meaning of metaphysical doctrines, for every such immortality. doctrine, and indeed every breath of our spiritual life, presupposes such affirmation. But the soul, the " I " which posits itself, in opposing itself to every reality, posits itself as different from all other reality. When, then, it is the natural world with which the soul finds itself confronted, world and soul are not the same thing. As the world is manifold, the soul is joined with its multiplicity. Since this multi plicity is Nature, — spatial and temporal, where nothing is its other, in which everything at first is not, then is, and after it has been is not, where everything is born and dies, — so the soul comes to be conceived like all the other elements of the manifold as born and destined to die, as sharing in the vicissitudes of all transient things, to whose company it belongs. But the " I " is not only a multiplication, the positing of its other and the opposing of itself to this other, it is also, and primarily, a unity, through which all the coexistents in space are embraced in one single survey in the subject, and all the events in time are cornpresent in a present which is the negation of time. The " I " dominates space and time. It is opposed to nature, unifying it in itself, passing from one of its terms to another, in space and in time, breaking through and thrusting beyond every limit. The mind cannot marshal its forces amidst the manifold without some glimmering of the fact that it subdues, dominates and triumphs, by withdrawing itself from its laws.
It gets a glimpse of this (a glimpse which is essential to it and original) as soon as ever it perceives the 'value of its positing the object and contraposing itself to it, or rather when it perceives that the value of every real affirmation is in its discrimination be tween the true and the false, without which the mere affirmation as such is unintelligible. If we think at all we must think that what we think of is as it is thought of and not otherwise; that is, we cannot think of anything except as being true in distinction from its contrary of being false. And the true is not relative, as it were an element of a multiplicity in which there are many elements. The true is one, absolute; absolute even in its relativity, for it cannot be except what it is. The element of the manifold has the other elements surrounding itself, but the true, if it is true, is alone. Truth, therefore, cannot be subject to the spatiality and temporality of natural THE ETERNAL IN ONE'S SELF 143 things; it transcends them even in being what must be thought about them. It posits itself as eternal. The eternity of truth implies the eternity of the thought in which truth is revealed. Speculation in pursuing truth may detach from it this eternity, but only in so far as it finds it. So that even when in making a speculative induction the conclusion seems to transcend the eternal nature of truth, it yet pre supposes a certain presence of the eternal in mind, and a certain identity of the two terms, thinking and eternal. And this is why, having made truth tran scendent we must make mind transcendent, endowing it with the ultramundane, if not premundane, life of the soul. Feeling truth in one's self can only be feeling the eternal in one's self, or feeling that we participate in the eternal, or however otherwise we like to express it. In its origin and in substance the immortality of the soul has no other meaning. All the grounds upon which faith in immortality has absolute value rested, it we set aside reasons prompted of the spiritual by desire to prove its rationality, so often attached to inadequate philosophical con cepts, resolve themselves into the affirmation of the absoluteness of the value of all the affirmations of mind, Philosophy of religion and natural religion have placed the immortality of the soul among the con-§ s Religion stitutive principles of religion itself. But and immor- the contrary rather is the truth. If it be true, as Kant thought, that religion within the limits of reason leads necessarily to the concept of im mortality, it is no less true that there have been religions which have had no explicit doctrine of immortality. Moreover religion within the limits of reason is not religion, but philosophy. Religion, as we shall see i44 IMMORTALITY CH.
later, is the position in which the absolute is taken in its abstractly objective aspect, and this involves the negation of the subject, and leads to mysticism, which is the subject's self-negation of its individuality, and its immediate self-identification with its object. Im mortality, on the contrary, is the subject's self-affirma tion of its own absolute value. From this it follows that there are certain forms of naturalistic atheism which deny immortality because they deny transcend ence in any form, which yet become substantially more positive than some mystical tendencies with regard to the affirmation of the immanent value of the soul, than they would be if they affirmed the con cept of immortality. But we shall see further on that religion in its extreme and ideal position is unrealizable; because the very mysticism which is the denial of the value of the subject is the activity of that subject, and therefore the implicit affirmation of its value. Absolute transcendence cannot be affirmed of mind without denying it. God can only be God in so far as he is very man. And so the development of the awareness of this immanent relation of the object with the subject — development due to the work of the thought in which philosophical reflexion consists — leads on the one hand to the contamination of the purity of religion with the rationality of the subject, and on the other to the commingling and integrating of the eternity of God with the eternity of mind. Thus it is not the concept of God which posits the immortal soul, but the concept of God in so far as it is our concept and therefore a manifestation of the power of our mind. Or we might even say it is the concept of our soul, which in turning to God finds its own concept unknow able except as eternal. It implies immortality. It THE ABSOLUTENESS OF VALUE 145 is therefore the concept of our own immortality, or of the absolute value of our own affirmation, which generates that concept of God with which is bound up the concept of an immortal soul, or rather, the concept of a true and real God who is eternal being.
Whatever we value — our children, our parents, the God in whom we trust, the property we have <. T, acquired as the result of our labour, the religious art and philosophy which is the work of character of our mind — possesses value to the extent that it triumphs over the limits of our natural life, passes beyond death into immortality. The man who aspires to be united with God, and to rejoin his dead in another world than this world of experience, is united even in this world to those whom he leaves behind, to his heirs to whom he bequeaths the fruit of his labour, and to his successors to whom he commends and trusts the creations of his mind, because his whole personality becomes eternal in what he values as the reality of his own life.
Whatever the particular form which faith in im mortality may take, that faith is immanent, because The substantially, immortality is the mentality puzzle of the of mind, the spirituality of spirit. It is just concept of ob- that absolute value which is the essential character or every form and of every moment of spiritual activity. All the troublesome puzzles which surround immortality are derived from the mind's projection of its own value into the object, which is the realm of the manifold, the world of space and time. These puzzles, consequently, are mirrored in the embarrassments of those who in every age have travailed with this concept of the absoluteness of value, in giving birth to the scepticism inherent in all the L 146 IMMORTALITY CH.
naturalistic and relativistic conceptions of knowing and of acting and of whatever is conceived as spiritual act.
All these puzzles disappear when the problem of immortality is set forth in its own terms. Immortality belongs to mind, and mind is not nature, § ii. Immor-.
talityasan and precisely for that reason and only for attribute of that reason it is not included within the limits of any natural thing, nor of nature generally, which is never a whole. Nature is not infinite either in space or in time. The same reason which, as we saw, proved that it is indefinite in space applies equally to time. It is identical with that in which Kant found his solution of the first of the antinomies.1 Nature is not temporally infinite but temporally finite; its limits are displaceable; and their essential displaceability implies that time for nature is indefinite. But the indefiniteness of time is the temporal infinity of mind in its unity which remains one even in being multiplied, since multiplicity always supposes unity. To inquire what was at the beginning of nature and what there will be at the end is to propound a meaningless problem, because nature is only conceivable as a given nature, this nature^ enclosed within certain limits of time, only assignable in so far as they are not absolute and as the mind passes beyond them in the very act of supposing them. But this indefiniteness of nature, in its turn, would not be intelligible were it not an effect of the infinity of mind, which supposes all the limits of time, by passing beyond them and therefore by gathering in itself and 1 The first antinomy said in the thesis, " The world in time has a begin ning and as regards space is enclosed within certain limits "; and in the antithesis, " The world has neither beginning in time, nor limits in space, but is infinite in regard to time as in regard to space."
THE HIGHER PERSONALITY 147 reconciling in its own immanent unity all temporal multiplicity.
The conclusion is that if we think of ourselves em pirically as in time, we naturalize ourselves and imprison § 12. Immortal ourselves within definite limits, birth and personality. death, outside of which our personality cannot but seem annihilated. But this personality through which we enter into the world of the manifold and of natural individuals, in the Aristotelian meaning, is rooted in a higher personality, in which alone it is real. This higher personality contains the lower and all other empirical personalities, and as this higher per sonality is not unfolded in space and time we cannot say that it is before the birth and after the death of the lower, because "before" and "after" applied to it would cause it to fall from the one to the many, and by destroying it as the one we should thereby also destroy the manifold. But this personality is outside every " before and after." Its being is in the eternal, opposed to time, which it makes to be. This eternity, however, does not transcend time in the meaning that it stands outside time as one reality is outside another.
Is it not clear, then, that the eternity of mind is the mortality of nature, because what is indefinite from the standpoint of the many is infinite from the stand point of the one? Life, the mind's reality, is in experience (in nature, the experience of which is consciousness). But it lives within nature without being absorbed in it, and without ever itself becoming it; moreover, it always keeps its own infinity or unity, without which even nature with its multiplicity, that is, with space and time, would be dissolved.
The only immortality, then, of which we can think, the only immortality of which we have ever actually thought, when the immortality of mind has been affirmed, is the immortality of the transcendental " I "; — not the immortality of the empirical individual " I," in which the mythical philosophical interpreta tion of this immanent affirmation of mind has been imaginatively entangled. In this way it has come to project multiplicity, and consequently the spatiality and temporality of nature, into the realm of im mortality.
Nor does it leave unsatisfied the heart's desire. Only those who fail to place themselves at the § 13. The standpoint of our idealism will think it heart's desire, does. That standpoint requires that we shall in every case pass from abstract to concrete thought, and so keep ever before us the reality whose indispensable condition it is to be inherent in thought, in thought as present reality, not in thought when we only mean it as an abstract possibility, something distinct from its present activity. But whoever attains this standpoint must take heed. He must, as it were, keep his attention fixed and not divided, one eye on concrete thought in which the multiplicity is the multi plicity of the one and nature therefore is mind, and the other on abstract thought in which the multiplicity is nothing but multiplicity and nature is outside and beyond mind. This is the case of those who protest and assure us that they understand and know the tran scendental "I," that unity to which we must refer the world of experience, and who then turn and seek in that world of experience itself the reply to the problems which arise in the depth of their soul, problems, that is to say, which arise precisely in the activity of the transcendental " I."
The heart — for by that name we are accustomed CHAOTIC MULTIPLICITY 149 to express the inmost and concrete concerns of our § 14. The im- spiritual individuality — does, it is true, mortality of the demand immortality for the empirical " I," empirical I. rather than for the transcenciental " I." It wants the immortality of our individual being, in its concrete form of a system of particular relations, depending on the positive concreteness of natural individuals. My immortality is the immortality of all which for me has absolute value. My immortality therefore includes, for example, that of my children and my parents, for they with me form a complex multiplicity of individuals. It comes to saying generally that my immortality is only a real concrete thing in the immortality of the manifold.
But, in the first place, we must remember that in so far as I attribute to the manifold, or recognize in it, the value which makes me feel the need of affirming its immortality, I am not myself one of the elements of the manifold, I am the One, the activity which in itself is unmultipliable because it is the principle of the multiplicity. And in the second place, we must remember that the multiplicity which I prize, and in prizing cannot but affirm its immortality, is the multi plicity which has value, the multiplicity which is not abstracted from the activity which posits it, and is not abstractly multiple. It is not a multiplicity, for example, in the sense that I and my child are numeric ally two and I and my parents are numerically three, for it is a multiplicity actually realized in the present unity of the mind. It is as though the multiplicity, fixed as it is, as we analytically make it, issued forth from the eternal to be flung into the abstract and self-contradic tory time, which is chaotic multiplicity: but mind, in so far as it does not fix the multiplicity but lives in it, that is 1 50 IMMORTALITY CH.
to say, from the immanent standpoint, never abandons the empirical reality to itself. It holds it, reconciles it eternally in itself, eternizes it in its own eternity.
We have an example of this immanent eternity whenever, without plunging into idealistic speculation, we have the intuition and affirmation which is the recognition of a work of art, for a work of art is immortal. But how is it immortal? As one among other works of art, chronologically fixed in a series? As a fact? No, clearly not. Its immortality is in the mind which withdraws it from the multiplicity. And the mind withdraws it in understanding and enjoying it, that is, in re-creating it in itself by a creative act. In this way, and in this way alone, the work of art is present reality, reality with neither antecedents nor consequents, unique with the unity which rules time and triumphs over it by the judgment regarding the value of the work itself, a judgment immanent in the creative act. But how if it be not read, if it be not re-created? The supposition itself removes the problem; for we are asking what is meant by the immortality of art, that is, of art as it is, and art is only in so far as it is known or is for us.
Will it not be said, however, that immortality is only of the immortals, and even of these it is not § 15. immor- their whole individuality which lives in tality is not a memory, but only those moments of privilege. supreme universal value, which highly privileged souls have known how to live, and deeds such as they have only once in their lives performed? The case of art which we have instanced is no more than an example, but since what is material in it is an intuition of speculative truth to be found in ordinary thought, it may aid us to rise at once to the truth itself MONIMENTUM AERE PERENNIUS 151 in its lull universality. The immortals — the poets, the philosophers, all humanity's heroes — are of the same stuff as all men, and indeed of the same stuff as things. Nothing is remembered and all is remembered. Nothing is immortal if we recognize immortality only by its mark on empirical memory; everything is immortal if memory, by which the real is perpetuated and triumphs over time, means what strictly it only can mean. We have already shown that memory, as the preservation of a past which the mind has mummified and withdrawn from the very series itself of the elements of time, is a myth. In this meaning nothing is remembered, nothing abides or is repeated after having been, and the whole of reality is inex orably clothed, by definition, with the " innumerabilis annorum series et fuga temporum," of which Horace speaks in the well-known ode: l Exegi monimentum aere perennius regalique situ pyramidum altius, quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens possit diruere aut innumerabilis annorum series et fuga temporum. non omnis moriar multaque pars mei vitabit Libitinam: usque ego postera crescam laude recens, dum Capitolium scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex. dicar, qua violens obstrepit Aufidus et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium regnavit populorum, ex humili potens princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos deduxisse modos. sume superbiam quaesitam meritis et mihi Delphica lauro cinge volens, Melpomene, comam.
What escapes the grasp of the goddess Libitina and abides, — a monument more lasting than bronze, — is 1 Horace, Odes, iii. 30.
the song in the poet's imagination, with its eternal value by which it will always rise and live again in the human imagination, not because it is always the same written poem, but because every poem is always a new poem, real in the act of its restoration, in a way which will always be new because always unique. Horace's ode, which we can localize at a particular point in the series of years, is swept away by the " fuga temporum." Horace as the man who was born and died is indeed dead, and his monu ment rises up in us, in an " us " who, in so far as we are subject and immanent act, are not different from Horace himself. For Horace, besides being an object among the other manifold objects compresent in history as we know it when we read it, is presented to us, not as something different from us, but as our brother and father, even as our very self in its inner transparence, in its self-identity. What is real, then, in memory does not come to us from the past but is created in the eternity of our present, behind which there is no past and in front of which there is no future.
The poet's true eternity, then, is not the poet in so far as he belongs to the manifold, but the poet in so far as he is one with the unity of the transcendental "I," with the immanent principle of every particular experience, in so far, that is to say, as the poet and we ourselves are one. But if this be the meaning of eternity, who or what is not eternal, dissolved in the One that abides? What word is there, though it sound for an instant only in the secrecy of our soul; what grain of sand is there, buried it may be in the ocean depths; what star is there, imagined to exist beyond every possible limit, beyond all astronomi cal observation; which does not concur with, and which THE PRESENT IS THE ETERNAL 153 is not concentred in, that One in relation to which all is thinkable? What would our body be, our body as we represent it empirically, could we not think of it as a point around which the whole of a nature which is indefinite gravitates? And what would it be if we detached it in its spatial and temporal multiplicity from the I, from that transcendental energy which posits it and is posited by it? And how could a word sound in our inner being without being a determina tion of our own soul, and therefore a reality gradually propagating itself, or concentrically resounding in and across our life, in the universal reality, which even empirically represented cannot be thought except as forming one whole system? And who is there who in such an hour has not been or is not a poet and cannot say with Horace, " Exegi monimentum acre perennius "? Nothing which happens can be represented empirically except as flowing, as compresent with the future in the actuality of the present. Understood in the speculative mode of philosophy it means that there is no present poised between the two opposed terms past and future. The present is the eternal, a negation of all time.
The part of us and of those dear to us which dies is a materiality which has never lived. For real § 1 6. The materiality is not the simple abstraction immortality of from the spiritual act which appears as the mortal. materiality. When, as in ordinary thought, we have this abstract materiality in mind, we are un conscious of the spirit which gives it life and makes it be. Abstract materiality is not immortal, for the simple reason that it does not exist. The materiality which is a multiplicity of the mind is in the mind; it is in it, and has value just so far as it is its realization. Its immortality consists in its mortality. Because the unity of mind is the intelligibility of the multiplicity of nature. And this multiplicity, when not taken in the abstract, is the nature of mind (the manifoldness of the one). It participates, therefore, in its immortality. But it cannot participate in mind's immortality by destroying mind, but by itself being destroyed as nature. It is just this which happens, in virtue, let us clearly understand, not of nature itself which is the externality of the spiritual act, but of the spiritual act which, as we have shown, does not posit the manifold without unifying it in the very act which posits it, and therefore does not give life which is not also death. Were the life of the object posited by the mind not also its death, it would imply the abandon ment of the object by the mind itself. Life would be a petrified life, which is absolute death. True life, on the other hand, is made one by death, and therefore the immortality of the manifold (things and men, for men in so far as they are a many are things) is in their eternal mortality.
Is the individual, then, mortal or immortal? The Aristotelian individual, who is the individual in the § 17. The ordinary meaning, is mortal; that is, its immortal immortality is its mortality, because its individual. reality is within the mind which is im mortal. But the individual as spiritual act, the individual individualizing, is immortal. The mind's act as -pure act^ outside which there is nothing which is not an abstraction, is the realm of immortality.
If a man were not this act and did not feel, however obscurely, in his very being that he is immortal, he could not live, because he could not escape that absolute practical scepticism which is not simply an CAN WE BE AND NOT THINK? 155 attempt not to think (which the theoretical or abstract scepticism, that so often has made inroads on the human soul, has always been), but the effective arrest of thought, of the thought by which alone we can perceive truth in the world of the eternal. Can we be and not think, if being is essentially thinking or rather thinking itself? The energy which sustains life is precisely the consciousness of the divine and eternal, so that we always look down on the death and vanish ing of everything perishable from the height of the immortal life.
CHAPTER XI CAUSALITY, MECHANISM AND CONTINGENCY OUR doctrine of time and space has brought us back to the concept with which we started of the infinite § i. is mind and unmultipliable unity of mind. As conditioned? positive the individual is posited in a spatial multiplicity which is also temporal, but without ever destroying the mind's unity, or ever being able to transcend it. From the womb of space we have seen infinite mind reborn, and from the womb of time immortal mind.
And now some one may object. ' You tell us that the past of time and the spatial form of nature are annulled in the unity of the spiritual act; and yet you say that the past is confluent in the present. The present, then, is conditioned by the past, without which accordingly it cannot be conceived. And you say also that the multiplicity of coexistents is made one and reconciled in the unity of the spiritual act. Even the act, then, is conditioned by the multiplicity of the co existents. And even if both these multiplicities be a production of the mind it is no less true that their ultimate unification, and in this the development of mind consists, is conditioned by the antecedents. These antecedents cannot be thought to be immedi ately identical with the consequent unity."
Here too we might very easily dispose of the CH. xi CONDITION AND CONDITIONATE 157 objection by referring to what we had said on the inconsistency of the manifold in its abstract opposition to unity, and simply call attention to the principle that the condition is not to be conceived abstractly as separated from the conditionate and standing by itself, limiting as it were the conditionate itself. Our rejoinder would in truth miss its effect if we did not in this case also submit to a strict examination the concept of condition on which not only empiricism but also transcendentalism rely as their second plank of safety. These two modes of philosophizing are, as we know, much more akin than is commonly supposed.
" Condition " may have two quite different mean ings. It may mean what is simply necessary or it § 2 The may mean what is necessary and sufficient.
necessary con- The necessary condition of a real thing dition, and the /j in the metaphysical and in the necessary and v,,.., sufficient empirical sense) is another real thing, the condition. realization of which makes the realization of the first possible. The sufficient condition of a real thing is another real thing, realization of which makes its realization necessary and infallible. In the first case the conditionate cannot be thought without at the same time thinking its condition, but the condition can be thought without thinking the conditionate. In the second case an absolute relation holds between condition and conditionate, and neither can be thought without the other.
The absolute character of the relation between the two terms, and the necessity that the conditionate The meta- follow the condition, are the constitutive physical con- elements of the metaphysical concept of cept of cause. cause. We can in fact define cause as the real thing whose realization renders necessary the realization of another real thing. This causality has been called metaphysical from the necessity of the relation which it posits between condition and conditionate, cause and effect. It is a necessity which cannot be learnt by experience, for if experience bears witness to relations at all, it is only to contingent relations of facts. It is an a -priori necessity, only knowable a -priori by analysis of concepts. For this reason in the metaphysics of Descartes and Spinoza it is reduced to mere logical deduction based on the principle of identity.
But the strictly metaphysical character of such a causality lies deeper. It lies in a principle of which the necessity of the relation between cause