One mode of conceiving development is that by which we posit abstractly the unity outside the multi-§ 2. The ab- plicity. The unity of the development is stract concept then imagined as the ground or basis of of development. ^ development, either as its principle or as its result. The germ of a plant, for example, is represented as the undifferentiated antecedent of the vegetative process, and the growth of the plant as consisting in a progressive differentiation and multi plication of the primitive unity. In such case we may believe we are conceiving the growth of the plant but really we are making it impossible to conceive. The plant lives and grows not only in so far as there is a succession of different states, but in so far as there is the unity of all its states beginning with the germ.
And when we oppose the germ to the plant, the tender seedling springing from the soil to the big tree with its wide-spreading branches, we are letting the living plant escape and setting side by side two images, two dead photographs as it were, of a living person. We have multiplicity it is true, but not the reality which comes by the multiplication into different forms of what throughout the development is and always re mains one. Another example, taken not from vague fancy but from scientific and philosophical systems, is that of the old vitalist physiology and the mechan istic physiology which arose in the last century as a reaction against it. Both fell into an identical error, for extremes meet. Vitalism posited life as the necessary antecedent or principle of the various organic functions, as an organizing force, transcending all the single specifications of structure and function. Mechan ism abolished this unity antecedent to the different organic processes, and these became simply physicochemical processes. It dreamed of a posthumous unity consequent on the multiple play of the physicochemical forces which positive analysis discovers in all vital processes. Life was no longer the principle but the result, and it appeared as though, instead of a meta physical explanation starting from an idea or from a iv THE LIVING THING AND ITS STATES 39 purely ideal entity, there was now substituted a strictly scientific and positive explanation, since the new point of departure is in the particular phenomena, in the object of experience. In reality for a spiritual istic and finalistic metaphysic there was substituted a materialistic and mechanistic one. The one meta physic was worth as much as the other, because neither the unity from which the vitalists set out nor that at which the new mechanists arrived was unity. They both adopted an abstraction in order to under stand the concrete. Life is not an abstract unity but the unity of an organism, in which the harmony, fusion and synthesis of various elements, exist in such wise that there is neither unity without multiplicity nor multiplicity without unity. The unity cannot yield the multiplicity, as the old physiology supposed, and the multiplicity cannot yield the unity, as the new physiology supposed, and for the following simple reason. So far as the unity and the multiplicity are not real principles but simple abstractions, there can never result from them true unity and true multiplicity, for these, far from being outside one another, are one and the same, the development of life.
There is then another mode of thinking the relation between unity and multiplicity. It can be termed § 3 The con- concrete in opposition to the former which crete concept of clearly is abstract. This is the mode which development. w'jj on]v jet us COnceive unity as multi plicity and vice versa: it shows in multiplicity the reality, the life of the unity. This life just because it never is but always becomes, forms itself. As we have said, it is not a substance, a fixed and definite entity, but a constructive process, a development.
From this theory that the mind is development, it follows that to conceive a mind as initially perfect, or § 4. Unity as as becoming finally perfect, is to conceive multiplicity. it no longer as mind. It was not in the beginning, it will not be in the end, because it never is. It becomes. Its being consists in its becoming, and becoming can have neither antecedent nor con sequent without ceasing to become.
Now this reality which is neither the beginning nor the end of a process but just process, cannot be conceived as a unity which is not a multiplicity; because as such it would not be development, that is, it would not be mind. Multiplicity is necessary to the very concreteness, to the very dialectical reality of the unity. Its infinity which is the essential attribute of the unity is not denied by its multiplicity but is confirmed by it. Infinity is realized through the multiplicity, for the multiplicity is nothing but the unfolding which is the actualizing of the reality.
The dialectical concept of mind, then, not only does not exclude, it requires spiritual multiplicity as the § 5. The unity essential mark of the concept of the which is muld- infinite unity of mind. Infinite unity plied and the jg therefore infinite unincation of the multiplicity which is multiple as it is infinite multiplication unified. of the one. Let us be careful to note, however, that there are not two methods as the Platonists, with their usual abstractness, suppose: one of descent from the one, or multiplication, the other of ascent or return to the one, or unification. Such are, for example, the two famous cycles of Gioberti's formula: Being creates the existing and the existing returns to Being.1 This is to fall back into the error already criticized, into the false mode of understanding 1 " L' Ente crea 1' esistente, e 1' esistente ritorna all' Ente."
WHAT BECOMES NEVER IS 41 development. Neither term (one, many) ever is, either as starting-point or end reached. The development is a multiplication which is a unification, and a unifica tion which is a multiplication. In the growing germ there is no differentiation which splits up the unity even for one single moment. The mind therefore does not posit, or confront itself with, an other by alienating that other from itself. It does not break up its own intimate unity through the positing of an otherness which is pure multiplicity. What is other than we is not so other as not to be also our self. Ever bear in mind that the " we " which we mean when we use it as a convention in speech is not the empirical self, and is not the scholastic compound of soul and body, nor even pure mind, it is the true, the transcendental " we." It is especially important to make clear that the concept of dialectical development only belongs rightly to this transcendental " we," for only in dialectic of it is it given to us to meet the spiritual thought reality. For there are two modes in which dialectic may be understood, and it is necessary once again to make a clear distinction. One of these modes is that of Plato. It was he who introduced the concept of dialectic into philo sophy, and he meant by it sometimes the role which philosophy fulfils and sometimes the intrinsic character of the truth to which philosophy aspires. Dialectic therefore is the fundamental meaning of philosophy in Plato's system. Indeed for Plato, it is the philosopher's inquiry, his research. Dialectic is not what makes the philosopher aspire to the ideas but what makes the ideas, to the knowledge of which he aspires, form themselves into a system. They are interconnected by mutual relations in such wise that the cognition of the particular is the cognition of the universal, the part implies the whole, and philosophy is, to use his own expression, a Synopsis?- It is clear that this concept of the role of philosophy must depend on the dialectic which belongs to the ideas; it must depend, that is, on the system of relations by which all are bound together among themselves in such wise that, as Plato argues in the Parmenides, every idea is a unity of the one and the many. Now, it is clear that a dialectic so conceived implies the immediateness of thought, because it is the whole of thought from all eternity. It is clear therefore that such a dialectic is the negation of all development.2 It is not of this Platonic dialectic that we are now speaking. The radical difference between it and the modern may be seen in the fact that diadialectic of lectic in the Platonic meaning, is thought in thought so far as it is self-identical (the thought to which Aristotle attributed, as its funda mental laws, the principles of identity and non-contra diction); whereas in our meaning thought is dialectical because it is never self-identical. For Plato every idea in the totality of its relations is what is, what it is im possible to think of as changing and being transformed. We can pass from one idea to another, and in passing we can integrate an initial idea with the cognition of relations with which formerly it had not been thought, but this movement and process in us supposes rest, fixity and immutability in the idea itself. This is the Platonic and Aristotelian standpoint, and from this standpoint the principle of non-contradiction is the 2 See Gentile, La Riforma della Dialectica hegeliana, Messina, Principato, 1913, pp. 3-5 and 261-3; and Sistema di Logica, Part I. chap. viii. s. 6.
iv OLD DIALECTIC AND NEW 43 indispensable condition of thought. For us on the other hand true thought is not thought thought, which Plato and the whole ancient philosophy regarded as self-subsistent, a presupposition of our thought which aspires to correspondence with it. For us the thought thought supposes thought thinking; its life and its truth are in its act. The act in its actualization, which is becoming or development, does indeed posit the identical as its own object, but thanks precisely to the process of its development, which is not identity, which is not, that is to say, abstract unity, but unity and multiplicity, or rather, identity and difference in one.
This concept of dialectic judged by the principle of noh-contradiction, which it seems flagrantly to violate, is a paradox and a scandal. For how can and the prin- we deny that the principle of non-contraciple of non- diction is a vital condition of all thought?
dissidence between the concept of thought thought, for which the principle of non-contradiction has a meaning, and the concept of thought thinking, the act of the transcendental ego, to which it can have no relevance, we see that the dialectic is a strictly correct concept. It is only when we descend from thought thinking, which is activity, to thought thought, which is the limit of the activity it presupposes and itself abstract, that the principle of non-contradiction applies. The world thought cannot be except as it is thought: however it is thought, it is immutable (in the thought which thinks it). But our modern aspiration to conceive mind as the transcendental activity productive of the objective world of experience, places us within a new world, a world which is not an object of experience, since it is not a world thought, but the ground and principle of experience, the thinking. The new world cannot be governed by the law which was quite right for the old world, and those who continue to point to the principle of non-contradiction as the pillars of Hercules of philo sophy show that they still remain in that old world.
The distinction here emphasized between dialectic as Plato understood it, thought in its immediacy or „...thought thought, and our modern diaof the distinc- lectic, thought as act or process, thought don between the thinking, throws light on the meaning and value and inner nature or many concepts, which approximate to our concept of development. They are met with in Plato himself and before and after him, and even in our own time. They are concepts springing from the same soil in which dialectic as Plato understood it has its roots, yet they are quite distinct from the dialectic which makes spiritual reality intelligible to us, and which in its turn can only be understood in regard to spiritual reality.
The Platonic dialectic is only dialectic in appear ance. If we consider it with regard to the man's mind § 10. Criticism w^° ^oes not possess the system of the of the Platonic ideas and aspires to possess it, then indeed there is a development of the unity running through the multiplicity. There is an in definite approach to the realization of dialectical unity in the ever-widening inquiry into the relations by which the ideas are inter-connected. But since the value of this inquiry presupposes that an eternal dialectic is immanent in the ideal world, or since the reality which it is sought to know by dialectic is a presupposition of the thought, the dialectic belongs to the ideas, and though it is possible to conceive a mind sharing in it, iv THE GENESIS OF NATURE 45 still it is not the dialectic of the mind. The ideas do not realize unity, because they are unity; and they do not realize multiplicity because they are multi plicity. Neither in the one case nor in the other have the ideas in themselves any principle of change and movement. Therefore the true dialectic is that which is no longer that of the ideas. The Platonic principle evidently depends on referring the dialectic, which is originally development and process of formation, to an antecedent which transcends it, and in which its value is thought to lie. It resolves, that is to say, the mediacy which belongs to mind in so far as it is development into the immediacy of the reality which it presupposes and which it cannot conceive therefore except as self-identical (at least in regard to the thought which thinks it), according to the laws of the Aristotelian logic.
Now, if this be the fundamental character and the intrinsic defect of the Platonic dialectic, it will cling to all the conceptions, however dynamical and dialectical we make them, which have reference to a reality opposed to the thought which thinks it and pre supposed by it.
So in Plato, besides the dialectic of the ideas, we have another dialectic. Plato does not indeed speak § n The °f it under that name, but he conceives it Platonic dia- apparently in a manner analogous to what lectic of Nature. we mean by the dialectic of development.
It is the movement, the process of continual formation, the yeveo-L?, as he calls it, of nature. It is not, or at least he certainly does not intend it to be, immediate like the eternal world of the ideas. But Plato's Nature, if it presuppose the eternal ideas, is itself a presupposi tion in regard to thought, as it was for all the philosophers before him. Nature is not a presupposition in regard to thought in general, for Greek philosophy throughout its whole history cannot be said to have ever succeeded in withdrawing from the ambit of the laws of nature; on the contrary nature is for it an abstract entity, whose position, whatever it be, has no real importance for those who look only at the inner and concrete meaning of philosophical systems. Can we then say of nature so conceived, a nature which in itself, abstractly thought of, becomes^ but in so far as it comes to be thought, is, and in so far as it is, comes to be thought, — can we really say of this nature that it moves and generates and regenerates itself con tinually? In so far as we do not think it but only feel it, yes: but in so far as we think it (and how have we come to speak of 7ei/eo-t? if we do not think it?) it does not move and can no longer be moved; it becomes rigid and petrified in the very fact that it is object of thought. And indeed Plato as the result of his criticism of sensations, and of the consequent opinions, finds no other elements intelligible except the ideas, archetypes, the images of which lying in the depths of the soul are awakened by means of the stimulus of those very sensations. So that though we begin by seeing confusedly the movement which is in travail with all natural things, we are not arrested by this first giddy intuition, but pass thence to the contemplation of the fixed and immutable and intelligible ideas. They are the deepest reality of nature, precisely because they are withdrawn from the restlessness of the sensible appearances, or rather because they have not, like these, a character which actually contradicts the reality which thought conceives as already realized. Yet even for Plato there is a iv NATURE FOR ARISTOTLE 47 material element which in nature is added to the pure ideal forms without disturbing their motionless perfec tion. But this matter is precisely what from the Platonic standpoint is never made intelligible. Plato says it is non-being. It is something for which in thought's paint-box there are no colours, since whatever is pre sented to thought and therefore exists for it, is idea. And what can genesis itself be, in its eternal truth, but idea? It would not be, were it not idea. To be, then, means that from this lower world of birth and death we are exalted into the hyperuranion of the eternal forms. And we know that when Plato had posited the trans cendence of the ideas it was no longer possible for him to redescend into the world of nature.
Aristotle, although he has been called the philo sopher of becoming, had no better success. He denies the § 12 The Platonic transcendence. The ideal forms Aristotelian immanent in the matter form nature. They are subjected to the movement by which alone it is possible for the ideas to be realized in matter. There is no substance which is not a unity of form and matter. He thinks of the world therefore as mass animated by eternal movement which brings the eternal thought into act. Yet even for him thought thinks nature as its antecedent: thinks it therefore as an already realized reality which as such can be defined and idealized in a system of fixed and un changeable concepts. Indeed there is no science for him which is not the act of the intellect. It is the human intellect corresponding, a static correspondence moreover, to the eternal intellect, which is incarnate in the material world in virtue of the purpose which rules the movement. So that nature for Aristotle, as for Plato, is not an object of science in so far as it is nature; and in so far as it is an object of science at all it is no longer nature, no longer movement, but pure form. It is a concept and a system of concepts. The Aris totelian becoming, in so far as it is not and cannot be the becoming of thought, remains a mere postulate. As thing thought of, it is not becoming; as becoming, it cannot be thought.
In saying that the whole ancient philosophy stopped at the concept of reality as presupposed by thought, we mean that this was inevitable because ancient philo- throughout the whole period it never sophy failed to became possible to conceive, and in fact understand ancient philosophy never did conceive, history. '.
history, -progress. It never conceived a reality which is realized through a process, which is not a vain distraction of activity but a continual creation of reality, a continual increase of its own being. Nature, as Plato and Aristotle conceive it, supposes a perfec tion of being which must be realized in it, but this perfection of being lies behind its back. Man's thinking presupposes the reality of its own ideals, and can strive towards them; but only if it is alienated from them. In the beginning there shines a light, and this must be the goal of human efforts: the golden age, the </>vo-t? (as opposed to the v6/j,o<i) of the Sophists, the Cynics and the Stoics, lies behind us, as in the Platonic idealism the ideal world precedes our corporeal life.
The idea of history, the idea of the life of the human mind, as seriously entering into the formative § 14. Primacy process and development of reality itself, of the concept was never so much as suspected throughof progress. out fae whole course of the ancient philosophy nor even in the medieval so far as that WE ARE THE OLD 49 WE ARE THE OLD 49 continues the ancient. Even at the beginning of the modern era we find Bacon speaking of an instauratlo ab imis which is to cancel the past of science as lost labour. We find Descartes equally denying the value of tradition, and conceiving reason abstractly as the power of the empirical individual, who must commence or recommence scientific inquiry by himself alone and start from the beginning. Yet we may hear one voice entirely new, though never understood by his contemporaries, that of Giordano Bruno. In the Cena de le Ceneri (1584) he championed the freedom of the new scientific thought against the authority of Aristotle. We have need indeed, he remarked, to trust the judgment of the old; but the old are not the ancients, it is we who are the old, we who come later and are therefore wiser by the experience and reflexion of the ages lived through.1 Bruno is perhaps the first to affirm that the mind has a development which is an increase of its power, and therefore its true and proper realiza tion. It is the first indication of the modern concept, wholly idealistic and Christian, of the importance of history.
How many are there even to-day who appreciate this concept of history as progress, gradual realization of humanity itself? The dialectical conground of the ception is possible on one condition only, concept of an(} that is that in history we see not a past but the actual present. This means that the historian does not detach himself from his material and set up res gestae as the presupposition and already exhausted antecedent of his historia 1 Cf. my article " Veritas filia temporis," 1912, in Giordano Bruno e lafilosofia del Rinascimento, Florence, Vallecchi, 1920.
E rerum gestarum. If he does and trusts to what is called the positive element of historical events, instead of to their organic spirituality, he comes to consider history in the same way as that in which the naturalist considers nature. It is commonly supposed that historical positivism stands on the same basis as naturalistic positivism. But it is not the same, for the naturalist, in so far as he is such, is necessarily positivist. He must set out with the presupposition that nature is and that it can be known; and its knowability depends on its being, whether its being is known or not. We mean by nature something the mind finds confronting it, something already realized when we are brought into relation with it; and positivism is nothing but the philosophy which conceives reality as fact, independent of any relation to the mind which studies it. History presents, indeed, in the positive character of its events, an analogy with nature; but its intelligibility consists in the unity of the real to which it belongs on the one side and in the mentality of the historian on the other. The history of a past is impossible if it is found unintelligible (if, for example, it is attested by undecipherable documents). Between the personages of history and ourselves there must be a common language, a common men tality, an identity of problems, of interests, of thought.
This means that it must pertain to one and the\ same world with ourselves, to one and the same process of reality. History, therefore, is not already realized when we set out on our historical research; it is our own life in act. If then nature is nature in so far only as it precedes the thought of nature, history is history in so far only as it is the thought of the historian.
HISTORICAL MATERIAL 51 Whoever does not feel this identity of self with history, whoever does not feel that history is prolonged and concentrated in his consciousness, has not history confronting him, but only brute nature, matter deaf to the questionings of mind. A history so conceived cannot prove a progress, because it cannot be conceived dialectically as a process of formation. It cannot be so conceived for the same reason as that which pre vented Plato and Aristotle perceiving the dynamical life of nature. A history which is finished, self-con tained, done with, is necessarily represented as all gathered and set out on one plane, with parts which are called successive, though they have no real and substantial succession, that is, an intrinsically necessary order, in which what comes after cannot go before because it implies and therefore presupposes that which comes first. There can be no such order in the history which is simply the matter of historical representation, for the order of an historian's presenta tion of material is a nexus and unity which belongs to his mind. Strictly, history is not the antecedent of the historian's activity; it is his activity. This is confirmed in the fact that every organization of historical elements, although each element has its own colour and meaning as positive historical fact, bears the imprint of the historian's mentality (political, religious, artistic, philo sophical). There is not a material element of history which remains point for point the same in the various representations which different historians offer, nothing which when we have despoiled a history of all the historian's subjective particularity — according to the usual empirical conception — we can fix in its skeletal objectivity.
What we have said of the concept of history, represented as existing antecedent to the mind of the historian, should suffice to clear away the absurdity in absurdity of the evolutionist notion of a the concept of nature, conceived in the same way, that is, as a reality presupposed by the mind which knows it and therefore independent of the reality of that mind. Such is the nature which Darwin and his followers strive to conceive as an evolution.