thinkable, we never come to our thought's margin, we never come up against something other than thought, the presence of which brings thought to a stop. So that the mind is not only in itself psycho logically one, it is one epistemologically and it is one metaphysically; it is never able even to refer to an object which is external to it, never able therefore to be conceived as itself a real among reals, as a part only of the reality.
But this is not enough. So far we have looked at only one side of the question. A deep and invincible § i c The repugnance has in every age made the multiplicity human mind shrink from affirming this unmultipliable and infinite unity of the mind in its absolute subjectivity. The mind cannot issue from itself, it can detach nothing from itself, its world is within it. And yet this concept of the self, of a centre around which every one necessarily gathers all the real and possible objects of his experience, seems to hint at something different from it, something which is its essentially correlative term. In affirming a subject we at the same time affirm an object. Even in self-consciousness the subject opposes itself as object to itself as subject. If the activity of conscious ness is in the subject, then when in self-consciousness that same subject is the object, as object it is opposed to itself as the negation of consciousness, even as unconscious reality, relatively at least to the conscious ness which belongs to the subject. The object is always contraposed to the subject in such wise that, however it may be conceived as dependent on the subject's activity, it is never given it to participate in the life with which the subject is animated. So that the subject is activity, search, a movement towards m OMNIS DETERMINATE EST NEGATIO 31 the object; and the object, whether it be the object of search or the object of discovery or the object of awareness, is inert, static. Consequently to the unity realized by the, subject's activity there stands opposed in the object the multiplicity which belongs to the real, hardly separated from the synthetic form which the subject imprints on it. Things, in fact, in their objectivity, presupposed as the term of the mind's theoretical activity, are many: essentially many, in such wise that a single thing is unthinkable save as resulting from a composition of many elements. A unique and infinite thing would not be knowable, because to know is to distinguish one thing from another. Omnis determinatio est negatio. Our whole experience moves between the unity of its centre, which is mind, and the infinite multiplicity of the points constituting the sphere of its objects.
What we have then to do here is to bring clearly into relief the character of this relation between the unity § 16. The rek- of the mind and the multiplicity of things, tion between It escaped Kant. It refers to the exact the unity of nature of the mind's theoretical activity.
mind and the. r. r mind and the. r. r multiplicity of Let us note first of all that if the unity ot things. mind and the multiplicity of things were together and on the same plane, as Kant thought when he presupposed the uncompounded manifold of data coming from the noumenon to the synthesis of aesthetic intuition, then the unity of the ego would be no more than a mere name, because it could be summed up with the other factors of experience and so would participate in the totality which includes the multiplicity of the data. In such case it would be seen to be a part. To be one among many is not really to be one since it is to participate in the nature 32 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY of the many. But the multiplicity of things does not stand in the same rank with the unity of the ego, for multiplicity belongs to things in so far as they are objects of the ego, or rather in so far as all together are gathered into the unity of consciousness. Things are many in so far as they are together, and therefore within the unity of the synthesis. Break up the synthesis and each is only itself without any kind of reference to the others. And therefore consciousness cannot have one of them as object without being enclosed within it and imposing on itself the absolute impossibility of passing to another. Which comes to saying that the thing no longer is one thing among many, but unique. In so far therefore as there is multiplicity there is a synthesis of multiplicity and unity.
The multiplicity of things, in order to be the multiplicity which belongs to the object of conscious ness, implies the resolution of this very multiplicity, and this is its unification in the centre on which all the infinite radii of the sphere converge. The multi plicity is not indeed added to unity, it is absorbed in it. It is not n + i, but n = I. The subject of experi ence cannot be one among the objects of experience because the objects of experience are the subject. And when we feel the difference, and only the difference, between ourselves and things, when we feel the affinity of things among themselves, and seem ourselves to be shut up as it were within a very tiny part of the whole, to be as a grain of sand on the shore of an immense ocean, we are regarding our empirical selves, not the transcendental self which alone is the true subject of our experience and therefore the only true self.
THINKING AND ACTING 33 We have not, however, eliminated every difficulty. The mind is not only bound to the multiplicity of the s i The obJect or °f the things. There is the mind>s multiplicity of persons. There is, it will apparent limit be said, not only a theoretical activity by acdvit°UCal wnicn we are in relation with things, there is also a -practical activity by which we are in relation with persons, and thereby constrained to issue from our unity and to recognize and admit a reality transcending our own.
It is of the greatest importance to bring this difficulty clearly to light, for it has immediate con sequences in regard to the moral conception of life. Let us note then that the mind is never properly the pXire theoretical activity which we imagine to stand in opposition to the practical activity. There is no theory^ no contemplation of reality, which is not at the same time action and therefore a creation of reality. Indeed there is no cognitive act which has not a value, or rather which is not judged, precisely in its character of cognitive act, according to whether it conforms with its own law, in order that it may be recognized or not as what it ought to be. Ordinarily we think that we are responsible for what we do and not for what we think. We suppose we could not think otherwise than as we think, that though indeed we may be masters of our conduct, we are not masters of our ideas. They are only what they can be, what reality makes them. This common belief, held even by many philosophers, is a most serious error. Were we not the authors of our ideas, that is, were our ideas not our pure actions, they would not be ours. It would be impossible to judge them, they would have no value; they would be neither true nor false. They D 34 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY would be, altogether and always, whatever a natural and irrational necessity had made them. The human mind, wherein they would be, altogether and always, running confusedly, would be powerless to exercise any discrimination and choice. It is absurd. For even in thinking the sceptical thesis itself we must think it, whether we will or no, as true, that is, as clothed with truth value, for which it must be thought and its opposite rejected.
Every spiritual act, then (including that which we regard as simply theoretical), is practical in as much as it has a value, practical in being or in not being what it ought to be. It is therefore our act and it is free. Every act is spiritual, moreover, in so far as it is governed by a law, by which an account is required from men not only of what they do but of what they say or of what they would say if they expressed what they think. This law which governs the spiritual act has nothing in common with the laws characterizing natural facts. Natural laws are no other than the facts themselves, whereas a law of the mind is, so to say, an ideal, or rather an ideal which the mind presents to itself in distinction from the fact of its own working. We are accustomed to think that the mind is one thing, the laws which govern it another. Mind is freedom; but also, and just on that account, it is law, which it distinguishes from itself as an activity higher than its own.
Yet again, the law of the mind is rational, and in that alone it is distinguished from the law of nature. The law of nature is what is, not something we are seeking behind what is. It is vain to seek the why of what is. If we ask, Why? of an earthquake or of any other -physical evil we ask it not of nature, but of God, THE SPIRITUAL LAW 35 who can make nature intelligible as the work of mind or act of will. The spiritual law, on the contrary, in all its determinations, has a definite why, and speaks its own language to our soul. The poet correcting his poem obeys a law which speaks the language of his own genius. To the philosopher nothing is more familiar, more intimate, than the voice which admonishes him continually, preventing him from uttering absurdities in regard to what he discovers. Every law which others, our teachers or governors, impose on our conduct, is only imposed truly and effectively when it is rendered transparent in its motives and in its intrinsic rationality, perfectly fitted to our concrete spiritual nature.
' In conclusion, if the mind be free, in so far as it is limited by laws it can only mean that these laws are not a different reality from that which it is realizing, but the reality itself. The mind cannot be conceived in freedom, with its own value, except by seeing it from the point of view of other minds, just as the " I," as subject of pure abstract knowledge, has need of the "not-I," freedom has need of another "I." And so we have man thinking of God as author of the laws imposed on him and on all other particular men. So too we have man girding himself with duties and positing around him as many minds, as many persons, as subjects are required for the rights which his duties recognize. And when we look within our own consciousness and consider the value of what we are doing and of what we are saying to ourselves, it is as though innumerable eyes were looking in upon us to judge us. The very necessity of the multiplicity of things, as we have already made clear, forces us to conceive manifold duties, many subjects 36 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY CH.IH with rights, many persons. Such a concept could never arise in a pure theoretical experience, for a pure theoretical experience could not be made to think of another world than that of things. But we are not a pure theoretical experience. And therefore our world is peopled with minds, with persons.
How then are we to maintain the infinite unity of mind in the face of this necessity of transcending it by a multiplicity of persons?
CHAPTER IV MIND AS DEVELOPMENT THE difficulty instanced at the end of the last chapter concerns, as we can now clearly see, not simply the con cept of mind but the concept of the real.
S i. Develop- L. r ment as unity For it is only a difficulty in the concept of of unity and mind in so far as the real in its totality comes to be conceived as mind, bmce, if we take our start in the present actuality of conscious- ne'ss in which mind is realized, then to posit the infinite unity of mind is to posit the unity of the real as mind.
The solution of this difficulty, which we have tried to present in all its force, is to be found in the concept already expounded that the mind is not a being or a substance but a constructive process or development. The very word development includes in its meaning both unity and multiplicity. It affirms an immanent relation between unity and multiplicity. But there is more than one way of understanding such a relation. It is necessary therefore to clear up precisely the exact mode in which in our view mind is to be conceived as development.
One mode of conceiving development is that by which we posit abstractly the unity outside the multi- § 2. The ab- plicity. The unity of the development is stract concept then imagined as the ground or basis of of development. ^ development, either as its principle or as its result. The germ of a plant, for example, is 37 38 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT represented as the undifferentiated antecedent of the vegetative process, and the growth of the plant as consisting in a progressive differentiation and multi plication of the primitive unity. In such case we may believe we are conceiving the growth of the plant but really we are making it impossible to conceive. The plant lives and grows not only in so far as there is a succession of different states, but in so far as there is the unity of all its states beginning with the germ. And when we oppose the germ to the plant, the tender seedling springing from the soil to the big tree with its wide-spreading branches, we are letting the living plant escape and setting side by side two images, two dead photographs as it were, of a living person. We have multiplicity it is true, but not the reality which comes by the multiplication into different forms of what throughout the development is and always re mains one. Another example, taken not from vague fancy but from scientific and philosophical systems, is that of the old vitalist physiology and the mechan istic physiology which arose in the last century as a reaction against it. Both fell into an identical error, for extremes meet. Vitalism posited life as the necessary antecedent or principle of the various organic functions, as an organizing force, transcending all the single specifications of structure and function. Mechan ism abolished this unity antecedent to the different organic processes, and these became simply physico- chemical processes. It dreamed of a posthumous unity consequent on the multiple play of the physico- chemical forces which positive analysis discovers in all vital processes. Life was no longer the principle but the result, and it appeared as though, instead of a meta physical explanation starting from an idea or from a iv THE LIVING THING AND ITS STATES 39 purely ideal entity, there was now substituted a strictly scientific and positive explanation, since the new point of departure is in the particular phenomena, in the object of experience. In reality for a spiritual istic and finalistic metaphysic there was substituted a materialistic and mechanistic one. The one meta physic was worth as much as the other, because neither the unity from which the vitalists set out nor that at which the new mechanists arrived was unity. They both adopted an abstraction in order to under stand the concrete. Life is not an abstract unity but the unity of an organism, in which the harmony, fusion and synthesis of various elements, exist in such wise that there is neither unity without multiplicity nor multiplicity without unity. The unity cannot yield the multiplicity, as the old physiology supposed, and the multiplicity cannot yield the unity, as the new physiology supposed, and for the following simple reason. So far as the unity and the multiplicity are not real principles but simple abstractions, there can never result from them true unity and true multiplicity, for these, far from being outside one another, are one and the same, the development of life.
There is then another mode of thinking the relation between unity and multiplicity. It can be termed § 3 The con- concrete in opposition to the former which crete concept of clearly is abstract. This is the mode which development. w'jj on]v jet us COnceive unity as multi plicity and vice versa: it shows in multiplicity the reality, the life of the unity. This life just because it never is but always becomes, forms itself. As we have said, it is not a substance, a fixed and definite entity, but a constructive process, a development.
From this theory that the mind is development, it 40 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.
follows that to conceive a mind as initially perfect, or § 4. Unity as as becoming finally perfect, is to conceive multiplicity. it no longer as mind. It was not in the beginning, it will not be in the end, because it never is. It becomes. Its being consists in its becoming, and becoming can have neither antecedent nor con sequent without ceasing to become.
Now this reality which is neither the beginning nor the end of a process but just process, cannot be conceived as a unity which is not a multiplicity; because as such it would not be development, that is, it would not be mind. Multiplicity is necessary to the very concreteness, to the very dialectical reality of the unity. Its infinity which is the essential attribute of the unity is not denied by its multiplicity but is confirmed by it. Infinity is realized through the multiplicity, for the multiplicity is nothing but the unfolding which is the actualizing of the reality.
The dialectical concept of mind, then, not only does not exclude, it requires spiritual multiplicity as the § 5. The unity essential mark of the concept of the which is muld- infinite unity of mind. Infinite unity plied and the jg therefore infinite unincation of the multiplicity which is multiple as it is infinite multiplication unified. of the one. Let us be careful to note, however, that there are not two methods as the Platonists, with their usual abstractness, suppose: one of descent from the one, or multiplication, the other of ascent or return to the one, or unification. Such are, for example, the two famous cycles of Gioberti's formula: Being creates the existing and the existing returns to Being.1 This is to fall back into the error already criticized, into the false mode of understanding 1 " L' Ente crea 1' esistente, e 1' esistente ritorna all' Ente."
WHAT BECOMES NEVER IS 41 development. Neither term (one, many) ever is, either as starting-point or end reached. The development is a multiplication which is a unification, and a unifica tion which is a multiplication. In the growing germ there is no differentiation which splits up the unity even for one single moment. The mind therefore does not posit, or confront itself with, an other by alienating that other from itself. It does not break up its own intimate unity through the positing of an otherness which is pure multiplicity. What is other than we is not so other as not to be also our self. Ever bear in mind that the " we " which we mean when we use it as a convention in speech is not the empirical self, and is not the scholastic compound of soul and body, nor even pure mind, it is the true, the transcendental " we." It is especially important to make clear that the concept of dialectical development only belongs rightly to this transcendental " we," for only in dialectic of it is it given to us to meet the spiritual thought reality. For there are two modes in which dialectic may be understood, and it is necessary once again to make a clear distinction. One of these modes is that of Plato. It was he who introduced the concept of dialectic into philo sophy, and he meant by it sometimes the role which philosophy fulfils and sometimes the intrinsic character of the truth to which philosophy aspires. Dialectic therefore is the fundamental meaning of philosophy in Plato's system. Indeed for Plato, it is the philosopher's inquiry, his research. Dialectic is not what makes the philosopher aspire to the ideas but what makes the ideas, to the knowledge of which he aspires, form themselves into a system. They are interconnected by mutual relations in such wise that 42 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT the cognition of the particular is the cognition of the universal, the part implies the whole, and philosophy is, to use his own expression, a Synopsis?- It is clear that this concept of the role of philosophy must depend on the dialectic which belongs to the ideas; it must depend, that is, on the system of relations by which all are bound together among themselves in such wise that, as Plato argues in the Parmenides, every idea is a unity of the one and the many. Now, it is clear that a dialectic so conceived implies the immediateness of thought, because it is the whole of thought from all eternity. It is clear therefore that such a dialectic is the negation of all development.2 It is not of this Platonic dialectic that we are now speaking. The radical difference between it and the modern may be seen in the fact that diadialectic of lectic in the Platonic meaning, is thought in thought so far as it is self-identical (the thought to which Aristotle attributed, as its funda mental laws, the principles of identity and non-contra diction); whereas in our meaning thought is dialectical because it is never self-identical. For Plato every idea in the totality of its relations is what is, what it is im possible to think of as changing and being transformed. We can pass from one idea to another, and in passing we can integrate an initial idea with the cognition of relations with which formerly it had not been thought, but this movement and process in us supposes rest, fixity and immutability in the idea itself. This is the Platonic and Aristotelian standpoint, and from this standpoint the principle of non-contradiction is the 2 See Gentile, La Riforma della Dialectica hegeliana, Messina, Principato, 1913, pp. 3-5 and 261-3; and Sistema di Logica, Part I. chap. viii. s. 6.
iv OLD DIALECTIC AND NEW 43 indispensable condition of thought. For us on the other hand true thought is not thought thought, which Plato and the whole ancient philosophy regarded as self-subsistent, a presupposition of our thought which aspires to correspondence with it. For us the thought thought supposes thought thinking; its life and its truth are in its act. The act in its actualization, which is becoming or development, does indeed posit the identical as its own object, but thanks precisely to the process of its development, which is not identity, which is not, that is to say, abstract unity, but unity and multiplicity, or rather, identity and difference in one.
This concept of dialectic judged by the principle of noh-contradiction, which it seems flagrantly to violate, is a paradox and a scandal. For how can and the prin- we deny that the principle of non-contra- ciple of non- diction is a vital condition of all thought?
dissidence between the concept of thought thought, for which the principle of non-contradiction has a meaning, and the concept of thought thinking, the act of the transcendental ego, to which it can have no relevance, we see that the dialectic is a strictly correct concept. It is only when we descend from thought thinking, which is activity, to thought thought, which is the limit of the activity it presupposes and itself abstract, that the principle of non-contradiction applies. The world thought cannot be except as it is thought: however it is thought, it is immutable (in the thought which thinks it). But our modern aspiration to conceive mind as the transcendental activity productive of the objective world of experience, places us within a new world, a world which is not an object of experience, since it is 44 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT not a world thought, but the ground and principle of experience, the thinking. The new world cannot be governed by the law which was quite right for the old world, and those who continue to point to the principle of non-contradiction as the pillars of Hercules of philo sophy show that they still remain in that old world.
The distinction here emphasized between dialectic as Plato understood it, thought in its immediacy or „...thought thought, and our modern diaof the distinc- lectic, thought as act or process, thought don between the thinking, throws light on the meaning and value and inner nature or many concepts, which approximate to our concept of development. They are met with in Plato himself and before and after him, and even in our own time. They are concepts springing from the same soil in which dialectic as Plato understood it has its roots, yet they are quite distinct from the dialectic which makes spiritual reality intelligible to us, and which in its turn can only be understood in regard to spiritual reality.
The Platonic dialectic is only dialectic in appear ance. If we consider it with regard to the man's mind § 10. Criticism w^° ^oes not possess the system of the of the Platonic ideas and aspires to possess it, then indeed there is a development of the unity running through the multiplicity. There is an in definite approach to the realization of dialectical unity in the ever-widening inquiry into the relations by which the ideas are inter-connected. But since the value of this inquiry presupposes that an eternal dialectic is immanent in the ideal world, or since the reality which it is sought to know by dialectic is a presupposition of the thought, the dialectic belongs to the ideas, and though it is possible to conceive a mind sharing in it, iv THE GENESIS OF NATURE 45 still it is not the dialectic of the mind. The ideas do not realize unity, because they are unity; and they do not realize multiplicity because they are multi plicity. Neither in the one case nor in the other have the ideas in themselves any principle of change and movement. Therefore the true dialectic is that which is no longer that of the ideas. The Platonic principle evidently depends on referring the dialectic, which is originally development and process of formation, to an antecedent which transcends it, and in which its value is thought to lie. It resolves, that is to say, the mediacy which belongs to mind in so far as it is development into the immediacy of the reality which it presupposes and which it cannot conceive therefore except as self-identical (at least in regard to the thought which thinks it), according to the laws of the Aristotelian logic.
Now, if this be the fundamental character and the intrinsic defect of the Platonic dialectic, it will cling to all the conceptions, however dynamical and dialectical we make them, which have reference to a reality opposed to the thought which thinks it and pre supposed by it.