subjective is but inaccurately term it, we are left in no included by the doubt that its essential character is multisubject m its plicity devoid of any synthetic principle. We are left in no doubt, because the hypothesis of the object, obtained by such abstraction, is that there shall remain in what is abstracted nothing which can in any way be assigned to the subject's activity, and that every universal and syn thetic principle, as an ideality which unites the multiplicity of the manifold, comes from the subject. But having made the abstraction, and having so fixed the multiplicity, we must not then go on and claim that we have shown it living by the very logic according to which it can only live in the integrity of the living organism from which we have abstracted it. It would be like cutting with a surgeon's knife a limb from the living body and sup posing we could still keep it alive, in the same physio logical and biological meaning, as when it was part of the whole vital system.
Absolute multiplicity is the character of the positive in so far as it is posited, or of the object in § 9. Kant's so far as it is object._But, as we have shown, anticipation of the positive is posited for the subject in so the doctrine. far ^s it is posited by it< Neither does the object transcend the subject nor can it be immanent ix GENETIC AND NATIVIST THEORIES 123 in it save in virtue of the action of the subject itself. All the infinite elements into which the world con fronting me is multiplied, and all the infinite moments into which every one of its elements, and itself as a whole, are multiplied within me, in confronting me are in me, through my work. Multiplication by which one thing is not another, is my act. And this is the great truth which Kant in his dissertation De mundi sensibitis atque intelligibilis forma et -principiis (1770), and more clearly still, eleven years later, in the Critique of Pure Reason, perceived when he maintained the subjectivity of the forms of space and of time, under standing these forms as functions; a concept entirely lost sight of by the empiricist psychologists and epistemologists of the nineteenth century who sought to prove that even these forms of experience are a product of experience; and no less lost sight of by the champions of the psychology called nativist, who denied that Kant was right because these forms are, in fact, a necessary antecedent of experience!
The forms of space and time are neither antecedent nor consequent. If the forms are the functions by § 10. Space as which the object of experience is conspatializing stituted, their activity and effective reality activity. can j-jg nowhere else but in experience.
Space and time are inconceivable as empty forms which have to be filled, as one would fill an empty vessel, with single presentations of sensible experience. Space, 1 The only one who saw clearly the common error in the genetic and nativist theories in psychology in regard to Kant was Spaventa in his article Kant e I' empirismo (1881). By taking space to signify spatiality he indicated the only way in which the doctrine of Kant can be interpreted and verified. We have followed the same plan in this chapter. See Spaventa, Scritti filosofici, ed. Gentile, Napoli, Morano, 1900, p. 85 ff. In that article it seems to me we are given a glimpse of the concept of space as act.
i24 SPACE AND TIME CH.
and time, so conceived, would be multiplicity already posited independent of the mind's activity. Instead, it is the mind's spatializing activity which generates multiplicity. It does not presuppose it. And in so far as mind has that multiplicity confronting it (or we might say in so far as there is multiplicity, since to be is always to be for mind), in so far it generates it. It is not multiple but multiplication. Multiplication is the concrete reality which gives place to multiplicity. It is only abstractly that multiplicity can be thought of as something which subsists, withdrawn from the movement which belongs to, and is, the presupposition of thought.
But if we would understand in its pure spirituality this doctrine that the reality of space is spatialization, § ii. Unity as we must abandon the Kantian standpoint the ground of of the datum of immediate sensible experispauality. ence. The manifold of sense is in Kant a presupposition of empirical intuition, and this intuition is a logical antecedent of the actualization of the spatial function, and is concerned with a non-subjective multi plicity, the multiplicity obscurely imagined by Kant as outside the whole cognitive process, in the manner of the atomists and in agreement with the vague philosophical intuitions implicit in the scientific conceptions of his time. Spatiality, as we have said, is not so much order and synthesis as differentiation and multiplication. Kant insists on the unifying and order-imposing func tion because he presupposes (we have seen why) the manifold. He makes space the formal unity into which the mind receives the multiplicity, gathering it into a synthesis. But the multiplicity itself, if it exist, presupposes unity, for it cannot exist except as it is assembled, ordered, unified. The unity is first THE ACT OF MULTIPLICATION 125 and spatiality consists in the multiplication of the one. So that strictly it is not the many which is synthesized, it is the one which is analysed.
Analysis, on the other hand, here as in every other moment of spiritual life, cannot be separated from synthesis. For the act which multiplies the and synthesis one does not destroy it; it is in multiplying of spatial that it realizes it, and thence the multi plicity which follows from the act is a multi plicity of the one. And analysis does not disperse the individuality, rather does it enrich it, make it concrete, give it power; indeed, it strengthens it and confers on it a fuller and healthier reality. Space is, in fact, the harmonious whole of the world which we represent spatially, and what makes it one in the horizon of our consciousness. As a whole, it is unbounded in so far as our imagination enables us indefinitely to extend its limits, but it is imprisoned in us, an object of present experience, given (in so far as we make it such for our selves) and held together by the seal of time. So that every element of it, and itself as a whole, is articulated in the series of its states, connected together and forming an adamantine chain within which all that is positive in the facts is stretched out in the reality of the world. All is in us: we are all.
We, then, are not in space and in time, but space and time, whatever is unfolded spatially and has § 13 Space and successive stages in time, are in us. But time in the the " us " which is here intended is not mmd.
empirical but the transcendental ego. It is not meant that space is located in us. It is im portant to make this clear. The ego is not the space in which space is, meaning space as we commonly understand it. Space is activity; and for what is 126 SPACE AND TIME en.
spatial to be in the " I," means that it is spatial in virtue of the activity of the " I," that its spatiality is the explication, the actuality of the " I."
Kant said that space is a form of external sense, time a form of internal sense. He meant that if we represent nature, that is, what we call the external of the concept world and think or as having been in existof the spiritual ence before our knowledge and spiritual act as tem- ]j£e bepran 'in space, then we represent the multiplicity or the objects or our internal experience, or what we distinguish as diverse and mani fold in the development of our spiritual life, not in space but in time. But we have insisted on the substantial identity of the scheme which is at the foundation of the idea of time and of the idea of space, and we have expounded time as the spatialization of the spatial element. Clearly then we cannot accept the Kantian distinction as a sufficient indication of the substantial diversity between nature and mind. We are not speak ing of the error committed by the psychophysicists who propose to solve experimentally the problem of the measurement of psychical time, and who measure only, what alone is measurable in regard to what is psychical, the physiological phenomena held to be concomitant with the true and proper psychical act. In this case there is no more than the fallacy of double meaning. But the process of spiritual development itself, as every one allows, is subject to the form of time; chronology we know is an indispensable element of history in its more spiritual meaning; and also the!? very basis of personality lies in the memory by which the mind prolongs its present reality and is rooted in the past.
But even here we have to consider attentively what PAST FACT AND PRESENT ACT 127 it is which is rightly temporal, and what it is which is spiritual in the reality, which in its wide temporal and meaning we crudely speak or as both spintwhat is not ual and temporal. Time as Kant's form temporal m Qf internal experience has regard to the empirical ego, that is, not the ego which is empirically (the I in so far as it is a subject of a simple experience) but the ego which is known empiric ally (the I in so far as it is an object of simple experience). And Kant distinguishes from experience the transcendental ego which by its activity makes experience possible. So that what is temporal in experience is not temporal in the absolute knowledge which understands that experience as the display of the activity of the transcendental " I," the true " I " and the act which is properly spiritual. This " I " does not come within the horizon of empiricism, for empiricism must be true to itself; but it is revealed and attracts attention when we become conscious of empiricism. This consciousness of empiricism is not itself empirical but absolute knowledge, for it has to give an account of empiricism. What is temporal as an abstract object of the real " I " is not an " I," is not something which has freedom or any spiritual value, because it is what is done, not what is doing. It is the positive in so far as it is posited.
An historical fact as regards time is a past fact but our judgment concerning it can only have meaning if we take as its valuation, not the accomplished fact, but the historian's consciousness and personality, of which indeed the idea of the historical fact is an inherent part. Only spiritual acts have value, we do not judge pure facts such as fair or foul weather, deformity or fine stature. Now it is true that each of us is his past, just as civilization and learning are what is retained and remembered, but what we retain is in fact what we now understand, and it is obvious that the intellect with which we now understand is no longer identical with that with which we formerly understood, were it for no other reason than that our intellect having once understood is thereby made more intelligent. When we bring to mind in a present act the past fact of our spiritual life, a past coloured in our soul, now with a sad regret, now with a sweet and tender yearning, now with joy and now with sorrow, we are not really com paring two realities, one present one past, but two empirical representations both equally present as the actuality of the " I " which compares and judges: equally present because, although variously assorted in the time series, all our past states are compresent in the temporalizing act of the mind.
We are now able to see what is in the true meaning spiritual in regard to time. The temporal as mere positive fact is not spiritual, but the act by which the temporal is temporal, the act through which the temporal fact acquires its positive character; this act is spiritual. It is natural in living our experience to multiply our states and see ourself as a many. But the " know thyself " of philosophy ought to open our eyes, revealing to us the act of experiencing and multiplying, which is the root of temporal multiplicity.
The coexistence of the elements of space has its exact counterpart in the compresence of the elements § 16. Co- °f time. The compresence of the time existence and elements gives us the exact significance and compresence. enables us to understand the coexistence of the spatial elements. Compresence is the convergence ix THE INTELLIGIBILITY OF TIME 129 of all the moments of time (past, present and future in their infinite distinctions and consequent multiplica tions) in a -present which is no longer a present situated between a past and a future, but a negation of all temporal multiplicity and of all succession. It is not duration^ as time deprived of spatiality has been some what fancifully defined (in so far as it is time it cannot be deprived of spatiality, since time is already space), but eternity, which is the principle and therefore a negation of time. The eternal present on which all the rays of time converge and from which all irradiate, is the intelligibility of time. Time is unintelligible only so long as we are anxious to set it above us as pure time, without eternity: pure nature without mind, multiplicity without unity.
Coexistence is convergence of all the points of space in a -point which is outside all the points and so a negation of their multiplicity: a point which is the " I " itself, a spatializing activity from which all points irradiate and on which all are centred. This merely ideal, or as we should say transcendental point, by its spatializing activity posits all the points of space and all the moments of time, thus generating the positive character of the real in space and time.
It is clear that without coexistence and cornpresence there cannot be space and time. And both are unintelligible if we seek to understand finite point and them as the actual multiplicity which each the eternal is? except on one condition, namely, that space is the spatiality of the point and the point is non-spatial, and time is the temporality of the instant and the instant is non -temporal. Both therefore are contained in one reality, by which they attain their being, and this is eternal in regard to time, K in so far as it is absolutely instantaneous; and it is one in regard to space, which is the fundamental process of its multiplication. Nature, in short, even in this aspect, is only intelligible as the life of mind, which however it is multiplied remains one.
This doctrine of space and time as absolute spatialization, which is only multiplicity in so far as § 18 The multiplicity is absorbed in the unity of reality of space mind, does not mean that the multiand time. plicity of the coexistent things in space and of the compresent series of the events in time is reduced to a simple illusion. If we say, as we certainly can and ought to say, that reality is neither spatial nor temporal, because reality is mind and mind is neither in space nor in time, this need not imply that no form of reality can be represented rightly as space and time. We only mean — and we cannot insist too strongly on its importance — that space and time are not adequately conceived when they are assumed to exist in their pure and abstract manifoldness, immobile and irreducible. They have a real multiplicity, however, but only in so far as it is posited, in the mobility, in the life, in the dialectic of the actual position which mind makes for them by realizing in them its own unity.
We may say, indeed, that what we ordinarily think of space and time, as we effectively conceive them before we attain the view-point of the pure act, is quite true, but not the whole truth. It is as it were no more than the half-truth, which for its completion must find the other half. It does not indicate a real division, but only the half-truth of immature philo sophical reflexion, incapable of apprehending in its integrity the spiritual act which is posited as space ix THE FALSITY OF THE HALF-TRUE 131 and time. This other half is that which reconciles the abstractness of positive reality in the naturalistic meaning, in a positive reality which renders possible the first by actualizing it.
In logical language, spatiality is the antithesis of which mind is the thesis. Mind, however, in so far , as it is simple thesis opposed to its time in the antithesis is no less abstract than spatialsynthesis of ity. The concreteness of each consists in its synthesis. The synthesis is not a tertium quid supravening on mind or unity and nature or spatiality, and reconciling their opposition by unifying their terms. The synthesis is original, and this means there is neither thesis without antithesis nor antithesis without thesis. Just as there is no opposition without opponents, though it be of the one to itself as different and identical. And this duality of the terms is thrown into relief and made to appear an absolute duality which is not unity when we bring an abstract analysis to bear on the unique living spiritual process, in which the thesis is the antithesis, and the antithesis is the thesis.
Our conclusion is, then, that not only is the naturalism which thinks that space and time are pre suppositions of the mind, false, or, what of naturalism is the same thing, half true, but also that and abstract an idealism which should deny space would spiritualism. ^ ^^ Because just as •<. ig false to think the antithesis without the thesis which is the ground of it, so it is false to think the thesis without the antithesis which is the structure raised upon it.
All philosophies which have failed to attain the concept of mind as pure act, the concept which alone makes it possible to understand spatiality as mind, 1 32 SPACE AND TIME CH.
have been naturalistic, even those which hold that there is no way of conceiving nature without a mind which creates it and explains it. Because a mind which is supposed to stand outside nature and be antecedent to nature as the idea is antecedent to the creation, must be conceived as outside of, and antecedent to, the mind which knows this nature. Such a mind is both pre-mental and pre-natural, the ground both of nature and of the mind whose idea nature is. Now this mind can only be posited by and for the present mind, the mind which it is urgently necessary to understand, the mind which in no other way but that of understanding can guarantee the truth of what it thinks. And this extra-mind is posited for present mind just as nature is posited for it. It is posited as a reality, which is all reality, already realized, while the mind which now is has yet to arise and be.
When mind is assigned this place in regard to the transcendent reality, space can only be the abstract multiplicity, absolutely inconsistent with any unity, which has been shown to be unintelligible and absurd; and this notwithstanding any effort philosophy may make to conceive it as subjective and as unity. On the other hand, it cannot be said that there has ever been an idealism really opposed to such naturalism. We may see in Spinoza a true and distinctive negation of the multiplicity which is spatiality. It is the basis of his system, as it was generally of the neo-Platonic pantheism with which Spinoza's speculation is akin, as seen in his reconstitution of Stoicism and Eleaticism. But that negation does not annul the multiplicity of nature in the unity of mind, but rather in an immediate natural unity. It may be regarded as an anomaly of naturalism, and it becomes in fact a ix SPINOZA AND LEIBNIZ 133 kind of mysticism, which is the negation of nature as such, and a retracting of the mind within itself, by cancelling all the determinations of its object and so blocking the way of knowing it as a positive object, or as a true and proper natural object.
No abstract idealism has ever been absolute, nor is such an idealism possible, because from the absolute §21. Criticism standpoint it would be aware of its own of the monad- abstractness. Yet we are not without a ism of Leibmz. reiative abstract idealism, relative because we find it in the end, as I shall show, turning into a pure naturalism. This is the philosophy of Leibniz, who held that mind cannot be conceived except as a pure unity cut off from all multiplicity.
The mona^ as Leibniz called it, is absolutely simple, a substance which exists in so far as it is separate from all relation with the manifold. The monadism of Leibniz is the most significant and conspicuous instance of the abstract idealism which I have called relative. It is a real compromise between the reason ing of the mind and the plain and ingenuous natural istic intuition of reality. Leibniz is idealist and monist in his conception of the quality of substance, because for him there is no other substance but mind, but he is pluralist in his mode of conceiving the being of substance according to the most rigidly naturalistic conception, that of the atomists. Atomist or mechan ist he is not, inasmuch as he denies that the phenomena spring out of inter-atomic actions, or, in his own language, out of actions exercised by one monad on the others. All that happens resolves itself for him into the internal life of each monad which is appetition and perception, or rather mind and nothing other than mind. But this mind is both self-sufficient and 134 SPACE AND TIME CH.
insufficient. It is self-sufficient since the monad has no windows and receives nothing from without; but it is insufficient in so far as the monad originally mirrors the universe in itself, and therefore all the other monads as others, are originally and substantially others. They are not the monad yet they condition it, through the monad of monads, God, who presides over all and is himself the condition of each. So that each monad is, in so far as all the others are, which others it cannot make exist. And therefore the monad is not selfsufficient. Moreover, as free, it is nothing, because appetition is its essential being and it develops in so far as it acquires ever clearer and distincter perception, not of itself, but of all the others, the consciousness of which can never be self-consciousness in it, and there fore true and proper realization of the monad in its autonomy, because the others are outside it. The •monad therefore, I repeat, is self-sufficient and in sufficient. In so far as it is self-sufficient it is mind, in so far as it is insufficient it is no longer mind but changed into the plurality of its objects, naturalistically. The monad, in fact, as true monad, as the unity which to be mind it must be, cannot be a monad among the monads. Together with the others the monad ends by being multiplicity (a multiplicity which in its turn postulates a unity, which it interprets by making it one sole multiplicity) and the multi plicity will be the true unity. The Leibnizian monad is only a monad relatively to a subjective point of view. And even this, according to Leibniz, there is power to transcend, by rising to the absolute or divine point of view which recognizes the infinite multiplicity of the monads, more absolutely unrelated than any atomist had ever had the courage to conix DUALISM OF SOUL AND BODY 135 ceive his material elements. Its absolute irrelativity makes the monadology, in this respect, a more naturalistic conception even than that of materialistic atomism.
There is an equal abstractness in the idealism of the dualists, an idealism also relative and leading § 22. Criticism fatally towards naturalism. The dualism of dualism. of SOul and body, or of spirit (a divine transcendent personality) and nature (man being included in nature, through what he is naturally], is idealistic so long as it is a question of conceiving mind in itself, without putting it in relation with its opposite; but no sooner does it seek to integrate the concept in the whole than the rights of mind are suppressed and nature alone becomes compact, uni form and infinite. The soul, which is not body, simply is, and by its pure being excludes from itself all spatial multiplicity, and therefore is free. Yet the soul which is not body is with the body; and with the body it makes two. But as the body is a great multitude of parts, the soul, situated in the heart or in the brain or in a particular point of the brain such as the pineal gland (to which even so great a philosopher as Descartes assigned it), is added to the number of all the parts, together composing the multiplicity which is explicitly or implicitly spatial. So there may be as many souls as there are bodies; and they may form companies as souls, although by means of bodies. They will constitute a spatial manifold because they must be distributed on the face of the earth with intervals between them, and having relations with the various natural and local conditions which will be mirrored in the diverse natures of the souls themselves. So in a thousand ways naturalism 136 SPACE AND TIME CH.K invades the spirituality of the soul conceived in this dualistic way.
Analogous considerations can be set forth in regard to the dualism of God and nature, the conjoining of which is impossible without assimilating one term to the other. In every case the error is not in the duality but always in the abstractness of the duality. In the concrete the duality rules only on the basis of the unity.
CHAPTER X IF mind is the principle of space and has that principle in itself, there is not a space which contains the mind § i. Mind and an^ therefore it is impossible to attribute the boundless- to mind any of those limits by which every! of space. Spatiai reality is circumscribed. And in this we may see both the ground of the fmiteness of space and the profound meaning of the infinity of mind.
Space is indefinite, not infinite. It has no assign able limits, yet it is not the negation of every limit, for it cannot be conceived otherwise than limited. Space as an object of the mind is a datum: it represents that positive multiplicity which the mind itself posits. It is not an undefined or indefinite object because to be an object of the mind really means that it is some thing the mind has defined. Space is antithesis as such, as we have already said, and the antithesis stands confronted by the thesis, not as something which may be, but as a definite position. This positive and effectual determinateness of space (and of every thing which is posited before us as spatial) implies the limit of space, implies that it is precisely a certain space. But, on the other hand, as it is posited by the mind, and only subsists as the mind posits it, it has no independent being of its own but a being which 138 IMMORTALITY CH.
depends on a continuous and inexhaustible spiritual activity. Spiritual activity, therefore, posits space not by positing it finally once for all but by continuing in the actuality of positing it. Or rather in the very act which posits space, space is never posited, but always is to be posited. And the limits of space, like its own being, are not something fixed but a boundary which is mobile, always living and present.
The conclusion is that space exists only in so far as there is and at the same time as there is not a § 2. The limit spatial limit. Or, we might even say, of space. space exists in so far as the limit which determines spatiality is displaceable to infinity. The limit can never be lacking and yet it can never be fixed; because, it does not belong to an object which exists for itself and is originally independent like an absolute substance. It is the attribute of an object produced by the immanent act of a subject, whose reality consists in the production and therefore in the limitation of its own object.
Space accordingly is finite without being a fixed finite thing. This negativity of every definite limit, § 3. The in- with the consequent impossibility of assignfinityofthe ing to it an absolute limit, constitutes its mm ast e indefinitcness. This indefiniteness of space negativity or _ \ the spatial is a consequence of the infinity of the mind. limit- For the negativity of the spatial limit is the intrinsic character of the limit, not in so far as it is posited by an act which completes it, but in so far as it comes to be posited by the act in fieri; by the act, that is, which is always act, a pure act, and which here is the act of limitation. If we could free the limit from the spiritual act, it would rest fixed, but it is INFINITE AND INDEFINITE 139 not fixed, and is displaced because limit means limita tion and is conceivable only through its immanence in the mind's act. This act does not fix the limit once for all, and then cease to act. The unfailing absolute ness of the act implies the immanence of the limita tion, and thence the negativity of the limit, the ever positing and at the same time the never being posited of the limit.
It follows that space how vast soever it be is always within the mind, the mind, that is, is superior to it, can look beyond its limits towards remoter limits; and only in so far as every space is contained within a greater space, is the contained space determinate, that is, a representable space. Now infinity is pre cisely this immanent negation of every spatial limit, which whilst subjecting every spatial reality to limits, overrules or transcends these limits by spiritual activity. Not that there is a space without limit, but that there is no limit which is not negated. It is the mind which always negates and never recognizes the limit, which, in positing it, removes it and thus manifests its own absolute infinity. This absolute infinity, on the other hand, does not imply abstention from all limitation (because limitation, which is its own multiplication in spatiality, is its very life), but only the transcending of every limit and therefore the impossibility of being stopped at any assignable limit however remote. The infinite, in short, is the exclusion of every limit; an exclusion which coincides with the immanent assigning of the limit to the object, in its im mediate positivity. Leopardi in his ode L' Infinite has very finely expressed that dizziness which comes over the mind when it is withdrawn from all limits not only of the infinite but even of the indefinite. It leads, he shows us, not to the exaltation but to the annihilation of the mind.
Mirando interminati Spazi di la da quella, e sovrumani Silenzi, e profondissima quiete lo nel pensier mi fingo; ove per poco II cor non si spaura.
Cosi tra questa Immensita s' annega il pensier mio; E il naufragar m' e dolce in questo mare.
(Contemplating the boundless spaces beyond, and superhuman silences and profoundest rest, there in thought I bring myself where the heart has so little to fear.
So midst this immensity my thought itself is drowned and even shipwreck is sweet to me in this sea.)
' Thought is drowned," because the one retires from the many (which is never immeasurable but always bounded) and is thereby withdrawn from the essential condition of its own being which is to be actualized as the one in the many.
Infinite in regard to space, the mind is also infinite in regard to time. How can it be otherwise if time Th is a kind of spatiality? But as spatial mind's infinity infinity is the infinity of what is opposed in regard to to space, so temporal infinity is the infinity of what being opposed to temporal reality is withdrawn from time. The want of an exact doctrine of time has rendered impossible in the past a rational doctrine of the infinity of mind in regard to time.
The problem of the immortality of the soul is not an invention of philosophers; and the question of the § 5. The im- origin in time of the belief in immortality manent faith is a meaningless question if we are thinkin immortality. ing> not Qf the empiricized forms of the mind, but of its essential nature and functions, for these are eternal.
x INDISPENSABLE ACT OF THINKING 141 The affirmation of the immortality of the soul is immanent in the affirmation of the soul. For this affirmation is the " I " affirming itself, and it is the simplest, most elementary, and therefore the indis pensable act of thinking. The extreme difficulty of describing the essence of this most primitive and truly fundamental reality, and consequently the inade quate conceptions with which for so long the human mind has been in travail, have led to the formulation of many different ways, all inadequate, of understanding the relation which binds the " I " to the object, and the soul to the body and through the body to all which is spatial and which being spatial must also be temporal. These have given rise to various, totally unsatisfactory, modes of conceiving, and even modes of denying, immortality. Yet even negation by the soul of im mortality is an affirmation of its own power and value which in a way affirms the immortality it denies.
What is the meaning of immortality? The soul posits itself as " I," and to affirm its being as " I ': s 6 The requires no support of psychological and