Let it not be thought that the concept of this deeper personality, the Person which has no plurality, § 6. The unity 'm any way excludes and effectually annuls of the tran- the concept of the empirical ego. Idealism and thTmuhi°- ^oes not mean mysticism. The particular plicity of the individual is not lost in the being of the empirical ego. « I " which is absolute and truly real. For this absolute " I " unifies but does not destroy. It is the one which unifies in itself every particular and empirical ego. The reality of the transcendental ego even implies the reality of the empirical ego. It is only ii FERUM ET FACTUM CONVERTUNTUR 15 when it is cut off from its immanent relation with the transcendental ego that the empirical ego is falsely conceived.
If we would understand the nature of this subject, — the unique and unifying transcendental I, in which the whole objectivity of spiritual beings structive process is resolved, confronted by nothing which ofthetran- can assert independence, a subject therescendental ego. fore ^^ nQ othemess opposed to it, — if we would understand the nature of this reality we must think of it not as a being or a state, but as a constructive process. Giambattista Vico in his De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1710) chose as his motto: " Verum et factum convertuntur." It showed profound insight. The concept of truth coincides with the concept of fact.
The true is what is in the making. Nature is the true, according to Vico, only for the divine intellect which is creative of nature; and nature cannot be the true for man, for nature is not made by us and into its secrets it is not given to us therefore to penetrate. All we can see of these secrets is the pheno mena in their extrinsic de facto modes of linkage (as Hume will say a little later), but we cannot know why one phenomenon must follow on another, nor in general why what is, is. When we look within nature itself all is turbid, mysterious. On the other hand, in regard to everything which we understand because it is our own doing, the criterion of truth is clearly within us. For example, what is a straight line? We know because we ourselves construct it in the inmost recess of our own thinking by means of our own imagination. The straight line is not in nature; we understand it thanks to our imagination, and not immediately but 1 6 SPIRITUAL REALITY by constructing it. So later in his Scienza nuova (1725) Vico tells us that the human mind can know the laws of the eternal historical process, conceived as spiritual development, because the cause and first origin of all historical events is in the human mind.
The greatest effort we can make, still following Vico, to get within the processes of nature is experi- § 8. Mind as *»<?#/, and in experiment it is we ourselves concrete who dispose the causes for producing the development. effects. But even in the case of experiment the efficient principle remains within nature itself, whose forces we use without any means of knowing the internal mode of their working. And even in ex periment our knowledge stops at the simple discovery of the de facto connexions, so that the inward activity of the real, which ought to be the true and proper object of knowledge, escapes us. Our experiments being operations extrinsic to nature can only yield a super- \ ^ ficial knowledge of it. Its superficiality, or its defect as truth, is most clearly seen when natural science is ' compared with mathematics, and even more so when it is compared with the science of the human world, with what Vico called the world of the nations. For numbers and magnitudes, the realities studied by mathematics, are constructed by us, they are not realities in their own right but fictions, suppositions, merely postulated entities; whereas history is true and effectual reality. When we have understood history by mentally reconstructing its reality, there remains nothing outside it, no reality independent of history by which we can possibly test our reconstruction and decide whether it corresponds or not.
What then is the meaning of this doctrine of Vico?
FACTUM AND FIERI 17 It teaches us that we can only say we know an object when there is in that object nothing immediate^ nothing which our thought finds there already before we begin to know it, real therefore even before it is known. Immediate knowledge is contradictio in adjecto. Would you know what language is? There is no better answer than the remark of von Humboldt (1767- 1835): true language is not epyov (opus) but evepyeia (opera). It is not the result of the linguistic process, but is precisely that process which is developed in act. Whatever language is then, we know it, not in its definite being (which it never has), but step by step in its concrete development. And as with language so with all spiritual reality, you can only know it, so to say, by resolving it into your own spiritual activity, gradually establishing that self-sameness or unity in which knowledge consists. Destroy the degrees or steps of the development and there is no longer the development, you have destroyed the very reality whose realization and understanding is in question.
The truth is that the fact, which is convertible with the truth (verum et factum convertuntur\ in being the same spiritual reality which realizes itself or which is known in its realizing, is not, strictly speaking, a fact or a deed but a doing. We ought then rather to say: verum et fieri convertuntur.
CHAPTER III THE UNITY OF MIND AND THE MULTIPLICITY OF THINGS THE subject in this constructive process, the subject which resolves the object into itself, at least in so far § i Verum as tne ODject *s spiritual reality, is neither factum a being nor a state of being. Nothing but quatenusfit. faQ constructive process is. The process is constructive of the object just to the extent that it is constructive of the subject itself. And therefore instead of saying verum et factum conver -fun fur, we ought to say verum et fieri convertuntur, or even, verum est factum quatenus fit. In so far as the subject is con stituted a subject by its own act it constitutes the object. This is one of the vital concepts. We must acquire firm possession of it if we would avoid the equivocal blunders of some of the ostentatious and only too easy criticisms of this idealism.
Idealism is the negation of any reality which can be opposed to thought as independent of it and as the § 2. The incon- presupposition of it. But more than this, gruence of it is the negation of thought itself as an being and mind. activity? if that thought is conceived as a reality existing apart from its developing process, as a substance independent of its actual manifestation. If we take words in their strict meaning we must say that idealism is the denial of being either to a mind or to mind, the denial that a mind is, because " being " 18 CH.III BEING VERSUS MIND 19 and " mind " are mutually contradictory terms. If, speaking of spiritual reality, we say of a poet that he is, or of a poem that it is, in affirming being we are denying mind. We can say indeed that it is what the mind opposes to itself as a term of its transcendental activity. If we would say, however, what it now itself is, we can only mean, if we have a philosophical concept of it, what its development is, or more strictly, what this development is actualizing.
A stone is, because it is already all that it can be. It has realized its essence. A plant is, an animal is, § 3. Mind and in so far as all the determinations of the nature. plant or animal are a necessary and pre ordained consequence of its nature. Their nature is what they can be, and what cannot be altered at will, cannot break out into new unforeseeable manifesta tions. All the manifestations by which their nature is expressed is already there existing implicitly. There are processes of reality which are logically exhaustible, although not yet actually realized in time. The existence of these is ideally actualized. The empirical manifestations of their being come to be conceived, therefore, as closed within limits already prescribed as impassable boundaries. This restricted nature is a consequence which follows from the fact that every thing is represented in its relation to mind, as a reality confronting it, whose being therefore is presupposed in the fact that the mind knows it. The mind itself, on the contrary, in its actuality is withdrawn from every pre-established law, and cannot be defined as a being restricted to a definite nature, in which the process of its life is exhausted and completed. So to treat it is to lose sight of its distinctive character of spiritual reality. It is to confuse it and make it merely one of 20 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY the objects to which instead it ought to be opposed; one of the objects to which in so far as it is mind, it is in fact opposed. In the world of nature all is by nature. In the world of mind neither person nor thing is by nature, all is what it becomes through its own work. In the world of mind nothing is already done, nothing is because it is finished and complete; all is always doing. Just as all which has been understood is nothing in regard to what we want to and as yet are unable to understand, so likewise in the moral life all the merits of the noblest deeds hitherto performed do not diminish by a hair's-breadth the sum of duties there are to fulfil and in the fulfilment of which the whole value of our conduct will lie, so long as we continue to have worth as spiritual beings.
Mind according to our theory is act or process not substance. It is very different therefore from the § 4 Mind- concept of mind in the old spiritualistic substance and doctrine. That theory, in opposing mind mmd-act. to matter, materialized mind. It declared it to be substance, by which it meant that it was the subject of an activity of which it was independent, an activity therefore which it could realize or not realize without thereby losing or gaining its own being. In our view mind has no existence apart from its manifestations; for these manifestations are according to us its own inward and essential realization. We can also say of our mind that it is our experience, so long as we do not fall into the common error, due to faulty interpretation, of meaning by experience, the content of experience. By experience we must mean the act of experiencing, pure experience, that which is living and real.1 1 See L' esperienza pura e la realta storica, Firenza, Libreria della Voce, 1915.
m THERE IS NO INACTIVE SOUL 21 Let us be on our guard that we are not ensnared in the maze of language. Mechanistically analysed, § 5. The pit- not only is the noun distinguished from falls of language, the verb but it is detached from it and stands for a concept separable and thinkable apart. As love is loving and hate is hating, so the soul which loves or hates is no other than the act of loving or o hating. Intellectus is itself intelligere, and the gram matical duality of the judgment intellectus intelligit is an analysis of the real unity of mind. Unless we understand that unitv there is no understanding. If J o the living flame in which the spiritual act consists be quenched there is no remainder; so long as the flame is not rekindled there is nothing. To imagine ourselves simple passive spectators of our soul, even after a spiritual life intensely lived, full of noble deeds and lofty creations, is to find ourselves inert spectators in the void, in the nought which is absolute. There is just so much mind, just so much spiritual wealth, as there is spiritual life in act. The memory which does not renew, and so create ex novo, has nothing, absolutely nothing, to remember. Even opening our eyes to look within, when it requires no effort to do so, brings work, activity, keenness, in a word, is life. To stop is to shut our eyes; not to remain an inactive soul but to cease to be a soul.
This soul, it is hardly necessary to point out, is not the object of psychology. Psychology claims § 6. The object to be the natural science of psych- of psychology, ical phenomena, and accordingly adopts towards these phenomena the same attitude which every natural science adopts towards the class of objects it chooses for special study. The class of objects presented to the psychologist, like the classes 22 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY of natural objects presented to the naturalist, is taken just as what it purports to be. It is not necessary therefore that the psychologist, before he can analyse the soul which is the object of his science, should have to re-live it. He can be olympically serene in its presence. What he has singled out for observation may be a tumult of emotions, but he must preserve before it the same imperturbability which the mathe matician preserves before his geometrical figures. It is his business to understand, he must be perfectly impassive even before a real passion. But is the passion, when the psychologist analyses it without being himself perturbed by it, a spiritual reality? It is certainly a phenomenon which to exist must be given a place in the world of objects we can know about; and this is the ground of the science of psychology. Its particular claim to be science we will examine later. But if we are now asked: Can we think that this reality which confronts the mind and which the mind has to analyse, a reality therefore which is a presupposition of the mind whose object it is, is spiritual reality? We must answer at once: No. If the object is a spiritual reality and if our doctrine of the knowledge of spiritual reality be true, the object must be resolved into the subject; and this means that whenever we make the activity of others the object of our own thought it must become our own activity. Instead of this the psychologist, in the analysis which he undertakes from an empirical or naturalistic standpoint, presupposes his object as other than and different from the activity which analyses it. Understanding his object means that the object is not the activity of the subject for which it is object. The anthropologist who specializes on criminal anthro- THE ANALYSABLE SOUL 23 pology does not even for one single moment feel the need to be the delinquent and so resolve the object into the subject! Just so; precisely because the reality he studies is psychology (in the naturalistic meaning) it is not spiritual reality. This means that whatever appearance of spirituality it may have, the reality in its fulness, in what it truly is, escapes the analysis of the psychologist. And every time we consider any aspect whatever of spiritual reality simply from the empirical standpoint, the standpoint of empirical psychologists, we may be sure from the start that we only see the surface of the spiritual fact, we are looking at some of its extrinsic characters, we are not entering into the spiritual fact as such, we are not reaching its inmost essence.
To find spiritual reality we must seek it. This means that it never confronts us as external; if we § 7. How to would find it we must work to find it. discover mind. And if to find it we must needs seek it, and finding it just means seeking it, we shall never have found it and we shall always have found it. If we would know what we are we must think and reflect on what we are; finding lasts just as long as the construction of the object which is found lasts. So long as it is sought it is found. When seeking is over and we say we have found, we have found nothing, for what we were seeking no longer is. Nolite judkare says the Gospel. Why? Because when you judge a man you no longer regard him as man, as mind, you take a standpoint from which he is seen as so much material, as belonging to the natural world. He has ceased to be the mind which subsists in doing, which can only be understood when seen in act: not in the act accomplished, but in the act in process.
24 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY We may say of spiritual reality what the great Christian writers have said of God. Whoever seeks Him shall find Him. But to find spiritual reality one must be willing to put his whole being into the search, as though he would satisfy the deepest need of his own life. The God you can find is the God whom in seeking you make to be. Therefore faith is a virtue and supposes love. In this lies the folly of the atheist's demand that the existence of God should be proved to him without his being relieved of his atheism. Equally fatuous is the materialist's denial of spiritual reality: he would have the philosopher show him spirit, — in nature! Nature which by its very definition is the absence of mind! Wonderful are the words of the psalmist. Dixit insipiens in corde suo non est Deus. Only in his foolish heart could he have said it!
To have grasped the truth that mind is a reality which is in self-realization, and that it realizes itself as § 8 Warning self-consciousness, is not enough in itself against defini- to free us from the illusion of naturalism, tions of mind. por Spirituai reality seems itself to be in continual rebellion against such definition, arresting and fixing itself as a reality, an object of thought. All the attributes we employ to distinguish mind tend, however we strive against it, to give it substance. Verum est factum quatenus fit is in effect a definition of mind as truth. What then is truth but some thing we contrapose to error? A particular truth is a truth and not an error, and a particular error is an error and not a truth. How then are we to define and conceive truth without shutting it within a limited and circumscribed form? How are we to conceive truth, — not Truth as the sum of all its determinations, object of a quantitatively omniscient mind, but some TRUTH AND DEFINITION 25 definite truth (such as the theory of the equality of the internal angles of a triangle to two right angles), any truth in so far as it is an object or fixed in a concrete spiritual act, — how are we to conceive such a truth except by means of a fixed and self-contained concept, whose formative process is exhausted, which is therefore unreformable and incapable of development? And how can we think our whole spiritual life otherwise than as the continual positing of definite and fixed moments of our mind? Is not spiritual concreteness always spiritual being in precise, exact and circum scribed forms?
This difficulty, when we reflect on it, is not different from that which, as we saw, arises in the necessity we are under of beholding men and things in the medium of multiplicity. And it can only be eliminated in the same way, that is, by having recourse to the living experience of the spiritual life. For neither the multiplicity nor the fixedness of spiritual reality is excluded from the concept of the progressive unity of mind in its development. But, as the multiplicity is subordinated and unified in the unity, so the deter- minateness is subordinated in the concreteness of the system of all the determinations, which is the actual life of mind. For determinateness is essentially and fundamentally multiplicity, it is the particularity of the determinations by which each is what it is and reciprocally excludes the others. It is only by abstrac tion that even such a truth as that instanced, of the equality of the internal angles of a triangle to two right angles, can be said to be closed and self-contained. In reality it is articulated into the process of geometry in all the minds in which this geometry is actualized in the world.
26 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY This shows us why the concept of mind as process is a difficult concept. Against it all the fixed abstrac- §9. Theintui- tions of common sense and of science tionofmind. (which by its very nature always moves in the abstract) are continually working, incessantly crowding our intellect, drawing it hither and thither, not suffering it without bitter exertion to keep its hold on the immediate intuition of the spiritual life. By that intuition alone it attains, in its vivid moments, its norm and its inspiration towards science and virtue, which the more they fill the soul the more strongly vibrate the tense cords of our internal forces.
The unity of mind, which lives in such intuition, has been more or less clearly pointed out by all § 10. The philosophers, but no one yet perhaps has unity of mind, brought out with definite clearness its distinctive mark — unmultipliable and infinite unity.
The unity of mind is unmultipliable because, although psychology may compel us to analyse and reconstruct spiritual reality, it is impossible ever to think that mind is decomposable into parts, each conceiv able by itself as a self-contained unity, irrespective of the rest. Empirical psychology, while it distinguishes the various concurrent psychical facts in a complex state of consciousness and declares different elements to be ultimate terms in its analysis, yet goes on to point out that all the elements are fused in one whole, and that all the facts have a common centre of reference, and that it is precisely in virtue of this that they assume their specific and essential psychological character. Even the old speculative psychologies (as empirical as the modern in their starting-point), when they dis tinguish abstractly the various faculties of the soul, always reaffirm the indivisible unity or the simplicity MULTIPLE PERSONALITY 27 (as they call it) of the mind as the common basis and unique substance of the various faculties. The life, the reality, the concreteness of the spiritual activity, is in the unity; and there is no multiplicity except by neglecting the life and fixing the dead abstractions which are the result of analysis.
Modern empiricism, with its natural bias towards multiplicity, compelled to acknowledge that in any given experience consciousness is a unique centre §11. The em- f reference for zn ^g psychical phenoment against meiia, and that therefore there is no multi- the unity of pHcity within the ambit of one conscious ness, supposes that in the phenomenon of multi-pie -personality^ studied in abnormal psychology, multiplicity is introduced into consciousness itself. For though within the ambit of consciousness there is no multiplicity, yet when expelled from the ambit, two or more consciousnesses may exist in one and the same empirical subject. But this empirical observa tion itself serves only to confirm our doctrine of the non-multiplicity of mind because the duplication con sists in the absolute reciprocal exclusion of the two consciousnesses, each of which is a consciousness only on condition of its not being a partial consciousness, nor part of a deeper total consciousness, but that it is itself total and therefore itself unique, not one of two.
The unity of the mind is infinite. For the reality of the mind cannot be limited by other realities and still § 12. The error keep its own reality. Its unity implies its of pluralism. infinity. The mind is not a multiplicity: nor is the whole, of which it is a part, multiple, the part being a unity. For if the mind belonged to a multiple whole it would be itself intrinsically multiple.
28 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY CH.
The negation of intrinsic multiplicity is therefore enough to make clear the absurdity of the concept that the mind is part of a multiplicity. Atomists and monadists alike, however, have thought it possible to conceive the composite and also at the same time to conceive the simple as a constitutive element of the composite. We need not in this place discuss the strength of this thesis, we may for our present purpose even admit that it has all the value which common sense attributes to it, for, independently of every consequence of the concept of the unmultipliable or intrinsic unity of consciousness, there is a much more effective way of showing its infinity.
When we present the concept of our consciousness to ourselves we can only conceive it as a sphere whose 5 The radius is infinite. Because, whatever effort infinity of we make to think or imagine other things consciousness. or otner consciousnesses outside our own consciousness, these things or consciousnesses remain within it, precisely because they are posited by us, even though posited as external to us. The without is always within; it denotes, that is to say, a relation between two terms which, though external to one another, are both entirely internal to consciousness. There is for us nothing which is not something we perceive, and this means that however we define it, whether as external or internal, it is admitted within our sphere, it is an object for which we are the subject. Useless is the appeal to the ignorance in which, as we know by experience, we once were and others may now be of the realities within our subjective sphere. In so far as we are actually ignorant of them, they are not posited by consciousness and therefore do not come within its sphere. It is clear that our very ignorance is (X in UNITY AND INFINITY 29 not a fact unless at the same time it is a cognition. That is to say, we are ignorant only in so far either as we ourselves perceive that we do not know or as we perceive that others perceive what we do not. So that ignorance is a fact to which experience can appeal only because it is known. And in knowing ignorance we know also the object of ignorance as being external to the ambit of a given knowing. But external or internal it is always in relation to, and so within, some conscious ness. There exists no means of transcending this consciousness.
Spinoza conceived the two known attributes of substance, thought and extension, to be external to one another. He opposed idea and res, mens infinity of an(^ corPus> but he was not therefore able to thought think that ordo et connexio idearum idem est according to ac or^Q et Connexj0 rerum^ because, as he tells us, res (and primarily our own body) is no other than objectum mentis? The body is the term of our consciousness or the content of its first act. It is what Rosmini later called the basal feeling (sentimento fundamental^ the sense which the soul has in its feeling of what is primarily the object felt, the object beneath every sensation, the body. The objectum mentis of Spinoza is indeed different from the mind, but it is bound to the mind and seen by the mind itself as something different from it. In the very position then which the mind assigns to the body (and to all bodies) the mind is not really transcended. Spinoza therefore conceived mind as an infinite attribute of the infinite substance. Substance, from the standpoint of thought, is altogether thought.
And as we move with thought along all that is 30 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY CH