Nous tromper dans nos entreprises, C'est a quoi nous sommes sujets: Le matin je fais des projets, Et le long du jour des sottises; ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 233 or at the most they conclude that there is no way to free oneself from a bad passion save with another one equally bad, from a vice with a vice, " as from a plank we pluck with nail a nail."
Nevertheless, he who torments himself and Difficulty and reality of gets angry, or laughs and draws such conclusions dominating as these, is not in the right. That is to say, he is right to laugh at ingenuous sages and at odious preachers and moralists, for their theories are certainly simplicist and false. But he is wrong in not understanding that his own theory is also simplicist and false, for it runs into the opposite extreme. — Habits and passions are habits and passions, because slowly formed: it is therefore a vain illusion to attempt to destroy them at a blow. Perhaps it is believed that the passions are tender flowerets or grasses that a child has attached to the surface of the soil? They are a rank growth, strong oaks whose roots dive deep into the earth! — That is most true, but it is not for this reason impossible to modify and destroy them. They are indeed actually modified, for that very pain, that very disappointment, are a beginning of modification; since we do not persist in what we abhor and follow, dragged along by force; and little by little we end by freeing ourselves. The process of freeing 234 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
ourselves from the passions, or from vicious habits, then, is effective, but slow, as the formation of those habits has been slow. We do not cure an illness with a sudden act of will, but nevertheless the will guides and directs the process of healing, and can open or close the entrance to the medicinal forces of nature. Now the passions or vicious habits are maladies that must follow their course, which, in order to be beneficial, must coincide with the cure. The sages who give receipts for freeing ourselves from them immediately are the Dulcamaras of moral maladies; but the existence of the Dulcamaras should not impel us to deny the existence of doctors, and above all of ourselves as doctors of ourselves. And we should certainly adopt a very bad and illusory method of cure, were we to accept the method so often recommended, of destroying passion with passion, or vice with vice, thus adding vice to vice, as those who treat the illnesses of the body with narcotics or with stimulants often add malady to malady. Volitional Habits, then, not less than single volitional habits and habits and individuality, acts, of which they were and are composed, can be and are continually conquered and modified, in so far as they are opposed to the new volitional syntheses. This confirms what has already been ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 235 said in criticizing the polipathetic view, which ignores the volition for the volitions, as the virtuous habit is ignored in favour of vicious habits. But the theory of apathicism is also to be found in this field, and it is needful to assert in opposition to it, the great importance proper to the volitional habits in giving concrete form to virtue. This second critical thesis is that which affirms the value of individuality or peculiarity in the practical field.
Every individual is furnished by mother Negations of individuality nature with certain definite habits, according \.Q for uniformity and their the contingencies of reality among which he critique. enters the world; and he acquires yet others in the course of life, owing to the actual condi tions through which he passes and to the works that he accomplishes. Those habits which he has from birth are called aptitudes, disposi tions, natural tendencies: the others acquired. The individual in his reality is, as has been said, nothing but these groups of habits and changes as they change. Now is it rational and possible (the two questions here form one) that the individual in his willing and acting should rid himself of such habits? Is it possible to consider them as things without value? Is it possible to establish an antithesis between individu- 236 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
ality and rational action, as between good and evil?• — The levellers who claim to impose the same task upon all and wish to make of the female a male, of the poet a reasoner, of the man of science a warrior, of the saint a man of business, and thus to give to every one a part of the task of others; — the dreamers of a future society, in which all this shall have been done, and the poet should attend to his poem, after having played the philosopher for a couple of hours, for another couple of hours the tailor, and for yet another two the waiter at an inn; — all the pedants of abstract regularity, whom we meet to our great annoyance in life; — behold the apathicists appear anew, for, as in the theory of the volitional act, they advocated an abstract action, conducted by the rational will alone in the void of the passions; so here, they advocate an abstract rational habit, in the theory of volitional habits, a model of human activity, to which all individuals would be obliged to con form. Perhaps some such sensible observation as this of Vauvenargues should suffice to confute them: // ne faut pas beaucoup de reflexion pour faire cuire un poulet; et, cependant, nous voyons des hommes qui sont toute leur vie mauvais rotisseurs: taut il est ndcessaire dans tous les ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 237 metiers, dy etre appeld par ^m instinct particulier et comme incttpendant de la raison. But since it might be said that we wish to solve a grave question with a joke, we will recall that the volitional acts and the passions, volition and the volitions, are of the same nature (though the one is actual and the others only possible), and that the nature of willing implies actual definite situations, and that for this reason we never will in universal but always in particular. In the same way virtue, the virtuous habit of the will, is not of a different nature to the volitional habits in general, to the passions, but is particular and individual as they are. Those who make war upon individual habits never succeed in substituting for them a universal habit, which is inconceivable, but at the most other habits, equally particular and individual. The poet who will play the farmer, the tailor, and the waiter, in the imagined society of the future, will do all these things as a poet. This may perhaps be an advantage, but may also perhaps be the contrary, as future consumers of grain, of garments, and of repasts will become aware. For the rest, do we not even now see women devoting themselves to the severe studies of philology, of philosophy, and of mathematics?
238 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
But with the rarest exceptions, they remain always women: their production, which is with out originality, is not like that of man, done with the complete dedication of the whole being to the search for truth and of artistic perfection; and if in the midst of the most abstruse inquiry, the image of themselves as wife or mother pass through their minds, they desert, at the critical moment, the philosophical categories, the formulae of flexions, the ruled or tangential spaces, and sigh for their unborn sons and for the husband that they have not found. Is this distortion of natural habits useful? Generally speaking, it is not. It is a doing and an undoing, a despisal of the riches wisely accumulated and capitalized by Reality in the course of its evolution. Temperament Certainly the disposition natural or acquired and character...indi/erence of is not virtue, and the temperament (since temtemperament.
perament is nothing but the sum of habits and aptitudes) is not character. But virtue and character presuppose habits and passions, of which they give the rational and volitional synthesis: they are the form of that matter. And as matter considered in the abstract is neither good nor bad, so the habits and the passions (as has been very well observed) are not in themselves either virtues or vices: they ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 239 are facts. And it is necessary to take account of facts; otherwise, they revenge themselves. On the other hand, habits and passions certainly change; but not all of a sudden and capriciously, rather, little by little, and always on the basis of existing habits and passions.
The first duty of every individual who wishes The discovery of the proper to act effectively, consists, therefore, in seeking self. for himself, in exploring his own dispositions, in establishing what aptitudes have been deposited in him by the course of reality, both at the moment of his birth, and during the develop ment of his own individual life: in knowing, that is to say, his own habits and passions, not in order to make of them a tabula rasa, but to use them. The search is not easy and the preparatory part of life, namely youth, is spent upon it. Few are the fortunate individuals who have at once a clear and certain knowledge of their own being and of their duty; the majority seek and find it after many wanderings; and if such wanderings sometimes (as is written in the dedication of the Scienza nuovd) "seem misfortunes and are opportunities," at others they are but a fruitless moving to and fro; hence those that are undecided during the whole of their lives, the eternal youths, those who aspire 24o PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
to all or to many of the directions of human activity and are incapable in all. But when our own being unveils itself and we see our path clearly, then to disordered agitation suc ceeds the calm of sure and regular work, with its defeats and victories, its joys and sorrows, but with the constant vision of the Aim, that is, of the general direction to be followed. Vainly will he who is endowed and prepared for guiding mankind in political strife and has a clear and lively perception of human strength and weakness, of what can and of what cannot be done, and is furnished, so to speak, with practical sense (with the sense of complications and slight differences), will try (save in the rarest and most exceptional cases, and this reserve is to be understood in all that we are saying here) to acquire a place among those who cultivate the abstract and universal, opera tions demanding almost opposite aptitudes; vainly will he who was born to sing attempt to calculate; vainly will he whose mind and soul were made to accentuate dissensions in their bitter strife bend himself to be a con ciliator and a peacemaker. It is worse than superfluous, it is stupid to weep over one's choleric or phlegmatic temperament. There ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 241 have been choleric saints that have even used the stick, and phlegmatic saints who have suc ceeded admirably in patient persuasion: the mild Francis, " all seraphic in his ardour," and the impetuous Dominic " whose blows fell on the boughs of heresy." Reality is diversity and has need of both, and each is praiseworthy if he do that well to which he has been called.
This concept of the vocation has a mystical and The idea of " vocation."
religious origin and preserves that form; but it is clear that by means of the previous considerations we have divested it of that form and reduced it to a scientific concept. The individual is not a " monad " or a "real," he is not a "soul" created by a God all in a moment and all of a piece; the individual is the historical situation of the universal spirit at every instant of time, and, therefore, the sum of the habits due to the historical situations. Those modes of con ceiving and talking of one and the same individual in two different situations, or of two different individuals in the same situation, are to be avoided, because individual and situation are all one. But when the individual has been thus defined, it remains none the less true that each individual must direct his life according to pre-existing habits and personal dispositions, 242 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
and thus we discover the true meaning of the mythologies and religions that have been men tioned, and the struggles to find the suitable employment can be expressed with the words that religion has taught us when we were children: the " vocation " and the special " mission " that is allotted to us in life, until the last giving of accounts and the words of dismissal and repose: Nunc dimitte servum tuum, Domine! We are the children of that Reality which generates us and knows more than we, the Reality of which religions have caught a glimpse and called it God, father, and eternal wisdom.
The affirmation of the rights that belong standings as to the rights of to individuality in the practical field has several individuality.
Evil times assumed and still assumes (in our time, individuality. v more than in the past, owing to materialism and naturalism) a form, no longer symbolical and mystical, but wrong and irrational, that it is desirable to remark upon here, always in order to avoid possible equivoques. Indeed many look upon the respect due to their own beings as due to their caprice, that is to say, to what is on the contrary the negation of being: the right of the individual as the right to commit follies, or to a disaggregate individu ality. The declared necessity of temperament ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 243 for character is exchanged for admiration of temperament considered in itself, which, as such, is neither admirable nor blameworthy; but when separated from character becomes vice and folly. Hence the admiration that has even become a literary fashion, for the dissolute, for the violent, for homicides, for the criminals of the public prisons, illustrated by a few courageous and energetic souls among them, whereas they are as a rule weak, vile, and turbid.
Various theories are also erroneous, in which False doctrines it has been sought to establish the relation connection of virtues and between the passions and the will, temperament vices- and character, passions and temperament being understood as vicious passions and evil tempera ment; that is, not in themselves, but in their antithesis to the rational will: hence the vain arid paradoxical attempts to join together and harmonize virtue and vice. Thus it has been maintained that in certain vices are foreshadowed the virtues which will or can be developed from them; for instance, military valour in ferocity, industrial capacity in greed; whereas ferocity and greed are wilful acts and contradictions incapable of generating any virtue, as is seen in the customary cowardice of the ferocious and 244 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
the ineptitude of the greedy and covetous. Such a connection of virtues and vices has on other occasions been presented as a mixture or co- temperament, and it has been affirmed that the vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as do poisons into the composition of medicines. Finally, virtue and vice have been placed in causal relation, and the causes of civil progress have been found in human vices. But the vices, as they are not the antecedents, so are they neither the ingredients nor the causes of the virtues. These are strength, those the lack of strength. It is generally affirmed that in every individual the virtues are accompanied by their correlative vices, but if this possess some approximate value as an empirical observation, strictly speaking it has none, because men can be conceived and are actually found, whose virtue, far from yielding to excesses and to vices, is eurythmic and temperate. But perhaps that common saying aims at something else that it fails of explaining well; namely, that every power has its impotence and every individual his limit; but this does not mean vice or defect; it is nothing but the tautological affirmation that the part is not the whole and the individual not the universal. But if the individual do not exhaust the ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 245 universal, the universal lives in individuals; The universal in the Reality in each of its particular manifestations, individual and education.
Therefore the affirmation of the right of indi viduality does not deny the right of universality; or it denies it only in that abstract form in which, to tell the truth, it is by itself denied. The individual is under the obligation to seek himself, but in order to do this he has also the obligation of cultivating himself as man in universal. A school that represented simply a cultivation of individual aptitudes, would be a training, not an education, a manufactory of utensils, not a nursery of spiritual and creative activities. The true specialism is universalism, and inversely, which means that if the universal do not act without specializing itself, yet specialization is not really specialization if it do not contain uni versality. If the two terms that are by nature indissoluble be divided, there remains only fruit less generalization or stupid particularization, and if our times have sinned in this latter respect, other times have sinned in the opposite. He is well-balanced who between these two forms of degeneration both knows and fills his own proper and individual mission so perfectly that he fulfils at the same time with it and through it the universal mission of man.
DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRESS Multiplicity THE demonstration hitherto developed, that evil and unity; development. [s negativity or contradiction, and that this con tradiction takes place owing to the multiplicity of the desires in respect to the singleness of char acter of the volitional act, gives rise to the further question: Why should there be such a multiplicity, concurrent with the demand for unity, and thus be generated strife and contradiction? Here it would be fitting to observe that we must have filled our mouths very uselessly for a century with the word evolution, if such a question as this be renewed, or we remain bewildered and embarrassed before it. For the reason of that fact, which seems without a reason, is to be found precisely in the concept of "evolution" This concept resumes most ancient views, and has been substituted in modern times for that of an immovable Reality, of a God who exists perfect and satisfied in himself, and creates a world for ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 247 his own transitory pleasure; or for a complex of beings, eternally the same, with variations that are only apparent. The concept of evolution has entered so profoundly into the blood and bones of modern man that even those repeat it who would be incapable of analyzing and understand ing it; even the least acute of all, the positivist philosophers who like to call themselves " philo sophers of evolution."
But before it acquired, as a vague and confused Becoming as...synthesis of formula, so great a publicity as quite to amount to being and not- being. popularity, a philosopher of genius had analyzed and synthetized it, induced and deduced it in an unsurpassable manner, with the speculative formula of reality as becoming; that is, as syn thesis of being and not-being, being and not- being being thus unthinkable separately, and only thinkable in their living connection, which is becoming and development (evolution). Reality is development, that is, infinite possibility that passes into infinite actuality and from the multi plicity of every instant takes refuge in the one, to break forth anew in the multiple and produce the new unity. The inquiry into the dialectic of the volitional act enters in this way into the very heart of reality. In order to deny multiplicity, contradiction, evil and not-being, it would be 248 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
necessary to deny at the same time unity, coher ence, good and being. Nature as But if by the theory that has been recorded becoming. Its becoming. Its resolution in we have explained the necessity of evil for good, or the necessity of the not necessary for the necessary in the volitional act of man, the identi fication of the volitional act, which is man's, with reality which is of the universal whole, might seem to be too audacious. For (it will be said) the complex of other beings, that we are wont to separate from the complex of human beings and to oppose to it as nature, either is motionless and does not develop, or develops without any consciousness of good and evil, of pleasure and pain, of value and disvalue. Both theses have been maintained and nature has been represented, now as without history, now as develop ing itself in an unconscious or mechanical manner. But the contradictions and absurdities of both theses have been together perceived. " Motion less beings " is a phrase without meaning, to such a degree that even empirical science has every where pushed its way into history, and has talked of the evolution of animals and vegetables, of the chemical elements, and even of a history of light and heat. The other expression, " unconscious beings," is not less empty, because being and ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 249 activity are not otherwise conceivable save in the way that we know our being, which is consciousness; and although empirical science certainly points to more and more rudimentary and tenuous forms of consciousness in beings, always differently individualized, yet it has never been able to demonstrate the absolutely uncon scious. If so-called nature be, it develops, and if it develop, cannot do so without some con sciousness. This deduction is not a matter of conjecture, but a logical and irrefutable con sequence. What is there, then, that persists in men's souls, as an obstacle to the acceptance of this consequence, in accordance with the pro found belief of humanity in a community of all beings with one another and with the Whole, as manifested in philosophies and in religions, in the speculations of the learned and in ingenuous popular beliefs? A scholastic prejudice, an idol of the intellect, the hypostasis of that concept of "nature" that Logic has taught us is nothing but the abstract, mechanicizing, classifying function of the human spirit; a prejudice arising from the substitution of the naturalistic method for reality, by which a function is changed and materialized into a group of beings. Those idealists were also slaves of the error of a like hypostasis, 250 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
who, though they thought everything as an activity of the spirit, yet stopped when face to face with Nature, making of it an inferior grade of the Spirit, or, metaphorically, a spirit alienated from itself, an unconscious consciousness, a petrified thought, and creating for it a special philosophy (as though all the other did not suffice), entitled precisely, Philosophy of nature. But modern thought knows henceforth how man creates for his use that skeleton or mannequin of an immobile, external mechanical nature, and he is no longer permitted to fall back into equivoque and substitute this for entity or for a complex of entities. Nor should he find any difficulty in discovering everywhere activity, development, consciousness, with its antitheses of good and evil, of joy and sorrow. Certainly the stars do not smile, nor is the moon pale for sorrow: these are images of the poets. Certainly animals and trees do not reason like men; this, when it is not poetry, is gross anthropomorphism. But nature, in her intimate self, longs for the good and abhors the evil, she is all wet with tears and all a-shiver for joy; strife and victory is everywhere and in every moment of universal life.
This conception of reality, which recognizes the ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 251 indissoluble link between good and evil, is itself optimism a pessimism: beyond good and evil, and consequently surpasses critique. the visual angles of optimism and pessimism — of optimism that does not discover the evil in life and posits it as illusion, or only as a very small and contingent element, or hopes for a future life (on earth or in heaven) in which evil will be suppressed; and of pessimism, that sees nothing but evil and makes of the world an infinite and eternal spasm of pain, that rends itself internally and generates nothing. It confronts the first with the fact that evil is truly the original sin of reality, ineliminable so long as reality exists, and therefore absolutely ineliminable as a category: the second, with the other category the good, equally ineliminable, for without it evil could not be. And it is easy to show how the optimist declares himself a pessimist, the pessimist an optimist, out of their own mouths. The setting free from individuality and from will, which the pessimist proposes as a radical remedy, is the remedy that reality itself applies at every moment, for we free our selves from the contradiction of individuality and of wilfulness by the affirmation of the rational will, with which the same pessimist cannot dis pense, for the effectuation of his programme of ascesis or of suicide, which, according as it is 252 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
understood, is either not a programme, or a programme altogether capricious and without universal value. In truth, there is no need to oppose a eulogy of Life with a eulogy of Death, since the eulogy of Life is also a eulogy of Death; for how could we live, if we did not die at every instant? Dialectic The dialectic conception of reality as developoptimism, ment, that is, as a synthesis of being and not- being, can certainly be termed optimistic, but in a very different signification to that of abstract optimism. The synthesis is the thesis enriched with its antithesis, and the thesis is the good, being, not the bad or not-being. But who will wish seriously to oppose this logical consequence? Is it not a fact that men hope and live, although in the midst of their sorrows? Is it not a fact that the world is not ended and does not appear to have any intention of ending? And how would that be possible, if the moment of the good did not prevail, just because the positive prevails upon the negative and Life constantly triumphs over Death? Concept of This continuous triumph of Life over Death cosmic progress, cosmic progress, constitutes cosmic progress. Progress, from the point of view whence we have hitherto regarded it, that of individualized activity, is identical ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 253 with activity; it is the unfolding of this upon passivity. Every volitional act, like every theoretical act, is therefore to be considered in itself, that is, only in relation to the given situa tion from which it breaks forth. In every new situation the individual begins his life all over again. ^ But from the cosmic point of view, at which we now place ourselves, reality shows itself as a continuous growing upon itself; nor is a -T* real regress ever conceivable, because evil being that which is not, is irreal, and that which is is always and only the good. ] The real is always rational, and the rational is always real. Cosmic progress, then, is itself also the object of affirma tion, not problematic, but apodictic.
The difficulties that can be and are opposed objections and critique of