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 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 Qf philosophy with its history, 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 partially 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 24o 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 SubJeCt lt is a theor7 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 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 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 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 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 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