the two elements which constitute it, and there is no possibility of understanding their relation, for it is just the process of actualization of the individual itself; and that is precisely the nature it would affirm in opposition to the transcendental reality of the pure Platonic ideas.
The thousand years' history of the problem concern ing the -prindpium individuationis^ which had its rise in the Aristotelian concept of the individual, astic inquiry serves to prove how insuperable were the concerning the difficulties to which Aristotelianism was prindpium ^ condemned, unwilling to stop at the abstract universal or rlatonism, and yet completely unable to seek the immanence of the universal or rather its individuality, where alone it is possible to find it, — in the reality which is not the antecedent of thought, but thinking itself. The inter preters of Aristotle asked themselves: Of the two elements which constitute the individual, matter and form, which must be considered the principle of individualization? For if, as Plato had con ceived, the form is universal, the matter likewise must itself be universal, as that from which all the forms which are displayed in the endless series of the in dividuals, however disparate themselves, issue; a matter which in itself has none of the determinations which are realized in it by the intervention of the forms. So that form and matter, the one as much as the other taken by itself, each excludes the very possibility of any determination or individualization. Individuality arises from their meeting. But in this meeting which of the two determines the indeterminate, making it individual?
If we start with the abstract original duality of v THE PRINCIPIUM INDIFWUATIONIS 61 matter and form as given, it is impossible that we § 5. Giordano should find the ground of their unity, or Bruno's the true principium individui. Giordano difficulty. Bruno in the fuller maturity of the Re nascence saw this clearly, yet he could only do what Aristotle, coming after Plato, had done before: turn and affirm the need of unity. It was not given even to Bruno to perceive what he called the point of the union (// punto delf unione He remained, even to the end, at the standpoint of ancient philosophy, imagining reality as a presupposition of thought: a standpoint from which it is impossible to conceive movement and development. For if we start with unity, unity remains abstract and unproductive, unable to give the ground of duality; and if we start with duality, the duality cannot but be eternal duality, because it cannot but be identical with itself and there fore incapable of being unified.
The medieval philosophers started with duality and inquired which of the two terms generates that s 6 The unity which is the individual. They were antinomy of divided into two opposite camps, and their the individual. conmct was interminable since they found, on the one side and on the other alike, unchallengeable reasons, the one for maintaining that the principle of the individual is in the form, and the other for main taining that it is in the matter. They opposed and contraposed, thesis to antithesis, antithesis to thesis, without ever succeeding in extricating themselves from the antinomy. The problem is in fact insoluble because, whoever posits duality and then seeks to understand the relation of the two terms, must, since i De la causa, principle e uno (1584), in Opere Italians, ed. Gentile, vol. i.
62 THE PROBLEM OF NATURE it is not an a -priori relation (that is, a relation on the existence of which each of the two terms depends), decide in favour of one of the two. Either he thinks matter is primordial and matter only; or he thinks form is primordial and form only. To think both matter and form as together is excluded by the hypothesis of the duality, according to which each of the two terms is what it is without the other and by itself excludes the other. Now, to think matter by itself is to think a pure indeterminateness, which cannot produce deter mination from itself, and which cannot therefore appear individualized save by reason of its opposite, form, which will then be the individualizing principle. But this deduction is legitimate only so far as it admits the contrary. It is rendered possible in fact by the concept of the abstract matter which supposes the concept of abstract form. For to deny the concept of abstract form would involve also the denial that matter is really indeterminate, and this is the very basis on which the deduction rests. Suppose then we begin by thinking of form by itself. Lo and behold, the very term, which from one aspect appeared the origin of determinateness, now, looked at from the opposite aspect, is transfigured into the pure determinable which is absolutely indeterminate. In its pure ideality the form is the possibility of all particular individuals and not any one of the particular individuals. It must be incorporated and determined as a single existent; but this incarnation cannot be a transforma tion and generation from within. There must intervene something which (precisely as Plato said) is the negation of the ideal, actually universal being. And then it is evident that the individualizing principle can only be in the matter which is opposed to the form.
MATERIA SI GNAT A 63 Hence the scales of the Scholastics, leaning now to one side, now to the other; some affirming that § 7. Thomas t^ie principium individui is the form, others Aquinas's that it is the matter; each with equal ground in reason; each shut in by the impossibility of definitely breaking down the argu ments of the opposite side. There is one doctrine, however, which though unjustifiable on the basis of scholasticism, brought into play a high speculative talent, that of Thomas Aquinas. This doctrine takes its stand not on matter abstractly conceived, quo- modolibet accepta, but rather on matter conceived as having in itself a principle of determination, materia signata: matter impressed with a signum which implies a certain preadaptation to the form, a certain principle or beginning of it. An illogical doctrine, in so far as it framed the problem whether form or matter is the individualizing principle, it yet has the great merit that it substantially denies even the possibility of solving the problem without changing its terms. Practically it amounts to a rejection of the problem, which, like all problems admitting of two contradictory solutions or, as Kant would say, giving rise to antinomies, is wrongly stated.1 It must not be thought that the problem of the principle of individualization was abandoned with the § s. Survival of disappearance of scholasticism, when the the Scholastic authority of Aristotle was shaken and inquiry. modern philosophy entered on a new life.
We have already shown that Bruno, notwithstanding his intense aspiration towards unity, never rose above the Aristotelian conception, and, were this the place, we 1 For the medieval solutions of the problem, see Gentile, I Problemi della scolastica, Bari, Laterza, 1913, chap. iv.
64 THE PROBLEM OF NATURE CH.
might trace the history of the many attempts in the modern era which have been made to solve this famous problem. It involves the essential question of philo sophy. It is not merely a theme for intellectual gym nastics, such as we are accustomed to consider most of the questions over which medieval philosophers grew impassioned. The form is fundamentally the idea of the world, its ground, its plan, the Logos, God; and the matter is, in its turn, that obscure term which, irreducible to God's real essence, makes the world to be distinct from God even though it be the actualizing of his thought. All who think this world, in whatever way they think it, see in it a design, an order, something rational, which renders it intelligible in so far at least as it appears such. Galileo reduces the intelligibility of nature, which for him is the world itself in its totality, to mathematical relations, and these relations present themselves as laws conceivable in themselves, independently of their verification in natural facts, as if there were a logic presiding over the working, or rather over the realization of nature itself. Hegel constructed a complicated pure logic, by which the world is rendered intelligible to the philosopher, and this logic, in its pure element, the Logos, is posited before thought as the eternal plan, which is followed out in the world.
It is impossible ever to see reality otherwise than by the light of an idea, which, once we conceive the reality as a positive and therefore contingent fact, must ideally work loose from that fact, and posit itself as a pure idea, and so oblige us to ask: How does it become fact? The ques tion is not substantially different from that with which the prindpium individui is concerned. This HEGEL'S LOGIC AND NATURE 65 supposes, as already noticed and as it should now be clear, an original dualistic intuition. It could not be put in the monistic philosophies which denied the transcendence of the ideal to the real, of God to the world, and therefore of the form to the matter. But a philosophy must do more than merely propose to restore unity and reject transcendence, if it would gain that absolute concept of immanence for which monism strives, that in which alone it is possible to be rid of the antinomy of the principle of individualization. Hegel in this respect passes ordinarily for a more immanentist philosopher than he really is. He is responsible for pantheism being identified with im- manentism and has become the prototype of the pantheists. Certainly no one before him had made such mighty efforts to free reality from every shadow of a principle which transcends it. Yet, even so, he found himself faced with the necessity of conceiving the abstract form which is not matter, and therefore the universal which is not particular and the ideal which is not real, exactly as all the other inquirers into the individualizing principle were. He too has to ask: How or whence is the individual?
The most difficult problem perhaps which we meet in the Hegelian philosophy is this: When we have § 9. Hegel's posited logic, or the nexus of all the problem. categories of reality, how or whence is nature? This nature is the particular which must intervene where there is nothing but the universal. It is the incarnating of the pure ideal in matter, beginning with its simplest determination, space. It is, in short, the Aristotelian individual. And this problem in Hegel, however his own declarations in regard to it are to be taken, remains, and must F 66 THE PROBLEM OF NATURE CH.
remain, unsolved. There is in fact repeated for it the difficulty of the Platonic idealism. The Logos is the thinkability, or thinking as a whole. There are there fore two alternatives, either there is nothing else than the Logos, or there is something else but it is not thinkable (intelligible). In the first case, there is no nature outside the Logos, in the second case there is nature but no philosophy of it. And if the Logos has been excogitated in order to understand nature, then the Logos is no longer Logos or rather no longer what it ought to be. So, then, the standpoint of the Logos excludes nature. And if the universality of the Logos does not satisfy us and we are athirst for actuality, for natural positiveness and particular determinateness, then there is nothing for it but to abandon the Logos, to deny the Idea, and indeed Hegel himself says so. But this negation (completely analogous to the opposi tion of the Platonic non-being to being), the negation which the idea itself makes of itself, can have value only if it be itself a logical act, and is therefore within the sphere of the Logos, and not an act which the Idea, remaining within that sphere and developing the whole of its logical activity, can never fulfil. It fulfils it just when it overcomes pure logicity and breaks through the enclosing bark of the universal, pushing itself forth as particular. Such a rupture is inconceivable.
Even Hegel, then, propounds the problem of the principle of individualization without solving it. He § 10. why propounds it and cannot solve it, because, Hegel's problem as we have seen, the true concept of the dialectic (its own Logos) cannot be reached as a thing thought of, or as a reality which is a pre supposition of thinking, that abstract reality which had already been idealized by Plato into universals, from HEGEL'S PROBLEM UNSOLVED 67 which, as Aristotle clearly saw, it is impossible to redescend to the individuals of nature.
By this way, then, the individual has not been and is not to be found. For a nature which with its individuals is contraposed to thought cannot be grasped.
CHAPTER VI THE ABSTRACT UNIVERSAL AND THE POSITIVE ANOTHER famous controversy which engaged medieval philosophers and had not indeed come to an end when § i. The dispute tne m°dern era began, is the dispute con- concerning cerning the value of universals. Even in universals. fais the concept of the individual is at stake; because, according to the way in which we interpret the value of the universal, we shall corre spondingly conceive the individual. And if we fail to understand the universal in a way which enables us thereby to understand the individual, the need of conceiving the individual will necessarily remain unsatisfied.
Who has not heard of the famous dispute which divided the Scholastics of the thirteenth century? § 2. Nominal- ^ne nominalists, compromising the reality ism and of every ideal principle which is mediated in more than one individual, and therefore even the reality of the Christian dogmas (for they affirm such principles), denied that the Aristotelian philosophy supposed universals existing as universals, in the way that Plato had conceived them. Substance, according to Aristotle, must be conceived as individual, as a-vvo\ov, a concrete whole of form and of matter: not therefore a simple universal but a particularized uni versal. And it matters not that in knowing the intellect 68 CH.VI NOMINALISTS AND REALISTS 69 is concerned with the form only of the individual and that it has as its proper object the universal alone. The intellect knows the universal in the individuals. In the individuals the ideality of the universal is incorporated with the matter, and outside the in dividuals the universal is nothing but a pure name.
The realists, developing the permanent Platonic motive in Aristotelianism, objected, in their turn, that if the universal is not real, the individual cannot be real, for the individual is a determination of the uni versal, and only in the universal can attain the principle of its own being. The individual is real, in so far and only in so far as it participates in the universal. And precisely because we must say alike of each and every individual, that the reality of the individual is ephemeral and transient, inasmuch as it must be concurrent with the reality of all the other individuals, so we must say of the universal that in its unity it has a constant and eternal reality. So that the individual both is and is not real. The individual is not truly real if as in dividual it is distinguished from and opposed to the universal. The individual is real in so far as over flowing the limits of its own individuality, it coincides with the universal. For the universal is real in the absolute meaning.
Nominalism is clearly a naturalistic and material istic theory. In confining reality to the individuals, § 3. Criticism it tends to suppress their intelligibility, for of nominalism, it denies the absolute value of the universals through which they are intelligible. It tends also thereby to deny that there can be value in thought by itself, for thought contrasted with what alone is real in the individuals is indistinguishable from nothing. The universal, a pure name in so far as it is present in 70 THE ABSTRACT AND THE POSITIVE CH.
the individuals, does not universalize them, but par ticularizes itself. The conceptualists who called the universal a concept are substantially one with the nominalists, for their concept is no more than a name, a universal shorn of the reality which only the indi viduals possess. Nominalism means, therefore, that the form of each individual, since it is not identical with the form of all other individuals, inasmuch as we can conceive the form of each independently of each of the individuals, is no longer universal but particular. It is the form given hie et.nunc^ which in its being omnimodo determinatum comes to be in apprehensible by thought, ineffable, non-intuitable. Reality despoiled of its form is deprived of the illumina tion of thought. It is no more than the pure abstract presupposition of the terms of that thought. The individual, in short, as pure individual is not even individual: it is nothing.
Realism, on the other hand, falls into the opposite fault. So true is it that in vitium ducit culpae fuga § 4. Criticism & caret arte. If the universal be already of realism. real and the individual can add nothing to its reality, in what then does the individuality of the individual consist? We come back to the great difficulty of Plato, who remained imprisoned within the circle of the ideas, unable to return from them to the world, although it had been in order to understand the world that he had excogitated the ideas.
The eclectic theories succeeded no better. One of these was that of Avicenna, afterwards adopted and § 5 Criticism largely developed and disseminated by of the eclectic Thomas Aquinas. With the nominalists, Thomas Aquinas admitted the universalia in re^ but from these, with the conceptualists, he disvi THE ECLECTIC THEORIES 71 tinguished the universalia post rem, the universals man extracts from sensible experience in forming concepts; but also with the realists he maintained the value of the universalia ante rem, the divine thoughts which are realized in the world of natural individuals although they are real in God before they are realized in the world. As a solution it combines in one the difficulties of the opposed theses it would reconcile. Because, if the universals post rem are not one and the same with the universals in re, their difference signifies precisely, that in abstracting the universals from the individuals in which they inhere, we are withdrawing them from the reality which they have only while they adhere to the individuality. The concept, therefore, is an altera tion of the object and renders more remote the real being of things which it is proposed to know by means of the concept. And it comes to this, that for Thomas Aquinas, as for every nominalist, things in their individuality are unknowable.
And the knowability of things cannot be founded on the concept of the universale ante rem. Because this universal also is completely different from the other two, and they therefore cannot guarantee the value of the third which is realized in the mind of man. Be sides, granting to the individual thing the reality of the universal which it actuates, but which is already realized in the mind of God, the reality of this universal makes it impossible to understand in what its ulterior actualization can consist, since it is already full reality, in all its possible determinations, not one of which can be lacking in the idea which God resolves to realize. And the conclusion is that even the universale ante rem, notwithstanding the company of its brethren in re and post rem, remains quite alone, imprisoned in its pure 72 THE ABSTRACT AND THE POSITIVE CH.
ideality, impotent to explain the being of the individual. If the idea of the world precedes the world, and the idea is real, the world is impossible. And thus we see that even in the dispute concerning universals we are confronted with an insoluble antinomy. The reality of the individual cannot be made intelligible without the reality of the universal; but the reality of the universal renders unintelligible the reality of the individual.
This antinomy is even more insistent and per plexing than that which springs from the inquiry § 6. The concerning the individualizing principle: antinomy of because universalizing the individual is an the umversals. indispensable condition of conceiving it, it is indeed the very act of thinking it. And without the individual, hie et nunc^ there is no nature. Every thing concrete, even the life by which we live, flies off and vanishes. But to universalize is also to idealize, and therefore to see escaping from us, in another direction, everything real, for the real is always particular, determinate and individual.
Modern philosophy began to free itself from the bondage of this antinomy when with Descartes it said: § 7. Metaphysics c°Sito erS° sum- Jt was a beginning in so and empiricism far as in the cogito the concreteness of the in Descartes. individual, the " I " who thinks, coincides with the universality of thought. But it is only a beginning, inasmuch as in Descartes the coincidence between the individual and the universal is only to the extent that the thinking is my thinking, mine who say " cogito," and I who think am; that i^, in so far as the reality which is thought is the thought which thinks. So that, even in Descartes, no sooner is the thought turned away from the subject which is realized in its vi THE KANTIAN NOUMENON 73 own thinking, to the reality which is posited before the subject in virtue of his thinking, than the co incidence disappears, and the abyss between the individual and the universal reopens, and philosophy is constrained anew to oscillate between a world which is intelligible but not real (the rational world of the metaphysicians, from Descartes to Wolf) and a world real indeed, and substantial, but not intelligible, although obscurely felt and able to shine through sensible impressions, unconnected and manifold (the " nature " of the empiricists from Bacon to Hobbes, from Locke to Hume). Either a metaphysic of empty shadows, or a prostration of reason before an unknown and unknowable Absolute!
In Kant we meet a much more vigorous effort than Descartes's to understand the immanence of the universal in the individual, and to compreowe to Kant hend how thereby the concept of the and wherein individual is made possible. This is the a -priori synthesis which binds the intuition to the concept in a relation on which both the one and the other depend, and without which neither the one nor the other is. Yet Kant distinguishes the phenome non from the noumenon, and for him it is the noumenon which is the true root of the individual object of experience, and without experience thought would remain closed within the universal mesh of its pure forms (which are the Scholastic universals expressed in Kantian terminology). And when in Kant's successors the noumenon was dispensed with, and the individual was sought in thought itself, which is the universal, as an element or moment of it, specula tion, even in affirming the impossibility of conceiving an individual other than self-consciousness, can only 74 THE ABSTRACT AND THE POSITIVE CH.
make self-consciousness intelligible by transcending it in nature and in pure logic. We find once again the kingdom of universals, on which, as on the empire of Charles V., the sun never sets and from which there is no going forth. The universal has indeed separated itself from the individual, by revolting against it and devouring it.
In our own time the dispute concerning universals has come again into the arena in the doctrine of the § 9. The new practical character of mathematical and nominalism of naturalistic laws and concepts. This merits the pragmatists. particuiar consideration, because, while it renews the old nominalism, it appears to indicate, although distantly, that doctrine of the immanence of the universal in the particular which, as we shall see more clearly in the sequel, explains the individual who is only individual, but is not nature.
Several modern epistemologists, approaching philo sophy for the most part from the side of the natural and mathematical sciences, and inspired by observations which spring from the criticism of those sciences (Avenarius, Mach, Rickert, Bergson, Poincare and others), have pointed out that the concepts of the naturalists, like the definitions of the mathematicians, derive their value purely from the definite ends which they serve. They.do not mirror the real, for the real is always diverse and therefore merely individual; and consequently, in the true and proper meaning of the term, they are not knowledge. In the case of the natural sciences they are to be considered symbols, tickets, arbitrary and mnemonic schemes, devised by man in order to guide experience, regulate with the least effort the great press of single perceptions, and communicate their own experience to others in vi PRAGMATIST THEORIES 75