This concept of the concept, it is now clear, per meates the whole of metaphysics as science of know-§ 3. its meta- ledge, and puts logic in a new light; for physical value, logic has hitherto been understood as a science of the concept in itself, abstracted from the subject who thinks it, as though the concept had for its object the whole of reality, the subject included, reality conceived naturalistically, or idealistically in the manner of Plato.1 The other concept, the goal which all our doctrine 1 With regard to the concept as conceptus sui, cf. Gentile, Modernismo, p. 202; Sommario di Pedagogia, i. pp. 72-75; and Sistema di Logica, vol. ii.
FORM AND MATTER 243 has in view is the concept of absolute formalism, as § 4. Absolute the conclusion of every science of mind, or formalism. rather of every real science. For science must, if it would gain a full understanding of its own object, rise from reality as nature to a complete grasp of the concept of reality as mind. If we mean by form and matter what Kant meant when he called form the transcendental activity of the mind by which the matter of experience is shaped into a world, the con tent of consciousness, all that we have explained of the relation between mind and whatever we can consider as opposed to mind authorizes us to conclude that there is no matter outside form, neither as formal matter, that is, elaborated by the activity of the form, nor as raw material on which it might appear that such activity had yet to be exercised. Matter is posited by and resolved into form. So that the only matter there is in the spiritual act is the form itself, as activity. The positive is the form itself, it is positive in so far as it posits, not in so far as it is, as we say, posited.
Even these two concepts, form and matter, appar ently so fundamental in their difference, are only one s 5. The form concept. They are the Alpha and Omega as activity. of an alphabet which form not a straight line but a circle whose end is its beginning. Form, in fact, can be and must be meant as absolute, it has not matter confronting it, in so far as it is con ceived not only as activity 1 but as an activity which produces nothing which it expels from itself and leaves outside, inert and brute, nothing therefore which it 1 Even before Kant, Spinoza had observed this. " Nee sane aliquis de hac re dubitare potest, nisi putet ideam quid mutum instar picturae in tabula, et non modum cogitandi esse, nempe ipsum intelligere," Ethics, ii. prop. 43 sch.
posits before thought as radically different from thought itself. So that to conceive thought as absolute form is to conceive reality as conceptus sui.
In this concept we have the guiding thread which will lead us out of the labyrinth in which the human § 6. The limit mind has been for ever straying, striving of mind. after and yet failing to touch anything real outside itself, and always finding itself at grips with something, the identification of itself with which is repugnant to its deepest demands, — evil (pain, error, sin), nature. Let us take care that the thread does not break in our hands.
If reality be conceived as posited, already realized, evil is inconceivable. For evil is what ought not to be, what is opposed to the mind in so far as the mind is what ought to be and sets itself before itself as an end to be reached, and which mind in fact reaches by the manner in which it posits it. What else is pain but the contrary of the pleasure which for each one is, as Vico said, the proclaiming his own nature? The mind's not-being, — that is what is painful. Now if mind (the reality as concept) has being, in the meaning of Parmenides, there is no longer any place for pain. But mind is the negation of Parmenides's being, because in so far as it thinks it is doing) the non-being of being. So that it is in not being: it fulfils its real nature in so far as this is not already realized and is in process of realization. And hence mind finds itself always confronting itself as its own negation. Hence, too, the providential pain which spurs us on from task to task, and which has been always recognized as the inner spring by which the mind progresses and lives on condition of progressing.
Thus the truth of the concept is assured, because TRUTH AND ERROR 245 truth is nothing but the attribute which belongs to thought as concept. Were the concept an immediate self-identity with no difference within it as a stone is a stone and two is two, neither more nor less than the determinate sum-total of what is thought, then error would be inconceivable. For error, therefore, we have to repeat the argument in regard to pain. The concept is not already posited but is the positive which posits a process of self-creation which has as its essential moment its own negation, the error opposed to the true. So there is error in the system of the real in so far as the development of its process requires error as its own ideal moment, that is, as a position now passed and therefore discounted. Prove any error to be error and no one will be found to father and support it. Error only is error in so far as it is already overcome, in other words, in so far as it is our own concept's non-being. Like pain, therefore, it is not a reality opposed to that which is mind (conceptus sui), it is that reality, but looked back on as one of its ideal moments before its realization.
What we have said of theoretical error applies equally to practical error or moral evil, since intellect § 9. Error itself is will. We may even say that as sin- will is the concreteness of intellect. So the true conceptus sui is that world self-consciousness which we are not to think of as an abstract philo sophy (contraposed to life), but as the highest form of life, the highest peak to which as mind the world can rise. A form which does not rise so high as to cease to be the ground and foundation, the one and single form as it expands from base to apex of the pyramid of life. You conceive the world as other than yourself who conceive it, and the necessity of that concept is a pure logical necessity because it is abstract. But you conceive the world (as you should and at bottom perhaps always do conceive it) as your own reality, there being no other, a self-possessed reality, and then you cannot suppose it outside the necessity of your concept as! though the law did not concern you. The rationality 'of your concept will appear to you as your own law, as duty. What else indeed is duty but the unity of the law of our own doing with the law of the universe? And what else is the immorality of the egoist, with eyes only for his own interest, if it be not the separation he makes between himself and the world, between its law and his law? The history pfmqrality is the history of an ever more spiritualistic understanding of the world. Every new step we take, in ideally tending to the formation of the moral consciousness, is a deepening of the spiritual meaning of life, a greater realizing ofi reality as self-conceived.
Will it ever be possible, then, to attain perfect good ness (an earthly or a celestial paradise) in a vision of the whole infinite mind if the mind which is the good will as full spiritual reality can only be conceived as development? How can we conceive, either at the beginning or at the end or at any intermediate time, the mind stainless and sinless, if the good will is effort and conquest? If its being is its non-being?
When once the concept of reality as self-con cept is understood, we see clearly that our mind's real need is not that error and evil should in truth and disappear from the world but that they the pain in should be eternally present. Without error there is no truth, without evil there is no good, not because they are two terms bound MAKING SIN IMPOSSIBLE 247 to one another in the way that Plato,1 following Heracleitus, said pleasure and pain are bound together, 'but because error and evil are the non-being of that reality, mind, the being of which is truth and goodness. Mind is truth and goodness but only on condition that it is making them in conquering its own inner enemy, consuming it, and therefore having always the need of conquering and consuming, as the flame needs fuel. A mind which already is mind is nature. A moral character already constituted as a means of governing conduct mechanically and making sin impossible in the same meaning in which, given the law of gravity, it is held impossible for a body lighter than air to fall to earth, is, as any one may easily under stand, the negation of all true and real moral feeling. It is the negation of the freedom which Kant rightly held essential for the moral mind.
1 " Socrates, sitting up on the couch, bent and rubbed his leg, saying, as he was rubbing: How singular is a thing called pleasure, and how curi ously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it; for they are never present to a man at the same instant, and yet he who pursues either is generally compelled to take the other; their bodies are two, but they are joined by a single head. And I cannot help thinking that if Aesop had remembered them, he would have made a fable about God trying to reconcile their strife, and how, when he could not, he fastened their heads together; and this is the reason why when one comes the other follows: as I know by my own experience now, when after the pain in my leg which was caused by the chain pleasure appears to succeed." — Phaedo, 60 B-c (Jowett's translation). This is all very true but not the whole truth. Strictly speaking, Socrates not only has pleasure because he has had pain (which is now a mental image in time), he also had pleasure even while experiencing the pain in so far as he perceived that it was pain.
For perceiving, like scratching, is an activity, however small its degree. And this comes to saying that pleasure and pain, like positive and negative, are not outside one another. The negative is contained in the positive in so far as the positive is its own process. Both are one reality. Pessimism with its abstract conception of a limit which it would draw close round the whole life of the mind, does not understand the reality because it is itself a misunderstanding.
248 REALITY AS SELF-CONCEPT CH.
There are not, then, error and truth, but error in truth as its content which is resolved in its form. Nor are there good and evil, but evil by which good is sustained, in its absolute formalism.
The problem of the Nature which mind finds always confronting it and therefore holds to be a presupposition of its own being, is identical with the problem or pain, or error and or evil. Like Bruno's Amphitrite, from whose womb all forms are generated and to whose womb all return, mind, which in its concrete position contraposes itself to itself, strives thereby to obtain all the nutriment it needs for its life from beginning to end.
The self-concept, in which alone mind and all that is is real, is an acquiring consciousness of self. This „, Self is inconceivable as something anterior immanence of to and separate from the consciousness of nature in the which in the self-concept it is the object. It is realized then in realizing its own object, or, in other words, it is realized in the position affirmed when the self is subject and that identical self is object. It is the I. It is the spiritual reality. It is an identity of self with self, but not an identity posited in its immediacy, so much as an identity which is posited in reflexion. It duplicates itself as self and other, and finds itself in the other. The Self which would be self without other would clearly not be even self because it only is in so far as the other is. Nor would the other were it not itself be other, because the other is only conceivable as identical with the subject. That is, in affirming reality, the subject which affirms is the reality which confronts it in the affirmation.
If we accept this doctrine that dialectic is mind THE DIALECTIC 249 in its life, that outside it there is nothing we can § 13. Reality SrasP but snadows> intelligible only in of mind as relation to the bodies which cast them, reality of the three concepts emerge as equally neces sary: (i) The reality of the subject, as pure subject; (2) the reality of the object, as pure object; (3) the reality of mind, as the unity or process of the subject, and the immanence of the object in the subject.
Were there no subject what would think? Were there no object what would the thinker think? It is § 14. Necessity impossible to conceive thought without of the object, personality, because thought, however dogmatic or sceptical the form of it we would posit, is conceptus sui. It is " I." Thence thought is not mere activity but an activity which relies on itself, and therefore posits itself as a person. But none the less it is equally impossible to conceive thought without its term or fulcrum, because the concept of self realizes the Self as object of knowledge. Thought, then, is conceivable on condition that whenever and in so far as the subject is conceived the object also is conceived. Each is real since thought is real, but nothing is real outside thought.
But even thought would itself be inconceivable if the subject in being the opposite of the object were § 15. The not at tne same time the object itself, and spirituality of vice versa. The reason of this is that the opposition is inherent in the concept of thought as conceptus sui. The opposition is between self and self. The difference and otherness belongs wholly to the self or I. It is a relation which will never be intelligible so long as we try to understand it by the analogy of other kinds of relation. The A y A y "I," to be exact, is not different from itself, but differentiates itself, thereby positing its own identity as the basis of its own difference. So that the thesis and the antithesis, concurrent in the reality of the self-consciousness (being and not being subject), have their fundamental reality in the synthesis. The synthesis is not subject and object, but only subject, the real subject, realized in the process by which it overcomes the ideality of the pure abstract subject and the concomitant ideality of the pure abstract object. / This synthesis as the concrete reality of self-conscious ness is the process which is not fact but act, living and eternal act. To think anything truly, means to realize it. And who does not know that it is to this realization mind is working, that it may establish the fulness of freedom, the reign of mind, or regnum hominis in which all human civilization, all lordship over nature and subjection of it to human, that is, to spiritual ends, consists? What is the progressive spiritualization of the world but the realization of the synthesis, which reconciles opposition even by preserving it, in the unity, which is its own ground and its whole meaning?
But this human perfectibility, this ever more powerful lordship of man over nature, this progress § 16. The and increase of the life of mind triumphing world as an ever more surely over the adverse forces eternal history. o£ nature) conquering them and subduing them, even within the soul itself, making, as Vico said, of the very passions virtues, this march of humanity, as we usually picture it, with its stages, through space and time, — what is it but the empirical and external representation of the immanent eternal victory, the full and absolute victory, of mind over nature, of that immanent resolution of nature in mind, THE REGNUM HOMINIS 251 which, like the concept of the necessary reconcilia tion of temporal history in ideal and eternal history, is the only possible speculative concept of the relation between nature and mind?
Descend into your soul, take by surprise in its essential character, as it is in the living act, in § 17 The tne quivering of your spiritual life, that meaning of our " nature" which grows so formidable in non-bemg. a}j fae vastness of time and of space which you confer on it. What is it? It is that obscure limit of your spiritual being beyond which your living spirit is ever passing out and to which it is ever returning. It is the limit which marks the boundary of the Kantian phenomenon, as in ancient philosophy it used to stand behind the subjective sensation of Democritus and Protagoras, concealing from thought a chaos of impervious and raw materiality. It is the limit which Plato found at the margin of his ideal being, the dark hemisphere encircling the horizon of the luminous heaven of thought. It is the limit which even to Hegel seemed to set bounds to logic and to demand a crossing of it by the Idea which makes nature, by descending into space and time and break ing its own unity in the dispersed multiplicity of the existents which are its particulars. Seen from within your soul, is not this " nature " your own non-being, the non-being of your own inward commotion, of the act by which you are to yourself? It is not your nonbeing as something existing for others to recognize. It is the non-being which belongs to your act itself; what you are not and must become, and which you bring into being by the act which posits it. Consider any definite object of your thought whatsoever, it can be no other than your own definite thought itself. It is what you have thought and what you in your actual consciousness have set apart as object. What else is it but a form of your non-being, or rather of the ideal moment to which you must contrapose it, and which you must contrapose to yourself in order to be yourself a definite real?
Nature, like mind, has two faces, one which looks outward and one which looks inward. Nature seen Th from without, as we see it before us, a eternal past of pure abstract object, is a limit of mind the eternal and rules it. Whence it is that mind cannot see even itself from within, and conceives itself mechanically, in space, in time, without freedom, without value, mortal. But nature has another face. It is that which it presents to our view when, awaking from that dream which for ordinary common sense is philosophy, and arousing ourselves, and strenuously reasserting our personality, we find nature itself within our own mind as the non-being which is life, the eternal life which is the real opposite of what Lucretius called mors immortalisl Nature, then, is the eternal past of our eternal present, the iron necessity of the past in the absolute freedom of the present. And beholding this nature, man in his spiritual life recovers the whole power of the mind and recognizes the infinite responsibility which lies in the use he makes of it, rising above all trivial incidents of the universal life, such as resemble in the ordinary view the buzzing of insects on the back of the unfeeling Earth, and attending to the life breath of the Whole whose reality culminates in self-consciousness.
1 Lucretius, De rerum natura, Hi. 869, " mortalem vitam mors cum immortalis ademit."
CHAPTER^ XVII EPILOGUE AND COROLLARIES WE may now briefly sum up the main features of the doctrine we have sketched.
An absolute idealism cannot conceive the idea except as thought in act, as all but consciousness s i The °f tne idea itself, if we keep for idea the characteristic objective meaning, which it originally had of idealism. 'ln p}atO) anc| which it continues to have in common thought and in the presuppositions of scientific knowing, that of being the term of thought or intuition. On the other hand, an idealism which is not absolute can only be a one-sided idealism or half-truth, which is as much as to say an incoherent idealism. It may be transcendent, like Plato's, which leaves matter, and therefore the becoming of nature, outside the idea. It may be immaterial, like Berkeley's, for which all is idea except God, the reality who makes perception be. It may be critical or transcendental, like Kant's, in which the idea is a mere unifying activity of a manifold arising from another source, and the idea therefore supposes its opposite, an unknowable, which is the negation of the idea itself. An idealistic conception aims at conceiving the absolute, the whole, as idea, and is therefore intrinsically absolute idealism. But absolute it cannot be unless the idea coincides with the act of knowing it, because — and here we find the very root of the difficulty in which Platonism is entangled — were the idea not the act itself through which it is known, it would leave something outside itself, and the idealism would then no longer be absolute.
An idealism conceiv d strictly in this meaning fulfils the task which Fichte assigned to philosophy and § 2. The named Wissenschaftshhre; a task not fuldoctrine of filled even by Hegel, for he presupposed to knowing. the absoiute i^a or tne idea for itself, the idea in itself and the idea outside itself. That is, to the absolute idea he presupposed logic and nature. In the final solution of the cosmic drama these acquire in the human mind the self-consciousness to which they aspire and of which they have need. Self-consciousness must therefore be said to be their true essence. Hegel's use of the " I " of Fichte, in order to solve the difficulty Fichte's conception gave rise to from the abstractness of his concept of the " I," an " I " incap able of generating the " not-I " from its inward nature as " I," ends in destroying rather than in establishing the absolute reality of the " I." The " I " is not absolute if it has something outside it on which it is based, instead of being the foundation of everything and therefore having the whole within itself. The defect of Hegelianism is precisely that it makes what ever presupposes the " I " precede it. Even without this defect it is unfaithful to the method of immanence which belongs to absolute idealism, and turns again to the old notions of reality in itself which is not the thought by which it is revealed to us.1 The idealism which I distinguish as actual inverts 1 Cf. the last chapter of my Riforma della dialettica hegeliana.
ACTUAL IDEALISM 255 the Hegelian problem: for it is no longer the question § 3. The °f a deduction of thought from Nature and principle of of Nature from the Logos, but of Nature actual idealism. and the Logos from thought. By thought is meant present thinking in act, not thought defined in the abstract; thought which is absolutely ours, in which the " I " is realized. Aid through this inversion the deduction becomes, what in Hegel it was impossible it could become, the real proof of itself which thought provides in the world's history, which is its history. The impossibility of the Hegelian deduction arises from the fact that it starts from the abstract and seeks to attain the concrete, and to pass from the abstract to the concrete is impossible. The concrete for the! philosopher is his philosophy, thought which is in the act of realizing itself, and in regard to which the logic of the real, which governs that thought itself, and the Nature on which that logic must be posed as a pedestal of the history of thought, are alike abstract.
From the concrete to the abstract, on the other hand, there is but one passage, — the eternal process of selfidealization. What else indeed is the act of thought, the " I," but self-consciousness or reality which is realized in being idealized? And what is the idealiza tion of this reality, realized just when it is idealized, but the dualizing by which the act of thought balances itself between the two selves, of which the one is subject and the other object only in their reciprocal mirroring of one another through the concrete and absolute act of thought? The dualizing implies an inward differentiating of the real which in idealizing itself distinguishes itself from itself (subject from object). The " I " knows, therefore, when it finds itself in its ideality confronting itself in its reality as different from itself. And it is in fact radically different. It is the negation of the real which is idealized. The one is act, the thinking, the other is what is thought, the opposite of thinking.
The thinking is activity, and what is thought is a product of the activity, flat is, a thing. The activity as such is causa sui and therefore it is freedom. The thing is a simple effect which has the principle of its own being outside it, and therefore it is mechanism. The activity becomes, the thing is. The thing is as other, a term of the relation to an other. In that is its mechanistic nature. Thereby it is one among many, that is, its concept already implies multiplicity, number. The activity, on the contrary, realizes itself in the other, or rather it is realized in itself as other. It is therefore a relation with itself, an absolute, infinite unity, without multiplicity.
The multiplicity of the thing thought implies the reciprocal exclusion of the elements of the multiplicity and thereby space. The thing thought is nature. It is nature in so far as it is the idea in which the reality has been revealed to itself. So that the Platonic idealism is a pure naturalism rather than a spiritualism. It is the affirmation of a reality which is not mind, and if there be such a reality mind is no longer possible. This is the characteristic alike of a transcendent ideal ism like Plato's, and of the crudest materialistic naturalism.
The difficulty we all experience in understanding this new deduction of nature from the idea as thought § 4. Deduction is due to the fact that we entirely lose of nature. sight of the abstractness of the nature we are proposing to deduce, and restrict ourselves to the false common notion of nature which represents it as INTELLECTUALISM 257 INTELLECTUALISM 257 concrete and actual reality. In so doing we are ignoring entirely the true character of actual thought as absolute reality. For naturalism has always been the necessary consequence, and as it were another aspect, of intellectualism. We can indeed define intellectualism as the conception of a reality which is intended as the opposite, and nothing but the opposite, of mind. If mind has such independent reality confronting it, it can only know it by presup posing it already realized, and therefore by limiting itself to the part of simple spectator. And the nature it will then know is not what it may see within itself, —that would be spiritualism; but what is other than itself. That alone is nature. But this nature of the intellectualist does not require to be deduced. Were there such an obligation it would be a sign that the intellectualist is right; and then it is no longer a case of deducing nature because, in the intellectualist position, it is itself the first principle. Indeed the problem of the deduction of nature does not arise until we have left the false standpoint of intellectualism and so got rid of the illusion of a natural reality.
In this way we can easily perceive the abstractness of the thing thought as such, or rather of nature in so § 5. Nature as far as it stands opposed to mind. And abstract nature, then this mysterious nature, impenetrable by the light of the intellect, appears a simple moment of thought: a moment whose spirituality is unveiled in all its purity directly we come to think it in act, in the concrete from which it has been abstracted, in the act of thought in which it is really posited. Since it is impossible — and that it is so should now be abundantly clear to every one — to fix cognitively in the real world, and as it were to s surprise, a natural reality without positing it as an idea corresponding to a certain moment of our repre sentative activity and thereby converting the opaque solidity of nature into the translucent inwardness of thought.
There is also in what is thought, taken in itself, a double nature, and its intrinsic contradiction is a form § 6 Double °f the restless activity of thought. What aspect of what is thought cannot be what is now thinkis thought. abie Decause jt js what js thought, and it