is what is thought just because not thinkable. The thing thought is thing, nature, matter, everything which can be considered as a limit of thought, and what limits thought is not itself thinkable. The thing thought is the other of the thinking, or the term, which when it is reached we feel the thinking is stopped. The essence of that other is destined always to be withdrawn from view. We can know the pro perties or qualities, but behind them there remains the thing, unattainable. And so with everything thought, it is on this condition it is thought, because everything thought is thing, and in so far as it is such, incom mensurable with mind.
And yet, because not thinkable, the thing is thought: the thinking is the thing's very unthinkability. It is not in itself unthinkable beyond the sphere of our thinking; but we think it as not thinkable. In its unthinkability it is posited by thought, or better still, it is as unthinkable that it is posited. For it is the nature of thought to affirm, and it is only in affirming that it is. By this I mean that if we regard thought as simply what is affirmed, as the conclusion or result of the affirmation, it is no longer an affirming, nor even a thinking. And as thought cannot not be xvn ACT WHICH IS NEVER FACT 259 thought, it affirms itself without being fixed as an affirmation. That is, it posits itself as act which is never fact, and thereby it is pure act, eternal act. Nature in the very act in which it is affirmed is denied, that is, spiritualized. And on this condition only can it be affirmed.
Nature, then, is an abstract conception of the real, and cannot be given except as an abstract reality. § 7. The nature The thought in which my I ' is of the "I." actualized can only be mine. When thought is not mine, when in my thinking I do not recognize myself, do not find myself, am not living in it, the reality which comes to be the thought in which my thought meets itself, in which, that is, I meet myself, is for me nature. But to be able to conceive this nature as absolute reality I must be able to think the object in itself, whereas the only object I can think is an aspect of the actual subject.
And also, be it noted, this object is not one which has only a value for knowledge. It is a reality intrinsi cally metaphysical. The " I," from whose dialectical process the object arises, the object which is then no other than the life of the " I," is the absolute " I." It is the ultimate reality which, try how we will to divest it of the value for knowledge with which we endow all reality, we can only conceive as " I." It is the " I " which is the individual, but the individual as subject with nothing to contrapose to itself and finding all in itself. It is therefore the actual concrete universal. This " I " which is the absolute, is in so far as it affirms itself. It is causa sui.
Deprived of its internal causality it is annulled. In causing itself it is creator of itself and in itself of the world, of the world which is the most complete that we can think, — the absolute world. This world is the object of which our doctrine speaks, and therefore our doctrine is a doctrine of knowledge in so far as it is a metaphysic.
The world is nature and the world is history. Each term comprehends the other so that we can say § 8. History the world is nature or history. We as nature. distinguish the two domains of reality in the distinction between an other than mind and an other in mind. The other than mind, which is outside mind in general, is nature. It has not the unity, the freedom, the immortality which are the three essential characters of mind. The other in mind is history. It participates in all these essential characters, but at the same time implies an otherness in regard to the spiritual activity for which it is and which affirms it. The earth's movement is a natural fact, but the Copernican theory is a historical fact. What constitutes the difference is not that the historical fact is, and the natural fact is not, an act of the mind identical with that by which I think it, but that it is an act of the mind which is already complete when I think it and present therefore to my thinking with a positive character of autonomy, or objectivity, analogous to that of natural facts. We can even say in regard to it, that from being a spiritual act it has become a fact. The form of otherness from the subject, the fact that Copernicus who wrote the De revolutionibus orbium celestium and I who read it are different persons, is not the essential thing which gives the Copernican theory its character as history. It possesses that character because we can speak of historical fact, of fact which has in itself a certain law, which every one who narrates or remembers the NATURE AND HISTORY 261 history must respect: a law which requires an absolute form of otherness through which the creative spiritual act of the historical fact is different from the historical spiritual act. Caesar, when he wrote his Commentaries, must have already completed the facts which he narrated; and were there no difference between the man of action and the writer, there could be no history, or history would be confused with romance. I who am speaking am free to say what I will; but when I have spoken aha jacta est; I am no longer master of my words, they are what they are, and as such they confront me limiting my freedom; and they may become the torment of my whole life. They have become history, it may be, in the secret recesses of my own soul.
In this meaning, in spite of the profound difference which it makes between natural facts and historical facts, the difference that historical facts are and natural facts are not, at least are not originally, spiritual acts, nature and history coincide in so far as they imply a form of otherness from the " I " which knows, and apart from which we could not speak either of the one or of the other.
This is not enough. In the ordinary concepts of nature and history, that is, in the concepts which the naturalists have of nature and the spatialkyof historians have of history, otherness is nature and of absolute otherness. It is not the otherhistory as ness we mciicated in the proposition that the unthinkable is thought, but the other ness we mean when we find it necessary to say that what is thought is unthinkable. The " nature " of the naturalist is nature without final ends, extraneous to mind; the nature we can only know as phenomenon; the nature of which in resignation or despair we say ignorabimus. And the history of the historians is that fathomless sea of the past which loses itself and disappears in the far-offness of the prehistoric, wherein lie also the roots of the tree of civilization. It is the history of men's actions, the actions of men whose soul can only be reconstituted in an imagination devoid of any scientific justification. Naturalists and historians alike are confined to the cm without being able to seek the Stort, because for them otherness is not substantial unity, a moment of the dialectical process. Their object is not that which we only recognize in its opposition to the subject, it is full and radical otherness, or rather multiplicity. And thus it is that nature is displayed in space and time (where spirituality is inconceivable), and history at least in time, which, as we know, is only a kind of space, for time in the before and after of the succession implies a reciprocal exclusion of the elements of the manifold.
Nature and history, then, coincide in their character of spatiality. Spatiality withdraws them both from § 10. Time the mind, if not from the mind as it is and mind. generally conceived, at least from the mind as it must be conceived in the concrete; realistic ally, as the actual "I."
For if, with Kant, we make time, or as we should now say the form of spatiality which is time, the form of the internal sense, and so adapt it to the spiritual facts, we are no longer looking at the spirituality of those facts: the spirituality for which they must not be facts but the spiritual act. When we declare that the Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1781 but that Kant began to write it towards the end of CONCRETE TIME 263 1772, we are not thinking of the Criticism by which it is one indivisible spiritual act, but we are putting it on the same plane on which we place many other mental and natural facts. Moreover, if we would know what that Criticism is, as Kant's thought, we must read his book, reflect on it, and thereby separate it from its time and make Kant's past work our present thought. Thereby time is thought of by the mind as nature and not as mind, thought of as a multiplicity of facts external to one another and therefore conceivable according to the principle of causality, not as that living unity, the historian's immortal mind.
But if from the naturalist's contemplation in which we are lost in the multitude of facts, we rise to the § ii. Nature philosopher's contemplation in which we and history find the centre of all multiplicity in the as mind. one^ t^en fae Spatiality, the multiplicity, the otherness of nature and history, which constitute their autonomy in regard to mind, all give place to the mind's absolute reality. The nature and the history of ordinary discourse are abstract nature and abstract history, and, as such, non - existent. The otherness which is the fundamental characteristic of each, were it as absolute as it appears, would imply the absolute unknowability of both, but it would also imply — a fact of much more importance — the impossibility of mind. For if there be something outside the mind in the absolute sense, the mind must be limited by it, and then it is no longer free, and no longer mind since mind is freedom. But the otherness of history and of nature, if we possess the real concept of the absoluteness of the " I," is no other than the objectivity of the " I " to itself which we have 264 EPILOGUE AND COROLLARIES «.
already analysed. Nature and history are, in so far as they are the creation of the " I " which finds them within itself, and produces them in its eternal process of self-creation.
This does not mean, as those who trust to common sense imagine in dismay, that reality is a subjective § 12. Against illusion. Reality is true reality, in the abstract sub- most literal and unambiguous sense, in jectivism. being the subject itself) the <c L» The cc ^ " is not self-consciousness except as a consciousness of the self, determined as some thing. The reality of the self- consciousness is in the consciousness, and the reality of the consciousness in the self-consciousness. The consciousness of a self-consciousness is indeed its own reality, it is not imprisoned in the self as a result or conclusion, but is a dialectical moment. This means that our intellect grows with what we know. It does not increase by acquiring qualities and preserving them without any further need of activity, but it is realized, with that increase, in a new know ing. Thus it is that our only way of distinguishing between the old knowledge and the new knowing is by analysis and abstraction: for the self-consciousness is one, and consciousness is consciousness of the selfconsciousness. Therefore the development of selfconsciousness, or, avoiding the pleonasm, self-conscious ness, is the world process itself, nature and history, in so far as it is a self-consciousness realized in conscious ness. If we give the name " history " to this develop ment of mind, then the history which is consciousness is the history of this self-consciousness and what we call the past is only the actual present in its concreteness.
CHAPTER XVIII IDEALISM OR MYSTICISM?
THE conception to which I have tried to give expression, a conception which resolves the world into spiritual act or act of thought, in unifying the analogy between infinite variety of man and nature in an actual idealism absolute one, in which the human is divine and the divine is human, may appear, and has been pronounced, a mystical conception.1 And 1 My friend Benedetto Croce has expressed his objection to mysticism in these words: " You cancel all the fallacious distinctions we are commonly accustomed to rely on, and history as the act of thought has then it seems nothing left but the immediate consciousness of the individual-universal in which all distinctions are submerged and lost. And this is mysticism, excellent in making us feel in unity with God, but ill-adapted for thinking the world or for acting in it " (Teoria e storia della storiografia, p. 103).
This is true, but as a criticism it does not inculpate our idealism, although that might also be defined as a consciousness (not indeed immediate, as has been shown) of the individual-universal; because, as Croce points out, mysticism cannot be historical, it cannot admit the consciousness of diversity, of change and of becoming. In fact " either the consciousness of diversity comes from the individual and intuitive element itself, and then it is impossible to understand how such an element can subsist with its own form of intuition, in thought which always universalizes; or it is affirmed to be a product of the act of thought itself, and then the distinction which it was supposed had been abolished is reaffirmed and the asserted distinctionless simplicity of thought is shaken " (p. 104). Such a simplicity, it must be clear even to the most cursory reader of the preceding pages, is certainly not the kind of simplicity actual idealism affirms. For idealism diversity is precisely a product of the act of thought itself. Only those distinctions are illegitimate which are presupposed and unproved. They are illegitimate because they are not derived from that act of thought which is the unshakeable and only possible foundation of a truly critical and realistic philosophizing and therefore of any efficacious acting in the world.
indeed it concurs with mysticism in affirming that the whole is one, and that to know is to attain this one behind all the distinctions.
Now mysticism has its very great merit but it has none the less its very grave defect. Its merit is the fulness and the truly courageous energy, of its con ception when it affirms that reality cannot be conceived except as absolute; or, as it is more usual to express it, there is no true reality but God only. And this living feeling, this intrinsic contact or taste of the divine (as Campanella would have said), is a sublimation of human energy, a purification of the soul, and blessedness. But mysticism has the serious defect that it cancels all distinctions in the " soul's dark night " (notte oscura dell' anima) and thereby makes the soul abnegate itself in the infinite, where not only all vision of finite things, but even its own personality, is lost to it. For its personality, as a concrete personality, is defined precisely in the function of all finite things. Through this tendency it not only quenches every stimulus towards scientific research and rational knowledge, but weakens and breaks every incentive to action, for action cannot be explained except by means of the concreteness of the finite. Just as we can only do one thing at a time, so we can only solve one problem at a time. To live is to be limited. The mystic ignores the limit.
But while " actual idealism " accords with " mysti cism " in what we have called its merit, it does not in § 2. The its fundamental theses participate in what difference. We have called its defect. Idealism re conciles all distinctions, but does not, like mysticism, cancel them, and it affirms the finite no less resolutely than it KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE 267 affirms the infinite, difference no less than identity. This is the substantial point of divergence between the two conceptions. The mystical conception, despite appear ances, is to be regarded as essentially an intellectualist doctrine, and therefore ideally anterior to Christianity: the idealistic conception is an essentially antiintellectualist doctrine, and perhaps even the maturest form of modern Christian philosophy.
Mysticism is usually arrayed against intellectualist theories because, according to the mystics, those theories § 3. Mysticism vainly presume to attain the Absolute by and intellectual- means of knowledge, whereas it can only be attained by means of love, or, as they say, by feeling or will. The difference between the two conceptions is substantially this: For the intellectualists the Absolute is knowable because in itself it is knowledge; for the mystics the Absolute is not knowable because it is not knowledge, but love. And love is distinguished from knowledge in being life, self-transformation, creative process, whereas knowledge supposes (that is, they believe it supposes) a reality already complete, which has only to be intuited. Mysticism, on the other hand, accords inwardly with intellectualism in conceiving its love as an object, and the process of the Absolute as a process which confronts mind, and in which process mind must itself be fused. And vice versa, intellectualism coincides with mysticism, in so far as, even in conceiving the object of knowledge as knowable, that is as itself knowledge, it makes that object entirely an external limit to the subject, and the subject having thus posited the object as its external limit is no longer itself conceivable, apart from empty metaphor, except as the subject of an intuitive activity.
The truth is that the real characteristic of intellectualism is not that in which it is opposed to mysticism but that in which it agrees with it, that is, in its conception of reality as mere absolute object and therefore its conception of the mind's process as a process which presupposes an object already realized before the process itself begins. The intellect in this conception stands opposed to value. Value creates its object (the good or the evil); intellect creates nothing, does nothing, merely contemplates existence, a passive and otiose spectator.
Now, in this respect mysticism is in precisely the same position as intellectualism, and it does not succeed, in spite of all the efforts it makes to conceive the mind as will (feeling, love), because will is freedom, self-creative; and freedom is impossible where the activity is not absolute. Hence mysticism falls back on the concepts of fate, grace, and the like.
The mystic's absolute reality is not subject but object. It is object, that is to say, from the point § 4. Objectivism °^ view of actual idealism, because in of mystical idealism the subject coincides with the thought. « j »» who af£rms the object. For even the mystic can speak of the personality, to to caelo different from his own, into relation with which his own personality enters or aspires to enter. So that he comes to conceive a personality which is an object of his mind, — that is, of the only mind which for him is effectively mind, — and therefore is not mind.
It is, then, no wonder that in the mystic's reality, so essentially objective and anti-spiritual, there is no place for anything purely depending on the subject, the individual personality, the man tormented by the desire of God who is all, and by the infinite sense of THE MORAL CONCEPTION 269 his own nothingness. It is no wonder if all particular things dissolve as illusive shadows. Within the allembracing reality, particulars are distinguished for the determinating activity of that finite power which in itself is nothing, — the intellect, or rather the personality as cognitive consciousness.
Modern idealism, on the contrary, moves in a direction directly opposite to that towards which § 5. The ami- mysticism is orientated. Idealism is, as intellectualism I have said, anti-intellectualistic, and in this sense profoundly Christian, if we take Christianity as meaning the intrinsically moral con ception of the world. This moral conception is one which is entirely alien to India and to Greece even in their greatest speculative efforts. The philosophy of India ends in asceticism, in the suppression of the passions, in the extirpation of desire and every root of the human incentive to work, in the nirvana. Its ideal, therefore, is the simple negation of the real in which morality realizes itself, human personality. And in Greek philosophy the highest ethical word it can pronounce is Justice. Justice renders to each his own and therefore preserves the natural order (or what is presupposed as such), but it can neither create nor construct a new world. Greek philosophy, therefore, cannot express the essential virtue of mind which is its creative nature, it must produce the good which it cannot find confronting it. How could Greek philo sophy understand the moral nature of mind seeing that its world was not mind but nature? The nature need not be material, it might be ideal, but it is what the mind contemplates, not what it makes. Greek morality ends in the Stoical doctrine of suicide, a doctrine consistent with its immanent tendency to an CH.
CH.
intellectualistic conception of a reality in which the subject has no worth. Christianity, on the other hand, discovers the reality which is not until it creates itself, and is what it creates. It cannot be treated like the Greek philosopher's world, already in existence and waiting to be known till the philosopher is ready to con template it, when he has drawn aside as it were, when, as Aristotle would say, all the wants of his life are appeased and life is as it were complete. It is a reality which waits for us to construct, a reality which is truly even now love and will, because it is the inward effort of the soul, its living process, not its ideal and external model. It is man himself who rises above humanity and becomes God. And even God is no longer a reality who already is, but the God who is begotten in us and is ourselves in so far as we with our whole being rise to him. Here mind is no longer intellect but will. The world is no longer what is known but what is made: and therefore not only can we begin to conceive the mind as freedom or moral activity, but the world, the whole world of the Christian, is freed and redeemed. The whole world is a world which is what it would be, or a world, as we say, essentially moral.
For an idealistic conception such as this a true mysticism is impossible. The chief presupposition in § 6. Criticism Brahmanism or Orpheism, of which there of the mystic are many forms even in the modern world, presupposition. the intellectualistic principle of abstract objectivity, is in idealism definitely destroyed. The whole development of Christian philosophical thought, arrested during the Scholastic period, restarted and reinvigorated in the Humanism and Naturalism of the Renascence, and since then proceeding gaily without INTELLECT AND WILL 271 serious interruption, may be regarded as a continual and progressive elaboration of anti - intellectualism. To such a point has this development been brought to-day, that even an anti-intellectualism like ours may assume the appearance of intellectualism to any one who fails to appreciate the slow transformation which speculative concepts undergo throughout the history of philosophy. For to-day we say that mind is not will, nor intellect and will, but pure intellect.
There is a point in regard to this anti-intellectualistic conception which deserves particular attention. § 7. The defect Descartes did indeed propose to correct of voluntarism, the abstractness of the intellectualist conception, and undoubtedly he has the merit that he affirms a certain subjectivity of truth and there fore of reality; but he falls back into the same abstractness since he does not abandon what is the very basis of intellectualism, the presupposition of absolute objectivity. Not only does he not abandon it, he duplicates it. He distinguishes the intellect from the will by its passivity. The intellect with a passive intuition mirrors the ideas, which are in themselves. In this passivity the intellect is defined in a way which will admit no character in it of freedom and spiritual subjectivity. Moreover, it is the will which, with its freedom of assenting or with holding assent from the content of the intellect, is able to endow cognition with its peculiar character of subjective certainty. Now it is clear that in thus driving subjectivity from the intellect to find refuge in the will, we are not only repeating but even dupli cating the desperate position in which intellectual ism is placed in the opposition between knowing and known. For now we have a double opposition, N N firstly that between the intellect and the ideas, secondly that between the intellect and the will. The will, in so far as it knows or recognizes what the intellect has received but does not properly know, is itself intellect, and the intellect is itself in regard to the will made an object of knowledge. And whoever reflects carefully will see that the will which has thus been excogitated to supply the defect of the intellect cannot attain its purpose, because if we suppose truth to be objective in regard to the intellect its objectivity must be always out of reach. We should want a second will to judge the first, and a third to judge the second, and still, to quote Dante, " lungi sia dal becco T erba."1 In short, intellectualism is here attempting to cure its own defect by an intellectualistic theory of the will. The intellect only draws back, it is neither eliminated nor reconciled.2 And the doctrines which, following Kant, make a sharp distinction between the theoretical and the practical reason, conferring on the theoretical a power of knowing and on the practical a power of doing, have no greater success. If the Cartesian antiintellectualism integrates the intellect with a will, and then discovers that this will itself is intellectual, the Kantian anti-intellectualism juxtaposes a will to the intellect, and the will in this juxtaposition must again discover itself intellectual. Indeed the Kantian will, precisely because it is separated from the intellect and creates a reality which is not the reality, does not attain the full autonomy which implies the absolute immanence of the purpose, and it needs to postulate an extra-mundane summum bonum and therefore God 1 Inferno, xv. 72. 2 See the special treatment of this point in Sistema di Logica, vol. i. part i.
xvm TRUE ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM 273 and an immortal life of the individual beyond experi ence. And what is this transcendent world but a real world which it does not create, a world which objectively confronts the will, just as phenomenal nature objectively confronts the intellect? In general, a will, which is not the intellect itself, can only be distinguished from it on condition that, at least for the intellect, there is conceived a reality not produced by mind but a presupposition of it. And when the mind, be it even only as hitellect, presupposes its own reality, the reality created by the will can never be the absolute reality, and therefore can never have moral and spiritual value, free from every intellectualistic defect.
There is only one way of overcoming intellectualism and that is not to turn our back on it but to look § s. How in- it squarely in the face. Only so is it tellectualism is possible to conceive and form an adequate overcome. -^ea Qf knowledge. It is our way and we may sum it up briefly thus: we do not suppose as a logical antecedent of knowledge the reality which is the object of knowledge; we conceive the intellect as itself will, freedom, morality; and we cancel that independent nature of the world, which makes it appear the basis of mind, by recognizing that it is only an abstract moment of mind. True anti - intellectualism indeed is identical with true intellectualism, when once we understand intellect ualism as that which has not voluntarism opposed to it, and is therefore no longer one of two old antagonistic terms but the unity of both. And such is our idealism, which in overcoming every vestige of transcendence in regard to the actuality of mind can, as we have said, comprehend within it the most T radical, most logical, and the sincerest, conception of Christianity.
Now such a conception puts us at the very antipodes of mysticism. It is hardly necessary to point out that in it all the rights of individuality find thesis between satisfaction, with the exception or those idealism and which depend on a fantastic concept of the individual among individuals. In modern philosophy such a concept is absurd, because, as we have shown, the only individual we can know is that which is the positive concreteness of the uni versal in the "I." That absolute " I " is the " I" which each of us realizes in every pulsation of our spiritual existence. It is the I which thinks and feels, the I which fears and hopes, the I which wills and works and which has responsibility, rights, and duties, and constitutes to each of us the pivot of his world. This pivot, when we reflect on it, we find to be one for all, if we seek and find the all where alone it is, within us, our own reality. I do not think I need defend this idealism from the charge or suspicion of suppress ing individual personality.
The suspicion, — I was about to say the fear, — which casts its shadow over the principle that the act § 10. idealism of thought is pure act, is lest in it the disand distinctions, tinctions of the real, that is of the object of knowledge as distinct from the knowing subject, should be suppressed. Now whoever has followed the argument to this point must see clearly that the unification with which it deals is one than which there can be nothing more fundamental, inasmuch as it affirms that in the act of thinking nature and history are reconciled. We can wish to feel no other. For such unification is at the same time the conservation, xvm THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION 275 or rather the establishing, of an infinite wealth of categories, beyond anything which logic and philosophy have hitherto conceived. Bear in mind that reconciling the whole of natural and historical reality, in the act of thinking (and this is philosophy), does not mean that there is, properly speaking, a single massive absorption of the whole of reality, it means that the eternal reconciliation of reality is displayed in and through all the forms which experience indicates in the world. Experience is, from the metaphysical point of view, the infinite begetter of an infinite offspring, in which \ it is realized. There is neither nature nor history, but always and only this nature, this history, in this, spiritual act.