We may take a point as one among the points. This is the point of the multiplicity, and it gives rise to the concept of space. But there is also the point of the unity, which cannot be fixed in its unity without making the multiplicity which depends on it fall to nothing. Thereby it spatializes itself. Let us take, for example, any element of space, any " here," what soever. In taking it in its definite elementariness, and withdrawing it from the elements together with which, and as one of which, it forms a whole, we withdraw it from spatiality. But does it then persist as something unique? No, because from its own being there arises again spatiality as a reciprocal exclusion of the elements of experience. Let us suppose it to remain always the element as defined, let us say a point, yet experience brings reciprocal exclusion in the succession of instants, it becomes without spatial change a " now " excluding other " nows."
It may be said, then, that time is the spatialization of the unity of space?- And therefore time and space can be represented schematically as two intersecting straight lines having only one point in common. It is one unique point of space which cannot be a point in space without being one of the infinite points of time. But let us beware lest our own fancy blocks our conception of this simple imaginative system of space. Let us for the moment simply keep in view the fact that there is a multiplicity of spatial points, and among 1 This unity, being always a unity, may be like the unity of the point, that is of a spatial element, or like the unity of space in its totality, for space itself is always a relative totality.
THE HERE AND THE NOW 119 these find the unity which is multiplied in time. We notice, that is to say, that we are dealing with a multiplicity which is given, or rather which is real and absolute, independently of every mental unification. And then we shall recognize that for one point of space, time is its spatialization: time as every one intuits it.
Space, then, we conclude, completes itself in time by positing itself as an absolute multiplicity, every element of which is itself a multiplicity. tionand6^ Not ^at time is the following out of the difference same process as the multiplication of between space Space> Were it so there would be no point or space, nor any definite spatial unity at all. We have to arrest the spatial process by fixing an element of space, a point, in order to under stand the other element, an instant, which is generated by the multiplication of the first. It also is spatializa tion in so far as, like the first, it is a reciprocal exclusion of distinct elements, and therefore a multiplicity, but it is only a new spatialization of the first space. And herein is the difference of time from space.
Space is a pure multiplicity immediately given. But you cannot withdraw from this multiplicity one of its units without seeing this unit in a second pure multiplicity, given in the first: and this is time. To think nature as one — as the One of Parmenides, or as the spherical whole, identical in all its parts, which Xenophon imagined — and to think this one outside of time in an eternity, immobile, is to think nothing, and this it seems is what Gorgias pointed out. The object is spatially manifold; and because it is absolutely so, it is also temporally manifold. A pflance — be it no more than a glance — cast on the O D world, holds in it a spatial multiplicity. Yet we 120 SPACE AND TIME cannot fix this multiplicity before us, neither in its whole such as it is, nor in any one of its parts. From beginning to end it is multiplied into a multitude of images of its whole or of its part and so is prolonged into the past and into the future. Either the multi plicity is spatial, or it is temporal.
In every case, then, we have a multiplicity and a multiplicity not unified. This was precisely what Kant presupposed as the antecedent of his tiality and pure subjective functions of space and time, temporality Instead, it is the whole content of our concept or space and time. And to this concept every kind of empiricism has recourse in order to determine what by nature is positive in the richness of its individuals. So that without maintain ing the concept of multiplicity in its absolute inde pendence of every synthetic unity, it is impossible to stop short of conceiving reality as spatial and temporal. And, in fact, it is so; because the pure manifold oscil lates between two extremes equally absurd without being able to rest at an intermediate point. We have already seen that either the multiplicity is thought as a whole, and then the unity of the whole comes into conflict with the multiplicity and contradicts it; or it is thought of in each of its parts, detaching a part from the whole, and then the part is itself a unity which equally comes into conflict with and contradicts the multiplicity.
It comes really then to saying that when we think of the world as spatial and temporal, and mean thereby a world in itself, what we call nature, existing before mind and independently of mind, we are thinking of nothing. The meaning of the spatiality and temporality of the real must be something different from this, and ix CAN UNITY BE EXCLUDED? 121 we must inquire what this meaning is, keeping hold of what is positive in space and time and rejecting the supposed transcendence of their multiplicity.
Of what we have said so far in illustration of the ordinary idea that space and time are systems of the absolute multiplicity of positive reality we may now say that while it is true it is not the whole truth. For the absurdity arises from the abstractness in which philosophical speculation has fixed an idea which is immanent in consciousness where it is integrated in the condition indispensable to its concreteness.
The inconceivability of pure multiplicity, repre sented by the absolute spatiality, which, as we see, § 7 Ingenuous- *s both space and time, consists in the ness of the claim to exclude the unity from that multi- concept of an piicitv The unitv, if admitted, would lay it objective under the suspicion or the intrusion or an world as a ideal element, the suspicion that mind was pure manifold. present. The aim is to keep the positive element in existing reality separate from the identity with which thought is supposed to invest it, and by idealizing it, to change it from a world of things into a world of ideas. The claim comes down to us from the ancient illusion that we can place reality before thought, untouched by any subjective action, at least as a postulate of the knowledge, through which the same reality would then be presented more or less informed by the logical principles and cognitive forms of the subject. But we have repeatedly called attention to the fact that this non - subjective reality itself is a reality posited by the subject, therefore itself subjective, in the absolute sense, and non-subjective only relatively to the degree or mode of subjectivity of a reality in all other respects subjective. The 122 SPACE AND TIME CH.
stimulus of a sound-sensation, as an example of a non- subjective movement, is itself something conceived by the mind, intelligible only as a function of the mental activity which reconstructs the antecedents of the sensation by means of physiology and abstract physics. When we analyse the concept of abstract reality according to this ingenuous interpretation of its non- subjectivity, or objectivity as we generally subjective is but inaccurately term it, we are left in no included by the doubt that its essential character is multi- subject m its plicity devoid of any synthetic principle. We are left in no doubt, because the hypothesis of the object, obtained by such abstraction, is that there shall remain in what is abstracted nothing which can in any way be assigned to the subject's activity, and that every universal and syn thetic principle, as an ideality which unites the multiplicity of the manifold, comes from the subject. But having made the abstraction, and having so fixed the multiplicity, we must not then go on and claim that we have shown it living by the very logic according to which it can only live in the integrity of the living organism from which we have abstracted it. It would be like cutting with a surgeon's knife a limb from the living body and sup posing we could still keep it alive, in the same physio logical and biological meaning, as when it was part of the whole vital system.
Absolute multiplicity is the character of the positive in so far as it is posited, or of the object in § 9. Kant's so far as it is object._But, as we have shown, anticipation of the positive is posited for the subject in so the doctrine. far ^s it is posited by it< Neither does the object transcend the subject nor can it be immanent ix GENETIC AND NATIVIST THEORIES 123 in it save in virtue of the action of the subject itself. All the infinite elements into which the world con fronting me is multiplied, and all the infinite moments into which every one of its elements, and itself as a whole, are multiplied within me, in confronting me are in me, through my work. Multiplication by which one thing is not another, is my act. And this is the great truth which Kant in his dissertation De mundi sensibitis atque intelligibilis forma et -principiis (1770), and more clearly still, eleven years later, in the Critique of Pure Reason, perceived when he maintained the subjectivity of the forms of space and of time, under standing these forms as functions; a concept entirely lost sight of by the empiricist psychologists and epistemologists of the nineteenth century who sought to prove that even these forms of experience are a product of experience; and no less lost sight of by the champions of the psychology called nativist, who denied that Kant was right because these forms are, in fact, a necessary antecedent of experience!
The forms of space and time are neither antecedent nor consequent. If the forms are the functions by § 10. Space as which the object of experience is con- spatializing stituted, their activity and effective reality activity. can j-jg nowhere else but in experience.
Space and time are inconceivable as empty forms which have to be filled, as one would fill an empty vessel, with single presentations of sensible experience. Space, 1 The only one who saw clearly the common error in the genetic and nativist theories in psychology in regard to Kant was Spaventa in his article Kant e I' empirismo (1881). By taking space to signify spatiality he indicated the only way in which the doctrine of Kant can be interpreted and verified. We have followed the same plan in this chapter. See Spaventa, Scritti filosofici, ed. Gentile, Napoli, Morano, 1900, p. 85 ff. In that article it seems to me we are given a glimpse of the concept of space as act.
i24 SPACE AND TIME CH.
and time, so conceived, would be multiplicity already posited independent of the mind's activity. Instead, it is the mind's spatializing activity which generates multiplicity. It does not presuppose it. And in so far as mind has that multiplicity confronting it (or we might say in so far as there is multiplicity, since to be is always to be for mind), in so far it generates it. It is not multiple but multiplication. Multiplication is the concrete reality which gives place to multiplicity. It is only abstractly that multiplicity can be thought of as something which subsists, withdrawn from the movement which belongs to, and is, the presupposition of thought.
But if we would understand in its pure spirituality this doctrine that the reality of space is spatialization, § ii. Unity as we must abandon the Kantian standpoint the ground of of the datum of immediate sensible experi- spauality. ence. The manifold of sense is in Kant a presupposition of empirical intuition, and this intuition is a logical antecedent of the actualization of the spatial function, and is concerned with a non-subjective multi plicity, the multiplicity obscurely imagined by Kant as outside the whole cognitive process, in the manner of the atomists and in agreement with the vague philosophical intuitions implicit in the scientific conceptions of his time. Spatiality, as we have said, is not so much order and synthesis as differentiation and multiplication. Kant insists on the unifying and order-imposing func tion because he presupposes (we have seen why) the manifold. He makes space the formal unity into which the mind receives the multiplicity, gathering it into a synthesis. But the multiplicity itself, if it exist, presupposes unity, for it cannot exist except as it is assembled, ordered, unified. The unity is first THE ACT OF MULTIPLICATION 125 and spatiality consists in the multiplication of the one. So that strictly it is not the many which is synthesized, it is the one which is analysed.
Analysis, on the other hand, here as in every other moment of spiritual life, cannot be separated from synthesis. For the act which multiplies the and synthesis one does not destroy it; it is in multiplying of spatial that it realizes it, and thence the multi plicity which follows from the act is a multi plicity of the one. And analysis does not disperse the individuality, rather does it enrich it, make it concrete, give it power; indeed, it strengthens it and confers on it a fuller and healthier reality. Space is, in fact, the harmonious whole of the world which we represent spatially, and what makes it one in the horizon of our consciousness. As a whole, it is unbounded in so far as our imagination enables us indefinitely to extend its limits, but it is imprisoned in us, an object of present experience, given (in so far as we make it such for our selves) and held together by the seal of time. So that every element of it, and itself as a whole, is articulated in the series of its states, connected together and forming an adamantine chain within which all that is positive in the facts is stretched out in the reality of the world. All is in us: we are all.
We, then, are not in space and in time, but space and time, whatever is unfolded spatially and has § 13 Space and successive stages in time, are in us. But time in the the " us " which is here intended is not mmd.
empirical but the transcendental ego. It is not meant that space is located in us. It is im portant to make this clear. The ego is not the space in which space is, meaning space as we commonly understand it. Space is activity; and for what is 126 SPACE AND TIME en.
spatial to be in the " I," means that it is spatial in virtue of the activity of the " I," that its spatiality is the explication, the actuality of the " I."
Kant said that space is a form of external sense, time a form of internal sense. He meant that if we represent nature, that is, what we call the external of the concept world and think or as having been in exist- of the spiritual ence before our knowledge and spiritual act as tem- ]j£e bepran 'in space, then we represent the multiplicity or the objects or our internal experience, or what we distinguish as diverse and mani fold in the development of our spiritual life, not in space but in time. But we have insisted on the substantial identity of the scheme which is at the foundation of the idea of time and of the idea of space, and we have expounded time as the spatialization of the spatial element. Clearly then we cannot accept the Kantian distinction as a sufficient indication of the substantial diversity between nature and mind. We are not speak ing of the error committed by the psychophysicists who propose to solve experimentally the problem of the measurement of psychical time, and who measure only, what alone is measurable in regard to what is psychical, the physiological phenomena held to be concomitant with the true and proper psychical act. In this case there is no more than the fallacy of double meaning. But the process of spiritual development itself, as every one allows, is subject to the form of time; chronology we know is an indispensable element of history in its more spiritual meaning; and also the ? very basis of personality lies in the memory by which the mind prolongs its present reality and is rooted in the past.
But even here we have to consider attentively what PAST FACT AND PRESENT ACT 127 it is which is rightly temporal, and what it is which is spiritual in the reality, which in its wide temporal and meaning we crudely speak or as both spint- what is not ual and temporal. Time as Kant's form temporal m Qf internal experience has regard to the empirical ego, that is, not the ego which is empirically (the I in so far as it is a subject of a simple experience) but the ego which is known empiric ally (the I in so far as it is an object of simple experience). And Kant distinguishes from experience the transcendental ego which by its activity makes experience possible. So that what is temporal in experience is not temporal in the absolute knowledge which understands that experience as the display of the activity of the transcendental " I," the true " I " and the act which is properly spiritual. This " I " does not come within the horizon of empiricism, for empiricism must be true to itself; but it is revealed and attracts attention when we become conscious of empiricism. This consciousness of empiricism is not itself empirical but absolute knowledge, for it has to give an account of empiricism. What is temporal as an abstract object of the real " I " is not an " I," is not something which has freedom or any spiritual value, because it is what is done, not what is doing. It is the positive in so far as it is posited.
An historical fact as regards time is a past fact but our judgment concerning it can only have meaning if we take as its valuation, not the accomplished fact, but the historian's consciousness and personality, of which indeed the idea of the historical fact is an inherent part. Only spiritual acts have value, we do not judge pure facts such as fair or foul weather, deformity or fine stature. Now it is true that each of us is his past, 128 SPACE AND TIME 128 SPACE AND TIME just as civilization and learning are what is retained and remembered, but what we retain is in fact what we now understand, and it is obvious that the intellect with which we now understand is no longer identical with that with which we formerly understood, were it for no other reason than that our intellect having once understood is thereby made more intelligent. When we bring to mind in a present act the past fact of our spiritual life, a past coloured in our soul, now with a sad regret, now with a sweet and tender yearning, now with joy and now with sorrow, we are not really com paring two realities, one present one past, but two empirical representations both equally present as the actuality of the " I " which compares and judges: equally present because, although variously assorted in the time series, all our past states are compresent in the temporalizing act of the mind.
We are now able to see what is in the true meaning spiritual in regard to time. The temporal as mere positive fact is not spiritual, but the act by which the temporal is temporal, the act through which the temporal fact acquires its positive character; this act is spiritual. It is natural in living our experience to multiply our states and see ourself as a many. But the " know thyself " of philosophy ought to open our eyes, revealing to us the act of experiencing and multiplying, which is the root of temporal multiplicity.
The coexistence of the elements of space has its exact counterpart in the compresence of the elements § 16. Co- °f time. The compresence of the time existence and elements gives us the exact significance and compresence. enables us to understand the coexistence of the spatial elements. Compresence is the convergence ix THE INTELLIGIBILITY OF TIME 129 of all the moments of time (past, present and future in their infinite distinctions and consequent multiplica tions) in a -present which is no longer a present situated between a past and a future, but a negation of all temporal multiplicity and of all succession. It is not duration^ as time deprived of spatiality has been some what fancifully defined (in so far as it is time it cannot be deprived of spatiality, since time is already space), but eternity, which is the principle and therefore a negation of time. The eternal present on which all the rays of time converge and from which all irradiate, is the intelligibility of time. Time is unintelligible only so long as we are anxious to set it above us as pure time, without eternity: pure nature without mind, multiplicity without unity.
Coexistence is convergence of all the points of space in a -point which is outside all the points and so a negation of their multiplicity: a point which is the " I " itself, a spatializing activity from which all points irradiate and on which all are centred. This merely ideal, or as we should say transcendental point, by its spatializing activity posits all the points of space and all the moments of time, thus generating the positive character of the real in space and time.
It is clear that without coexistence and corn- presence there cannot be space and time. And both are unintelligible if we seek to understand finite point and them as the actual multiplicity which each the eternal is? except on one condition, namely, that space is the spatiality of the point and the point is non-spatial, and time is the temporality of the instant and the instant is non -temporal. Both therefore are contained in one reality, by which they attain their being, and this is eternal in regard to time, K 130 SPACE AND TIME in so far as it is absolutely instantaneous; and it is one in regard to space, which is the fundamental process of its multiplication. Nature, in short, even in this aspect, is only intelligible as the life of mind, which however it is multiplied remains one.
This doctrine of space and time as absolute spatialization, which is only multiplicity in so far as § 18 The multiplicity is absorbed in the unity of reality of space mind, does not mean that the multi- and time. plicity of the coexistent things in space and of the compresent series of the events in time is reduced to a simple illusion. If we say, as we certainly can and ought to say, that reality is neither spatial nor temporal, because reality is mind and mind is neither in space nor in time, this need not imply that no form of reality can be represented rightly as space and time. We only mean — and we cannot insist too strongly on its importance — that space and time are not adequately conceived when they are assumed to exist in their pure and abstract manifold- ness, immobile and irreducible. They have a real multiplicity, however, but only in so far as it is posited, in the mobility, in the life, in the dialectic of the actual position which mind makes for them by realizing in them its own unity.
We may say, indeed, that what we ordinarily think of space and time, as we effectively conceive them before we attain the view-point of the pure act, is quite true, but not the whole truth. It is as it were no more than the half-truth, which for its completion must find the other half. It does not indicate a real division, but only the half-truth of immature philo sophical reflexion, incapable of apprehending in its integrity the spiritual act which is posited as space ix THE FALSITY OF THE HALF-TRUE 131 and time. This other half is that which reconciles the abstractness of positive reality in the naturalistic meaning, in a positive reality which renders possible the first by actualizing it.
In logical language, spatiality is the antithesis of which mind is the thesis. Mind, however, in so far , as it is simple thesis opposed to its time in the antithesis is no less abstract than spatial- synthesis of ity. The concreteness of each consists in its synthesis. The synthesis is not a tertium quid supravening on mind or unity and nature or spatiality, and reconciling their opposition by unifying their terms. The synthesis is original, and this means there is neither thesis without antithesis nor antithesis without thesis. Just as there is no opposition without opponents, though it be of the one to itself as different and identical. And this duality of the terms is thrown into relief and made to appear an absolute duality which is not unity when we bring an abstract analysis to bear on the unique living spiritual process, in which the thesis is the antithesis, and the antithesis is the thesis.
Our conclusion is, then, that not only is the naturalism which thinks that space and time are pre suppositions of the mind, false, or, what of naturalism is the same thing, half true, but also that and abstract an idealism which should deny space would spiritualism. ^ ^^ Because just as •<. ig false to think the antithesis without the thesis which is the ground of it, so it is false to think the thesis without the antithesis which is the structure raised upon it.
All philosophies which have failed to attain the concept of mind as pure act, the concept which alone makes it possible to understand spatiality as mind, 1 32 SPACE AND TIME CH.
have been naturalistic, even those which hold that there is no way of conceiving nature without a mind which creates it and explains it. Because a mind which is supposed to stand outside nature and be antecedent to nature as the idea is antecedent to the creation, must be conceived as outside of, and antecedent to, the mind which knows this nature. Such a mind is both pre-mental and pre-natural, the ground both of nature and of the mind whose idea nature is. Now this mind can only be posited by and for the present mind, the mind which it is urgently necessary to understand, the mind which in no other way but that of understanding can guarantee the truth of what it thinks. And this extra-mind is posited for present mind just as nature is posited for it. It is posited as a reality, which is all reality, already realized, while the mind which now is has yet to arise and be.