THE subject in this constructive process, the subject which resolves the object into itself, at least in so far § i Verum as tne ODject *s spiritual reality, is neither factum a being nor a state of being. Nothing but quatenusfit. faQ constructive process is. The process is constructive of the object just to the extent that it is constructive of the subject itself. And therefore instead of saying verum et factum conver -fun fur, we ought to say verum et fieri convertuntur, or even, verum est factum quatenus fit. In so far as the subject is con stituted a subject by its own act it constitutes the object. This is one of the vital concepts. We must acquire firm possession of it if we would avoid the equivocal blunders of some of the ostentatious and only too easy criticisms of this idealism.
Idealism is the negation of any reality which can be opposed to thought as independent of it and as the § 2. The incon- presupposition of it. But more than this, gruence of it is the negation of thought itself as an being and mind. activity? if that thought is conceived as a reality existing apart from its developing process, as a substance independent of its actual manifestation. If we take words in their strict meaning we must say that idealism is the denial of being either to a mind or to mind, the denial that a mind is, because " being " CH.III BEING VERSUS MIND 19 and " mind " are mutually contradictory terms. If, speaking of spiritual reality, we say of a poet that he is, or of a poem that it is, in affirming being we are denying mind. We can say indeed that it is what the mind opposes to itself as a term of its transcendental activity. If we would say, however, what it now itself is, we can only mean, if we have a philosophical concept of it, what its development is, or more strictly, what this development is actualizing.
A stone is, because it is already all that it can be. It has realized its essence. A plant is, an animal is, § 3. Mind and in so far as all the determinations of the nature. plant or animal are a necessary and pre ordained consequence of its nature. Their nature is what they can be, and what cannot be altered at will, cannot break out into new unforeseeable manifesta tions. All the manifestations by which their nature is expressed is already there existing implicitly. There are processes of reality which are logically exhaustible, although not yet actually realized in time. The existence of these is ideally actualized. The empirical manifestations of their being come to be conceived, therefore, as closed within limits already prescribed as impassable boundaries. This restricted nature is a consequence which follows from the fact that every thing is represented in its relation to mind, as a reality confronting it, whose being therefore is presupposed in the fact that the mind knows it. The mind itself, on the contrary, in its actuality is withdrawn from every pre-established law, and cannot be defined as a being restricted to a definite nature, in which the process of its life is exhausted and completed. So to treat it is to lose sight of its distinctive character of spiritual reality. It is to confuse it and make it merely one of the objects to which instead it ought to be opposed; one of the objects to which in so far as it is mind, it is in fact opposed. In the world of nature all is by nature. In the world of mind neither person nor thing is by nature, all is what it becomes through its own work. In the world of mind nothing is already done, nothing is because it is finished and complete; all is always doing. Just as all which has been understood is nothing in regard to what we want to and as yet are unable to understand, so likewise in the moral life all the merits of the noblest deeds hitherto performed do not diminish by a hair's-breadth the sum of duties there are to fulfil and in the fulfilment of which the whole value of our conduct will lie, so long as we continue to have worth as spiritual beings.
Mind according to our theory is act or process not substance. It is very different therefore from the § 4 Mind- concept of mind in the old spiritualistic substance and doctrine. That theory, in opposing mind mmd-act. to matter, materialized mind. It declared it to be substance, by which it meant that it was the subject of an activity of which it was independent, an activity therefore which it could realize or not realize without thereby losing or gaining its own being. In our view mind has no existence apart from its manifestations; for these manifestations are according to us its own inward and essential realization. We can also say of our mind that it is our experience, so long as we do not fall into the common error, due to faulty interpretation, of meaning by experience, the content of experience. By experience we must mean the act of experiencing, pure experience, that which is living and real.1 1 See L' esperienza pura e la realta storica, Firenza, Libreria della Voce, 1915.
m THERE IS NO INACTIVE SOUL 21 Let us be on our guard that we are not ensnared in the maze of language. Mechanistically analysed, § 5. The pit- not only is the noun distinguished from falls of language, the verb but it is detached from it and stands for a concept separable and thinkable apart. As love is loving and hate is hating, so the soul which loves or hates is no other than the act of loving or o o hating. Intellectus is itself intelligere, and the gram matical duality of the judgment intellectus intelligit is an analysis of the real unity of mind. Unless we understand that unitv there is no understanding. If J o the living flame in which the spiritual act consists be quenched there is no remainder; so long as the flame is not rekindled there is nothing. To imagine ourselves simple passive spectators of our soul, even after a spiritual life intensely lived, full of noble deeds and lofty creations, is to find ourselves inert spectators in the void, in the nought which is absolute. There is just so much mind, just so much spiritual wealth, as there is spiritual life in act. The memory which does not renew, and so create ex novo, has nothing, absolutely nothing, to remember. Even opening our eyes to look within, when it requires no effort to do so, brings work, activity, keenness, in a word, is life. To stop is to shut our eyes; not to remain an inactive soul but to cease to be a soul.
This soul, it is hardly necessary to point out, is not the object of psychology. Psychology claims § 6. The object to be the natural science of psychof psychology, ical phenomena, and accordingly adopts towards these phenomena the same attitude which every natural science adopts towards the class of objects it chooses for special study. The class of objects presented to the psychologist, like the classes of natural objects presented to the naturalist, is taken just as what it purports to be. It is not necessary therefore that the psychologist, before he can analyse the soul which is the object of his science, should have to re-live it. He can be olympically serene in its presence. What he has singled out for observation may be a tumult of emotions, but he must preserve before it the same imperturbability which the mathe matician preserves before his geometrical figures. It is his business to understand, he must be perfectly impassive even before a real passion. But is the passion, when the psychologist analyses it without being himself perturbed by it, a spiritual reality? It is certainly a phenomenon which to exist must be given a place in the world of objects we can know about; and this is the ground of the science of psychology. Its particular claim to be science we will examine later. But if we are now asked: Can we think that this reality which confronts the mind and which the mind has to analyse, a reality therefore which is a presupposition of the mind whose object it is, is spiritual reality? We must answer at once: No. If the object is a spiritual reality and if our doctrine of the knowledge of spiritual reality be true, the object must be resolved into the subject; and this means that whenever we make the activity of others the object of our own thought it must become our own activity. Instead of this the psychologist, in the analysis which he undertakes from an empirical or naturalistic standpoint, presupposes his object as other than and different from the activity which analyses it. Understanding his object means that the object is not the activity of the subject for which it is object. The anthropologist who specializes on criminal anthro- THE ANALYSABLE SOUL 23 pology does not even for one single moment feel the need to be the delinquent and so resolve the object into the subject! Just so; precisely because the reality he studies is psychology (in the naturalistic meaning) it is not spiritual reality. This means that whatever appearance of spirituality it may have, the reality in its fulness, in what it truly is, escapes the analysis of the psychologist. And every time we consider any aspect whatever of spiritual reality simply from the empirical standpoint, the standpoint of empirical psychologists, we may be sure from the start that we only see the surface of the spiritual fact, we are looking at some of its extrinsic characters, we are not entering into the spiritual fact as such, we are not reaching its inmost essence.
To find spiritual reality we must seek it. This means that it never confronts us as external; if we § 7. How to would find it we must work to find it. discover mind. And if to find it we must needs seek it, and finding it just means seeking it, we shall never have found it and we shall always have found it. If we would know what we are we must think and reflect on what we are; finding lasts just as long as the construction of the object which is found lasts. So long as it is sought it is found. When seeking is over and we say we have found, we have found nothing, for what we were seeking no longer is. Nolite judkare says the Gospel. Why? Because when you judge a man you no longer regard him as man, as mind, you take a standpoint from which he is seen as so much material, as belonging to the natural world. He has ceased to be the mind which subsists in doing, which can only be understood when seen in act: not in the act accomplished, but in the act in process.
We may say of spiritual reality what the great Christian writers have said of God. Whoever seeks Him shall find Him. But to find spiritual reality one must be willing to put his whole being into the search, as though he would satisfy the deepest need of his own life. The God you can find is the God whom in seeking you make to be. Therefore faith is a virtue and supposes love. In this lies the folly of the atheist's demand that the existence of God should be proved to him without his being relieved of his atheism. Equally fatuous is the materialist's denial of spiritual reality: he would have the philosopher show him spirit, — in nature! Nature which by its very definition is the absence of mind! Wonderful are the words of the psalmist. Dixit insipiens in corde suo non est Deus. Only in his foolish heart could he have said it!
To have grasped the truth that mind is a reality which is in self-realization, and that it realizes itself as § 8 Warning self-consciousness, is not enough in itself against defini- to free us from the illusion of naturalism, tions of mind. por Spirituai reality seems itself to be in continual rebellion against such definition, arresting and fixing itself as a reality, an object of thought. All the attributes we employ to distinguish mind tend, however we strive against it, to give it substance. Verum est factum quatenus fit is in effect a definition of mind as truth. What then is truth but some thing we contrapose to error? A particular truth is a truth and not an error, and a particular error is an error and not a truth. How then are we to define and conceive truth without shutting it within a limited and circumscribed form? How are we to conceive truth, — not Truth as the sum of all its determinations, object of a quantitatively omniscient mind, but some TRUTH AND DEFINITION 25 definite truth (such as the theory of the equality of the internal angles of a triangle to two right angles), any truth in so far as it is an object or fixed in a concrete spiritual act, — how are we to conceive such a truth except by means of a fixed and self-contained concept, whose formative process is exhausted, which is therefore unreformable and incapable of development? And how can we think our whole spiritual life otherwise than as the continual positing of definite and fixed moments of our mind? Is not spiritual concreteness always spiritual being in precise, exact and circum scribed forms?
This difficulty, when we reflect on it, is not different from that which, as we saw, arises in the necessity we are under of beholding men and things in the medium of multiplicity. And it can only be eliminated in the same way, that is, by having recourse to the living experience of the spiritual life. For neither the multiplicity nor the fixedness of spiritual reality is excluded from the concept of the progressive unity of mind in its development. But, as the multiplicity is subordinated and unified in the unity, so the determinateness is subordinated in the concreteness of the system of all the determinations, which is the actual life of mind. For determinateness is essentially and fundamentally multiplicity, it is the particularity of the determinations by which each is what it is and reciprocally excludes the others. It is only by abstrac tion that even such a truth as that instanced, of the equality of the internal angles of a triangle to two right angles, can be said to be closed and self-contained. In reality it is articulated into the process of geometry in all the minds in which this geometry is actualized in the world.
This shows us why the concept of mind as process is a difficult concept. Against it all the fixed abstrac-§9. Theintui- tions of common sense and of science tionofmind. (which by its very nature always moves in the abstract) are continually working, incessantly crowding our intellect, drawing it hither and thither, not suffering it without bitter exertion to keep its hold on the immediate intuition of the spiritual life. By that intuition alone it attains, in its vivid moments, its norm and its inspiration towards science and virtue, which the more they fill the soul the more strongly vibrate the tense cords of our internal forces.
The unity of mind, which lives in such intuition, has been more or less clearly pointed out by all § 10. The philosophers, but no one yet perhaps has unity of mind, brought out with definite clearness its distinctive mark — unmultipliable and infinite unity.
The unity of mind is unmultipliable because, although psychology may compel us to analyse and reconstruct spiritual reality, it is impossible ever to think that mind is decomposable into parts, each conceiv able by itself as a self-contained unity, irrespective of the rest. Empirical psychology, while it distinguishes the various concurrent psychical facts in a complex state of consciousness and declares different elements to be ultimate terms in its analysis, yet goes on to point out that all the elements are fused in one whole, and that all the facts have a common centre of reference, and that it is precisely in virtue of this that they assume their specific and essential psychological character. Even the old speculative psychologies (as empirical as the modern in their starting-point), when they dis tinguish abstractly the various faculties of the soul, always reaffirm the indivisible unity or the simplicity MULTIPLE PERSONALITY 27 (as they call it) of the mind as the common basis and unique substance of the various faculties. The life, the reality, the concreteness of the spiritual activity, is in the unity; and there is no multiplicity except by neglecting the life and fixing the dead abstractions which are the result of analysis.
Modern empiricism, with its natural bias towards multiplicity, compelled to acknowledge that in any given experience consciousness is a unique centre ment against meiia, and that therefore there is no multithe unity of pHcity within the ambit of one conscious ness, supposes that in the phenomenon of multi-pie -personality^ studied in abnormal psychology, multiplicity is introduced into consciousness itself. For though within the ambit of consciousness there is no multiplicity, yet when expelled from the ambit, two or more consciousnesses may exist in one and the same empirical subject. But this empirical observa tion itself serves only to confirm our doctrine of the non-multiplicity of mind because the duplication con sists in the absolute reciprocal exclusion of the two consciousnesses, each of which is a consciousness only on condition of its not being a partial consciousness, nor part of a deeper total consciousness, but that it is itself total and therefore itself unique, not one of two.
The unity of the mind is infinite. For the reality of the mind cannot be limited by other realities and still § 12. The error keep its own reality. Its unity implies its of pluralism. infinity. The mind is not a multiplicity: nor is the whole, of which it is a part, multiple, the part being a unity. For if the mind belonged to a multiple whole it would be itself intrinsically multiple.
28 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY CH.
The negation of intrinsic multiplicity is therefore enough to make clear the absurdity of the concept that the mind is part of a multiplicity. Atomists and monadists alike, however, have thought it possible to conceive the composite and also at the same time to conceive the simple as a constitutive element of the composite. We need not in this place discuss the strength of this thesis, we may for our present purpose even admit that it has all the value which common sense attributes to it, for, independently of every consequence of the concept of the unmultipliable or intrinsic unity of consciousness, there is a much more effective way of showing its infinity.
When we present the concept of our consciousness to ourselves we can only conceive it as a sphere whose 5 The radius is infinite. Because, whatever effort infinity of we make to think or imagine other things consciousness. or otner consciousnesses outside our own consciousness, these things or consciousnesses remain within it, precisely because they are posited by us, even though posited as external to us. The without is always within; it denotes, that is to say, a relation between two terms which, though external to one another, are both entirely internal to consciousness. There is for us nothing which is not something we perceive, and this means that however we define it, whether as external or internal, it is admitted within our sphere, it is an object for which we are the subject. Useless is the appeal to the ignorance in which, as we know by experience, we once were and others may now be of the realities within our subjective sphere. In so far as we are actually ignorant of them, they are not posited by consciousness and therefore do not come within its sphere. It is clear that our very ignorance is (X in UNITY AND INFINITY 29 not a fact unless at the same time it is a cognition. That is to say, we are ignorant only in so far either as we ourselves perceive that we do not know or as we perceive that others perceive what we do not. So that ignorance is a fact to which experience can appeal only because it is known. And in knowing ignorance we know also the object of ignorance as being external to the ambit of a given knowing. But external or internal it is always in relation to, and so within, some conscious ness. There exists no means of transcending this consciousness.
Spinoza conceived the two known attributes of substance, thought and extension, to be external to one another. He opposed idea and res, mens infinity of an(^ corPus> but he was not therefore able to thought think that ordo et connexio idearum idem est according to ac or^Q et Connexj0 rerum^ because, as he tells us, res (and primarily our own body) is no other than objectum mentis? The body is the term of our consciousness or the content of its first act. It is what Rosmini later called the basal feeling (sentimento fundamental^ the sense which the soul has in its feeling of what is primarily the object felt, the object beneath every sensation, the body. The objectum mentis of Spinoza is indeed different from the mind, but it is bound to the mind and seen by the mind itself as something different from it. In the very position then which the mind assigns to the body (and to all bodies) the mind is not really transcended. Spinoza therefore conceived mind as an infinite attribute of the infinite substance. Substance, from the standpoint of thought, is altogether thought.
And as we move with thought along all that is 30 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY CH thinkable, we never come to our thought's margin, we never come up against something other than thought, the presence of which brings thought to a stop. So that the mind is not only in itself psycho logically one, it is one epistemologically and it is one metaphysically; it is never able even to refer to an object which is external to it, never able therefore to be conceived as itself a real among reals, as a part only of the reality.
But this is not enough. So far we have looked at only one side of the question. A deep and invincible § i c The repugnance has in every age made the multiplicity human mind shrink from affirming this unmultipliable and infinite unity of the mind in its absolute subjectivity. The mind cannot issue from itself, it can detach nothing from itself, its world is within it. And yet this concept of the self, of a centre around which every one necessarily gathers all the real and possible objects of his experience, seems to hint at something different from it, something which is its essentially correlative term. In affirming a subject we at the same time affirm an object. Even in self-consciousness the subject opposes itself as object to itself as subject. If the activity of conscious ness is in the subject, then when in self-consciousness that same subject is the object, as object it is opposed to itself as the negation of consciousness, even as unconscious reality, relatively at least to the conscious ness which belongs to the subject. The object is always contraposed to the subject in such wise that, however it may be conceived as dependent on the subject's activity, it is never given it to participate in the life with which the subject is animated. So that the subject is activity, search, a movement towards m OMNIS DETERMINATE EST NEGATIO 31 the object; and the object, whether it be the object of search or the object of discovery or the object of awareness, is inert, static. Consequently to the unity realized by the, subject's activity there stands opposed in the object the multiplicity which belongs to the real, hardly separated from the synthetic form which the subject imprints on it. Things, in fact, in their objectivity, presupposed as the term of the mind's theoretical activity, are many: essentially many, in such wise that a single thing is unthinkable save as resulting from a composition of many elements. A unique and infinite thing would not be knowable, because to know is to distinguish one thing from another. Omnis determinatio est negatio. Our whole experience moves between the unity of its centre, which is mind, and the infinite multiplicity of the points constituting the sphere of its objects.
What we have then to do here is to bring clearly into relief the character of this relation between the unity § 16. The rek- of the mind and the multiplicity of things, tion between It escaped Kant. It refers to the exact the unity of nature of the mind's theoretical activity.
mind and the. r. r multiplicity of Let us note first of all that if the unity ot things. mind and the multiplicity of things were together and on the same plane, as Kant thought when he presupposed the uncompounded manifold of data coming from the noumenon to the synthesis of aesthetic intuition, then the unity of the ego would be no more than a mere name, because it could be summed up with the other factors of experience and so would participate in the totality which includes the multiplicity of the data. In such case it would be seen to be a part. To be one among many is not really to be one since it is to participate in the nature of the many. But the multiplicity of things does not stand in the same rank with the unity of the ego, for multiplicity belongs to things in so far as they are objects of the ego, or rather in so far as all together are gathered into the unity of consciousness. Things are many in so far as they are together, and therefore within the unity of the synthesis. Break up the synthesis and each is only itself without any kind of reference to the others. And therefore consciousness cannot have one of them as object without being enclosed within it and imposing on itself the absolute impossibility of passing to another. Which comes to saying that the thing no longer is one thing among many, but unique. In so far therefore as there is multiplicity there is a synthesis of multiplicity and unity.
The multiplicity of things, in order to be the multiplicity which belongs to the object of conscious ness, implies the resolution of this very multiplicity, and this is its unification in the centre on which all the infinite radii of the sphere converge. The multi plicity is not indeed added to unity, it is absorbed in it. It is not n + i, but n = I. The subject of experi ence cannot be one among the objects of experience because the objects of experience are the subject. And when we feel the difference, and only the difference, between ourselves and things, when we feel the affinity of things among themselves, and seem ourselves to be shut up as it were within a very tiny part of the whole, to be as a grain of sand on the shore of an immense ocean, we are regarding our empirical selves, not the transcendental self which alone is the true subject of our experience and therefore the only true self.
THINKING AND ACTING 33 We have not, however, eliminated every difficulty. The mind is not only bound to the multiplicity of the s i The obJect or °f the things. There is the mind>s multiplicity of persons. There is, it will apparent limit be said, not only a theoretical activity by acdvit°UCal wnicn we are in relation with things, there is also a -practical activity by which we are in relation with persons, and thereby constrained to issue from our unity and to recognize and admit a reality transcending our own.
It is of the greatest importance to bring this difficulty clearly to light, for it has immediate con sequences in regard to the moral conception of life. Let us note then that the mind is never properly the pXire theoretical activity which we imagine to stand in opposition to the practical activity. There is no theory^ no contemplation of reality, which is not at the same time action and therefore a creation of reality. Indeed there is no cognitive act which has not a value, or rather which is not judged, precisely in its character of cognitive act, according to whether it conforms with its own law, in order that it may be recognized or not as what it ought to be. Ordinarily we think that we are responsible for what we do and not for what we think. We suppose we could not think otherwise than as we think, that though indeed we may be masters of our conduct, we are not masters of our ideas. They are only what they can be, what reality makes them. This common belief, held even by many philosophers, is a most serious error. Were we not the authors of our ideas, that is, were our ideas not our pure actions, they would not be ours. It would be impossible to judge them, they would have no value; they would be neither true nor false. They D D would be, altogether and always, whatever a natural and irrational necessity had made them. The human mind, wherein they would be, altogether and always, running confusedly, would be powerless to exercise any discrimination and choice. It is absurd. For even in thinking the sceptical thesis itself we must think it, whether we will or no, as true, that is, as clothed with truth value, for which it must be thought and its opposite rejected.
Every spiritual act, then (including that which we regard as simply theoretical), is practical in as much as it has a value, practical in being or in not being what it ought to be. It is therefore our act and it is free. Every act is spiritual, moreover, in so far as it is governed by a law, by which an account is required from men not only of what they do but of what they say or of what they would say if they expressed what they think. This law which governs the spiritual act has nothing in common with the laws characterizing natural facts. Natural laws are no other than the facts themselves, whereas a law of the mind is, so to say, an ideal, or rather an ideal which the mind presents to itself in distinction from the fact of its own working. We are accustomed to think that the mind is one thing, the laws which govern it another. Mind is freedom; but also, and just on that account, it is law, which it distinguishes from itself as an activity higher than its own.
Yet again, the law of the mind is rational, and in that alone it is distinguished from the law of nature. The law of nature is what is, not something we are seeking behind what is. It is vain to seek the why of what is. If we ask, Why? of an earthquake or of any other -physical evil we ask it not of nature, but of God, THE SPIRITUAL LAW who can make nature intelligible as the work of mind or act of will. The spiritual law, on the contrary, in all its determinations, has a definite why, and speaks its own language to our soul. The poet correcting his poem obeys a law which speaks the language of his own genius. To the philosopher nothing is more familiar, more intimate, than the voice which admonishes him continually, preventing him from uttering absurdities in regard to what he discovers. Every law which others, our teachers or governors, impose on our conduct, is only imposed truly and effectively when it is rendered transparent in its motives and in its intrinsic rationality, perfectly fitted to our concrete spiritual nature.
' In conclusion, if the mind be free, in so far as it is limited by laws it can only mean that these laws are not a different reality from that which it is realizing, but the reality itself. The mind cannot be conceived in freedom, with its own value, except by seeing it from the point of view of other minds, just as the " I," as subject of pure abstract knowledge, has need of the "not-I," freedom has need of another "I." And so we have man thinking of God as author of the laws imposed on him and on all other particular men. So too we have man girding himself with duties and positing around him as many minds, as many persons, as subjects are required for the rights which his duties recognize. And when we look within our own consciousness and consider the value of what we are doing and of what we are saying to ourselves, it is as though innumerable eyes were looking in upon us to judge us. The very necessity of the multiplicity of things, as we have already made clear, forces us to conceive manifold duties, many subjects 36 UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY CH.IH with rights, many persons. Such a concept could never arise in a pure theoretical experience, for a pure theoretical experience could not be made to think of another world than that of things. But we are not a pure theoretical experience. And therefore our world is peopled with minds, with persons.
How then are we to maintain the infinite unity of mind in the face of this necessity of transcending it by a multiplicity of persons?
CHAPTER IV THE difficulty instanced at the end of the last chapter concerns, as we can now clearly see, not simply the con cept of mind but the concept of the real.
S i. Develop- L. r ment as unity For it is only a difficulty in the concept of of unity and mind in so far as the real in its totality comes to be conceived as mind, bmce, if we take our start in the present actuality of consciousne'ss in which mind is realized, then to posit the infinite unity of mind is to posit the unity of the real as mind.
The solution of this difficulty, which we have tried to present in all its force, is to be found in the concept already expounded that the mind is not a being or a substance but a constructive process or development. The very word development includes in its meaning both unity and multiplicity. It affirms an immanent relation between unity and multiplicity. But there is more than one way of understanding such a relation. It is necessary therefore to clear up precisely the exact mode in which in our view mind is to be conceived as development.