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 comi8o 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 (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 _ called 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 js 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.
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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.
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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. is 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 jn 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