vni ONENESS 103 in regard to concrete thought ever by any means to oppose it to thought. On the other hand, the indi vidual (even the individual is posited not presupposed by thought) is equally everything whatever which can be thought of as real, or which is simply thinkable. Because thought in its general meaning, implying here as always that it is concrete, is all-inclusive. The cogito is positive, certain, individual. The world of Platonic ideas, the system of concepts in Spinoza's ethics, the world of possibles in the intellectualist system of Wolf — what are all these, when we turn them from abstract thought to the concrete, but definite historical philosophies, the thought of indi vidual philosophers, realized by them, and realizing themselves in us when we seek to realize them, in our individual minds? They deal with the cogitare which realizesTitself in a definite being who is absolutely unique; who is, not one among many, but one as a whole, infinite.
The extreme nominalism, which leaves no place even for names outside the concreteness of the in dividual, and the no less extreme realism, ciliation of which will admit nothing outside the realism and universal, each finds its own truth in the nominalism. Thus ig ended the opposition in which in the past they were arrayed against one another. Beyond the universal which is thought there is not the individual. In being the indi vidual the universal is itself the true individual, the fact being that outside the individual the universal is not even a name, since the individual itself, in its genuine individuality, must at least be named and clothed with a predicate, and indeed with the universality of thought. Names, rules, laws, false universals, all the black io4 THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED «.
sheep of the nominalists, are, in fact, chimaeras of § ii. Emptiness abstract thought, not existences. They are of names as real in the same kind of way as when universal. losing patience with our fellow-men in an outburst of wrath and resentment we call them beasts, the beasts are real. In such case it is obvious that were the men we so judge really such as we judge them, we who pass judgment upon them would also be the beasts to which we liken them. It is obvious also that such angry denial to men of humanity and reason does not even ab stractly mean that we deny them a share of our reason. The injustice of such denial leaps to view the moment we reflect that there are many degrees and many different forms of reason and that our own is real and imperious in so far as we realize it. A common name! — but every time a name sounds on our lips it is a new name, for it responds to an act which by its very definition, mental act, has no past. Fused in the unity of the mental act to which it belongs, it has nothing in common with all the other uttered sounds materially identical with it, used at other times to denote other objects of our experience. The rule does not include within it a multiplicity of instances, as the genus includes an indefinite series of individuals, because the rule abstracted from the instances is a rule which by definition is always inapplicable. The true rule is that which applies to instances singly turn by turn, by making them all one with it. Hence modern aesthetic knows that every work of art has its own poetry, and every word its own grammar.1 It is the same with la\Vs, and with all 1 Cf. Gentile, " I] concetto della grammatica," 1910, in Frammenti di Estetica e di letteratura, Lanciano, Carabba, 1920.
NAMES ARE NOT EXISTENCES 105 universals, whether empirical or speculative, they are never detached from the fact, from the individual. Moreover, universal and individual adhere and coalesce so long as we think of neither the one nor the other in the abstract, but in what they singly and together signify to the mind every time they are effectively thought. For then they are nothing but the logical transparency, the thinkability of facts and individuals, which otherwise would vanish beyond the outer limits of the logical horizon. They come within this logical horizon not as abstract objects of thought, but rather as moments of the life of thought, and individuals in the meaning we have indicated.
The individual we have found is positive. It is the only positive it is given us to conceive. But it is §12. The mind positive not, it is now clear, because, as as self-positing used to be supposed, it has been run to individual. eartj1 aiong a patk from wnich there is no escape. It is not a positive posited for the subject by some other; it is posited by the subject and is the very subject which posits it. For that subject has need to go out of itself in order to entrench itself in the positive, and the positive has not become for it fact, so long as it remains unconscious of its true being which it has projected before itself, and closed in an abstract reality. But, having acquired the consciousness of the inwardness of being in the very act by which it is sought, the mind sees it can no longer want a positivity surer and clearer than that which it already possesses in itself when it thinks and realizes itself. Common sense believes that when a man wakes up, he puts to flight his dream images, purely sub jective, a world which is not the world, by means of sensations of material objects, the rope of salvation io6 THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED CH.
without which he would be unable to escape shipwreck in the ocean of the inconsistent reality of his own fantasy. The exact contrary is true. When, in fact, on awaking from sleep we look at and touch the surrounding material objects in order to recover and possess again a clear and distinct consciousness of the real, it is not in the objects themselves and in external nature that we find the touchstone of reality, but in ourselves. And the difficulty of admitting as real that external nature which is not immediately enshrined within our subjective life as it formed itself in our dream, makes us touch our body and other bodies, that is, add new sensations and develop our ideas of that external nature which at first is as it were dis turbed and pushed aside and only with difficulty succeeds in affirming its reality. And if reality conquers the dream, it is because in experience, whence the dreamer draws the woof of the dream life, reality is posited through experience and not through the dream, save only in so far as it is only the reality of ourselves who have dreamed. And if we are cut off from this centre of reference of our experience as a whole, from the I, in regard to which experience is organized and systematized, we shall juxtapose reality to the things seen in fantasy and to all the life lived in the dream, without any possibility of discrimination and valuation. This comes to saying that the true and unique positive is the act of the subject which is posited as such. In positing itself, it posits in itself, as its own proper element, every reality which is positive.through its relation of immanence in the act in which the I is posited in an ever richer and more complex way. Withdraw, then, your subjectivity from the world you contemplate and the world becomes vni THE TOUCHSTONE OF REALITY 107 a reve without positivity. Make your presence felt in the world of your dreams (as happens when one dreams and there is no clash between the general context of experience and what we are dreaming) and the very dream becomes solid reality, positive to an extent which disturbs our personality, makes us passionate, makes us vibrate with joy or tremble with fear.
To sum up: the individual and its correlative uni versal, as we are now able to understand them, are clearly neither two objects nor two static vidualasa positions of thought. The category or universal which being does not properly belong to them, since, strictly speaking, there is no indi vidual and no universal. Nor can we even say, purely and simply, that the individual, the need of which Aristotle saw, is not nature, but thought. Because although nature w, it is only in so far as it is a term of the thought which presupposes it; and for the same reason Plato affirmed the being of the universal. But our universal is the universalizing, the making universal, or rather, since the universal is the thought itself which makes it, the self-making of the universal. In exactly the same way the individual is act rather than the principle or the term of an act; it consists in the indi vidual making itself or being individualized. And the conclusion is that we can speak of universal and indi vidual, in so far as we have in mind the subject, the I which thinks and in thinking is universalized by individualizing and individualized by universalizing.
Here the deeper meaning of the positive becomes apparent. It is not posited as the result of a process already completed and perfect, and this result does not stand confronting thought as a mystery. It is a mystery, for it is posited and we ask in vain: Who io8 THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED CH.
posits it? The positive is posited in so far as it actually posits itself, re-entering into that being which is in so far as it is thought. The positive rather than something posited is really the self-positing of being. Such a standpoint is secure just because it is the absolute transparence of thought as self-identical in its own act. And thought is made clear in its act because there is no surer proof of fact than being perceived; and the sureness does not depend on its being fact but on its being perceived, or rather on its being resolved into a real act of the thought which actuates and thinks itself.
When we oppose nature to mind we appear to be limiting mind. Nature is individual, and as such it § 14 Nature particularizes and thereby determines and the negation of realizes the universal which is mind. But individuality, fae specific character of nature by which we discriminate it is not in the concept of the in dividual. For we have shown that the individual as nature, the individual individualized, is unintelligible. The only conceivable individual is mind itself, that which individualizes.
It is true that we have not satisfied all the require ments on account of which in the history of philosophy the concept of the individual as nature vidual and the arose. The individual stands for positivity multiplicity as against the ideality of thought, but it also stands for multiplicity as against the unity of thought. And the positivity itself is integrated and fulfilled in the multiplicity, because the ideality arises as the intelligibility of the manifold. To over come pure ideality, therefore, it is not only necessary to grasp the real but the real which is manifold. Indeed, for Plato as for Aristotle, and also for the THE SCEPTICISM OF GORGIAS 109 pre-Socratic philosophers, the positive is nature as becoming, in which all is transformed, and whereby the forms of being and the objects of experience, or the individuals, are many.
The Eleatics alone were unifiers, as Aristotle remarks in a vigorous sentence. But the objective monism of Parmenides led to the agnostic scepticism of Gorgias, and this, carrying to its logical conclusion the doctrine of Parmenides concerning the identity of thinking with being, denied the possibility of the opposition of the one to the other which is an indis pensable moment in the concept of knowing, and therefore denied the possibility of knowing. To know is to distinguish, and therefore knowing implies that there are more terms than one and that we are not confined to only one. Socrates discovered the concept as the unity in which the variety of opinions concurs. The Platonic idea is the type of the manifold sensible things, and by its unity it makes their multiplicity thinkable. And what is the whole of ancient philosophy, from Thales and the first searchers for the original principle of things onwards, but one continual effort to reach unity by starting from the indefinite plurality of the existence presented in experience? This sums up the history of thought, which has always aspired to unity in order to render intelligible, without destroying, the multiplicity of individual and positive things. And this sums up logic. For if to the unity of the universal we should oppose a unique individual, the individual itself in its unity would be universal, a whole, and therefore it would in itself repeat the ideal position of the universal, and not yield the positive. Just as, were we able to think horse (^77-0x779) as thought of horses, then had nature produced no more than one no THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED CH.
single horse, this one horse could not be distinguished from the ideal horse, and could not therefore serve our thought as its fulcrum for the thinking of the universal. It would not be the positive of that idea. The universal is a mediation of the particulars and must therefore develop through the more positive.
We, on the other hand, have found a positivity which implies the identity of the individual with the universal. § 16. The I think, and in thinking I realize, an in- necessity of dividual which is universal, which is therethe manifold. fore ^ a universal ought to be? absolutely.
Other than it, outside it, there cannot be anything. But can I say, then, that I have realized something? The being which I affirm seems in its unity to reproduce the desperate position of Parmenides, for to pass from it to anything else is impossible. Is it something positive? Do I really think the " I " if I can think no other than the " I "? In making the individual conceivable, and in freeing it from the difficulties in which it was thrown by its opposition to the uni versal, have we not destroyed the very essence of individuality?
Against Parmenides there stands Democritus. And Aristotle's doctrine of the individual is a homage rendered to Democritus. The Democritan theory stamps the Aristotelian conception as the Eleatic theory stamps the idealistic conception of Plato. Aristotle does homage to the experience on which Plato, the great Athenian idealist, had turned his back, although continually forced to return to it. The idea is, indeed, the intelligibility of the^world; but it must be the intelligibility of a world which is a multiplicity of individuals.
We also are rendering homage to the profound vm REAL THINGS AND DREAM THINGS 1 1 1 truth of the Democritan atomism, which is the need of § 17. The difference, when we expound the concept concept of of mind as process. The unity of mind multiplicity. excludes only abstract multiplicity, since the unity of mind is in itself a multiplicity, a concrete multiplicity unfolded in the unity of the spiritual process. Here, however, the need of multiplicity assumes a new aspect and this needs to be explained. It concerns the multiplicity which is imposed on mind from within, in so far as it is consciousness of things and persons. And, indeed, there is no other multiplicity than this, a multiplicity which we see arising to confront us from within our own inmost being. But to the atomist (and every one is an atomist to the extent that he feels the need of the individual as something by which he must integrate and realize thought) it appears that the multiplicity, in so far as it is positive, lies beyond this subjective multiplicity. It is not enough to conceive a world diversified and rich in particulars, because this world exists: it may be a dream. And according to the atomist it would be a dream were we unable to explain our ideas by transcending the subject and attributing the origin of ideas to the real multiplicity of things. It would be no use to point out, as we have pointed out, that real things and dream things do not possess in them selves the marks by which they are discriminated, they need a subject to discriminate them, without which even waking life itself would be one whole dream from which we should never awaken. It would be no use, because the atomist will always reply that the real things which the subject opposes to the dream things are not real because we have ideas of them, for ideas presuppose real things which generate ideas in us.
ii2 THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED CH.
It is rather, he will say, that we can have ideas because the things which are represented by ideas are real in themselves with a reality which is at bottom that which we attribute to them, a reality in itself, which is the true reality, the only positive reality, nature. In nature there are individuals which are real individuals, the atoms, in themselves unknowable. There we find the true positivity on which thought must lean if we are not to gasp for breath in the void, whirled among vain shadows of one's self. And there we find not the multiplicity which is only our thought (the multiplicity we cannot think without unifying), but multiplicity in itself, the familiar ground of all the individual differences and oppositions and thereby of the complex life of the reality.
So that by means of the concept of the individual, multiplicity returns to camp with the claim to pitch its tent beyond the multiplicity we have acknowledged as immanent in the process of mind, and postulating accordingly a nature in itself, the basis of the whole life of mind and a condition of an exact concept of the individual as the integrating positivity of thought.
We have got, then, to scrutinize this concept of the multiplicity. It is a multiplicity which, it is evident at once, must be obscure, for it transcends the mind. It must be chaotic, for we have withdrawn it from any unity which could hold it together as a spiritual act. Like Leopardi's Infinite?- in which even thinking itself is drowned, it is fearsome. Yet we must scrutinize it, for, in spite of its transcendence — let us recall Berkeley's warning — it seizes a \place among our concepts, and even atomism is a philosophy. We cannot maintain a concept if it be inconsistent with 1 See the reference to this ode in Chapter X. § 3. — (Trans. Note.)
THE SHOCK OF THE ATOMS 113 other concepts which must co-exist with it in our mind.
A pure multiplicity is not only unknowable, it is not thinkable. The many are always a totality. § is. A pure ^ eacn °f the many were not one among multiplicity is the others, it would be one, not as a part, thinkable.
unity, the unity which atomism denies. It is not such a unity. Given the multiplicity a, b, c, d,..., a must not be b, nor c, nor d, so likewise with b and c and d; but that one thing should not be the other is impossible, absolutely, unless we deny all relation between them, since relation implies some identity. Multiplicity, then, necessarily carries with it the absolute non-relativity of the many which go to make it. So that a not only must not be b but must not even be relative to b. And this is absurd, because the very words " not be " affirm a reciprocal exclusion, and that is a relation.
Again, multiplicity posited as pure cannot be absolute without being composed of absolutely simple elements, otherwise every composite would be an exception to the multiplicity by organizing and unifying it. But the simple (ciropov, aVo/io? ova-la) becomes in its turn a flagrant violation of the law of multiplicity, because the simple is one. The atomist, starting from the unity of experience, denies it, splits it up, divides it; this is the logic of his thought. Wherever he finds unity he must divide. He cannot stop at the atom but must divide the atom even to infinity, and then there is multiplicity no longer, for multiplicity must have its elements.
Again, even granting the atomist his multiplicity, how can he form an image of it, and what use will the n4 THE POSITIVE AS SELF-CREATED cn.vm image be? The atoms like the ideas are excogitated as a principle of reality. In the reality there is the unity, but there is also the multiplicity (and hence the uselessness of the ideas, as Aristotle clearly showed). In the reality there is the multiplicity, but there is also the unity, the relation, the shock of the atoms and the aggregation of matter. But if we grant the absolutely unrelated simples then the shock is impossible, because the shock is relation however extrinsic the relation be. And if we grant the shock there is an end alike of the non-relativity, of the simplicity and of the multiplicity.
The difficulty is not new. It has been more or less clearly, more or less vigorously, urged continually against atomism, and mutatis mutandis against every form of pluralism. But this has not prevented philosophers, however adverse they may be to pluralism, from representing the world as in space and time, and from thinking of every positive individual as deter mined hie et nunct as existing, in so far as it exists, in space and in time. We must now consider space and time.
CHAPTER IX SPACE AND TIME SPACE and time are the two systems of the manifold. It is as such that they come to be thought of as the s i s xice and Sreat depository of what is positive, effec- time as tively real, concrete, individuality. To be systems of the real? [n the positive meaning, is to exist; and what exists, exists in space and in time. Nature, the realm of the existing, when contraposed to thought, is represented as just the totality of individuals co-existing in space and successive in time. Even Kant, who held that space and time are two a priori forms of experience, or rather two modes by which the unifying activity of mind works on the data of immediate sensibility, believed that the only way to guarantee the positive objectivity of sensible intuition was to presuppose that beneath the spatially and temporally unified manifold there was another mani fold, not yet unified by the subject, but the basis of such unification. Such manifold, as any one who reflects may see, is not really deprived nor indeed can ever be deprived of all spatiality and temporality, because to affirm a manifold is at the same time to affirm space and time. So that the pure subjective intuitions of Kant, the a priori forms of sense, held to be insufficient in themselves, and dependent on a matter external to them, end by presupposing themselves to themselves, and so being, even before as yet there is being.
n6 SPACE AND TIME CH.
Suppose the manifold to be a positive actual mani fold (not simply possible and therefore merely ideal); suppose it absolutely manifold (never mind absolute and that the absolutely manifold is an absurdity), positive and absolutely positive (not realizing or realizable but realized, which as we have clearly shown is another absurdity); and you will have the space in which we all represent things. Space in all its determinations, and apart from any question of the number of its dimensions, implies the reciprocal exclusion of all the terms of actual or possible experi ence.
All that we distinguish or can distinguish, and therefore all that we can posit in an actual experience, is spatial; or rather, it is resolved into elements, and in the last analysis into points, each of which is outside all the others and has all the others outside it. We may not distinguish the elements of space; and we do not, in fact, distinguish the ultimate elements, the points. But this does not prevent us regarding them as distinguishable elements in the object of an actual experience; or, what is the same thing, distinct elements in the object of a possible experience. This amounts to saying that the spatial elements are distinct with a distinction which no experience can abolish. Thence their positive objectivity, which has the appearance of being imposed on the subjective activity which generates experience.
>$, possible or ideal space is meaningless, although it has many times been affirmed. Thought is not § 3. The sup- spatial. The hypdmranion, of which posed ideal or Plato discourses, has no resemblance to possible space. thg tnje and proper ^^ the ^pa Q{ which he speaks in the Timaeus (50-52) as a THE WHERE AND THE WHEN 117 receptacle of forms without which the ideas would remain ideas and would not have the wherewithal and the how to be realized. The ideas, however many they are, make one; they are co-ordinated and resolve dialectically all their multiplicity. The thought of space, the idea of space, has in itself no more multi plicity than any other idea. The unresolved and unresolvable multiplicity is that of the spatial elements in so far as they are given in their positivity. I can indeed represent to myself a body not given, and that body will be spatial, but it will be spatial in so far, and only in so far, as I think of it as given, that is so long as I have not the consciousness that it is merely a possibility or ideality. For when this consciousness arises, the reality is no longer the body but the idea of the body, devoid, as idea, of all spatiality.
And this, indeed, is the reason why the material world, or rather the spatially given world, is for common sense the touchstone of the existent, of what is sure and positive, and it is why, when the existence of anything is not evident, we ask, Where is it?
But not only do we require the where of what exists, we also require the when. Simply in space § 4 Time as an<^ without time experience would not developed be actual and the real would not be from space. positive. For the real to be positive there must be multiplicity, and multiplicity is not absolute perfect multiplicity so long as it is only spatiality. Each point in space is a centre, to which the system of all other points is fixed, and this destroys multiplicity. The point as such is a limit of space and therefore itself devoid of spatiality. Yet just as reason compels us to divide the extended into its elements and to break up the unity of everything into multiplicity, so a n8 SPACE AND TIME CH.
point as such, limiting and thereby annulling space, is inconceivable without the concept of an ulterior multiplication which becomes a new spatialization.