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 transcenciental " 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 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 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 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 may mean what is necessary and sufficient.
necessary con- The necessary condition of a real thing dition, and the /j in the metaphysical 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 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, metaphysical tj'ie cause ls necessary for the effect, the identity of effect is necessary for the cause, and there- the cause and fore tfa effect js identical with the cause 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- 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