§ 13. Reality SrasP but snadows> intelligible only in of mind as relation to the bodies which cast them, reality of the three concepts emerge as equally neces sary: (i) The reality of the subject, as pure subject; (2) the reality of the object, as pure object; (3) the reality of mind, as the unity or process of the subject, and the immanence of the object in the subject.
Were there no subject what would think? Were there no object what would the thinker think? It is § 14. Necessity impossible to conceive thought without of the object, personality, because thought, however dogmatic or sceptical the form of it we would posit, is conceptus sui. It is " I." Thence thought is not mere activity but an activity which relies on itself, and therefore posits itself as a person. But none the less it is equally impossible to conceive thought without its term or fulcrum, because the concept of self realizes the Self as object of knowledge. Thought, then, is conceivable on condition that whenever and in so far as the subject is conceived the object also is conceived. Each is real since thought is real, but nothing is real outside thought.
But even thought would itself be inconceivable if the subject in being the opposite of the object were § 15. The not at tne same time the object itself, and spirituality of vice versa. The reason of this is that the opposition is inherent in the concept of thought as conceptus sui. The opposition is between self and self. The difference and otherness belongs wholly to the self or I. It is a relation which will never be intelligible so long as we try to understand it by the analogy of other kinds of relation. The REALITY AS SELF-CONCEPT A y "I," to be exact, is not different from itself, but differentiates itself, thereby positing its own identity as the basis of its own difference. So that the thesis and the antithesis, concurrent in the reality of the self-consciousness (being and not being subject), have their fundamental reality in the synthesis. The synthesis is not subject and object, but only subject, the real subject, realized in the process by which it overcomes the ideality of the pure abstract subject and the concomitant ideality of the pure abstract object. / This synthesis as the concrete reality of self-conscious ness is the process which is not fact but act, living and eternal act. To think anything truly, means to realize it. And who does not know that it is to this realization mind is working, that it may establish the fulness of freedom, the reign of mind, or regnum hominis in which all human civilization, all lordship over nature and subjection of it to human, that is, to spiritual ends, consists? What is the progressive spiritualization of the world but the realization of the synthesis, which reconciles opposition even by preserving it, in the unity, which is its own ground and its whole meaning?
But this human perfectibility, this ever more powerful lordship of man over nature, this progress § 16. The and increase of the life of mind triumphing world as an ever more surely over the adverse forces eternal history. o£ nature) conquering them and subduing them, even within the soul itself, making, as Vico said, of the very passions virtues, this march of humanity, as we usually picture it, with its stages, through space and time, — what is it but the empirical and external representation of the immanent eternal victory, the full and absolute victory, of mind over nature, of that immanent resolution of nature in mind, THE REGNUM HOMINIS 251 which, like the concept of the necessary reconcilia tion of temporal history in ideal and eternal history, is the only possible speculative concept of the relation between nature and mind?
Descend into your soul, take by surprise in its essential character, as it is in the living act, in § 17 The tne quivering of your spiritual life, that meaning of our " nature" which grows so formidable in non-bemg. a}j fae vastness of time and of space which you confer on it. What is it? It is that obscure limit of your spiritual being beyond which your living spirit is ever passing out and to which it is ever returning. It is the limit which marks the boundary of the Kantian phenomenon, as in ancient philosophy it used to stand behind the subjective sensation of Democritus and Protagoras, concealing from thought a chaos of impervious and raw materiality. It is the limit which Plato found at the margin of his ideal being, the dark hemisphere encircling the horizon of the luminous heaven of thought. It is the limit which even to Hegel seemed to set bounds to logic and to demand a crossing of it by the Idea which makes nature, by descending into space and time and break ing its own unity in the dispersed multiplicity of the existents which are its particulars. Seen from within your soul, is not this " nature " your own non-being, the non-being of your own inward commotion, of the act by which you are to yourself? It is not your nonbeing as something existing for others to recognize. It is the non-being which belongs to your act itself; what you are not and must become, and which you bring into being by the act which posits it. Consider any definite object of your thought whatsoever, it can be no other than your own definite thought itself. It is what you have thought and what you in your actual consciousness have set apart as object. What else is it but a form of your non-being, or rather of the ideal moment to which you must contrapose it, and which you must contrapose to yourself in order to be yourself a definite real?
Nature, like mind, has two faces, one which looks outward and one which looks inward. Nature seen Th from without, as we see it before us, a eternal past of pure abstract object, is a limit of mind the eternal and rules it. Whence it is that mind cannot see even itself from within, and conceives itself mechanically, in space, in time, without freedom, without value, mortal. But nature has another face. It is that which it presents to our view when, awaking from that dream which for ordinary common sense is philosophy, and arousing ourselves, and strenuously reasserting our personality, we find nature itself within our own mind as the non-being which is life, the eternal life which is the real opposite of what Lucretius called mors immortalisl Nature, then, is the eternal past of our eternal present, the iron necessity of the past in the absolute freedom of the present. And beholding this nature, man in his spiritual life recovers the whole power of the mind and recognizes the infinite responsibility which lies in the use he makes of it, rising above all trivial incidents of the universal life, such as resemble in the ordinary view the buzzing of insects on the back of the unfeeling Earth, and attending to the life breath of the Whole whose reality culminates in self-consciousness.
1 Lucretius, De rerum natura, Hi. 869, " mortalem vitam mors cum immortalis ademit."
CHAPTER^ XVII EPILOGUE AND COROLLARIES WE may now briefly sum up the main features of the doctrine we have sketched.
An absolute idealism cannot conceive the idea except as thought in act, as all but consciousness s i The °f tne idea itself, if we keep for idea the characteristic objective meaning, which it originally had of idealism. 'ln p}atO) anc| which it continues to have in common thought and in the presuppositions of scientific knowing, that of being the term of thought or intuition. On the other hand, an idealism which is not absolute can only be a one-sided idealism or half-truth, which is as much as to say an incoherent idealism. It may be transcendent, like Plato's, which leaves matter, and therefore the becoming of nature, outside the idea. It may be immaterial, like Berkeley's, for which all is idea except God, the reality who makes perception be. It may be critical or transcendental, like Kant's, in which the idea is a mere unifying activity of a manifold arising from another source, and the idea therefore supposes its opposite, an unknowable, which is the negation of the idea itself. An idealistic conception aims at conceiving the absolute, the whole, as idea, and is therefore intrinsically absolute idealism. But absolute it cannot be unless the idea coincides with 254 EPILOGUE AND COROLLARIES CH.
the act of knowing it, because — and here we find the very root of the difficulty in which Platonism is entangled — were the idea not the act itself through which it is known, it would leave something outside itself, and the idealism would then no longer be absolute.
An idealism conceiv d strictly in this meaning fulfils the task which Fichte assigned to philosophy and § 2. The named Wissenschaftshhre; a task not fuldoctrine of filled even by Hegel, for he presupposed to knowing. the absoiute i^a or tne idea for itself, the idea in itself and the idea outside itself. That is, to the absolute idea he presupposed logic and nature. In the final solution of the cosmic drama these acquire in the human mind the self-consciousness to which they aspire and of which they have need. Self-consciousness must therefore be said to be their true essence. Hegel's use of the " I " of Fichte, in order to solve the difficulty Fichte's conception gave rise to from the abstractness of his concept of the " I," an " I " incap able of generating the " not-I " from its inward nature as " I," ends in destroying rather than in establishing the absolute reality of the " I." The " I " is not absolute if it has something outside it on which it is based, instead of being the foundation of everything and therefore having the whole within itself. The defect of Hegelianism is precisely that it makes what ever presupposes the " I " precede it. Even without this defect it is unfaithful to the method of immanence which belongs to absolute idealism, and turns again to the old notions of reality in itself which is not the thought by which it is revealed to us.1 The idealism which I distinguish as actual inverts 1 Cf. the last chapter of my Riforma della dialettica hegeliana.
ACTUAL IDEALISM 255 the Hegelian problem: for it is no longer the question § 3. The °f a deduction of thought from Nature and principle of of Nature from the Logos, but of Nature actual idealism. and the Logos from thought. By thought is meant present thinking in act, not thought defined in the abstract; thought which is absolutely ours, in which the " I " is realized. Aid through this inversion the deduction becomes, what in Hegel it was impossible it could become, the real proof of itself which thought provides in the world's history, which is its history. The impossibility of the Hegelian deduction arises from the fact that it starts from the abstract and seeks to attain the concrete, and to pass from the abstract to the concrete is impossible. The concrete for the! philosopher is his philosophy, thought which is in the act of realizing itself, and in regard to which the logic of the real, which governs that thought itself, and the Nature on which that logic must be posed as a pedestal of the history of thought, are alike abstract. From the concrete to the abstract, on the other hand, there is but one passage, — the eternal process of self- idealization. What else indeed is the act of thought, the " I," but self-consciousness or reality which is realized in being idealized? And what is the idealiza tion of this reality, realized just when it is idealized, but the dualizing by which the act of thought balances itself between the two selves, of which the one is subject and the other object only in their reciprocal mirroring of one another through the concrete and absolute act of thought? The dualizing implies an inward differentiating of the real which in idealizing itself distinguishes itself from itself (subject from object). The " I " knows, therefore, when it finds itself in its ideality confronting itself in its reality as 256 EPILOGUE AND COROLLARIES CH.
different from itself. And it is in fact radically different. It is the negation of the real which is idealized. The one is act, the thinking, the other is what is thought, the opposite of thinking.
The thinking is activity, and what is thought is a product of the activity, flat is, a thing. The activity as such is causa sui and therefore it is freedom. The thing is a simple effect which has the principle of its own being outside it, and therefore it is mechanism. The activity becomes, the thing is. The thing is as other, a term of the relation to an other. In that is its mechanistic nature. Thereby it is one among many, that is, its concept already implies multiplicity, number. The activity, on the contrary, realizes itself in the other, or rather it is realized in itself as other. It is therefore a relation with itself, an absolute, infinite unity, without multiplicity.
The multiplicity of the thing thought implies the reciprocal exclusion of the elements of the multiplicity and thereby space. The thing thought is nature. It is nature in so far as it is the idea in which the reality has been revealed to itself. So that the Platonic idealism is a pure naturalism rather than a spiritualism. It is the affirmation of a reality which is not mind, and if there be such a reality mind is no longer possible. This is the characteristic alike of a transcendent ideal ism like Plato's, and of the crudest materialistic naturalism.
The difficulty we all experience in understanding this new deduction of nature from the idea as thought § 4. Deduction is due to the fact that we entirely lose of nature. sight of the abstractness of the nature we are proposing to deduce, and restrict ourselves to the false common notion of nature which represents it as INTELLECTUALISM 257 INTELLECTUALISM 257 concrete and actual reality. In so doing we are ignoring entirely the true character of actual thought as absolute reality. For naturalism has always been the necessary consequence, and as it were another aspect, of intellectualism. We can indeed define intellectualism as the conception of a reality which is intended as the opposite, and nothing but the opposite, of mind. If mind has such independent reality confronting it, it can only know it by presup posing it already realized, and therefore by limiting itself to the part of simple spectator. And the nature it will then know is not what it may see within itself, —that would be spiritualism; but what is other than itself. That alone is nature. But this nature of the intellectualist does not require to be deduced. Were there such an obligation it would be a sign that the intellectualist is right; and then it is no longer a case of deducing nature because, in the intellectualist position, it is itself the first principle. Indeed the problem of the deduction of nature does not arise until we have left the false standpoint of intellectualism and so got rid of the illusion of a natural reality.
In this way we can easily perceive the abstractness of the thing thought as such, or rather of nature in so § 5. Nature as far as it stands opposed to mind. And abstract nature, then this mysterious nature, impenetrable by the light of the intellect, appears a simple moment of thought: a moment whose spirituality is unveiled in all its purity directly we come to think it in act, in the concrete from which it has been abstracted, in the act of thought in which it is really posited. Since it is impossible — and that it is so should now be abundantly clear to every one — to fix cognitively in the real world, and as it were to s 258 EPILOGUE AND COROLLARIES CH.
surprise, a natural reality without positing it as an idea corresponding to a certain moment of our repre sentative activity and thereby converting the opaque solidity of nature into the translucent inwardness of thought.
There is also in what is thought, taken in itself, a double nature, and its intrinsic contradiction is a form § 6 Double °f the restless activity of thought. What aspect of what is thought cannot be what is now think- is thought. abie Decause jt js what js thought, and it is what is thought just because not thinkable. The thing thought is thing, nature, matter, everything which can be considered as a limit of thought, and what limits thought is not itself thinkable. The thing thought is the other of the thinking, or the term, which when it is reached we feel the thinking is stopped. The essence of that other is destined always to be withdrawn from view. We can know the pro perties or qualities, but behind them there remains the thing, unattainable. And so with everything thought, it is on this condition it is thought, because everything thought is thing, and in so far as it is such, incom mensurable with mind.
And yet, because not thinkable, the thing is thought: the thinking is the thing's very unthinkability. It is not in itself unthinkable beyond the sphere of our thinking; but we think it as not thinkable. In its unthinkability it is posited by thought, or better still, it is as unthinkable that it is posited. For it is the nature of thought to affirm, and it is only in affirming that it is. By this I mean that if we regard thought as simply what is affirmed, as the conclusion or result of the affirmation, it is no longer an affirming, nor even a thinking. And as thought cannot not be xvn ACT WHICH IS NEVER FACT 259 thought, it affirms itself without being fixed as an affirmation. That is, it posits itself as act which is never fact, and thereby it is pure act, eternal act. Nature in the very act in which it is affirmed is denied, that is, spiritualized. And on this condition only can it be affirmed.
Nature, then, is an abstract conception of the real, and cannot be given except as an abstract reality. § 7. The nature The thought in which my I ' is of the "I." actualized can only be mine. When thought is not mine, when in my thinking I do not recognize myself, do not find myself, am not living in it, the reality which comes to be the thought in which my thought meets itself, in which, that is, I meet myself, is for me nature. But to be able to conceive this nature as absolute reality I must be able to think the object in itself, whereas the only object I can think is an aspect of the actual subject.
And also, be it noted, this object is not one which has only a value for knowledge. It is a reality intrinsi cally metaphysical. The " I," from whose dialectical process the object arises, the object which is then no other than the life of the " I," is the absolute " I." It is the ultimate reality which, try how we will to divest it of the value for knowledge with which we endow all reality, we can only conceive as " I." It is the " I " which is the individual, but the individual as subject with nothing to contrapose to itself and finding all in itself. It is therefore the actual concrete universal. This " I " which is the absolute, is in so far as it affirms itself. It is causa sui.
Deprived of its internal causality it is annulled. In causing itself it is creator of itself and in itself of the world, of the world which is the most complete that 260 EPILOGUE AND COROLLARIES CH.
we can think, — the absolute world. This world is the object of which our doctrine speaks, and therefore our doctrine is a doctrine of knowledge in so far as it is a metaphysic.
The world is nature and the world is history. Each term comprehends the other so that we can say § 8. History the world is nature or history. We as nature. distinguish the two domains of reality in the distinction between an other than mind and an other in mind. The other than mind, which is outside mind in general, is nature. It has not the unity, the freedom, the immortality which are the three essential characters of mind. The other in mind is history. It participates in all these essential characters, but at the same time implies an otherness in regard to the spiritual activity for which it is and which affirms it. The earth's movement is a natural fact, but the Copernican theory is a historical fact. What constitutes the difference is not that the historical fact is, and the natural fact is not, an act of the mind identical with that by which I think it, but that it is an act of the mind which is already complete when I think it and present therefore to my thinking with a positive character of autonomy, or objectivity, analogous to that of natural facts. We can even say in regard to it, that from being a spiritual act it has become a fact. The form of otherness from the subject, the fact that Copernicus who wrote the De revolutionibus orbium celestium and I who read it are different persons, is not the essential thing which gives the Copernican theory its character as history. It possesses that character because we can speak of historical fact, of fact which has in itself a certain law, which every one who narrates or remembers the NATURE AND HISTORY 261 history must respect: a law which requires an absolute form of otherness through which the creative spiritual act of the historical fact is different from the historical spiritual act. Caesar, when he wrote his Commentaries, must have already completed the facts which he narrated; and were there no difference between the man of action and the writer, there could be no history, or history would be confused with romance. I who am speaking am free to say what I will; but when I have spoken aha jacta est; I am no longer master of my words, they are what they are, and as such they confront me limiting my freedom; and they may become the torment of my whole life. They have become history, it may be, in the secret recesses of my own soul.
In this meaning, in spite of the profound difference which it makes between natural facts and historical facts, the difference that historical facts are and natural facts are not, at least are not originally, spiritual acts, nature and history coincide in so far as they imply a form of otherness from the " I " which knows, and apart from which we could not speak either of the one or of the other.
This is not enough. In the ordinary concepts of nature and history, that is, in the concepts which the naturalists have of nature and the spatialkyof historians have of history, otherness is nature and of absolute otherness. It is not the other- history as ness we mciicated in the proposition that the unthinkable is thought, but the other ness we mean when we find it necessary to say that what is thought is unthinkable. The " nature " of the naturalist is nature without final ends, extraneous to mind; the nature we can only know as phenomenon; 262 EPILOGUE AND COROLLARIES CH.
the nature of which in resignation or despair we say ignorabimus. And the history of the historians is that fathomless sea of the past which loses itself and disappears in the far-offness of the prehistoric, wherein lie also the roots of the tree of civilization. It is the history of men's actions, the actions of men whose soul can only be reconstituted in an imagination devoid of any scientific justification. Naturalists and historians alike are confined to the cm without being able to seek the Stort, because for them otherness is not substantial unity, a moment of the dialectical process. Their object is not that which we only recognize in its opposition to the subject, it is full and radical otherness, or rather multiplicity. And thus it is that nature is displayed in space and time (where spirituality is inconceivable), and history at least in time, which, as we know, is only a kind of space, for time in the before and after of the succession implies a reciprocal exclusion of the elements of the manifold.
Nature and history, then, coincide in their character of spatiality. Spatiality withdraws them both from § 10. Time the mind, if not from the mind as it is and mind. generally conceived, at least from the mind as it must be conceived in the concrete; realistic ally, as the actual "I."
For if, with Kant, we make time, or as we should now say the form of spatiality which is time, the form of the internal sense, and so adapt it to the spiritual facts, we are no longer looking at the spirituality of those facts: the spirituality for which they must not be facts but the spiritual act. When we declare that the Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1781 but that Kant began to write it towards the end of CONCRETE TIME 263 CONCRETE TIME 263 1772, we are not thinking of the Criticism by which it is one indivisible spiritual act, but we are putting it on the same plane on which we place many other mental and natural facts. Moreover, if we would know what that Criticism is, as Kant's thought, we must read his book, reflect on it, and thereby separate it from its time and make Kant's past work our present thought. Thereby time is thought of by the mind as nature and not as mind, thought of as a multiplicity of facts external to one another and therefore conceivable according to the principle of causality, not as that living unity, the historian's immortal mind.
But if from the naturalist's contemplation in which we are lost in the multitude of facts, we rise to the § ii. Nature philosopher's contemplation in which we and history find the centre of all multiplicity in the as mind. one^ t^en fae Spatiality, the multiplicity,