So then the mind, which is the one in the sub stantiality of its self-consciousness, is the manifold as § n. The an actual reality of consciousness, and the categories and life of self-consciousness in consciousness is the category. faQ history which is a unity of historical reality and of the knowledge of it. Philosophy, therefore — this consciousness of itself in which mind consists — can only be philosophy in being history. And as history it is not the dark night of mysticism but the full mid -day light which is shed on the boundless scene of the world. It is not the unique category of self-consciousness; it is the infinite categories of consciousness. And then, in this con ception there cease to be privileges between different entities, categories and concepts, and all entities in their absolute determinateness are equal and are different, and all the concepts are categories, in being each the category of itself.1 The abstractness of 1 This problem of the categories will be found treated in the second volume of Sistema di Logica.
philosophy finds its interpretation in the determinateness of history, and, we can also say, of experience, showing how it is one whole a -priori experience, in so far as every one of its moments is understood as a spontaneous production of the subject.
Determinations are not lacking, then, in our idealism, and indeed there is an overwhelming wealth of them. § 12. The But whilst in empirical knowledge and in mysticism of every philosophy which has not yet attained our opponents. to the concept of the pure thinking, these complete distinctions of the real are skeletonized and reduced to certain abstract types, and these are then forced to do duty for true distinctions, in idealism these distinctions are one and all regarded in their individual eternal value. Mystics are therefore rather the critics than the champions of this idealism since in their philosophy all distinctions are not maintained.
On the other hand, we must not reduce these distinctions to the point at which we merely think § 13. Distinc- them as a number, and thereby conceive tions and them as Spinoza's infinite of the imagina tion, a series without beginning or end, extensible always and in every direction, and so for ever falling short of completion. In this mode reality would be an ought -to -be, and the reality of the " I " would have its true reality outside itself. The distinctions are an infinite of the imagination, a potential infinite, if we consider them as a pure abstract history of philosophy, as forms of consciousness cut off from self-consciousness. Instead of this, in our idealism the distinctions are always an actual infinite, the immanence of the universal in the particular: all in all.
I am not I, without being the whole of the " I THE ETERNAL THEOGONY 277 think "; and what " I think " is always one in so § 14. The far as it is "I." The mere multiplicity idealist con- always belongs to the content of the consciousness abstractly considered; in reality it is always reconciled in the unity of the " I." The true history is not that which is unfolded in time but that which is gathered up eternally in the act of thinking in which in fact it is realized.
This is why I say that idealism has the merit without the defect of mysticism. It has found God and turns to Him, but it has no need to reject any single finite thing: indeed without finite things it would once more lose God. Only, it translates them from the language of empiricism into that of philo sophy, for which the finite thing is always the very reality of God. And thus it exalts the world into an eternal theogony which is fulfilled in the inwardness of our being.
INDEX OF NAMES Agathon, 180 Antisthenes, 58 Bergson, 74 Boethius, 185 Boutroux, 172 ff.
Lange, 214 Mach, 74 Rickert, 74 INDEX OF NAMES Valla, 185 ff.
Xenophon, 119 Zabarella, 212 THE END Printed in Great Britain by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED Edinburgh.
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