It is not posited as immediately and simultaneously present, but as being formed and forming itself step by step, not in virtue of a law governing the whole of nature as the process of one spiritual reality, but according to the law of natural selec tion, the survival of the fittest. It is called selection by a lucus a non lucendo since no one selects. The selection results from the inevitable succumbing of the feebler and the adaptation of the stronger to the environment. From this mechanical law, directing a reality which has been set beyond the reach of mind, self-subsistent in its brute nature, there is con ceived to arise, as an effect of the mechanism itself, the highest form of animal and its soul. This soul is reason and will, a reality which puts it in opposition to all other kinds of animal and to all nature, which it understands and exercises lordship over. Now, subtract mind, sup pose it not yet to have come to birth, and evolution then stands to nature, as Darwin conceived it, in the same relation as that in which dialectic stands to the world of Platonic ideas, that is, it ceases any longer to be process because it implies a system of relations all of which are already posited and consolidated. Let us imagine that there really is a moment at which one given species exists, and that at this moment there does not yet exist the superior species which, according to the iv NATURAL SELECTION 53 evolutionist theory, must issue from it, then the least reflexion will show us that the passage of the one grade of nature into the other is unintelligible unless with the mind we pass from that moment, in which as yet the second grade does not exist, to the successive moment in which there is the first and the second grade and their relation. So that in general, in the whole chain of evolution, however long we imagine it, the first link of it is always presented as together with all the others even to the last: that is, even to man who is more than nature and therefore, by his intervention alone, destroys the possibility of conceiving nature in itself as an evolution. This amounts to saying that an indispensable condition of understanding nature, as we understand history, in its movement, is that the object be not detached from the subject and posited in itself, independent, in its unattainable transcendence. As transcendent object it can only be effectively posited as object already thought and thereby it is shown to be immanent in the thinking, but considered abstractly in a way which separates it from the thinking itself. And then it is obvious that what we find within the object is what we have put there.
To Hegel belongs the merit of having affirmed the necessity of the dialectical thinking of the real in its § 17. Criticism concretcness. He put to the proof and of the Hegelian showed the impossibility of the dialectical dialectic. thinking of the real if we begin by separat ing it from the act of thinking and regard it as in itself and presupposed by the act of thinking it. Hegel saw clearly that we do not conceive reality dialectically unless we conceive it as itself thought. He distinguished the intellect which conceives things, from the reason which conceives mind. Intellect abstractly represents things analytically, each for itself, self-identical, different from all the others. Reason comprehends all in the unity of mind, as each selfidentical and at the same time different, and therefore both different from and identical with all the others. And yet Hegel himself, when he would define, in the moments of its rhythm, the dialectical nature of thought, the thought which understands itself as unity of the variety and things as variety of the unity, instead of pre senting this dialectic as the archetypal law of thought in act, and thereby its presupposed ideal, could not avoid fixing it in abstract concepts. Thence his concepts are immobile, actually devoid of any dialectical character, and we are left unable to understand how the concepts by themselves can pass one into another and be unified in a real continuous logical movement.
The difficulties which he and many who ventured on his tracks had to meet in the deduction of those first categories of his Logic, by which the concept of becoming, the specific character of the dialectic, is constituted, are classical. Becoming is an identity of being and non-being, since the being which is not, becomes. And so Hegel has to move from the concept of being, pure being, free from every determina tion, which is indeed the least which can be thought, and which we cannot not think, in its absolute indeterminateness, whatever abstraction is made from the content of thought. Is it possible to pass from this concept of being, posited in this way before thought, and defined by means of its own indefiniteness, to the concept of becoming and so to prove that nothing is but all becomes? Yes, according to Hegel; because being as such is not thinkable, or rather it is only thinkable as self-identical with and at the same time different iv HEGEL'S CRUX PHILOSOPHORUM 55 from itself. It cannot be thought, because when we attempt to think it deprived of all content, absolutely indeterminate, we think of it as nothing, or nonbeing, or being which is not; and the being which is not, becomes. But it has been said, if the absolute indeterminateness of being equates it with nothing, we are then without the unity of being and non-being in which becoming consists: there is not that contra diction between being and non-being of which Hegel speaks, and which is to generate the concept of becoming. For if being is on the one hand identical with, and on the other hand different from, non-being.
then there is a being which is not non-being and a non-being which is not being; and there is wanting that unity of the different which gives rise to becoming. Being, as pure being, in such case would be extraneous to -non-being, as pure non-being, and there could not be that meeting together and shock of being and nothing from which Hegel thought to strike the spark of life. In the end we are left, from whichever side we approach, with two dead things which do not amalgamate in the living movement.
We might easily have brought forward other and different kinds of arguments, for this is Hegel's crux § 18. Reform of philosophorum^ round which battle has been the Hegelian waged. Every one feels the necessity of giving an account of the concept of becom ing, and yet no one is satisfied with Hegel's deduction of it.1 That deduction is vitiated by the error already indicated in distinguishing the dialectic which is understood as a dialectic of thing thought, from 1 I have given a short critical exposition of the principal attempts at interpretation in the volume already alluded to: La Riforma della Dialettica hegeliana, chap. i.
56 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.IV the true dialectic which can only be conceived as a dialectic of the thinking outside which there is no thought. The being which Hegel must prove identical with non-being in the becoming, the being which alone is real, is not the being which he defines as the indeterminate absolute (how can the indeter minate absolute be other than the indeterminate absolute?), but the being of the thought which defines and, in general, thinks. As Descartes saw, thought is in so far as we think. If thought were something that is, it would not be what it is — act. It is in not-being, in self-positing, in becoming, that it is.1 So that all the difficulties met with in the Hegelian dialectic are eliminated as soon as we acquire a clear consciousness of the immense difference between the reality which Plato and Aristotle con ceived dialectically, the reality also which in the ordinary notion of history and the evolutionist notion of nature are conceived dialectically, and the reality which modern idealist philosophy defines as dialectic. For the one, reality is thought of, or thinkable, which is the same thing; for the other, reality is thinking.
Get rid of the ordinary and unconscious abstraction according to which reality is what you think, and which yet, if you think it, can be nowhere but in your thought. Look with steady gaze at the true and concrete reality of the thought in act. The dialectical character of the real will then appear as evident and certain as it is evident and certain to each of us that in thinking we are conscious of what thinks, just as in seeing we are conscious of what sees.
1 Such is the concept I have expounded in my book just referred to, as a reform of the Hegelian principle.
CHAPTER V HAVING posited a purely ideal dialectic, and a Logos, distinct from mind or thought thinking, which is the § i The Hegel- consciousness of it, the road lay open to ian problem of Hegel to deduce mind from the Logos by Nature. passing through nature. For by conceiving the dialectic of thing thought as a pure thinkable, he had found a way of conceiving nature dialectically, for nature is thing thought and not a thinking. But it proves to be only a road painted on a wall. For he kept open the possibility of conceiving nature dialecti cally only because he had not yet discovered the true dialectic and continued to use the old, unserviceable Platonic dialectic. When we make dialectic coincide with thought we cannot, as we saw in the last chapter, even propose the problem of the dialectic of nature: it becomes an absurdity. If in place of the false concep tion of history which opposes history to the mind which thinks it, we have been able to indicate and put in its place the true conception of history, and if that dialecti cal concept eliminates the opposition and reveals the infinite unity of mind consolidated in its actuality, then the criticism we are now bringing against the dialectical concept of nature digs still deeper the abyss which yawns between mind and the concept of a reality which is resistant to all dialectical thinking. Granted the dialectical nature of mind, a limitation of its dialectic seems to carry with it a limitation of the reality of mind and so to force us to deny to it that infinity which we declared immanent in the concept of mind. Hence the problem arises: What is this nature which stands confronting the mind and is not susceptible of being presented dialectically? What is this nature which the mind finds outside itself as its own antecedent? Until we reply to this question it is clearly impossible to maintain our fundamental affirmation of the infinite unity of mind.
Before we can say what nature is we must first know whether the nature meant is thought of as general § 2. Nature as or universal, or as individual. Plato, individuality, following Socrates, who first originated the clear distinction between the general and the individual, was induced by the speculative transcendental tendency of his philosophy to think of nature as general, and so he turned the immediacy and positiveness of natural reality into the idea of the nature. The true horse is not for him the single, particular, individual horse but the species horse (not of course using the term in the empirical meaning of the naturalist). It is tVTroTT;?, horseness, and he tells us that it provoked the mirth of his opponent Antisthenes.1 Plato could not con ceive otherwise a nature which could be an object of science, or which could simply be, without an idea. But such a conception of nature fell under the criticism which Aristotle brought to bear on the Platonic transcendence. The Platonic doctrine makes the individual inconceivable, and it was the individual which, pressing upon thought with the demand that it be taken in its full actuality, 1 Simplicius, in Arist. Cat. 66 b 45 Br.
THE ARISTOTELIAN INDIVIDUAL 59 had generated the problem of the Socratic uni versal. For Aristotle, nature, in its opposition to thought, is posited as the unity of the form or idea with matter its opposite (Plato's non-being): for Aristotle's substance is precisely the individual which is that unity. And with Aristotle nature begins to be opposed to the universality of the idea, or of the pure thought with its own individuality, which brings the incarnation of the form into the matter: an incar nation, which is the actualizing of a power, due to the realization of the form itself, of which in the matter there is nothing but the abstract and inert possibility.
The concept of the individual has great importance in the Aristotelian philosophy. It affirms the necessity of overcoming the abstract position of the Aristotelian idea, which is actual thinking as thought, doctrine of the gut rather than a concept we should say it is a demand, or that it is the aspiration, of the Aristotelian thought to attain the immanent concept of the universal. The concept, indeed, is not attained; and it could not be attained so long as philosophy sought reality, and the reality of the individual, in thing thought instead of in thinking. It is shown indeed, that the individual we would distinguish from the idea, is distinguished as the process of realization from the reality which the idea will be. But this process of realization, as we have seen, from the Aristotelian standpoint, which coincides with the Platonic in making the reality thought of a presupposition of the thinking, is inconceivable except in so far as it has yet to begin (potency, matter), or is already exhausted (act, form). So that in analysing the individual it is necessary first to find the two elements which constitute it, and there is no possibility of understanding their relation, for it is just the process of actualization of the individual itself; and that is precisely the nature it would affirm in opposition to the transcendental reality of the pure Platonic ideas.
The thousand years' history of the problem concern ing the -prindpium individuationis^ which had its rise in the Aristotelian concept of the individual, astic inquiry serves to prove how insuperable were the concerning the difficulties to which Aristotelianism was prindpium ^ condemned, unwilling to stop at the abstract universal or rlatonism, and yet completely unable to seek the immanence of the universal or rather its individuality, where alone it is possible to find it, — in the reality which is not the antecedent of thought, but thinking itself. The inter preters of Aristotle asked themselves: Of the two elements which constitute the individual, matter and form, which must be considered the principle of individualization? For if, as Plato had con ceived, the form is universal, the matter likewise must itself be universal, as that from which all the forms which are displayed in the endless series of the in dividuals, however disparate themselves, issue; a matter which in itself has none of the determinations which are realized in it by the intervention of the forms. So that form and matter, the one as much as the other taken by itself, each excludes the very possibility of any determination or individualization. Individuality arises from their meeting. But in this meeting which of the two determines the indeterminate, making it individual?
If we start with the abstract original duality of v THE PRINCIPIUM INDIFWUATIONIS 61 matter and form as given, it is impossible that we § 5. Giordano should find the ground of their unity, or Bruno's the true principium individui. Giordano difficulty. Bruno in the fuller maturity of the Re nascence saw this clearly, yet he could only do what Aristotle, coming after Plato, had done before: turn and affirm the need of unity. It was not given even to Bruno to perceive what he called the point of the union (// punto delf unione He remained, even to the end, at the standpoint of ancient philosophy, imagining reality as a presupposition of thought: a standpoint from which it is impossible to conceive movement and development. For if we start with unity, unity remains abstract and unproductive, unable to give the ground of duality; and if we start with duality, the duality cannot but be eternal duality, because it cannot but be identical with itself and there fore incapable of being unified.
The medieval philosophers started with duality and inquired which of the two terms generates that s 6 The unity which is the individual. They were antinomy of divided into two opposite camps, and their the individual. conmct was interminable since they found, on the one side and on the other alike, unchallengeable reasons, the one for maintaining that the principle of the individual is in the form, and the other for main taining that it is in the matter. They opposed and contraposed, thesis to antithesis, antithesis to thesis, without ever succeeding in extricating themselves from the antinomy. The problem is in fact insoluble because, whoever posits duality and then seeks to understand the relation of the two terms, must, since i De la causa, principle e uno (1584), in Opere Italians, ed. Gentile, vol. i.
it is not an a -priori relation (that is, a relation on the existence of which each of the two terms depends), decide in favour of one of the two. Either he thinks matter is primordial and matter only; or he thinks form is primordial and form only. To think both matter and form as together is excluded by the hypothesis of the duality, according to which each of the two terms is what it is without the other and by itself excludes the other. Now, to think matter by itself is to think a pure indeterminateness, which cannot produce deter mination from itself, and which cannot therefore appear individualized save by reason of its opposite, form, which will then be the individualizing principle. But this deduction is legitimate only so far as it admits the contrary. It is rendered possible in fact by the concept of the abstract matter which supposes the concept of abstract form. For to deny the concept of abstract form would involve also the denial that matter is really indeterminate, and this is the very basis on which the deduction rests. Suppose then we begin by thinking of form by itself. Lo and behold, the very term, which from one aspect appeared the origin of determinateness, now, looked at from the opposite aspect, is transfigured into the pure determinable which is absolutely indeterminate. In its pure ideality the form is the possibility of all particular individuals and not any one of the particular individuals.
It must be incorporated and determined as a single existent; but this incarnation cannot be a transforma tion and generation from within. There must intervene something which (precisely as Plato said) is the negation of the ideal, actually universal being. And then it is evident that the individualizing principle can only be in the matter which is opposed to the form.
MATERIA SI GNAT A 63 Hence the scales of the Scholastics, leaning now to one side, now to the other; some affirming that § 7. Thomas t^ie principium individui is the form, others Aquinas's that it is the matter; each with equal ground in reason; each shut in by the impossibility of definitely breaking down the argu ments of the opposite side. There is one doctrine, however, which though unjustifiable on the basis of scholasticism, brought into play a high speculative talent, that of Thomas Aquinas. This doctrine takes its stand not on matter abstractly conceived, quomodolibet accepta, but rather on matter conceived as having in itself a principle of determination, materia signata: matter impressed with a signum which implies a certain preadaptation to the form, a certain principle or beginning of it. An illogical doctrine, in so far as it framed the problem whether form or matter is the individualizing principle, it yet has the great merit that it substantially denies even the possibility of solving the problem without changing its terms. Practically it amounts to a rejection of the problem, which, like all problems admitting of two contradictory solutions or, as Kant would say, giving rise to antinomies, is wrongly stated.1 It must not be thought that the problem of the principle of individualization was abandoned with the § s. Survival of disappearance of scholasticism, when the the Scholastic authority of Aristotle was shaken and inquiry. modern philosophy entered on a new life.
We have already shown that Bruno, notwithstanding his intense aspiration towards unity, never rose above the Aristotelian conception, and, were this the place, we 1 For the medieval solutions of the problem, see Gentile, I Problemi della scolastica, Bari, Laterza, 1913, chap. iv.
64 THE PROBLEM OF NATURE CH.
might trace the history of the many attempts in the modern era which have been made to solve this famous problem. It involves the essential question of philo sophy. It is not merely a theme for intellectual gym nastics, such as we are accustomed to consider most of the questions over which medieval philosophers grew impassioned. The form is fundamentally the idea of the world, its ground, its plan, the Logos, God; and the matter is, in its turn, that obscure term which, irreducible to God's real essence, makes the world to be distinct from God even though it be the actualizing of his thought. All who think this world, in whatever way they think it, see in it a design, an order, something rational, which renders it intelligible in so far at least as it appears such. Galileo reduces the intelligibility of nature, which for him is the world itself in its totality, to mathematical relations, and these relations present themselves as laws conceivable in themselves, independently of their verification in natural facts, as if there were a logic presiding over the working, or rather over the realization of nature itself. Hegel constructed a complicated pure logic, by which the world is rendered intelligible to the philosopher, and this logic, in its pure element, the Logos, is posited before thought as the eternal plan, which is followed out in the world.
It is impossible ever to see reality otherwise than by the light of an idea, which, once we conceive the reality as a positive and therefore contingent fact, must ideally work loose from that fact, and posit itself as a pure idea, and so oblige us to ask: How does it become fact? The ques tion is not substantially different from that with which the prindpium individui is concerned. This HEGEL'S LOGIC AND NATURE 65 supposes, as already noticed and as it should now be clear, an original dualistic intuition. It could not be put in the monistic philosophies which denied the transcendence of the ideal to the real, of God to the world, and therefore of the form to the matter. But a philosophy must do more than merely propose to restore unity and reject transcendence, if it would gain that absolute concept of immanence for which monism strives, that in which alone it is possible to be rid of the antinomy of the principle of individualization. Hegel in this respect passes ordinarily for a more immanentist philosopher than he really is. He is responsible for pantheism being identified with immanentism and has become the prototype of the pantheists. Certainly no one before him had made such mighty efforts to free reality from every shadow of a principle which transcends it. Yet, even so, he found himself faced with the necessity of conceiving the abstract form which is not matter, and therefore the universal which is not particular and the ideal which is not real, exactly as all the other inquirers into the individualizing principle were. He too has to ask: How or whence is the individual?
The most difficult problem perhaps which we meet in the Hegelian philosophy is this: When we have § 9. Hegel's posited logic, or the nexus of all the problem. categories of reality, how or whence is nature? This nature is the particular which must intervene where there is nothing but the universal. It is the incarnating of the pure ideal in matter, beginning with its simplest determination, space. It is, in short, the Aristotelian individual. And this problem in Hegel, however his own declarations in regard to it are to be taken, remains, and must F 66 THE PROBLEM OF NATURE CH.
remain, unsolved. There is in fact repeated for it the difficulty of the Platonic idealism. The Logos is the thinkability, or thinking as a whole. There are there fore two alternatives, either there is nothing else than the Logos, or there is something else but it is not thinkable (intelligible). In the first case, there is no nature outside the Logos, in the second case there is nature but no philosophy of it. And if the Logos has been excogitated in order to understand nature, then the Logos is no longer Logos or rather no longer what it ought to be. So, then, the standpoint of the Logos excludes nature. And if the universality of the Logos does not satisfy us and we are athirst for actuality, for natural positiveness and particular determinateness, then there is nothing for it but to abandon the Logos, to deny the Idea, and indeed Hegel himself says so. But this negation (completely analogous to the opposi tion of the Platonic non-being to being), the negation which the idea itself makes of itself, can have value only if it be itself a logical act, and is therefore within the sphere of the Logos, and not an act which the Idea, remaining within that sphere and developing the whole of its logical activity, can never fulfil. It fulfils it just when it overcomes pure logicity and breaks through the enclosing bark of the universal, pushing itself forth as particular. Such a rupture is inconceivable.
Even Hegel, then, propounds the problem of the principle of individualization without solving it. He § 10. why propounds it and cannot solve it, because, Hegel's problem as we have seen, the true concept of the dialectic (its own Logos) cannot be reached as a thing thought of, or as a reality which is a pre supposition of thinking, that abstract reality which had already been idealized by Plato into universals, from HEGEL'S PROBLEM UNSOLVED 67 which, as Aristotle clearly saw, it is impossible to redescend to the individuals of nature.
By this way, then, the individual has not been and is not to be found. For a nature which with its individuals is contraposed to thought cannot be grasped.
CHAPTER VI THE ABSTRACT UNIVERSAL AND THE POSITIVE ANOTHER famous controversy which engaged medieval philosophers and had not indeed come to an end when § i. The dispute tne m°dern era began, is the dispute conconcerning cerning the value of universals. Even in universals. fais the concept of the individual is at stake; because, according to the way in which we interpret the value of the universal, we shall corre spondingly conceive the individual. And if we fail to understand the universal in a way which enables us thereby to understand the individual, the need of conceiving the individual will necessarily remain unsatisfied.
Who has not heard of the famous dispute which divided the Scholastics of the thirteenth century? § 2. Nominal- ^ne nominalists, compromising the reality ism and of every ideal principle which is mediated in more than one individual, and therefore even the reality of the Christian dogmas (for they affirm such principles), denied that the Aristotelian philosophy supposed universals existing as universals, in the way that Plato had conceived them. Substance, according to Aristotle, must be conceived as individual, as a-vvo\ov, a concrete whole of form and of matter: not therefore a simple universal but a particularized uni versal. And it matters not that in knowing the intellect CH.VI NOMINALISTS AND REALISTS 69 is concerned with the form only of the individual and that it has as its proper object the universal alone. The intellect knows the universal in the individuals. In the individuals the ideality of the universal is incorporated with the matter, and outside the in dividuals the universal is nothing but a pure name.
The realists, developing the permanent Platonic motive in Aristotelianism, objected, in their turn, that if the universal is not real, the individual cannot be real, for the individual is a determination of the uni versal, and only in the universal can attain the principle of its own being. The individual is real, in so far and only in so far as it participates in the universal. And precisely because we must say alike of each and every individual, that the reality of the individual is ephemeral and transient, inasmuch as it must be concurrent with the reality of all the other individuals, so we must say of the universal that in its unity it has a constant and eternal reality. So that the individual both is and is not real. The individual is not truly real if as in dividual it is distinguished from and opposed to the universal. The individual is real in so far as over flowing the limits of its own individuality, it coincides with the universal. For the universal is real in the absolute meaning.
Nominalism is clearly a naturalistic and material istic theory. In confining reality to the individuals, § 3. Criticism it tends to suppress their intelligibility, for of nominalism, it denies the absolute value of the universals through which they are intelligible. It tends also thereby to deny that there can be value in thought by itself, for thought contrasted with what alone is real in the individuals is indistinguishable from nothing. The universal, a pure name in so far as it is present in the individuals, does not universalize them, but par ticularizes itself. The conceptualists who called the universal a concept are substantially one with the nominalists, for their concept is no more than a name, a universal shorn of the reality which only the indi viduals possess. Nominalism means, therefore, that the form of each individual, since it is not identical with the form of all other individuals, inasmuch as we can conceive the form of each independently of each of the individuals, is no longer universal but particular. It is the form given hie et.nunc^ which in its being omnimodo determinatum comes to be in apprehensible by thought, ineffable, non-intuitable. Reality despoiled of its form is deprived of the illumina tion of thought. It is no more than the pure abstract presupposition of the terms of that thought. The individual, in short, as pure individual is not even individual: it is nothing.