside itself a history which develops in
history in time. . , , . . . , r
time, whereas our eternal is time itself
considered in the actuality of mind.
The clearest confirmation we can give of the doctrine
of the identity of the ideal and eternal history with the
history which is developed in time, is that
10. Philo- . r i j
sophy and which in recent years has been formulated
history of i n Italy in the theory that philosophy and
t ! i * * *
history of philosophy are a circle. Empiri
cally we distinguish philosophy from its history ; not
in the sense in which Plato, or, according to tradition,
Pythagoras, distinguished divine philosophy (o-o^i a),
which is the true science of being, and human
210 THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY
philosophy ((/>t\oo-o</>ta), which is only an aspiration
towards that science : the one eternal in its transcend
ent position, the other subject to the becoming which
infects all natural things. We may say indeed that for
Plato a history of science, in the strict meaning, is
impossible, because for him either science has a history
and is not science, or is science and has no history.
The empirical distinction was made when the history
of philosophy first began to be a distinct concept (a
concept which did not arise before Hegel and the
general movement of Romanticism in the beginning
of the nineteenth century). It contraposes the history of
philosophy to philosophy, as the process of formation
can be contraposed to its result. Hegel, who has been
charged with having confused the history of philosophy
with his own philosophy, and also with having done
violence to the positivity of history by the rationalistic
logic of his system, did not fail to distinguish his own
philosophy from the whole historical process. He
conceived his own philosophy as a result, a recapitula
tion, or epilogue, an organization and system of all
the concepts which had been brought stage by stage
to the light, in the time of all the precedent systems.
For his method the history of philosophy is the con
dition of philosophy, just as no scientific research is
conceivable which is not connected with what has gone
before and which is not its continuation.
When we have made this distinction, and thereby
raised history of philosophy into a condition of
_, . , philosophy, it is obvious that the relation
n. The circle r J
of philosophy which makes philosophy a conditionate
and history of must be reversible. And so we find in
Hegel himself, and also in all historians
of philosophy who are conscious of the essentially
xiii PHILOSOPHY AND ITS HISTORY 211
philosophical as distinct from the philological value
of their discipline, the vital need of conceiving
philosophy as the necessary presupposition of its
history. If philosophy in re require as preparation for
it and development of it, the history of philosophy
which appears its antecedent, this history cannot
but be valued also post rem^ in the mind, as cognition
of the history of philosophy, since this cognition has
the value that it is the actual preparation for and
condition of an actual philosophy. Now were this
history of philosophy not what we have learnt and
therefore know, what could it be but the empty name
of a history which had no subject-matter ? And if it
be abstracted from present cognition, must it not be
after it has been learnt and, indeed, after it has been
reconstructed ? Or again, if it be reconstructible in
itself, must it not be reconstructed with precisely
those determinations which will fit it when it is, if it is,
reconstructed in act ? History, however, is ration
ally reconstructible history. How is it reconstructible ?
For Hegel the history of philosophy is reconstructible,
because, indeed, the philosophy is his own : so, too, with
every other philosopher, the philosophy whose history
he reconstructs is his own. Well, then, what will each
include in his own history as matter which belongs to
the history of philosophy ? A choice of material is
inevitable ; and a choice requires a criterion. And
the criterion in this case can only be a notion of the
philosophy. Again, every history disposes its own
materials in an order and in a certain perspective, and
each disposes its materials so that what is more important
stands out in relief in the foreground and what is less
important and more remote is pushed into the back
ground, and all this implies a choice among various
212 THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY
possible orders and dispositions. And this choice of
order and disposition of the already chosen material
itself also requires its criterion, and therefore the
intervention of a mode of understanding and judging
matter which here can only be a philosophy. So
we reach the conclusion that the history of philosophy
which must precede philosophy presupposes philo
sophy. And we have the circle.
For a long while it was suspected that it was a
vicious circle. Were it so, it would be necessary to
12. identity choose between a history of philosophy
and a solid which presupposed no philosophy but was
itself presupposed by it, and a history of
philosophy not presupposed by philosophy nor a basis
of it. But more accurate reflexion has shown that
the circle is not logically vicious, it is rather one of
those which Rosmini in his Logica calls solid circles
(circoli solidi), that is, circles which are unbreakable, or
regresses (regressfy as they were termed by Jacopo
Zabarella, the Italian sixteenth century philosopher. 1
1 Who wrote with insight : " Sicut rerum omnium, quae in universo
sunt, admirabilis est colligatio et nexus et ordo, ita in scientiis contingere
necesse fuit, ut colligatae essent, et mutuum sibi auxilium praestarent " (" De
Regressu, 1 in Rosmini, Logica, p. 274 n.). Rosmini, who founds his concept
of the solid circle on the " synthesizing character of nature " (sintesismo della
natura], formulates it thus : " The mind cannot know any particular
thing except by means of a virtual cognition of the whole," the mind therefore
has " to pass to the actual cognition of the particular by means of its
virtual acquaintance (nottzia) with the whole ; and to return from actual
particular cognition to the actual acquaintance, that is with some degree
of actuality of the whole itself" (p. 274). But the untenable distinction
between the virtual and the actual prevents Rosmini from perceiving the
deeper meaning of the circle. He will not let us take it as the identity
of the two terms bound together by the circle. It was impossible, indeed,
for him to give up the distinction of actual and virtual, because he had not
attained to the concept of process in which distinction is generated from
within identity itself. Hegel, on this matter more exact than Rosmini,
had said : " Philosophy forms a circle : it has a First, an immediate, since
ROSMINI S LOGICAL CIRCLE 213
And it has been shown that no philosophy is con
ceivable which is not based on the history of philosophy,
and no history of philosophy which does not lean on
philosophy, since -philosophy and its history are together
one as -process of mind. In the process of mind it is
possible to distinguish empirically an historical from
a systematic treatment of philosophy and to think
of either of the two terms as presupposing the other,
since speculatively the one is itself the other, although
in a different form, as the various stages of the spiritual
process considered abstractly are always different. 1
There is a difficulty, and it will meet us continually,
the difficulty of seeing clearly the identity of the
13. Objection process in which philosophy and history
and reply. of philosophy are identical and at the
same time, and while always maintaining their
identity, also different. It comes from the habitual
error we commit when, instead of conceiving the
two terms in the actuality of the thought which
thinks them, we presuppose them abstractly. It is
because both are conceived as external to the thinking
in which alone their reality consists that the necessity
arises of conceiving philosophy as external to the
history of philosophy and this as external to philosophy.
Instead, the history of philosophy, which we must
in general we must begin with something unproved, which is not a con
clusion. But what philosophy begins with is a relative immediate, since
from another end-point it must appear a conclusion. It is a consequence
which does not hang in air, it is not an immediate beginning, but is
circulating" (Grundlegen der Phil, des Rechts, 2, Zusatz). On the
circularity of thought consult the theory expounded by me in Sistema di
Logica, vol. i. pt. ii., and the " Superamento del logo astratto," in the Giornale
critico della filosofia italiana, i. (1920), pp. 201-10.
1 See on this argument chapter iii. and iv. of my Riforma delta
Dialettica hegeliana, and also one of my contributions to La Critica, 1916,
pp. 64 ff. Cf. Croce, Logica, pp. 209-21.
2i 4 THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY
keep in view if we are to see it as identical with
philosophy, is the history which is history of philo
sophy for us in the act of philosophizing. If from
that standpoint we should maintain the difference to
be pure difference, it is evident we should not be
able to think the history of philosophy at all, for
it would be different from his thinking who is the
philosopher philosophizing. Moreover, it cannot be
denied that the whole history of philosophy consists
in what has been philosophized, it is only history
of philosophy through philosophizing. So, on the
other hand, in making the history of philosophy we
imperil a system of concepts which is the historian s
philosophy. If I compare Kant s Critique of Pure
Reason with F. A. Lange s History of Materialism
(to instance the history of a Kantian philosopher),
Kant s philosophy is not Lange s history. And yet
the Kantian philosophy is the whole of Lange s his
tory, the whole history, that is, which is seen from
within the horizon of that definite thought which is
realized in the Critique. And, on the other hand,
Lange s History is Lange s system of thought, that is,
the whole philosophy which is such for him within
the ambit of the problems he propounds. Neither
in the one philosophy is there the whole of history
nor in the one history the whole of the philosophy, but
there is no specific difference which distinguishes
history of philosophy from philosophy. There are,
indeed, differences common to all parts, as we say,
or rather to all the determinations and individualiza-
tions of philosophy. We may distinguish them, for
example, as aesthetical, or ethical, or logical ; not one
of them is the whole of philosophy, yet each of them is
a philosophy always and whenever in the thinking
xni THE PHILOLOGICAL CONCEPTION 215
of a universal aspect of reality it really succeeds in
thinking systematically, however superficially, the
inner reality in its unity. For the totality of philosophy
does not consist in the scholastically encyclopaedic
completeness of its parts so much as in the logically
systematic character of the concepts in which it is
realized. A system embracing organically universal
reality may be contained in a most specialized essay
and altogether wanting in a voluminous encyclopaedia.
The identity of philosophy with its history is the
typical form and culminating point of the resolution
of temporal into eternal history, or indeed
14. The r . . J
history of or the facts or mind into the concept or
philosophy as spiritual act. It is the culminating point,
eternal history. because philosophy is the highest and at
the same time the concretest form of spiritual activity,
the form which judges all the others and can itself
be judged by none. To judge philosophy, in fact, is to
philosophize. He who looks at the history of philo
sophy with a philologist s eyes sees nothing in it
but facts which once were and no longer are thought ;
or regarding which the one thing that matters is that
they were, not that they are, thought with the value
of thought in the historian s eyes. 1 But this philological
conception is absurd because it postulates an objectivity
in historical fact, or rather it postulates the object of
historical knowledge, completely outside the subject,
a postulate there is no need for us now to criticize. As
actual fact there is no historian who does not take a
side in his history, bringing into it his own categories
of thought. These categories are indispensable not
1 By philology is meant the " knowledge of the known," to quote
F. A. Boeckh s definition, one which is in complete accord with Vico s
(except that in Vico the thought is profounder) " conoscenza del certo."
2i6 THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY CH.
merely for such judgment as he may bring to bear on
the facts after they have been presented in their strictly
objective configuration, but for the very intuition and
presentation of the so-called facts. The historian who
shows himself no partisan in indicating any particular
speculative direction is the sceptic who believes no
philosophy. But in the end, even the sceptic believes
his own sceptical philosophy and therefore in his way
takes a side, for scepticism indeed is itself a philosophy.
The sceptic judges all philosophies, and to judge philo
sophies is, as we have said, to philosophize.
The facts which enter into the history of philosophy
are all links of a chain which is unbreakable and which
in its wholeness is always, in the thought of the philo
sopher who reconstructs it, a whole thought, which by
a self-articulation and self-demonstration, that is, a
self-realization, becomes of itself a reality, in and
through the concrete process of its own articulations.
The facts of philosophy are in its past ; you think
them, and they can only be the act, the unique act of
your philosophy, which is not in the past, nor in a
present which will be past, since it is the life, the very
reality of your thought, a centre from which all time
irradiates, whether it be past or future. History, then,
in the precise meaning in which it is in time, is only
concrete in his act who thinks it as eternal.
Is there, then, another history besides the history
of philosophy ? Were there no other histories, it
is clear that our doctrine of the circle
problem of the of philosophy and its history would not
special be a special case of the identity of history
in time and eternal history, but would be
its full and absolute demonstration. Yet we do
distinguish from philosophy, (i) Art ; (2) Religion ;
SPECIAL HISTORIES 217
(3) Science ; (4) Life (that is, the will and practice
as distinct from the intellect and theory). So, then,
besides the history of philosophy, we have got, it seems,
to find a place for four other kinds of history ; with
this proviso, however, that each of these forms of
mind, in so far as it is distinct from the philosophical,
strictly has no history. This leads to an inquiry
of no slight interest in regard to the whole theory of
DO
mind.
NOTE
In section 14 of this Chapter I say that the unity of the history of
philosophy as forming a thinking which is one whole, belongs as of
right to the history of philosophy whose reality is in the thinking of the
philosopher who reconstructs it. This important consideration must,
I believe, have escaped the notice of my friend, Benedetto Croce,
when he disputed the difference here expounded between history of
art and history of philosophy, denying that " men have been exercised
over one unique philosophical problem, the successive and ever
less inadequate solutions of which form one single line of progress."
(Teoria e storia della storiografia, 2nd ed. Bari, Laterza, 1920, pp.
126-35 dnalogia e anomalie delle scienze specially
It is true that men have worked at problems which are always
different ; but man, mind, the spirit which is actually working in the
history of philosophy, works at one problem which is its own and
unique. System is not to be sought in a history in itself, which has no
existence, but in that real history of which Croce himself speaks with
such insight in the book referred to (p. 5), the history, as he says,
" which is really thought in the act which thinks it " (che realmente si
pensa nell atto che si pensa) : in the historian s mind who writes it.
The historian can only determine his object as the development of
his own concept, that is, of himself.
And I do not see how that endless multiplicity of philosophical
problems, each individually determined and therefore each different
from any and every other, which he finds rightly enough in the history
of philosophy, destroys the unity of the philosophical problem which
every historian finds and must always find in that history. Even for
Croce the difference of the distinctions does not exclude but rather
requires and implies the unity. So, too, when in his article " Inizio,
2i 8 THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY
periodi e caratteri della storia dell Estetica" (in Nuovi Saggi di Estetica,
Bari, 1920, pp. 108 ff.), he speaks of the different problems into which
from time to time the problem of art is transformed, it does not affect
the fact that out of all these distinct and various problems, by their
development, has come the concept of art, or rather, strictly, the con
cept which the historian of aesthetic has of art when he proposes
to write the history of aesthetic, and which is then the " unique "
problem of aesthetic, analogous to the unique problem of philosophy.
To deny the unity of the problem would compel us to reject
the doctrine of the concept as development ; and this is impossible.
It would even compel us to deny the unity of each of the single problems
among those, however many they be, which constitute the series ;
because every single problem is also complicated with many particular
problems, in knotting and unravelling which the thought of the whole
is articulated. Otherwise they would not be a thought but an intuition
beyond our grasp. But Croce certainly does not wish to take this path,
and to show how firmly he holds to unity we need only refer to the
chapter of his book entitled " La distinzione e la divisione," in which
he insists on the necessity of not separating the various special histories,
which in the concrete are all one history : general history (p. 107).
This, in its turn, is no other than philosophy in its development,
since history coincides with philosophy, that is, just with the history
of philosophy.
Analogous considerations are suggested by some of the corollaries
Croce deduces from the historical concept of philosophy. As when,
for example, he denies the concept of a fundamental or general philo
sophical problem, as almost a survival of the past, for the reason that
philosophical problems are infinite and all form an organism in which
" no single part is the foundation of all the others, but each by
turns is foundation and superstructure" (pp. 139-40). He himself
cannot but make a distinction in philosophy between a secondary and
episodical part and a principal and fundamental part (as he does at least
for ancient and medieval philosophy. Nuovi Saggi, p. 104) ; and he
even speaks of a philosophy in general or general philosophy (in genere
o generale, p. 88), and of a "fundamental philosophical inquiry"
(p. no), which with him, as we know, becomes an inquiry concerning
" the forms of the mind, and their distinction and relation, and the
precise mode of their relation to one another " ; and he cannot conceive
philosophy proper otherwise than as " the foundation and at the same
time the justification of the new historiography " (p. 285). It is true
that, having established the unity of philosophy and historiography
xiii CROCK S THEORY OF HISTORY 219
and admitted even the legitimacy of the partition of this unity into its
two elements, he does not think he is attributing other than a literary
and pedagogical value to this partition, it being possible " to bring
together on the same plane in verbal exposition now one now the other
of the two elements " (p. 136). But setting verbal exposition aside,
the logical position remains that philosophy, which Croce calls a
methodology of historiography, in its role of elucidating the categories
constitutive of historical judgments or rather of the directing concepts
in historical interpretation, is the basis and presupposition of philo
sophical historiography. And in a form relative and adapted to the
degree of philosophical reflexion possessed by the historian, it is always
the basis and presupposition of every definite historiography. This
surely means that what is fundamental in thought does not precede it
chronologically ; therefore it lives and develops in the dialectical unity
of thought itself together with the concurrent elements. Thus, to say
that the act of the subject is a synthesis of the position of the subject
and of the object does not affect the fact that the object may be
posited by the subject. What is true of philosophy is true of historio
graphy, not because the one is constituted before the other, but because
the unity which stands at the foundation of both when we distinguish
them one from another is philosophy and not historiography. It
is, that is to say, the active understanding, and not the object under
stood, in which that activity is made manifest. To say it is the
latter is, I am always insisting, to view the matter from the tran
scendental point of view.
CHAPTER XIV
ART, RELIGION AND HISTORY
IN introducing the concept of art in its distinction
from the concept of philosophy, I will first direct
i. The char- attention to what appears to me the
acterofart. crucial point in this distinction. A philo
sophical system excludes nothing thinkable from
the field of its speculation. It is philosophy in so
far as the real, which the mind aims at understanding,
is the absolute real, everything whatever which it is
possible to think. On the other hand, a work of art,
although it, too, expresses a world, expresses only the
artist s world. And the artist, when he returns from
art to life, feels that he returns to a reality different
from that of his fantasy. The poet courts life, but
a life whose value consists precisely in its not being
inserted into the life which the practical man sets
before him as his goal, nor into that which the philo
sopher tries to reconstruct logically in his thinking.
The impossibility of such insertion lies in the fact that
the poet s " life " is a subjective free creation detached
from the real, a creation in which the subject himself
is realized and, as it were, enchained, and posits himself
in his immediate abstract subjectivity. The kind of
dream situation described by Leopardi in his poem
" Alia sua Donna," and in his " Dialogo di Torquato
Tasso e del suo genio familiare," is what every poet
CH.XIV THE SUBJECTIVITY OF ART 221
and every artist experiences in regard to his own ideal,
and, in general, to every creature of his imagination. 1
1 The stanza of the poem is :
Viva mirarti omai
Nulla spene m avanza ;
S allor non fosse, allor che ignudo e solo
Per novo calle a peregrina stanza
Verra lo spirto mio. Gia sul novello
Aprir di mia giornata incerta e bruna
Te viatrice in questo arido suolo
lo mi pensai. Ma non e cosa in terra
Che ti somigli ; e s anco pari alcuna
Ti fosse al volto, agli atti, alia favella,
Saria, cosi conforme, assai men bella.
(Henceforth to behold thee living no hope remains, unless it should be
when my spirit, naked and alone, sets forth on new, untravelled ways to seek
its abiding-place. When my earthly sojourn newly opened, dark and drear,
even then I had my thought of thee, a wanderer on this barren waste. Yet
on earth is nothing which resembles thee, and were there anything even to
compare to thee in face, in action and in speech, however like it be to thee,
it still falls short of thy beauty.)
The following is the passage from the " Dialogue between Torquato
Tasso and his familiar Spirit."
Tasso. Were it not that I have no more hope of seeing Leonora again,
I could believe I had not yet lost the power of being happy.
Spirit. Which do you consider the sweeter, to see the loved lady, or
to think of her ?
Tasso. I do not know. When present with me she seemed a woman ;
far away she appeared and appears to me a goddess.
Spirit. These goddesses are so amiable, that when any of them approaches
you, in a twinkling they doff their divinity, detach their halo and put it
in their pocket, in order not to dazzle the mortal who stands before them.
Tasso. What you say is only too true. But does it not seem to you a great
fault in ladies, that they prove to be so different from what we imagine
them ?
Spirit. I do not see that it is their fault that they are made of flesh and
blood and not of nectar and ambrosia. What in the world possesses the
thousandth part or even the shadow of the perfection which you think
ladies have ? I", surprises me that you are not astonished to find men
are men, creatuico of little worth and unlovable, since you cannot under
stand why women are not angels.
Tasso. In spite of this I am dying to see her and speak to her again.
Spirit. Well, this night I will bring her to you in your dream. She shall
222 ART, RELIGION AND HISTORY
This is the deep ground of truth to which Manzoni
has given expression in an essay in which he subjects
2. Art and to criticism the historical novel as a form
history. o f art (Del romanzo storico e in genere
de componimenti misti di storia e d* invenzione). He
rightly rejects the romance which mingles invention
with history as poetry, because the poet s invention
or rather his creative subjective freedom is the very
essence of poetry, and poetry can allow no limitation
in the adjustment of it to the facts of historical
reality. Yet he is wrong in so far as he would
deduce from this an aesthetic defect in every his
torical romance. The poet can idealize history with
no greater restriction of his freedom than any other
abstract material taken as the object of his artistic
contemplation imposes on him. Has not Manzoni
himself idealized history in / promessi sposi ? The
history, indeed, or whatever the material of art be,
is not prized for any value it may possess in itself
considered in separation from the art which invests
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.
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.
ART ESSENTIALLY LYRICAL 223
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 " I " 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
- The Sanctis meant when he said, with equal
lyrical character truth, that art is form in which the con
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 person
ality, the very Leopardi who gives concrete life and
soul to a world which 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 sub
jectivity, is not opposed to the impersonality which
4. The im- ^ as Deen rightly held to be an essential
personality of character of art. Without this imperson-
art - ality where would be the universality,
infinity or eternity by virtue of which the work of
art at once soars above the empirical individual, be
coming a source of joy to all minds, conquering the
force of ages and endowed with immortality ? The
impersonality uf which Gustave Flaubert, 1 an exquisite
1 Cf. Antonio Fusco, La filosofia dell arte in Gustavo Flaubert,
Messina, 1917.
224 ART, RELIGION AND HISTORY CH.
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
I," 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-conscious
ness, 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
The indi- on ^y? tne thesis, in the spiritual dia-
viduality of lectic in which consciousness of the object
artistic work. ^ s other than self is the antithesis. Art
is consciousness of self, a pure, abstract, self-con
sciousness, 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 creat
ing 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.
Since, then, the most characteristic feature of art is
the raising of self-consciousness in its abstract im-
6. History of mediacy to a higher power, it thus de-
art as history taches itself from general consciousness
of philosophy. 1-11 11 r r
and withdraws into the dream or fantasy.
Hence it is clear that a history of art, in so far as it is
art, is inconceivable. Every work of art is a self-enclosed
INDIVIDUALITY OF ART 225
individuality, an abstract subjectivity empirically
posited among all other such in an atomistic fashion.
Every poet has his own aesthetic problem which he
solves on his own account and in such wise that it
withdraws him from any intrinsic relation with his
contemporaries and successors. Moreover, every poet
in each of his works propounds and solves a particular
aesthetic problem, so that his works, so far as we
regard exclusively their character as art, are the
expression of a spiritual reality fragmentary in its
nature and from time to time new and incommensur
able with itself. There is no genre, there are only
particulars. Not only is there not an aesthetic reality
such as literature, constituting for the historian of
literature a genre, the development of which he sup
poses himself to trace, but there is not even an aesthetic
reality answering to such a phrase as, for example,
"the art of Ariosto." Each of Ariosto s comedies,
satires, poems or other works, is an art by itself.
It is true we write histories of literature and of
the single arts, and, as we said in the last chapter,
to understand Ariosto is to understand his language,
and to do this we must get away from his poem, and
from himself as a definite individual, and go back and
immerse ourselves in the history of the culture out of
which has germinated his whole spirituality, the spiritu
ality expressed to us in the poet s words. But when
we have learnt the language and can read the poem,
we have to forget the whole of the long road we have
had to travel in order to learn it. Then there is our
own mentality acquired by what we have learnt and
what we have been, we have to loosen that and forget
ourselves in the poet s world and dream with him
drawing aside with him out of the high road along which
Q
226 ART, RELIGION AND HISTORY
in history spiritual reality travels, just as when we are
dreaming the world is forgotten and all the bonds
which bind us to the reality of the objects in which
dialectically our real life is made concrete are broken.
So though it is true that a history of the literature or art
of a people is possible, such as we have, for example,
in De Sanctis s Storia delta letteratura italiana^ one
of our noblest historical works, one in which we feel
as it were the very heart-beat of the dialectical life
of mind, yet if such a history would be something
more than a gallery or museum in which works
of art are collected which have no intrinsic art-
relation to one another, unless it be the light thrown
on them by the proximity of kindred works of the
same school or of the same period and therefore
generally of the same or similar technique, 1 if it
would be more than this then it can only be a history
of mind in its concreteness, out of which art bursts
forth as the plants spring from the soil. So that a
history of art in its aesthetic valuations must always
necessarily break the historical thread, and when the
ends are reunited the thread ceases to be a pure aesthetic
valuation. Aesthetic valuation is fused in the general
dialectic of history, the standpoint of which is the
unique value of mind as the constructor of history. In
short, when we are looking at art we do not see history
and when we are looking at history we do not see art. 2
Much the same, conversely, holds of religion. Re
ligion is not philosophy. We saw this when treating
7. Religion, of the immortality of the soul. Religion
may be defined as the antithesis of art. Art is the
1 Technique is an antecedent of art. In art technique is overcome and
annulled. This is clearly shown in B. Croce, Problemi di estetica, pp. 247-255.
2 Cf. " Pensiero e poesia nella Divina Comedia," in my Frammenti di
estetica, Lanciano, 1920.
xiv THE MOMENT OF RELIGION 227
exaltation of the subject released from the chains of
the real in which the subject is posited positively ;
and religion is the exaltation of the object, released
from the chains of the mind, in which the identity,
knowability and rationality of the object consists. The
object in its abstract opposition to knowing is the real.
By that opposition knowing is excluded from reality,
and the object is therefore eo ipso unknowable, only
affirmable mystically as the immediate adhesion of the
subject to the object. It is the position of Parmenides,
and from it Gorgias derived the first motive of his
negation of the possibility of knowing. 1 In its absolute
unknowability the object not only will not tolerate the
presence of the subject but will not even tolerate the
presence of other objects. And as there is no atomism
which does not necessarily resolve itself into unity, so
there is no pure polytheism which does not lead to
the idea of a higher divinity which confers the divine
power on all the others. The strictly religious
moment of religion can only be the moment of mono
theism, for in that the object is posited in its opposition
to the subject, and the subject cancelled, and there
remains no possibility of passing from it and positing
other objects, or of differentiating it in any way as
first. 2
If, then, we accept this position of the divine,
as the absolute, immobile and mysterious object,
c g Im _ is it possible for us, from the religious
possibility of a point of view, to conceive a history, a
history of development ? But a development can
only be of the subject, and religiously
the subject has no value. On the other hand it is
1 Cf. Sistema di Logica, i. pp. 151-153.
2 Cf. / discorsi di religione, Firenza, Vallecchi, 1920.
228 ART, RELIGION AND HISTORY
impossible that the mind should fix itself at the
simple religious standpoint by annulling itself as
subject, because the very annulling cannot occur
without an affirmation of the activity of mind.
Mind is borne, as by its own nature, from time to
time aloft above every religious standpoint, shaking
itself free in its autonomy by criticizing its concept
of the divine and thereby proceeding to ever more
spiritual forms of religion. So that in its religious
ness mind is immobile, it moves only by continually
overcoming its own religious moment and absorbing
it in philosophy.
The history of religion accordingly either takes a
rationalistic form, and then it depreciates the true and
. essential religiousness of every particular
9. History of & / r
religion as religion, by annulling the value which
history of each religion in claiming for itself cannot
philosophy. but deny to Qthers> History of religion
then becomes the history of the human mind, the mind
polarized in the moment of its antithesis, withdrawn
from its true dialectic, and dialecticized abstractly as a
consciousness in which the moment of free self-
consciousness is suppressed. It is then no longer a
history of religion but a history of the fundamental
dialectic of the mind, which is a synthesis of con
sciousness and self-consciousness in which religion
is deprived of its abstract religiousness and becomes
philosophy. Or the history of religion takes a form
which maintains the specific value of religion ; and
then it no longer finds matter for history. History
means development, that is a unity of a multiplicity,
whereas the religious consciousness admits no multi
plicity, it admits neither preparatory theophanies,
nor increase and progress such as a dogmatic
HISTORIES AND HISTORY 229
development which is other than a merely analytical
commentary. 1
As with art, so with religion, in each case his
tory is constructed by bringing it into the universal
history of the dialectical development of mind. In
this development art and religion are spiritual positions,
concepts of reality, and in being such are, essentially,
history of philosophy. So that a history of art and a
history of religion, in so far as they are really con
ceivable and therefore possible to carry out, are
histories of philosophy, and even so they are histories
in time which are resolved into an ideal history just
to the extent that they are shown in their own nature
to belong to the history of philosophy.
1 See Gentile, // modernismo e i rapporti tra religione e filosofia, Bari,
Laterza, 1909, pp. 65-78. For the whole of the discussion in this chapter
on the abstractness alike of art and of religion and of their concreteness in
philosophy, cf. Gentile, Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica, Bari,
Laterza (1913-1914), vol. i. part iii. chap. 4, and vol. ii. part ii. chaps. 2
and 4.
CHAPTER XV
SCIENCE, LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY
WE not only distinguish philosophy from art and
religion, we also distinguish it from science. Although
i. Science science has the cognitive character of philo-
and philo- sophy yet stricto sensu it is not philosophy,
sophy. j t j^g not t ] ie un i versa lit;y of its object
which philosophy has, and therefore it has not the
critical and systematic character of philosophy. Every
science is one among others and is therefore particular.
When a particular science transcends the limits of its
own special subject-matter it tends to be transformed
into philosophy. As particular, that is, concerned
with an object which itself is particular and can have
its own meaning apart from other objects which
coexist with it, science rests on the naturalistic pre
supposition. For it is only when we think of reality
as nature that it presents itself to us as composed of
many elements, any one of which can be made the
object of a particular investigation. A naturalistic
view is the basis, then, of the analytical character
of every science. Thence the logically necessary tend
ency of science in every period towards mechanism
and materialism.
Again, every science presupposes its object. The
science arises from the presupposition that the object
230
CH.XV PRESUPPOSITIONS OF SCIENCE 231
exists before it is thought, and independently alto-
2. Character- gether of being known. Had science to
isdcs of apprehend the object as a creation of
the subject, it would have first to pro
pound the problem of the position of the real in
all its universality, and then it would no longer be
science, but philosophy. In presupposing the object
as a datum to be accepted not proved, a natural
datum, a fact, every particular science is necessarily
empirical, unable to conceive knowledge otherwise
than as a relation of the object to the subject
extrinsic to the nature of both. This relation is
sensation or a knowing which is a pure fact on
which the mind can then work by abstraction and
generalization. Science, therefore, is dogmatic. It
does not prove and it cannot prove its two funda
mental presuppositions : (i) that its object exists ; (2)
that the sensation, the initial and substantial fact of
knowledge, which is the immediate relation with the
object, is valid. 1
Philosophy, on the other hand, proposes to prove
the value of the object, and of every form of the
3. Character- D J ect ) i n the system of the real, and its
istics of why and how. It gives, or seeks to give,
philosophy. an account not only O f t he existence of
the objects which the particular sciences dogmatically
presuppose, but even of the knowing (which itself
also is at least a form of reality) whereby every science
is constituted. And therefore philosophy, in being
systematic, is critical.
In science, in so far as it is particular, with the
naturalistic and materialistic tendency and by reason
1 On the dogmatic and non - systematic character of science cf.
Sistema di Logica, vol. i. Introduction, chap. i.
232 SCIENCE, LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY CH.
of it, there goes part passu the tendency to empiri-
4. The cism and dogmatism. Through these two
philosophy of tendencies science has continually come to
set itself up as a form of philosophy and
arrayed itself against the philosophy which has sought
by overcoming mechanism, empiricism and dogmatism,
to set forth the universal concept of the world in its
metaphysical ideality. And so science, in the very
spirit which rejects and opposes philosophy, is the
partisan of a philosophy : the feeblest and most naive
form which philosophy can assume.
In calling science naturalistic we do not mean to
identify it with the sciences of nature alone. Besides
5. Science and the natural sciences there are what are
naturalism. called the mental and moral sciences.
The moral sciences are equally naturalistic, in so far
as they also fail to attain the universality and system
of philosophy and have a particular and presupposed
object as a fact. All the moral sciences have this
character. This is why they are sciences and not
philosophy. They build upon an intuition of the
reality to which their object belongs, identical with the
naturalist s intuition of nature, and therefore, albeit
under another name, they conceive reality as nature.
Their reality is positive, in the meaning that it is pre
supposed and not posited by mind, it is therefore
outside the order and unity which belongs to mind,
pulverized in the inorganic multiplicity of its elements.
The value of mind is therefore for these sciences
inconceivable.
Even philosophy of mind ceases to be philosophy
any longer and becomes simply science when it seeks
to explain mind, both in its wholeness and in the
elements of which empirically it appears to be con-
THE MORAL SCIENCES 233
stituted, as a de facto reality. So, too, what is called
the general theory of law falls outside the proper ambit
of the philosophy of law, because it regards law as
simply a diversified phenomenology, a complex of
experiential data. The science with this subject-
matter must comport itself just as every natural science
comports itself towards the class of phenomena to
which it refers, determining its general characters
and de facto rules. 1 We may say then that strictly
philosophy has mind and the sciences have nature for
their object.
Even the mathematical sciences, which have them
selves established the postulates by which the world
of pure quantity is constituted, do not treat even their
own postulated reality in any way differently from the
natural sciences. They have in common the particu
larity of the object and the dogmatic character of the
propositions, a dogmatic character which results from
conceiving the object as self-subsisting in its absolute
necessity, confronting the subject which can do no
more in regard to it than presuppose it and analyse it.
Such being its nature, can there be a history of
science in the true meaning of history ? It is evident
6 impossi- *kat ^ or sc ^ ence there is no alternative, it
bilityofa must exclude the concept of a unique
history of history of science, for the very reason that
science. , , -
science breaks up into sciences, each of
which, in so far as it is science and not philosophy, is
separated from the others and has therefore no essential
relations with them. But besides being particular,
every science is, as we have said, empirical and dog
matic, because it presupposes the known to the
1 Cf. my Fondamenti della filosqfia del diritto, Pisa, Spoerri, 1916,
chap. i.
234 SCIENCE, LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY ea.
knowing, precisely as Plato presupposed the ideas,
which are purely the objects of its knowing, to the
mind which knows them. And for the same reason
that it is impossible to conceive a dialectic of the
Platonic ideas and therefore in the Platonic theory
a history of philosophy, it is impossible even
to conceive the history of science. There being a
definite reality to know, either we know it or we do
not know it. If it is partly known and partly not,
that can only mean that it has separable parts, and then
there is a part which is completely known and a part
which is completely unknown. Beyond truth, which
is posited in a form which has no degrees, there is
nothing but error, and between truth and error the
abyss. The history of the sciences in fact for the most
part assumed the aspect of an enumeration of errors
and prejudices, which ought to be relegated entirely
to the pre-history rather than to the history of science.
History ought to be the development of science, and
science as such can have no development, because it
presupposes a perfect truth which we cannot reach by
degrees but to which we suddenly leap. Therefore
the concept which completely fits the naturalistic
sciences is discovery, intuition, substantially identical
with the Platonic concept of the primitive and tran
scendent intuition of the ideas.
A history of a science is only possible on one
condition : it must not treat the science as a science
Th hi * n * ts particularity and in its dogmatic
tory of science character. Just as the history of art and
as a history of religion is rendered possible by resolving
the abstractness of each in the concrete-
ness of philosophy, so in the same way a history of a
science is possible. Every rational attempt at a history
xv DISCOVERY 235
of the sciences takes each particular science as a
development of the philosophical concepts which are
immanent in the science itself, by studying every form
of these concepts, not for the value the particular form
may have at a particular time for the scientific student
as an objective determination of reality, but as a degree
of mentality in perpetual formation by which the single
scientific problems are continually being set and solved.
The object it sets before itself is no longer the object
which is presupposed by the mind, but the life of the
mind. And it then becomes clear that the greater
concreteness of this history will not depend on the
single histories of the special sciences included in
it, but on its being a unique history, representing
the dialectical process of the thought which comes to
be realized as the thought of nature or as empiricist
philosophy.
When we reflect on the necessity which causes the
history of science to become identified with the history
s. Analoo-ies ^ philosophy we see that it has its root in
between science the fundamental identity of the epistemo-
and religion. logical position of scientific knowing with
art on the one hand and religion on the other.
Science, in so far as it is particular and non-systematic,
is, in regard to reality, in the position of art,
for art, as we have seen, is not philosophy because
its reality is a particular reality and therefore purely
subjective. On the other hand, in so far as science
does not posit its object but presupposes it as already
existing, it makes mind confront a real, whose reality
excludes the reality of the mind. Thereby it is in its
very nature agnostic, ready to say not only ignoramus,
but also, and primarily, ignorabimus, as religion does
before its unknown and fearfully mysterious god.
236 SCIENCE, LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY CH.
Ignorant of the true being of things, which is inscrut
able, science knows only what it calls the pure pheno
menon, a subjective appearance, as one-sided and
fragmentary as the poet s fantasies which only shine
forth in the imagination, in a dream in which the
mind is estranged from the real. Science, therefore,
oscillating between art and religion, does not unify
them, as philosophy does, in a higher synthesis, but
combines the defect and one-sidedness of each, the
defect of art in regard to objectivity and universality
with the defect of religion in regard to subjectivity
and rationality. Science claiming to be science in so
far as it abstracts from the one side or the other of
the concrete unity of mind, finds itself unable to
actualize itself unless it can overcome its abstractness.
This it can only do in the spiritual act which alone is
real as the inseparable unity of subject and object, the
unity whose process is philosophy in its history.
We have still to consider one term distinctive of
philosophy, life, practical activity, will. Were this
T reality something with a history of its own
opposition different from that of philosophy, it would
between theory seriously impugn our whole position of
and practice. ^ identity Q f philosophy with its his-
tory, because it concerns our fundamental concept, and
our principle, the concept of mind as unconditioned
reality.
But if we set aside the fantastic relations supposed
to exist between the will and external reality, relations
which empirical psychology tries in vain to rationalize,
making volitional activity intervene as a causality of
movement in a physical world presumed as transcend
ing psychical reality, if we set these aside, what
criterion of distinction is there between knowledge and
KNOWING AND WILLING 237
will ? Every time we contrapose the theoretical to the
practical we find we have first of all to presuppose the
reality intellectualistically, just as empiricism does and
just as Greek philosophy continued to do through
out its course, so precluding every way of identifying
mind with practical activity. For theory is opposed to
practice in this, that theory has reference to a world
which presupposes, whereas practice has reference
to a world which presupposes it. So that from the
theoretical point of view reality is either nature, or idea
which is not mind and cannot therefore be valued
otherwise than as nature. If, then, morality is the value
of a world which has its root in mind, it cannot be
conceived outside of the spiritual life. A philosophy
which does not intuitively apprehend reality as spiritual
and before Christianity no philosophy did has no
place for morality, nor indeed is it possible for it to
conceive practice in general. 1
Apart from the whole course of our inquiry so far,
it is now easy to prove that if we admit this twofold
view of mind, theoretical and practical, and maintain
that for mind as theoretical activity reality is not mind
but simple nature, the result is that we destroy
the possibility not only of conceiving the practical
activity but even of conceiving the theoretical. The
Pauline doctrine presents most vividly the conscious
ness of the opposition between the spirit (object of
practical activity) and the flesh or nature (object of
theoretical activity) ; but Paul makes shipwreck over
the concept of grace, a concept which has its origin
in the impossibility of really conceiving the creativeness
1 I have dealt with this subject in A. Rosmini, II principio delta morale,
Bari, Laterza, 1914 ; the Fondamenti della filosofia del diriito, chap. ii. ; and
the Discorsi di religione, Firenza, Vallecchi, 1920, chap. iii.
238 SCIENCE, LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY CH.
of mind as will, once the concept of nature is set up.
Indeed, if there is a world which already is all it can
be thought to be (and can we conceive anything which,
in being thought, is not assigned to the object of
the cognitive activity ?), and if we declare this world
to be a presupposition of mind and hence a reality
which must already exist in order that the mind
shall be and work, we can then no longer possibly
think that it is brought into being by the action of
mind. From the naturalistic standpoint (which is
necessarily an intellectualistic standpoint, so far, that
is, as mind is conceived as the merely theoretical
intellect) there is no place for a reality which has its
roots in the mind. And yet, on the other hand, if the
intellect be merely cognitive and if the whole of reality
is posited as its presupposition, how is it itself con
ceivable ? Lying outside the whole it cannot but
be nothing.
In all this there is nothing new. We are but looking
back and recapitulating an age-long argument, clear
10 Solution to demonstration in the history of philo-
ofthe sophy, that a concept of mind as wholly
antithesis. or p ar tially theoretical, in the meaning in
which theory is contraposed to life, is absolutely
untenable. Life, natural or spiritual, is the reality :
theory is merely its contemplation, extraneous to its
process, hovering over the world when its long-drawn
day is advanced towards evening. The concept is an
impossible one. There is no way of conceiving know
ledge except as a creation of the reality which is itself
knowledge and outside which other reality is incon
ceivable. Reality is spiritual, in self-creating it creates
will, and equally it creates intellect. The one creation
is identical with the other. Intellect is will and
ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE 239
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,
8 ii. Meanino- or w ^l ^ s not intellect, but because
of the thought, the real and living act of mind,
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
good 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 com
pare 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 impos
sible. 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 it : an object,
not a subject. And equally when an action is com
pleted 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
2 4 o SCIENCE, LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY CH.XV
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 confirma
tion of the absoluteness of the spiritual reality, incon
ceivable 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. 1
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. i.
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
x. The in a multiplicity of objects, reconciling
beginning and their multiplicity and objectivity in its own
Sub J eCt lt is a theor 7 Which
withdraws from mind every limit of space
and time and every external condition. It declares
that a real internal multiplication which would make
one of its moments a conditionate of anterior moments
is inconceivable. Hence history is not the pre
supposition 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. When the
concept as self- reality appears multiple it is because we
concept. ,i , ,
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 in
trinsically determined, mediated, unfolded, in all the
242 REALITY AS SELF-CONCEPT
multiplicity of its positive moments. Consequently,
since the unity is of the subject who conceives the
concept, the multiplicity of the concepts of things can
be no more than the superficial shell of the nut whose
kernel is one concept only, the concept of the subject-
centre of all things. So that the true concept, that
\ which alone has a right to be called the concept, is
\the self-concept (conceptus sui). And since we can
only speak of reality, in the universal, by means of
concepts, so that the sphere of the real osculates with
the sphere of the concept, the necessity of conceiving
the concept as conceptus sui carries with it also the
necessity of conceiving reality as conceptus sui. That
is, the subject who in conceiving the whole conceives
himself is the reality itself. It is not, as Schelling,
following out in all its consequences the neo-Platonic
speculation, supposed, first reality and then concept
of self (first Nature, and then Ego), but only self-
consciousness or the self-concept, precisely because
the concept cannot be understood except as conceptus
sui. The concept of natural reality, which is not yet
I, would not be the concept of self but of other.
This concept of the concept, it is now clear, per
meates the whole of metaphysics as science of know-
3. its meta- ledge, and puts logic in a new light ; for
physical value, logic has hitherto been understood as a
science of the concept in itself, abstracted from the
subject who thinks it, as though the concept had for
its object the whole of reality, the subject included,
reality conceived naturalistically, or idealistically in the
manner of Plato. 1
The other concept, the goal which all our doctrine
1 With regard to the concept as conceptus sui, cf. Gentile, Modernismo,
p. 202 ; Sommario di Pedagogia, i. pp. 72-75 ; and Sistema di Logica, vol. ii.
FORM AND MATTER 243
has in view is the concept of absolute formalism, as
4. Absolute the conclusion of every science of mind, or
formalism. rather of every real science. For science
must, if it would gain a full understanding of its own
object, rise from reality as nature to a complete grasp
of the concept of reality as mind. If we mean by form
and matter what Kant meant when he called form
the transcendental activity of the mind by which the
matter of experience is shaped into a world, the con
tent of consciousness, all that we have explained of the
relation between mind and whatever we can consider
as opposed to mind authorizes us to conclude that there
is no matter outside form, neither as formal matter, that
is, elaborated by the activity of the form, nor as raw
material on which it might appear that such activity
had yet to be exercised. Matter is posited by and
resolved into form. So that the only matter there is
in the spiritual act is the form itself, as activity. The
positive is the form itself, it is positive in so far as it
posits, not in so far as it is, as we say, posited.
Even these two concepts, form and matter, appar
ently so fundamental in their difference, are only one
s 5. The form concept. They are the Alpha and Omega
as activity. of an alphabet which form not a straight
line but a circle whose end is its beginning. Form,
in fact, can be and must be meant as absolute, it
has not matter confronting it, in so far as it is con
ceived not only as activity 1 but as an activity which
produces nothing which it expels from itself and leaves
outside, inert and brute, nothing therefore which it
1 Even before Kant, Spinoza had observed this. " Nee sane aliquis
de hac re dubitare potest, nisi putet ideam quid mutum instar picturae in
tabula, et non modum cogitandi esse, nempe ipsum intelligere," Ethics, ii.
prop. 43 sch.
244 REALITY AS SELF-CONCEPT
posits before thought as radically different from thought
itself. So that to conceive thought as absolute form
is to conceive reality as conceptus sui.
In this concept we have the guiding thread which
will lead us out of the labyrinth in which the human
6. The limit mind has been for ever straying, striving
of mind. after and yet failing to touch anything
real outside itself, and always finding itself at grips
with something, the identification of itself with which
is repugnant to its deepest demands, evil (pain, error,
sin), nature. Let us take care that the thread does
not break in our hands.
If reality be conceived as posited, already realized,
evil is inconceivable. For evil is what ought not to
be, what is opposed to the mind in so far
as the mind is what ought to be and sets
itself before itself as an end to be reached, and which
mind in fact reaches by the manner in which it posits
it. What else is pain but the contrary of the pleasure
which for each one is, as Vico said, the proclaiming
his own nature ? The mind s not-being, that is what
is painful. Now if mind (the reality as concept)
has being, in the meaning of Parmenides, there is no
longer any place for pain. But mind is the negation
of Parmenides s being, because in so far as it thinks
it is doing) the non-being of being. So that it is in
not being : it fulfils its real nature in so far as this is
not already realized and is in process of realization.
And hence mind finds itself always confronting itself
as its own negation. Hence, too, the providential pain
which spurs us on from task to task, and which has
been always recognized as the inner spring by which the
mind progresses and lives on condition of progressing.
Thus the truth of the concept is assured, because
TRUTH AND ERROR 245
truth is nothing but the attribute which belongs to
thought as concept. Were the concept an immediate
self-identity with no difference within it as
8. Error. . J . . .
a stone is a stone and two is two, neither
more nor less than the determinate sum-total of what is
thought, then error would be inconceivable. For error,
therefore, we have to repeat the argument in regard to
pain. The concept is not already posited but is the
positive which posits a process of self-creation which
has as its essential moment its own negation, the error
opposed to the true. So there is error in the system
of the real in so far as the development of its process
requires error as its own ideal moment, that is, as a
position now passed and therefore discounted. Prove
any error to be error and no one will be found to
father and support it. Error only is error in so far as
it is already overcome, in other words, in so far as it is
our own concept s non-being. Like pain, therefore,
it is not a reality opposed to that which is mind
(conceptus sui), it is that reality, but looked back on as
one of its ideal moments before its realization.
What we have said of theoretical error applies
equally to practical error or moral evil, since intellect
9. Error itself is will. We may even say that
as sin - will is the concreteness of intellect. So
the true conceptus sui is that world self-consciousness
which we are not to think of as an abstract philo
sophy (contraposed to life), but as the highest
form of life, the highest peak to which as mind
the world can rise. A form which does not rise so
high as to cease to be the ground and foundation,
the one and single form as it expands from base
to apex of the pyramid of life. You conceive the
world as other than yourself who conceive it, and the
246 REALITY AS SELF-CONCEPT
necessity of that concept is a pure logical necessity
because it is abstract. But you conceive the world
(as you should and at bottom perhaps always do
conceive it) as your own reality, there being no
other, a self-possessed reality, and then you cannot
suppose it outside the necessity of your concept as
! though the law did not concern you. The rationality
of your concept will appear to you as your own law,
as duty. What else indeed is duty but the unity of the
law of our own doing with the law of the universe ?
And what else is the immorality of the egoist, with
eyes only for his own interest, if it be not the separation
he makes between himself and the world, between its
law and his law ? The history pfmqrality is the history
of an ever more spiritualistic understanding of the
world. Every new step we take, in ideally tending to
the formation of the moral consciousness, is a deepening
of the spiritual meaning of life, a greater realizing ofi
reality as self-conceived.
Will it ever be possible, then, to attain perfect good
ness (an earthly or a celestial paradise) in a vision of the
whole infinite mind if the mind which is the good
will as full spiritual reality can only be conceived as
development ? How can we conceive, either at the
beginning or at the end or at any intermediate time,
the mind stainless and sinless, if the good will is effort
and conquest ? If its being is its non-being ?
When once the concept of reality as self-con
cept is understood, we see clearly that our mind s
real need is not that error and evil should
10. I he error
in truth and disappear from the world but that they
the pain in should be eternally present. Without
error there is no truth, without evil there
is no good, not because they are two terms bound
MAKING SIN IMPOSSIBLE 247
to one another in the way that Plato, 1 following
Heracleitus, said pleasure and pain are bound together,
but because error and evil are the non-being of
that reality, mind, the being of which is truth and
goodness. Mind is truth and goodness but only
on condition that it is making them in conquering its
own inner enemy, consuming it, and therefore having
always the need of conquering and consuming, as the
flame needs fuel. A mind which already is mind is
nature. A moral character already constituted as a
means of governing conduct mechanically and making
sin impossible in the same meaning in which, given the
law of gravity, it is held impossible for a body lighter
than air to fall to earth, is, as any one may easily under
stand, the negation of all true and real moral feeling.
It is the negation of the freedom which Kant rightly
held essential for the moral mind.
1 " Socrates, sitting up on the couch, bent and rubbed his leg, saying, as
he was rubbing : How singular is a thing called pleasure, and how curi
ously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it ;
for they are never present to a man at the same instant, and yet he who
pursues either is generally compelled to take the other ; their bodies are
two, but they are joined by a single head. And I cannot help thinking
that if Aesop had remembered them, he would have made a fable about
God trying to reconcile their strife, and how, when he could not, he
fastened their heads together ; and this is the reason why when one comes
the other follows : as I know by my own experience now, when after the
pain in my leg which was caused by the chain pleasure appears to succeed."
Phaedo, 60 B-c (Jowett s translation). This is all very true but not the
whole truth. Strictly speaking, Socrates not only has pleasure because
he has had pain (which is now a mental image in time), he also had pleasure
even while experiencing the pain in so far as he perceived that it was pain.
For perceiving, like scratching, is an activity, however small its degree. And
this comes to saying that pleasure and pain, like positive and negative, are
not outside one another. The negative is contained in the positive in so
far as the positive is its own process. Both are one reality. Pessimism
with its abstract conception of a limit which it would draw close round
the whole life of the mind, does not understand the reality because it is
itself a misunderstanding.
248 REALITY AS SELF-CONCEPT CH.
There are not, then, error and truth, but error in
truth as its content which is resolved in its form.
Nor are there good and evil, but evil by which good is
sustained, in its absolute formalism.
The problem of the Nature which mind finds
always confronting it and therefore holds to be a
presupposition of its own being, is identical
n. Nature. r . . r . r , . r , & , -
with the problem or pain, or error and or
evil. Like Bruno s Amphitrite, from whose womb all
forms are generated and to whose womb all return,
mind, which in its concrete position contraposes itself
to itself, strives thereby to obtain all the nutriment it
needs for its life from beginning to end.
The self-concept, in which alone mind and all that
is is real, is an acquiring consciousness of self. This
, Self is inconceivable as something anterior
12. The &
immanence of to and separate from the consciousness of
nature in the which in the self-concept it is the object.
It is realized then in realizing its own
object, or, in other words, it is realized in the position
affirmed when the self is subject and that identical
self is object. It is the I. It is the spiritual reality.
It is an identity of self with self, but not an identity
posited in its immediacy, so much as an identity which
is posited in reflexion. It duplicates itself as self
and other, and finds itself in the other. The Self
which would be self without other would clearly not
be even self because it only is in so far as the other is.
Nor would the other were it not itself be other,
because the other is only conceivable as identical with
the subject. That is, in affirming reality, the subject
which affirms is the reality which confronts it in the
affirmation.
If we accept this doctrine that dialectic is mind
THE DIALECTIC 249
in its life, that outside it there is nothing we can
13. Reality S ras P but snadows > intelligible only in
of mind as relation to the bodies which cast them,
reality of the three concepts emerge as equally neces
sary : (i) The reality of the subject, as
pure subject ; (2) the reality of the object, as pure
object ; (3) the reality of mind, as the unity or process
of the subject, and the immanence of the object in the
subject.
Were there no subject what would think ? Were
there no object what would the thinker think ? It is
14. Necessity impossible to conceive thought without
of the object, personality, because thought, however
dogmatic or sceptical the form of it we would posit,
is conceptus sui. It is " I." Thence thought is not
mere activity but an activity which relies on itself,
and therefore posits itself as a person. But none
the less it is equally impossible to conceive thought
without its term or fulcrum, because the concept of self
realizes the Self as object of knowledge. Thought,
then, is conceivable on condition that whenever and
in so far as the subject is conceived the object also is
conceived. Each is real since thought is real, but
nothing is real outside thought.
But even thought would itself be inconceivable if
the subject in being the opposite of the object were
15. The not at tne sam e time the object itself, and
spirituality of vice versa. The reason of this is that the
opposition is inherent in the concept of
thought as conceptus sui. The opposition is between
self and self. The difference and otherness belongs
wholly to the self or I. It is a relation which will
never be intelligible so long as we try to understand
it by the analogy of other kinds of relation. The
25
REALITY AS SELF-CONCEPT
A
y
"I," to be exact, is not different from itself, but
differentiates itself, thereby positing its own identity
as the basis of its own difference. So that the thesis
and the antithesis, concurrent in the reality of the
self-consciousness (being and not being subject), have
their fundamental reality in the synthesis. The
synthesis is not subject and object, but only subject,
the real subject, realized in the process by which it
overcomes the ideality of the pure abstract subject and
the concomitant ideality of the pure abstract object. /
This synthesis as the concrete reality of self-conscious
ness is the process which is not fact but act, living and
eternal act. To think anything truly, means to realize
it. And who does not know that it is to this realization
mind is working, that it may establish the fulness
of freedom, the reign of mind, or regnum hominis in
which all human civilization, all lordship over nature
and subjection of it to human, that is, to spiritual ends,
consists ? What is the progressive spiritualization of
the world but the realization of the synthesis, which
reconciles opposition even by preserving it, in the unity,
which is its own ground and its whole meaning ?
But this human perfectibility, this ever more
powerful lordship of man over nature, this progress
16. The an d increase of the life of mind triumphing
world as an ever more surely over the adverse forces
eternal history. o na t ure) conquering them and subduing
them, even within the soul itself, making, as Vico
said, of the very passions virtues, this march of
humanity, as we usually picture it, with its stages,
through space and time, what is it but the empirical
and external representation of the immanent eternal
victory, the full and absolute victory, of mind over
nature, of that immanent resolution of nature in mind,
THE REGNUM HOMINIS 251
which, like the concept of the necessary reconcilia
tion of temporal history in ideal and eternal history, is
the only possible speculative concept of the relation
between nature and mind ?
Descend into your soul, take by surprise in its
essential character, as it is in the living act, in
17 The tne quivering of your spiritual life, that
meaning of our " nature" which grows so formidable in
non-bemg. a }j fa e vastness of time and of space which
you confer on it. What is it ? It is that obscure limit
of your spiritual being beyond which your living spirit
is ever passing out and to which it is ever returning.
It is the limit which marks the boundary of the Kantian
phenomenon, as in ancient philosophy it used to
stand behind the subjective sensation of Democritus
and Protagoras, concealing from thought a chaos of
impervious and raw materiality. It is the limit
which Plato found at the margin of his ideal being,
the dark hemisphere encircling the horizon of the
luminous heaven of thought. It is the limit which
even to Hegel seemed to set bounds to logic and to
demand a crossing of it by the Idea which makes
nature, by descending into space and time and break
ing its own unity in the dispersed multiplicity of the
existents which are its particulars. Seen from within
your soul, is not this " nature " your own non-being,
the non-being of your own inward commotion, of the
act by which you are to yourself? It is not your non-
being as something existing for others to recognize.
It is the non-being which belongs to your act itself ;
what you are not and must become, and which you
bring into being by the act which posits it. Consider
any definite object of your thought whatsoever, it can
be no other than your own definite thought itself. It
252 REALITY AS SELF-CONCEPT CH.XVI
is what you have thought and what you in your actual
consciousness have set apart as object. What else is
it but a form of your non-being, or rather of the ideal
moment to which you must contrapose it, and which
you must contrapose to yourself in order to be yourself
a definite real ?
Nature, like mind, has two faces, one which looks
outward and one which looks inward. Nature seen
Th from without, as we see it before us, a
eternal past of pure abstract object, is a limit of mind
the eternal an d rules it. Whence it is that mind
cannot see even itself from within, and
conceives itself mechanically, in space, in time, without
freedom, without value, mortal. But nature has
another face. It is that which it presents to our view
when, awaking from that dream which for ordinary
common sense is philosophy, and arousing ourselves,
and strenuously reasserting our personality, we find
nature itself within our own mind as the non-being
which is life, the eternal life which is the real opposite
of what Lucretius called mors immortalisl Nature, then,
is the eternal past of our eternal present, the iron necessity
of the past in the absolute freedom of the present.
And beholding this nature, man in his spiritual life
recovers the whole power of the mind and recognizes
the infinite responsibility which lies in the use he
makes of it, rising above all trivial incidents of the
universal life, such as resemble in the ordinary view
the buzzing of insects on the back of the unfeeling
Earth, and attending to the life breath of the Whole
whose reality culminates in self-consciousness.
1 Lucretius, De rerum natura, Hi. 869, " mortalem vitam mors cum
immortalis ademit."
CHAPTER^ XVII
EPILOGUE AND COROLLARIES
WE may now briefly sum up the main features of the
doctrine we have sketched.
An absolute idealism cannot conceive the idea
except as thought in act, as all but consciousness
s i The f tne idea itself, if we keep for idea the
characteristic objective meaning, which it originally had
of idealism. ln p} a t O) anc | which it continues to have
in common thought and in the presuppositions of
scientific knowing, that of being the term of thought or
intuition. On the other hand, an idealism which is not
absolute can only be a one-sided idealism or half-truth,
which is as much as to say an incoherent idealism. It
may be transcendent, like Plato s, which leaves matter,
and therefore the becoming of nature, outside the idea.
It may be immaterial, like Berkeley s, for which all is
idea except God, the reality who makes perception be.
It may be critical or transcendental, like Kant s, in which
the idea is a mere unifying activity of a manifold arising
from another source, and the idea therefore supposes
its opposite, an unknowable, which is the negation
of the idea itself. An idealistic conception aims
at conceiving the absolute, the whole, as idea, and
is therefore intrinsically absolute idealism. But
absolute it cannot be unless the idea coincides with
254 EPILOGUE AND COROLLARIES CH.
the act of knowing it, because and here we find
the very root of the difficulty in which Platonism is
entangled were the idea not the act itself through
which it is known, it would leave something outside
itself, and the idealism would then no longer be
absolute.
An idealism conceiv d strictly in this meaning fulfils
the task which Fichte assigned to philosophy and
2. The named Wissenschaftshhre ; a task not ful-
doctrine of filled even by Hegel, for he presupposed to
knowing. the a b so i ute i^a or tne idea f or itself, the
idea in itself and the idea outside itself. That is, to
the absolute idea he presupposed logic and nature.
In the final solution of the cosmic drama these acquire
in the human mind the self-consciousness to which they
aspire and of which they have need. Self-consciousness
must therefore be said to be their true essence. Hegel s
use of the " I " of Fichte, in order to solve the
difficulty Fichte s conception gave rise to from the
abstractness of his concept of the " I," an " I " incap
able of generating the " not-I " from its inward nature
as " I," ends in destroying rather than in establishing
the absolute reality of the " I." The " I " is not
absolute if it has something outside it on which it is
based, instead of being the foundation of everything
and therefore having the whole within itself. The
defect of Hegelianism is precisely that it makes what
ever presupposes the " I " precede it. Even without
this defect it is unfaithful to the method of immanence
which belongs to absolute idealism, and turns again to
the old notions of reality in itself which is not the
thought by which it is revealed to us. 1
The idealism which I distinguish as actual inverts
1 Cf. the last chapter of my Riforma della dialettica hegeliana.
ACTUAL IDEALISM 255
the Hegelian problem : for it is no longer the question
3. The f a deduction of thought from Nature and
principle of of Nature from the Logos, but of Nature
actual idealism. and the L ogos f rom thought. By thought
is meant present thinking in act, not thought defined
in the abstract ; thought which is absolutely ours, in
which the " I " is realized. Aid through this inversion
the deduction becomes, what in Hegel it was impossible
it could become, the real proof of itself which thought
provides in the world s history, which is its history.
The impossibility of the Hegelian deduction arises
from the fact that it starts from the abstract and seeks
to attain the concrete, and to pass from the abstract
to the concrete is impossible. The concrete for the !
philosopher is his philosophy, thought which is in
the act of realizing itself, and in regard to which the
logic of the real, which governs that thought itself,
and the Nature on which that logic must be posed as
a pedestal of the history of thought, are alike abstract.
From the concrete to the abstract, on the other hand,
there is but one passage, the eternal process of self-
idealization. What else indeed is the act of thought,
the " I," but self-consciousness or reality which is
realized in being idealized ? And what is the idealiza
tion of this reality, realized just when it is idealized,
but the dualizing by which the act of thought balances
itself between the two selves, of which the one is
subject and the other object only in their reciprocal
mirroring of one another through the concrete and
absolute act of thought ? The dualizing implies an
inward differentiating of the real which in idealizing
itself distinguishes itself from itself (subject from
object). The " I " knows, therefore, when it finds
itself in its ideality confronting itself in its reality as
256 EPILOGUE AND COROLLARIES CH.
different from itself. And it is in fact radically
different. It is the negation of the real which is
idealized. The one is act, the thinking, the other is
what is thought, the opposite of thinking.
The thinking is activity, and what is thought is a
product of the activity, flat is, a thing. The activity
as such is causa sui and therefore it is freedom. The
thing is a simple effect which has the principle of its
own being outside it, and therefore it is mechanism.
The activity becomes, the thing is. The thing is as
other, a term of the relation to an other. In that is
its mechanistic nature. Thereby it is one among many,
that is, its concept already implies multiplicity, number.
The activity, on the contrary, realizes itself in the
other, or rather it is realized in itself as other. It is
therefore a relation with itself, an absolute, infinite
unity, without multiplicity.
The multiplicity of the thing thought implies the
reciprocal exclusion of the elements of the multiplicity
and thereby space. The thing thought is nature. It
is nature in so far as it is the idea in which the reality
has been revealed to itself. So that the Platonic
idealism is a pure naturalism rather than a spiritualism.
It is the affirmation of a reality which is not mind, and
if there be such a reality mind is no longer possible.
This is the characteristic alike of a transcendent ideal
ism like Plato s, and of the crudest materialistic
naturalism.
The difficulty we all experience in understanding
this new deduction of nature from the idea as thought
4. Deduction is due to the fact that we entirely lose
of nature. sight of the abstractness of the nature we
are proposing to deduce, and restrict ourselves to the
false common notion of nature which represents it as
INTELLECTUALISM 257
concrete and actual reality. In so doing we are
ignoring entirely the true character of actual thought
as absolute reality. For naturalism has always been
the necessary consequence, and as it were another
aspect, of intellectualism. We can indeed define
intellectualism as the conception of a reality which
is intended as the opposite, and nothing but the
opposite, of mind. If mind has such independent
reality confronting it, it can only know it by presup
posing it already realized, and therefore by limiting
itself to the part of simple spectator. And the nature
it will then know is not what it may see within itself,
that would be spiritualism ; but what is other than
itself. That alone is nature. But this nature of the
intellectualist does not require to be deduced. Were
there such an obligation it would be a sign that the
intellectualist is right ; and then it is no longer a
case of deducing nature because, in the intellectualist
position, it is itself the first principle. Indeed the
problem of the deduction of nature does not arise
until we have left the false standpoint of intellectualism
and so got rid of the illusion of a natural reality.
In this way we can easily perceive the abstractness
of the thing thought as such, or rather of nature in so
5. Nature as far as it stands opposed to mind. And
abstract nature, then this mysterious nature, impenetrable
by the light of the intellect, appears a simple
moment of thought : a moment whose spirituality
is unveiled in all its purity directly we come to
think it in act, in the concrete from which it has
been abstracted, in the act of thought in which it is
really posited. Since it is impossible and that it
is so should now be abundantly clear to every one
to fix cognitively in the real world, and as it were to
s
258 EPILOGUE AND COROLLARIES CH.
surprise, a natural reality without positing it as an
idea corresponding to a certain moment of our repre
sentative activity and thereby converting the opaque
solidity of nature into the translucent inwardness of
thought.
There is also in what is thought, taken in itself, a
double nature, and its intrinsic contradiction is a form
6 Double f the res tless activity of thought. What
aspect of what is thought cannot be what is now think-
is thought. ab i e Decause j t j s w h at j s thought, and it
is what is thought just because not thinkable. The
thing thought is thing, nature, matter, everything
which can be considered as a limit of thought, and
what limits thought is not itself thinkable. The
thing thought is the other of the thinking, or the term,
which when it is reached we feel the thinking is
stopped. The essence of that other is destined always
to be withdrawn from view. We can know the pro
perties or qualities, but behind them there remains the
thing, unattainable. And so with everything thought,
it is on this condition it is thought, because everything
thought is thing, and in so far as it is such, incom
mensurable with mind.
And yet, because not thinkable, the thing is thought :
the thinking is the thing s very unthinkability. It is
not in itself unthinkable beyond the sphere of our
thinking ; but we think it as not thinkable. In its
unthinkability it is posited by thought, or better still,
it is as unthinkable that it is posited. For it is the
nature of thought to affirm, and it is only in affirming
that it is. By this I mean that if we regard thought
as simply what is affirmed, as the conclusion or result
of the affirmation, it is no longer an affirming, nor
even a thinking. And as thought cannot not be
xvn ACT WHICH IS NEVER FACT 259
thought, it affirms itself without being fixed as an
affirmation. That is, it posits itself as act which is
never fact, and thereby it is pure act, eternal act.
Nature in the very act in which it is affirmed is denied,
that is, spiritualized. And on this condition only can
it be affirmed.
Nature, then, is an abstract conception of the real,
and cannot be given except as an abstract reality.
7. The nature The thought in which my I is
of the "I." actualized can only be mine. When
thought is not mine, when in my thinking I do
not recognize myself, do not find myself, am not
living in it, the reality which comes to be the
thought in which my thought meets itself, in which,
that is, I meet myself, is for me nature. But to be
able to conceive this nature as absolute reality I must
be able to think the object in itself, whereas the only
object I can think is an aspect of the actual subject.
And also, be it noted, this object is not one which
has only a value for knowledge. It is a reality intrinsi
cally metaphysical. The " I," from whose dialectical
process the object arises, the object which is then no
other than the life of the " I," is the absolute " I." It
is the ultimate reality which, try how we will to divest
it of the value for knowledge with which we endow all
reality, we can only conceive as " I." It is the " I "
which is the individual, but the individual as subject
with nothing to contrapose to itself and finding all in
itself. It is therefore the actual concrete universal.
This " I " which is the absolute, is in so far as it
affirms itself. It is causa sui.
Deprived of its internal causality it is annulled. In
causing itself it is creator of itself and in itself of the
world, of the world which is the most complete that
260 EPILOGUE AND COROLLARIES CH.
we can think, the absolute world. This world is
the object of which our doctrine speaks, and therefore
our doctrine is a doctrine of knowledge in so far as it
is a metaphysic.
The world is nature and the world is history.
Each term comprehends the other so that we can say
8. History the world is nature or history. We
as nature. distinguish the two domains of reality in
the distinction between an other than mind and
an other in mind. The other than mind, which is
outside mind in general, is nature. It has not the
unity, the freedom, the immortality which are the
three essential characters of mind. The other in
mind is history. It participates in all these essential
characters, but at the same time implies an otherness
in regard to the spiritual activity for which it is and
which affirms it. The earth s movement is a natural
fact, but the Copernican theory is a historical fact.
What constitutes the difference is not that the
historical fact is, and the natural fact is not, an act
of the mind identical with that by which I think it,
but that it is an act of the mind which is already
complete when I think it and present therefore to
my thinking with a positive character of autonomy,
or objectivity, analogous to that of natural facts. We
can even say in regard to it, that from being a spiritual
act it has become a fact. The form of otherness from
the subject, the fact that Copernicus who wrote the
De revolutionibus orbium celestium and I who read it
are different persons, is not the essential thing which
gives the Copernican theory its character as history.
It possesses that character because we can speak of
historical fact, of fact which has in itself a certain
law, which every one who narrates or remembers the
NATURE AND HISTORY 261
history must respect : a law which requires an
absolute form of otherness through which the creative
spiritual act of the historical fact is different from the
historical spiritual act. Caesar, when he wrote his
Commentaries, must have already completed the facts
which he narrated ; and were there no difference
between the man of action and the writer, there could
be no history, or history would be confused with
romance. I who am speaking am free to say what
I will ; but when I have spoken aha jacta est ; I
am no longer master of my words, they are what they
are, and as such they confront me limiting my freedom;
and they may become the torment of my whole life.
They have become history, it may be, in the secret
recesses of my own soul.
In this meaning, in spite of the profound difference
which it makes between natural facts and historical
facts, the difference that historical facts are and natural
facts are not, at least are not originally, spiritual acts,
nature and history coincide in so far as they imply a
form of otherness from the " I " which knows, and
apart from which we could not speak either of the
one or of the other.
This is not enough. In the ordinary concepts of
nature and history, that is, in the concepts which
the naturalists have of nature and the
spatialkyof historians have of history, otherness is
nature and of absolute otherness. It is not the other-
history as ness we mc ii ca ted in the proposition that
the unthinkable is thought, but the other
ness we mean when we find it necessary to say that
what is thought is unthinkable. The " nature " of the
naturalist is nature without final ends, extraneous to
mind ; the nature we can only know as phenomenon;
262 EPILOGUE AND COROLLARIES CH.
the nature of which in resignation or despair we say
ignorabimus. And the history of the historians is that
fathomless sea of the past which loses itself and
disappears in the far-offness of the prehistoric, wherein
lie also the roots of the tree of civilization. It is the
history of men s actions, the actions of men whose
soul can only be reconstituted in an imagination
devoid of any scientific justification. Naturalists and
historians alike are confined to the cm without being
able to seek the Stort, because for them otherness
is not substantial unity, a moment of the dialectical
process. Their object is not that which we only
recognize in its opposition to the subject, it is full
and radical otherness, or rather multiplicity. And
thus it is that nature is displayed in space and time
(where spirituality is inconceivable), and history at
least in time, which, as we know, is only a kind of
space, for time in the before and after of the succession
implies a reciprocal exclusion of the elements of the
manifold.
Nature and history, then, coincide in their character
of spatiality. Spatiality withdraws them both from
10. Time the mind, if not from the mind as it is
and mind. generally conceived, at least from the
mind as it must be conceived in the concrete ; realistic
ally, as the actual "I."
For if, with Kant, we make time, or as we should
now say the form of spatiality which is time, the form
of the internal sense, and so adapt it to the spiritual
facts, we are no longer looking at the spirituality of
those facts : the spirituality for which they must not
be facts but the spiritual act. When we declare that
the Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1781
but that Kant began to write it towards the end of
CONCRETE TIME 263
1772, we are not thinking of the Criticism by which
it is one indivisible spiritual act, but we are putting
it on the same plane on which we place many
other mental and natural facts. Moreover, if we
would know what that Criticism is, as Kant s thought,
we must read his book, reflect on it, and thereby
separate it from its time and make Kant s past work
our present thought. Thereby time is thought of by
the mind as nature and not as mind, thought of as
a multiplicity of facts external to one another and
therefore conceivable according to the principle of
causality, not as that living unity, the historian s
immortal mind.
But if from the naturalist s contemplation in which
we are lost in the multitude of facts, we rise to the
ii. Nature philosopher s contemplation in which we
and history find the centre of all multiplicity in the
as mind. one ^ t ^ en fae S p a ti a lity, the multiplicity,
the otherness of nature and history, which constitute
their autonomy in regard to mind, all give place to
the mind s absolute reality. The nature and the
history of ordinary discourse are abstract nature and
abstract history, and, as such, non - existent. The
otherness which is the fundamental characteristic of
each, were it as absolute as it appears, would imply
the absolute unknowability of both, but it would
also imply a fact of much more importance the
impossibility of mind. For if there be something
outside the mind in the absolute sense, the mind
must be limited by it, and then it is no longer free,
and no longer mind since mind is freedom. But the
otherness of history and of nature, if we possess the
real concept of the absoluteness of the " I," is no other
than the objectivity of the " I " to itself which we have
264 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 sub j ect itself) the <c L The cc ^ "
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 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 know
ing. 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 self-
consciousness. Therefore the development of self-
consciousness, or, avoiding the pleonasm, self-conscious
ness, is the world process itself, nature and history, in
so far as it is a self-consciousness realized in conscious
ness. If we give the name " history " to this develop
ment 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 con-
creteness.
CHAPTER XVIII
IDEALISM OR MYSTICISM ?
THE conception to which I have tried to give expression,
a conception which resolves the world into spiritual
act or act of thought, in unifying the
i. The ... .
analogy between infinite variety of man and nature in an
actual idealism absolute one, in which the human is divine
and the divine is human, may appear, and
has been pronounced, a mystical conception. 1 And
1 My friend Benedetto Croce has expressed his objection to mysticism
in these words : " You cancel all the fallacious distinctions we are commonly
accustomed to rely on, and history as the act of thought has then it seems
nothing left but the immediate consciousness of the individual-universal in
which all distinctions are submerged and lost. And this is mysticism,
excellent in making us feel in unity with God, but ill-adapted for thinking
the world or for acting in it " (Teoria e storia della storiografia, p. 103).
This is true, but as a criticism it does not inculpate our idealism, although
that might also be defined as a consciousness (not indeed immediate, as has
been shown) of the individual-universal ; because, as Croce points out,
mysticism cannot be historical, it cannot admit the consciousness of
diversity, of change and of becoming. In fact " either the consciousness
of diversity comes from the individual and intuitive element itself, and
then it is impossible to understand how such an element can subsist with
its own form of intuition, in thought which always universalizes ; or it is
affirmed to be a product of the act of thought itself, and then the distinction
which it was supposed had been abolished is reaffirmed and the asserted
distinctionless simplicity of thought is shaken " (p. 104). Such a simplicity,
it must be clear even to the most cursory reader of the preceding pages,
is certainly not the kind of simplicity actual idealism affirms. For idealism
diversity is precisely a product of the act of thought itself. Only those
distinctions are illegitimate which are presupposed and unproved. They
are illegitimate because they are not derived from that act of thought which
is the unshakeable and only possible foundation of a truly critical and
realistic philosophizing and therefore of any efficacious acting in the world.
265
266 IDEALISM OR MYSTICISM?
indeed it concurs with mysticism in affirming that the
whole is one, and that to know is to attain this one
behind all the distinctions.
Now mysticism has its very great merit but it has
none the less its very grave defect. Its merit is the
fulness and the truly courageous energy, of its con
ception when it affirms that reality cannot be conceived
except as absolute ; or, as it is more usual to express
it, there is no true reality but God only. And
this living feeling, this intrinsic contact or taste
of the divine (as Campanella would have said), is a
sublimation of human energy, a purification of the
soul, and blessedness. But mysticism has the serious
defect that it cancels all distinctions in the " soul s
dark night " (notte oscura dell anima) and thereby
makes the soul abnegate itself in the infinite, where
not only all vision of finite things, but even its own
personality, is lost to it. For its personality, as a
concrete personality, is defined precisely in the
function of all finite things. Through this tendency it
not only quenches every stimulus towards scientific
research and rational knowledge, but weakens and
breaks every incentive to action, for action cannot
be explained except by means of the concreteness
of the finite. Just as we can only do one thing at
a time, so we can only solve one problem at a time.
To live is to be limited. The mystic ignores the
limit.
But while " actual idealism " accords with " mysti
cism " in what we have called its merit, it does not in
2. The its fundamental theses participate in what
difference. W e have called its defect. Idealism re
conciles all distinctions, but does not, like mysticism, cancel
them, and it affirms the finite no less resolutely than it
KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE 267
affirms the infinite, difference no less than identity. This
is the substantial point of divergence between the two
conceptions. The mystical conception, despite appear
ances, is to be regarded as essentially an intellectualist
doctrine, and therefore ideally anterior to Christianity :
the idealistic conception is an essentially anti-
intellectualist doctrine, and perhaps even the maturest
form of modern Christian philosophy.
Mysticism is usually arrayed against intellectualist
theories because, according to the mystics, those theories
3. Mysticism vainly presume to attain the Absolute by
and intellectual- means of knowledge, whereas it can only
be attained by means of love, or, as they
say, by feeling or will. The difference between the
two conceptions is substantially this : For the in-
tellectualists the Absolute is knowable because in
itself it is knowledge ; for the mystics the Absolute
is not knowable because it is not knowledge, but
love. And love is distinguished from knowledge
in being life, self-transformation, creative process,
whereas knowledge supposes (that is, they believe it
supposes) a reality already complete, which has only
to be intuited. Mysticism, on the other hand,
accords inwardly with intellectualism in conceiving
its love as an object, and the process of the Absolute
as a process which confronts mind, and in which
process mind must itself be fused. And vice versa,
intellectualism coincides with mysticism, in so far
as, even in conceiving the object of knowledge as
knowable, that is as itself knowledge, it makes that
object entirely an external limit to the subject, and the
subject having thus posited the object as its external
limit is no longer itself conceivable, apart from empty
metaphor, except as the subject of an intuitive activity.
268 IDEALISM OR MYSTICISM?
The truth is that the real characteristic of intellectual-
ism is not that in which it is opposed to mysticism but
that in which it agrees with it, that is, in its conception
of reality as mere absolute object and therefore its
conception of the mind s process as a process which
presupposes an object already realized before the process
itself begins. The intellect in this conception stands
opposed to value. Value creates its object (the good
or the evil) ; intellect creates nothing, does nothing,
merely contemplates existence, a passive and otiose
spectator.
Now, in this respect mysticism is in precisely the
same position as intellectualism, and it does not
succeed, in spite of all the efforts it makes to conceive
the mind as will (feeling, love), because will is freedom,
self-creative ; and freedom is impossible where the
activity is not absolute. Hence mysticism falls back
on the concepts of fate, grace, and the like.
The mystic s absolute reality is not subject but
object. It is object, that is to say, from the point
4. Objectivism ^ view of actual idealism, because in
of mystical idealism the subject coincides with the
thought. j who a f rms t he object. For even
the mystic can speak of the personality, to to caelo
different from his own, into relation with which his
own personality enters or aspires to enter. So that
he comes to conceive a personality which is an object
of his mind, that is, of the only mind which for him
is effectively mind, and therefore is not mind.
It is, then, no wonder that in the mystic s reality,
so essentially objective and anti-spiritual, there is no
place for anything purely depending on the subject,
the individual personality, the man tormented by the
desire of God who is all, and by the infinite sense of
THE MORAL CONCEPTION 269
his own nothingness. It is no wonder if all particular
things dissolve as illusive shadows. Within the all-
embracing reality, particulars are distinguished for the
determinating activity of that finite power which in
itself is nothing, the intellect, or rather the personality
as cognitive consciousness.
Modern idealism, on the contrary, moves in a
direction directly opposite to that towards which
5. The ami- mysticism is orientated. Idealism is, as
intellectualism I have said, anti-intellectualistic, and in
this sense profoundly Christian, if we take
Christianity as meaning the intrinsically moral con
ception of the world. This moral conception is one
which is entirely alien to India and to Greece even in
their greatest speculative efforts. The philosophy of
India ends in asceticism, in the suppression of the
passions, in the extirpation of desire and every root
of the human incentive to work, in the nirvana. Its
ideal, therefore, is the simple negation of the real in
which morality realizes itself, human personality. And
in Greek philosophy the highest ethical word it can
pronounce is Justice. Justice renders to each his own
and therefore preserves the natural order (or what is
presupposed as such), but it can neither create nor
construct a new world. Greek philosophy, therefore,
cannot express the essential virtue of mind which is
its creative nature, it must produce the good which it
cannot find confronting it. How could Greek philo
sophy understand the moral nature of mind seeing that
its world was not mind but nature ? The nature need
not be material, it might be ideal, but it is what
the mind contemplates, not what it makes. Greek
morality ends in the Stoical doctrine of suicide, a
doctrine consistent with its immanent tendency to an
270
IDEALISM OR MYSTICISM?
CH.
intellectualistic conception of a reality in which the
subject has no worth. Christianity, on the other hand,
discovers the reality which is not until it creates itself,
and is what it creates. It cannot be treated like the
Greek philosopher s world, already in existence and
waiting to be known till the philosopher is ready to con
template it, when he has drawn aside as it were, when,
as Aristotle would say, all the wants of his life are
appeased and life is as it were complete. It is a reality
which waits for us to construct, a reality which is
truly even now love and will, because it is the inward
effort of the soul, its living process, not its ideal and
external model. It is man himself who rises above
humanity and becomes God. And even God is no
longer a reality who already is, but the God who
is begotten in us and is ourselves in so far as we
with our whole being rise to him. Here mind is no
longer intellect but will. The world is no longer
what is known but what is made : and therefore not
only can we begin to conceive the mind as freedom
or moral activity, but the world, the whole world of
the Christian, is freed and redeemed. The whole
world is a world which is what it would be, or a world,
as we say, essentially moral.
For an idealistic conception such as this a true
mysticism is impossible. The chief presupposition in
6. Criticism Brahmanism or Orpheism, of which there
of the mystic are many forms even in the modern world,
presupposition. the i nte llectualistic principle of abstract
objectivity, is in idealism definitely destroyed. The
whole development of Christian philosophical thought,
arrested during the Scholastic period, restarted and
reinvigorated in the Humanism and Naturalism of the
Renascence, and since then proceeding gaily without
INTELLECT AND WILL 271
serious interruption, may be regarded as a continual
and progressive elaboration of anti - intellectualism.
To such a point has this development been brought
to-day, that even an anti-intellectualism like ours may
assume the appearance of intellectualism to any one
who fails to appreciate the slow transformation which
speculative concepts undergo throughout the history
of philosophy. For to-day we say that mind is not
will, nor intellect and will, but pure intellect.
There is a point in regard to this anti-intellectual-
istic conception which deserves particular attention.
7. The defect Descartes did indeed propose to correct
of voluntarism, the abstractness of the intellectualist
conception, and undoubtedly he has the merit that
he affirms a certain subjectivity of truth and there
fore of reality ; but he falls back into the same
abstractness since he does not abandon what is the
very basis of intellectualism, the presupposition of
absolute objectivity. Not only does he not abandon
it, he duplicates it. He distinguishes the intellect
from the will by its passivity. The intellect with
a passive intuition mirrors the ideas, which are in
themselves. In this passivity the intellect is defined
in a way which will admit no character in it of
freedom and spiritual subjectivity. Moreover, it is
the will which, with its freedom of assenting or with
holding assent from the content of the intellect, is
able to endow cognition with its peculiar character
of subjective certainty. Now it is clear that in thus
driving subjectivity from the intellect to find refuge
in the will, we are not only repeating but even dupli
cating the desperate position in which intellectual
ism is placed in the opposition between knowing
and known. For now we have a double opposition,
272
IDEALISM OR MYSTICISM?
N
firstly that between the intellect and the ideas, secondly
that between the intellect and the will. The will, in
so far as it knows or recognizes what the intellect
has received but does not properly know, is itself
intellect, and the intellect is itself in regard to the
will made an object of knowledge. And whoever
reflects carefully will see that the will which has thus
been excogitated to supply the defect of the intellect
cannot attain its purpose, because if we suppose truth
to be objective in regard to the intellect its objectivity
must be always out of reach. We should want a
second will to judge the first, and a third to judge the
second, and still, to quote Dante, " lungi sia dal becco
T erba." 1 In short, intellectualism is here attempting
to cure its own defect by an intellectualistic theory of
the will. The intellect only draws back, it is neither
eliminated nor reconciled. 2
And the doctrines which, following Kant, make a
sharp distinction between the theoretical and the
practical reason, conferring on the theoretical a power
of knowing and on the practical a power of doing,
have no greater success. If the Cartesian anti-
intellectualism integrates the intellect with a will, and
then discovers that this will itself is intellectual, the
Kantian anti-intellectualism juxtaposes a will to the
intellect, and the will in this juxtaposition must again
discover itself intellectual. Indeed the Kantian will,
precisely because it is separated from the intellect
and creates a reality which is not the reality, does not
attain the full autonomy which implies the absolute
immanence of the purpose, and it needs to postulate
an extra-mundane summum bonum and therefore God
1 Inferno, xv. 72.
2 See the special treatment of this point in Sistema di Logica, vol. i. part i.
xvm TRUE ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM 273
and an immortal life of the individual beyond experi
ence. 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 hitellect, 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 intellectual-
istic defect.
There is only one way of overcoming intellectual-
ism and that is not to turn our back on it but to look
s. How in- it squarely in the face. Only so is it
tellectualism is possible to conceive and form an adequate
overcome. -^ ea Q f k now l e dge. 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 intellect
ualism 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 overcoming every vestige
of transcendence in regard to the actuality of mind
can, as we have said, comprehend within it the most
T
274 IDEALISM OR MYSTICISM?
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
in it all the rights of individuality find
9. The anti- . . .= .
thesis between satisfaction, with the exception or those
idealism and which depend on a fantastic concept of
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 uni
versal 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 suppress
ing individual personality.
The suspicion, I 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 dis-
and 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,
xvm THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION 275
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 begetter 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 sub
stantiality of its self-consciousness, is the manifold as
n. The an actual reality of consciousness, and the
categories and life of self-consciousness in consciousness is
the category. fa Q history which is a unity of historical
reality and of the knowledge of it. Philosophy,
therefore this consciousness of itself in which mind
consists can 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 con
ception 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. 1 The abstractness of
1 This problem of the categories will be found treated in the second
volume of Sistema di Logica.
T 2
276
IDEALISM OR MYSTICISM?
philosophy finds its interpretation in the determinate-
ness 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.
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 o f t h e 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 imagina
tion, a series without beginning or end,
extensible always and in every direction, and so for
ever falling short of completion. In this mode reality
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 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 " I
THE ETERNAL THEOGONY 277
think " ; and what " I think " is always one in so
14. The f ar as it is "I." The mere multiplicity
idealist con- always belongs to the content of the
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 philo
sophy, 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
Antisthenes, 58
Aquinas, 63, 70, 71
Ariosto, 203 ff., 225
Aristotle, 42, 47, 48, 51, 56, 60, 61,
63, 67, 68, 83, 85, 93, 100, 101,
107 ff., 114, 195, 270
Augustine, 191 n.
Avenarius, 74
Avicenna, 70
Bacon, 49, 73, 171
Bergson, 74
Berkeley, 1-6, 112, 201, 253
Boethius, 185
Boutroux, 172 ff.
Bruno, 49, 6"i, 63, 248
Campanella, 266
Comte, 1 80
Copernicus, 260
Croce, 217 ff. ., 223, 226 n., 265 n.
Dante, 12, 272
Darwin, 52
Democritus, no, 251
Descartes, 49, 56, 72, 73, 99, 100,
101, 135, 158, 171, 172, 271
Epicurus, 169
Fichte, 254
Flaubert, 223
Galileo, 64, 171, 172, 181, 182
Gaunilo, 100
Geulincx, 158, 164, 165 n.
Gioberti, 40, 87
Gorgias, 109, 119, 227
Hegel, 53 ff., 64 ff., 210, 212 ., 251,
254
Heracleitus, 247
Hobbes, 73
Horace, 151 ff.
Humboldt, 17
Hume, 15, 73, 161, 166 n., 179,
196
Kant, 4, 5, 31, 63, 73, 77 ff., 84, 90,
93, 96 ff., 115, 122 ff., 143, 146,
214, 243, 247, 253, 262, 263,
272
Lachelier, 172 n.
Lange, 214
Leibniz, 133, 134, 158, 165 n., 166,
185, 189 ff.
Leopardi, 112, 139, 140, 220 ff., 223
Locke, 73
Lucretius, 252
Mach, 74
Malebranche, 158, 164
Manzoni, 182, 183, 222
Parmenides, 109, no, 119, 158,
227, 244
Plato, 41, 42, 44-48, 51, 56, 60-62,
66, 68, 70, 83-87, 94, 100, 101,
107, 108, no, 116, 206, 209, 234,
247, 251, 253
Plotinus, 195, 199 n.
Poincare, 74
Protagoras, 206, 251
Pythagoras, 209
Rickert, 74
Rosmini, 29, 212
279
280
INDEX OF NAMES
Sanctis, de, 223, 226
Schelling, 242
Simplicius, 58
Socrates, 58, 109, 247
Spaventa, 123 n.
Spinoza, 29, 103, 132, 158, 162,
199, 243 n., 276
Thales, 109, 158
Valla, 185 ff.
Vico, 15, 16, 161, 166 n., 196, 209,
2I5., 244, 250
Wolf, 73, 103
Xenophon, 119
Zabarella, 212
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