BENEDETTO CROCE (continued 4)

The poles of feeling (pleasure and pain) and their identity with their practical opposites.

Here occurs an opportunity of tying a thread that we had left loose when discussing the theory of feeling, or rather the distinction of feeling into the two poles of pleasure and pain, understood, not as a psychological distinction of greater or less, or of mixed states, but as a philosophical distinction of pure states, or of terms that are truly opposed. When the vague and indeterminate term of "feeling" is directed toward theoretical facts and is determined by theoretical philosophy as æsthetic activity or speculative thought, or in some other way, the terms of pleasure and pain are, strictly speaking, not applicable to it. The pure theoretic activity considered in itself, cannot be polarized, as has been seen; it will always attain to the beautiful, always to the true. Only in so far as the theoretic activity is also practical activity, by the law of the unity of the spirit, will the polarization of good and evil, which in that case are called beautiful and ugly, true and false, take place through it if not in it. If the term "feeling" be on the contrary directed to practical facts, and its synonymity with the practical activity (of which feeling would be a distinguishing characteristic) made clear by the Philosophy of the practical, it is clear that to it belongs immediately and no longer mediately that polarity of good and evil. Good and evil then become what theoreticians of feeling call pleasure and pain. These terms are identical with the preceding, as feeling is a fact identical with the practical activity, generically considered.

Doctrines concerning pleasure and happiness: critique.

This theory of pain and pleasure, as the synonyms of the practical positive and negative, helps to put an end to a long series of questions arising in connection with such concepts. Above all, the dispute as to whether pleasure be positive or negative will appear to be unfounded, and, therefore, whether pain have a positive or a negative value, or, finally, whether both be negative: unfounded, since "pleasure" means "positive" and "pain" "negative." At the most, it may be admitted that pain has also a positivity, which is however nothing but the positivity of the negative, that is the real existence of the negative pole.—The theory that man always proposes to himself pleasure as an end is, on the contrary, not only not unfounded, but of such evident truth as not to require enunciation, much less efforts to prove it. If pleasure be nothing but activity, it is natural that man should have no other end save pleasure, that is, activity, life itself. The correction that has been suggested by others, to the effect that man wills, not indeed pleasure, but activity, of which the outcome is pleasure, has but slight exactitude, for the two terms are not distinguishable, and the result is not separable from the activity; the pleasure of travelling is not separable from travelling. That polemic has value at the most against empiricism, which limits pleasure to an arbitrarily determined group of pleasurable facts, that is to say, circumscribes activity to certain particular manifestations of activity, collected in groups or classes, and substituted for the universal concept. Finally, by means of the identification of pleasure and pain with good and evil in general which we have given, all disputes as to the concept of happiness disappear, as to whether it be or be not distinct from that of the good action, practically coherent, and if man propose to himself happiness as an end. "Happiness" is equal to "pleasure," and "pleasure" is equal to "activity." To will the good (that is, to will well and energetically), and to be happy, are the same. The objection raised by some, that man does not will happiness, but a certain happiness, that he does not will pleasure, but a certain pleasure, not the good, but a certain good, is valid; but this only amounts to distinguishing volitional man in the act, from the theory of the will, constructed by the philosopher. If Tizio wishes at this moment to go to bed and Caio to take a moonlight walk, bed and walk are the affairs of Tizio and of Caio; for the philosopher there is no Tizio, no Caio, but man in universal; there is neither bed nor moon, but pleasure and the good.

Empirical concepts relating to good and evil.

The practical activity, the will, which is also strife between good and evil, can be illuminated now from this side and now from that by that indivisible unity, according to the accidents of discourse and the varying situations of life. In this way arises a series of concepts which, in so far as they are unilateral, are empirical, and only become again philosophical in the thought of the unity of which they form part. Thus, to make use of a comparison, space in geometry can be analyzed and split up into a first, second, and third dimension; but as spatiality, it is a unicum, which does not possess either one or two or three dimensions; and when in measuring or constructing plans of measurement, we proceed to think one of these dimensions, we become aware that we cannot think them, save all three together, or not as three, but as one. The empirical, practical concepts that arise upon the antithetical and dialectical nature of the will, have had much importance, and it is fitting, therefore, that we should mention and explain at least the principal among them.

Duty of being, ideal, inhibitive, and imperative power.

If the situations of life lead to the directing of the attention chiefly to the aspect of the will striving against inaction and arbitrary choice, it is posited in this strife, in this becoming, as something that is not but must be, not as real, but as ideal. If the greatness of the ideal that is to be and to fill the soul with joy, be set in relief in this struggle, then the ideal appears sweet and smiling, as a joy-bringing and beatific vision. If, on the other hand, the effort of its becoming be set in relief, the ideal can be made into a metaphor, as will opposed to will, as legitimate against rebellious will; and then it assumes a sour, rough, and hard appearance, and the names of inhibitive or imperative power, in so far as it impedes the will, or promotes liberty.

There is no less opportunity and interest in making clear that relation, from the point of view of the negative term, or of evil. A series of descriptive concepts then appears, which present the consciousness of evil, now as obstinate blindness (cor induratum), now as disquiet and scruple, which induce vigilance and circumspection, now as humility, which does not permit forgetting how easy it is to slip into evil. But it is worthy of note that the series of words and empirical concepts that serve to illuminate the satisfaction of the good, the victory won over oneself, tranquillity of conscience, is far less rich. Perhaps this arises precisely because there is less practical interest in celebrating the pleasure of victory than in the inculcation of the necessity for strife and the abhorrence of evil. Why draw attention to joy and to repose when man is already too much inclined to allow himself joy and repose; does not Life allow them to itself and cause other problems to follow on each solution, new perils to follow perils overpast, and the necessity for new struggles? It is therefore of importance to direct the greater sum of attention to those aspects from which the eye is most frequently turned aside. Finally, these various aspects can be placed in relation with the greater or less frequency with which each appears in individuals, thus arriving at the construction of the concepts of virtue and vice, and of the models of the virtuous man, the honest man, the deliberate man, the clever man, and their opposites, the vicious, the dishonest, the unreflective, the incapable man, and so on.

Their incapacity for setting as practical principles.

The same thing happens with these empirical practical concepts as with all the other empirical concepts, of which we have spoken in general. They have been stiffened into philosophical concepts, for the hasty satisfaction of the philosophical need of man. Hence, among others, many of the disputes as to the principle of the Philosophy of the practical. Some indeed maintain that such a principle is to be found in duty or the imperative; others in the idea or the ideal, others in the joy of good, others in the abhorrence of pain, others in virtue, others in enthusiasm, and so on. Each of the above-mentioned theoreticians has the sharpest eyes for the discovery of the defects in the theories of others, but is short-sighted as regards his own. Those who maintain the ideal satirize the form of the categoric imperative as suggestive of police or gendarmerie; those of the imperative and of duty deride the quietist form and the insipid ecstasy proper to the contemplation of ideals; those of the avoidance of pain do not spare their sarcasms for the hunters of joy; those of joy call these plunged in sorrow hypocrites, who also obtain enjoyments for themselves, if in no other way, then secretly: si non caste, caute. The truth is that all are wrong as philosophers, because they all find the principle of the will, not in itself but in an empirical concept, which gives to it an abstract and mutilated appearance. And, on the other hand, all are right, because those aspects are all real, and in each one of them the others can be implicitly shown. The categoric imperative, for instance, contains in itself both the will, which, in so far as it commands itself, is the true will, the joy of being and the sorrow of not being what we wish to be, the ideal, and the necessity of self-realization, and so of entering into strife against irreality, thus becoming imperative, and so on.

Its characteristics.

If none of the formulæ given above, owing to their empirical character, be able to indicate with precision the principle of the Philosophy of the practical, and all are more or less convenient synecdoches, for this reason none of those concepts are to be treated as rigorous concepts. If they be so treated, there is not one of them, however justified it may seem to be, that is not able to cause rebellions and has not done so. The type of the dutiful man has been reproached with being so much preoccupied with duty that he does not really perform it, because he forgets the impulse of the heart; of the type of the virtuous man it is said that he, as it were, ceases from being so by the very fact that virtue becomes in him a profession; of the type of the honest man, that there is nothing more base than the race of honest men; of the type of the pious Aeneas, that his piety is egoism; and in general of all these cases it has been recalled that a little vice is necessary for virtue, as alloy for metals. Repentance and remorse, too, although they be highly recommended as means of purification, have had their detractors; does it not suffice (they say) that an evil deed has been committed? Must the offence be aggravated by losing time over it, as though anything could be remedied with sorrowing and lamentation? But others have replied that, given human iniquity, it is better to exceed in the matter of remorse than to pass rapidly over it. Humility has been opposed with the sume superbiam as being more virile, and with the laudum immensa cupido as being more noble; the habit of self-tormenting with the servite domino in laetitia, as, on the other hand, the over-confident has been admonished with that other not less biblical dictum: beatus homo qui semper est pavidus. These are objections and replies that may all of them have value for the empirical situations to which they refer; but they have neither truth nor value in philosophy, for which they are all of them false, because the distinctions from which they derive are not philosophical. Remorse, for instance, has a value, not in itself, but as a passage to activity, without which such passage would not take place; the virtuous habit has a value, not in itself, but in so far as it is practised and constantly preserved; duty cannot differ from the aspiration of the soul, and both cannot differ from the volitional act; confidence is at the same time trepidation, and humility must be one with the pride of merit. To sum up, for, the philosopher, the dialectic of the will is all in the concept of will, with its polarization of good and evil, which is the actuality and concreteness of that concept.

III

THE VOLITIONAL ACT AND THE PASSIONS

The multiplicity of volitions and the struggle for unity.

If the volitions followed one another, so to speak monadistically, each one shut up in itself, simple, impenetrable, indecomposible, it would be impossible to understand the moment that there is in them of arbitrary choice, of evil, of contradiction. But it is not so. The individual is solicited simultaneously by many or, more exactly, by infinite volitions, because the individual is at every moment a microcosm and in him is reflected the whole cosmos, and he reacts against the whole cosmos by willing in all directions. This infinity of volitions that is in every individual, can be proved by a very obvious fact: by what occurs in the contemplation of works of art, in which the same individual is able to reconstruct in himself the most various actions and psychological situations, and to feel himself in turn mild and sanguinary, austere and voluptuous, Achilles and Thersites. This would not happen, had he not to some extent in himself the experience of all these various volitional attitudes. But even if we wish to restrict ourselves to those volitions that are the most closely connected with the historical situation, thus limited as well as may be (every historical situation is in reality a cosmic situation), restricting ourselves to what are called volitions of the moment, we have always, if not a chaos, certainly a multiplicity, or at the least a duality, of volitions. Were the individual to abandon himself to that chaos, to that multiplicity, to that duality, he would instantly be lacerated, broken in pieces, destroyed. But he does not abandon himself to it, for he is an individual, volitional and operating just because he renounces that feigned richness of the infinite and that pernicious richness of multiplicity or duality, limiting himself on each occasion to one single volition, which is the volition corresponding to the given situation.

Multiplicity and unity as bad and good.

This volition is consequently the result of a struggle in which the individual drives back all the other infinite volitions, to attach himself to that one alone which the given situation must and does arouse in him. And when the given volition does not affirm itself fully in this struggle, he falls a victim to multiplicity, in which is found that arbitrary choice attached to a volition which is not the one that should be willed, which he feels he wills and that he does will in a way. Hence the will becomes split up in different directions and contradictory, action not positive but negative, not truly action, but rather passivity.

The multiplicity of volitions explains then the moment of arbitrary choice, of evil, in the practical activity. This could be defined as the volition that conquers the volitions, as its contrary arbitrary choice is the contest of volitions with volition.

Excluded volitions and the passions or desires.

The volitions that are driven back on every occasion and excluded, to make way for the volitional act, are variously denominated in ordinary speech and by psychologists as appetites, tendencies, impulses, affections, wishes, velleities, desires, aspirations, passions. But, as is usual with us, we do not intend to compose and defend such classes in a naturalistic and psychological sense, nor consequently to distinguish appetite from desire, or affection from passion, with boundaries that must of necessity be arbitrary and undulating. What is of real importance is only the distinction and the precise boundary, not arbitrary but real, between the volition and volitions, or, as we can now say, the relation between true and proper volition and the passions or desires.

Passions and desires as possible volitions.

Passions or desires are and are not volitions: they are not volitions in respect to the volitional synthesis, which, by excluding, annuls them as such; they are on the other hand volitions, if considered in themselves, for they are capable of constituting the centre of new syntheses in changed conditions. It has been said that we cannot will the impossible, but that we can perfectly well desire it. That is not exact, because the impossible, the contradictory, cannot even be the object of desire. No one wishes to find himself at the same moment in two different places, or to construct a triangle that should be at the same time a square: and even if such absurd wishes be manifested in words, the words will be absurd, but the desires will either be different from what is stated, or they will not exist even as desires. In a certain aspect all desires are desires of the impossible (and not only some of them), if, that is to say, we consider them as volitions that have not been realized and which cannot be realized at that moment: but from another point of view, they are all possible, and can indeed be precisely defined as possible volitions. This is proved by their becoming gradually actual as the actual situation changes. If (to choose a very simple illustration) an individual engaged in a certain work repel the desire for food and sleep with his volition and action, that desire is nothing at that point, as actual volition; but it does not for that reason lose its intrinsic volitional character, for when the hour for the repast or for sleep has struck, it passes from possibility to actuality and becomes the will for food and sleep. The sophism previously criticized, by means of which a bad and unsuccessful act, that is to say one that is dominated by passion and caprice, is justified by proving that it has had a legitimate motive and answers to a good intention, appeals to this character of possibility, possessed by all desires, and artfully changes it into a character of actuality, thus substituting for the given the imagined situation.

Volition as conflict with the passions.

The relation that we have defined between volition and passions or desires explains why the will has often seemed to be nothing but a conflict with the passions, and life itself a battle (vivere militare est,) and at other times itself nothing but passions. The will is indeed homogeneous with the passions, and is opposed, not to the nature of the passions, which is its own nature, but to their multiplicity. For this reason, it has been said that only passion acts upon the passions: for the will is a passion among passions. Even the poet or the philosopher, who frees himself from the passions by objectifying them and making them material for æsthetic contemplation or for speculative research, succeeds in so doing, only because he is able to affirm the passion over the passions: the passion for poetry or for philosophy.

Critique of the freedom of choice.

We must however beware of enunciating this relation in a false form, as happens with the theory called freedom of choice, where the will is conceived as the faculty that chooses one volition from among others and makes it its own. The will does not choose a volition (save metaphorically), but so to speak chooses the choice itself, or makes itself will among the desires which are not will. Nor should the possible actions that are excluded be looked upon as constituting a graduation in respect to the spirit, which should will a and not b, c, d, e, and so on, attributing to them, nevertheless, different values, which can be symbolized by the declining series of numbers, passing downward from the will which is 10, to 9, 8, 7, 6, and so on. In reality, the volitions that are excluded (b, c, d, e) have no actual value, for the very reason that they are excluded. They may acquire it in other situations different from the one analyzed, but it is not possible to present the various situations together in one, and far less to determine them quantitatively and numerically, otherwise than in a symbolical manner. The propositions that present the will sometimes as the strongest volition in respect to the passions or desires, and sometimes as the weakest in respect to the passions, which seem to be the strongest, that is, according as we consider the active or the passive moment of the will, its victory or defeat, are also metaphorical and symbolical.

Significance of the so-called precedence of feeling over the volitional act.

The relation established receives further light from the generally admitted theory of the necessary precedence of the feelings as condition for the volitional act. The volitional act is preceded by a jostling multiplicity of volitions, by a swarm of passions and desires, which it dominates; and therefore it may seem that it follows, not the volition, but something different from the volition, to be called feeling. It is certainly different, but only because it is the plural of that singular. The nature of the passions and desires in respect to the volitional act has not been clearly elucidated, and this is another of the reasons that have caused the customary category of "feeling" to appear and to be retained.

Polipathicism and apathicism.

Finally and always through the established relation, the two opposed theories concerning the passions are excluded: that which makes the efficacious explanation of practical life to consist in giving free course to the passions, holding them all to be sacred as such: this theory could be called polipathicism; the other, which makes it consist of the eradication and destruction of all the passions, in order to give place to the exclusive domination of reason, of rational will, or of the will that really is will, and could therefore be called apathicism.

Polipathicism has the defect of not taking account among the passions of that which is passion par excellence, and which alone becomes actual, driving away the others: the will. Apathicism naturally possesses the opposite defect and takes account only of the will, and therefore not of that either, for the will becomes impotent when alone, just as in the other case it becomes a chaotic jumble of all the passions.

Erroneousness of both opposed theses.

Such views as these are so openly unsustainable that they hardly appear at all in their strictness and purity, in the course of the history of philosophy, and then fugitively. But it is desirable to be attentive not to identify the theoretic formulæ given above with the programmes of certain groups, sects, associations, or individuals who have verbally proclaimed polipathicism and apathicism, whereas they have implied something very different, and could not have done otherwise. Complete polipathicism and complete apathicism could only be attained by the individual at the cost of disaggregation and annihilation. At the most, sects, groups, societies, and individuals have been able to conform to those formulæ as the simple expression of tendencies; or those formulæ are applicable to them by hyperbole, in the condemnation that it has been held desirable to inflict upon certain unhealthy tendencies. Certainly there are individuals whose passions are in such slight control as to suggest the absence of will; they run after every one of their desires, or leave their soul open to the onset of the passions that devastate it as the wind and the hail do the fields. Lorenzo the Magnificent (symbolizing with his wonted finesse a profoundly philosophical conflict) said to his son Piero, who was addicted to every pleasure and caprice: "And I never have any wish but you realize it for yourself."[1] The young rake whose adventures were sung by De Musset may afford an example of the same disaggregation, composed of the most violent kind of passions:

Ce n'était pas Rolla qui gouvernait sa vie: C'étaient ses passions; il les laissait aller, Comme un pâtre assoupi regarde l'eau couler....

But even in these extreme and typical cases the will and the dominion of the passions are never altogether absent: otherwise it would be impossible to live, not only a lifetime, but a day, an hour, a minute. Thus too on the other hand, no individual, be he ever so apathetic and ascetic, ever frees himself altogether from the dominion of the passions and the desires. We read in the life of some saint or beatified personage, whose name escapes me, how he had attained to so great a degree of perfection that whatever food he put into his mouth, he tasted nothing but dry straw. Leaving to specialists the inquiry as to how a stomach of so slight a capacity for distinguishing one aliment from another could perform its function, and also as to the consequences for social productiveness of so strangely perfected an individual, it is certain that in order to nourish himself and live, the saint in question must have had the periodical appetite or desire of straw for his food, if for nothing else. Apathy too is often nothing but a most violent and tenacious, though disordered, passion for ease. Activity in any case reasserts itself with the dissolving of apathy, a state nigh to inertia and to death, when it dissolves grata vice veris et Favoni, that is, with the appearance of the desires, of those "suave impulses," those "heart-beats," that pain, and that pleasure, which Giacomo Leopardi depicted in his Risorgimento, overcome with astonishment, as though face to face with the mystery of life.

Their historical and contingent meanings.

The formulæ of polipathicism and of apathicism have had other contingent and historical meanings, but of a positive nature, which it is fitting to examine, in order to prevent the usual passage, so fruitful of errors, from philosophical to empirical theses. The return to the world and to nature, which is one of the characteristics of the Renaissance and of the Reformation itself; the rights of the passions, which is one of the traits of Romanticism in its initial period; neo-paganism, which has given to the Italy of our day its most lofty poetry in the work of Giosuè Carducci, were each in their turn nothing but beneficial reactions against the lazy monastic life of the Middle Ages, against Protestant pedantry, against degenerate Romanticism, which despised the real world and dreamed of contradictory ideals. On the other hand, in different times and circumstances, Christian ascesis, Franciscan poverty, and Puritan strictness were beneficial reactions. So true is this, that we are wont to unite in our admiration heroes of abstinence and heroes of the passions, assertors of the spirit and assertors of the flesh, for all, in different ways, because in different historical situations, willed always the elevation of humanity. Every one of those historical manifestations can be and has been blamed and satirized, but only in its decadence, where it has exhausted its proper function, and is no longer truly itself, but its own mask.—The friars of the stories of the sixteenth century are not the companions of St. Francis, as the indecent Italians of the late Renaissance are not the active merchants, philologists, and artists who promoted it, nor is there a greater lack of historical sense than the transference of the characteristics of the one to the other, as is the way of vulgar detractors and apologists. One and the same historical fact (as has been brilliantly said) always shows itself twice: the first time as tragedy, the second as comedy.

The domination of the passions and the will.

The cases that we have recorded, which have seemed to represent unbridled or exhausted passion, possess not a pathological but a physiological character, in so far as they really consist of a domination, a volitional synthesis, which conquers and contains divergent and ruinous passions. And with this we have answered the question as to whether or no the passions can be dominated, and whether man be slave or free. We can dominate them, and in that domination is life; if we do not dominate them, we advance to meet death; to dominate or not to dominate them are the very poles of the will, positive and negative, and we cannot think of the one as being abolished without thinking of the other as also abolished.

But the labour of dominating them is hard, as all life, "sweet life," is hard. The passions, driven back and restrained again and again by the will, yet rage within us, tumultuous, though conquered. We tear out the cumbersome plants, but not their roots and seeds. The man who considers himself hardened to the trials of life, still feels and suffers: the man who seems calm is yet always agitated within. As the labour that is called physical deposits poison at the base of the organism; so does the labour called spiritual in the depths of the soul. Hence the bitterness in those men who have willed and laboured much; hence their cupio dissolvi, their aspiration for that bourne where all is peace. The poet sublimely imagines old Luther, after his victories, in the midst of the people awakened by him to a new life:

Yet with a backward look, he sighed: Call me, O God, to thee, for I am tired, Nor without malediction can I pray!

IV

VOLITIONAL HABITS AND THE INDIVIDUALITY

Passions and states of the soul.

Just because the passions are possible volitions and therefore always have a definite content, it is no slight error on the part of writers of treatises, to consider joy and sorrow, enthusiasm and depression, content and discontent, tranquillity and remorse, and other antithetical couples, as passions. These couples are empirical concepts constructed upon the dialectical distinction of freedom and anti-freedom, of good and evil; but the groups of the passions must on the contrary be empirical concepts formed upon the basis of the varying determination of the volitional activity, according to objects, that is to say, in its particular determinations. Thus we can talk of the passion for celebrity, for science, for art, for politics, for riches, for luxury, for women, for the country, for the city, for sport, for fishing, and so on, with infinite subdivisions and complications.

Passions understood as volitional habits.

The distinction usually drawn between the affections, the impulses, the desires on the one hand and the passions on the other, is on the contrary justified, though it always has an empirical character; these being considered, not as the single and instantaneous desire or impulse that prompts to a single action, but as an inclination or habit of wishing and of willing in a certain direction. In this sense, passion would be a generic concept (always empirical), which could be divided (empirically) into the classes of the virtues and vices; for virtue is nothing but the passion or habit of rational actions, and vice the contrary.

Their importance.

These passions and volitional habits are not rigidly fixed, for nothing in the field of facts is rigidly fixed. As the bed of the river regulates the course of the river and is at the same time continuously modified by it, so is it with the passions and volitional acts, which reality keeps forming and modifying, and in modifying, forms anew and in forming modifies. For this reason there is always something arbitrary in defining habits as though they corresponded to a distinct and limited reality; and for this reason the concepts of them are arbitrary and empirical. Habits are not categories, nor do they give rise to distinct concepts; but they are the like in the unlike, unlike, itself also, in itself, although discernible in a certain way from other groups of dissimilar facts. Their importance is great, because they constitute, as it were, the bony structure of the body of reality. In them individuality understood as an empirical concept, has its foundation, for which, if it be not substance, neither is it a complex of casually divergent states.

The control of the passions in so far as they are volitional habits.

The nature of the passions as volitional habits to be both fixed and mobile, that is to say, only relatively fixed and relatively mobile, is the principle that aids the solution of several much-debated and certainly important questions of the Philosophy of the practical. And in the first place, the passions being understood as habits, the answer to the question as to whether or no they can be controlled, and if the answer be in the affirmative, then in what limits, receives a somewhat different meaning, which explains the interest which that question has always aroused. Nothing, in fact, removes our consciousness of freedom and personality in so brutal a manner and makes us feel our impotence and misery in so depressing a way, as to find ourselves with our good intention and action hardly begun, face to face with the unchained forces of our passions and of the habits that oppose it, which drown with their deafening clamour the weak and timid voice of the incipient action, vex it with their arrogance, and drag it along paths well known and abhorred. We fall then into mistrust and baseness, believe ourselves lost for ever; freedom and will seem to be fables for the adornment of sermons and the books of moralists. The sage who recalls to man the absolute empire that he possesses over his passions and exhorts him never to be troubled and to repeat the twenty or four-and-twenty letters of the alphabet, so that the spirit may have time to recuperate its strength, to resist and to conquer, seems to utter the insipid babble of one who has never truly loved and hated, and to measure the full and overflowing souls of others on the model of his own empty or almost empty soul. We laugh freely at the "short legs" of ideals and good intentions, and read again with satisfaction not undiluted with bitterness, some little story like Voltaire's Memnon ou la sagesse humaine, which bears as motto the very appropriate epigraph:

Nous tromper dans nos entreprises, C'est à quoi nous sommes sujets: Le matin je fais des projets, Et le long du jour des sottises;

or at the most they conclude that there is no way to free oneself from a bad passion save with another one equally bad, from a vice with a vice, "as from a plank we pluck with nail a nail."

Difficulty and reality of dominating them.

Nevertheless, he who torments himself and gets angry, or laughs and draws such conclusions as these, is not in the right. That is to say, he is right to laugh at ingenuous sages and at odious preachers and moralists, for their theories are certainly simplicist and false. But he is wrong in not understanding that his own theory is also simplicist and false, for it runs into the opposite extreme.—Habits and passions are habits and passions, because slowly formed: it is therefore a vain illusion to attempt to destroy them at a blow. Perhaps it is believed that the passions are tender flowerets or grasses that a child has attached to the surface of the soil? They are a rank growth, strong oaks whose roots dive deep into the earth!—That is most true, but it is not for this reason impossible to modify and destroy them. They are indeed actually modified, for that very pain, that very disappointment, are a beginning of modification; since we do not persist in what we abhor and follow, dragged along by force; and little by little we end by freeing ourselves. The process of freeing ourselves from the passions, or from vicious habits, then, is effective, but slow, as the formation of those habits has been slow. We do not cure an illness with a sudden act of will, but nevertheless the will guides and directs the process of healing, and can open or close the entrance to the medicinal forces of nature. Now the passions or vicious habits are maladies that must follow their course, which, in order to be beneficial, must coincide with the cure. The sages who give receipts for freeing ourselves from them immediately are the Dulcamaras of moral maladies; but the existence of the Dulcamaras should not impel us to deny the existence of doctors, and above all of ourselves as doctors of ourselves. And we should certainly adopt a very bad and illusory method of cure, were we to accept the method so often recommended, of destroying passion with passion, or vice with vice, thus adding vice to vice, as those who treat the illnesses of the body with narcotics or with stimulants often add malady to malady.

Volitional habits and individuality.

Habits, then, not less than single volitional acts, of which they were and are composed, can be and are continually conquered and modified, in so far as they are opposed to the new volitional syntheses. This confirms what has already been said in criticizing the polipathetic view, which ignores the volition for the volitions, as the virtuous habit is ignored in favour of vicious habits. But the theory of apathicism is also to be found in this field, and it is needful to assert in opposition to it, the great importance proper to the volitional habits in giving concrete form to virtue. This second critical thesis is that which affirms the value of individuality or peculiarity in the practical field.

Negations of individuality for uniformity and their critique.

Every individual is furnished by mother nature with certain definite habits, according to the contingencies of reality among which he enters the world; and he acquires yet others in the course of life, owing to the actual conditions through which he passes and to the works that he accomplishes. Those habits which he has from birth are called aptitudes, dispositions, natural tendencies: the others acquired. The individual in his reality is, as has been said, nothing but these groups of habits and changes as they change. Now is it rational and possible (the two questions here form one) that the individual in his willing and acting should rid himself of such habits? Is it possible to consider them as things without value? Is it possible to establish an antithesis between individuality and rational action, as between good and evil?—The levellers who claim to impose the same task upon all and wish to make of the female a male, of the poet a reasoner, of the man of science a warrior, of the saint a man of business, and thus to give to every one a part of the task of others;—the dreamers of a future society, in which all this shall have been done, and the poet should attend to his poem, after having played the philosopher for a couple of hours, for another couple of hours the tailor, and for yet another two the waiter at an inn;—all the pedants of abstract regularity, whom we meet to our great annoyance in life;—behold the apathicists appear anew, for, as in the theory of the volitional act, they advocated an abstract action, conducted by the rational will alone in the void of the passions; so here, they advocate an abstract rational habit, in the theory of volitional habits, a model of human activity, to which all individuals would be obliged to conform. Perhaps some such sensible observation as this of Vauvenargues should suffice to confute them: Il ne faut pas beaucoup de réflexion pour faire cuire un poulet; et, cependant, nous voyons des hommes qui sont toute leur vie mauvais rôtisseurs: tant il est nécessaire dans tous les métiers, d'y être appelé par un instinct particulier et comme indépendant de la raison. But since it might be said that we wish to solve a grave question with a joke, we will recall that the volitional acts and the passions, volition and the volitions, are of the same nature (though the one is actual and the others only possible), and that the nature of willing implies actual definite situations, and that for this reason we never will in universal but always in particular. In the same way virtue, the virtuous habit of the will, is not of a different nature to the volitional habits in general, to the passions, but is particular and individual as they are. Those who make war upon individual habits never succeed in substituting for them a universal habit, which is inconceivable, but at the most other habits, equally particular and individual. The poet who will play the farmer, the tailor, and the waiter, in the imagined society of the future, will do all these things as a poet. This may perhaps be an advantage, but may also perhaps be the contrary, as future consumers of grain, of garments, and of repasts will become aware. For the rest, do we not even now see women devoting themselves to the severe studies of philology, of philosophy, and of mathematics? But with the rarest exceptions, they remain always women: their production, which is without originality, is not like that of man, done with the complete dedication of the whole being to the search for truth and of artistic perfection; and if in the midst of the most abstruse inquiry, the image of themselves as wife or mother pass through their minds, they desert, at the critical moment, the philosophical categories, the formulæ of flexions, the ruled or tangential spaces, and sigh for their unborn sons and for the husband that they have not found. Is this distortion of natural habits useful? Generally speaking, it is not. It is a doing and an undoing, a despisal of the riches wisely accumulated and capitalized by Reality in the course of its evolution.

Temperament and character. Indifference of temperament.

Certainly the disposition natural or acquired is not virtue, and the temperament (since temperament is nothing but the sum of habits and aptitudes) is not character. But virtue and character presuppose habits and passions, of which they give the rational and volitional synthesis: they are the form of that matter. And as matter considered in the abstract is neither good nor bad, so the habits and the passions (as has been very well observed) are not in themselves either virtues or vices: they are facts. And it is necessary to take account of facts; otherwise, they revenge themselves. On the other hand, habits and passions certainly change; but not all of a sudden and capriciously, rather, little by little, and always on the basis of existing habits and passions.

The discovery of the proper self.

The first duty of every individual who wishes to act effectively, consists, therefore, in seeking for himself, in exploring his own dispositions, in establishing what aptitudes have been deposited in him by the course of reality, both at the moment of his birth, and during the development of his own individual life: in knowing, that is to say, his own habits and passions, not in order to make of them a tabula rasa, but to use them. The search is not easy and the preparatory part of life, namely youth, is spent upon it. Few are the fortunate individuals who have at once a clear and certain knowledge of their own being and of their duty; the majority seek and find it after many wanderings; and if such wanderings sometimes (as is written in the dedication of the Scienza nuova) "seem misfortunes and are opportunities," at others they are but a fruitless moving to and fro; hence those that are undecided during the whole of their lives, the eternal youths, those who aspire to all or to many of the directions of human activity and are incapable in all. But when our own being unveils itself and we see our path clearly, then to disordered agitation succeeds the calm of sure and regular work, with its defeats and victories, its joys and sorrows, but with the constant vision of the Aim, that is, of the general direction to be followed. Vainly will he who is endowed and prepared for guiding mankind in political strife and has a clear and lively perception of human strength and weakness, of what can and of what cannot be done, and is furnished, so to speak, with practical sense (with the sense of complications and slight differences), will try (save in the rarest and most exceptional cases, and this reserve is to be understood in all that we are saying here) to acquire a place among those who cultivate the abstract and universal, operations demanding almost opposite aptitudes; vainly will he who was born to sing attempt to calculate; vainly will he whose mind and soul were made to accentuate dissensions in their bitter strife bend himself to be a conciliator and a peacemaker. It is worse than superfluous, it is stupid to weep over one's choleric or phlegmatic temperament. There have been choleric saints that have even used the stick, and phlegmatic saints who have succeeded admirably in patient persuasion: the mild Francis, "all seraphic in his ardour," and the impetuous Dominic "whose blows fell on the boughs of heresy." Reality is diversity and has need of both, and each is praiseworthy if he do that well to which he has been called.

The idea of "vocation."

This concept of the vocation has a mystical and religious origin and preserves that form; but it is clear that by means of the previous considerations we have divested it of that form and reduced it to a scientific concept. The individual is not a "monad" or a "real," he is not a "soul" created by a God all in a moment and all of a piece; the individual is the historical situation of the universal spirit at every instant of time, and, therefore, the sum of the habits due to the historical situations. Those modes of conceiving and talking of one and the same individual in two different situations, or of two different individuals in the same situation, are to be avoided, because individual and situation are all one. But when the individual has been thus defined, it remains none the less true that each individual must direct his life according to pre-existing habits and personal dispositions, and thus we discover the true meaning of the mythologies and religions that have been mentioned, and the struggles to find the suitable employment can be expressed with the words that religion has taught us when we were children: the "vocation" and the special "mission" that is allotted to us in life, until the last giving of accounts and the words of dismissal and repose: Nunc dimitte servum tuum, Domine! We are the children of that Reality which generates us and knows more than we, the Reality of which religions have caught a glimpse and called it God, father, and eternal wisdom.

Misunderstandings as to the rights of individuality. Evil individuality.

The affirmation of the rights that belong to individuality in the practical field has several times assumed and still assumes (in our time, more than in the past, owing to materialism and naturalism) a form, no longer symbolical and mystical, but wrong and irrational, that it is desirable to remark upon here, always in order to avoid possible equivoques. Indeed many look upon the respect due to their own beings as due to their caprice, that is to say, to what is on the contrary the negation of being: the right of the individual as the right to commit follies, or to a disaggregate individuality. The declared necessity of temperament for character is exchanged for admiration of temperament considered in itself, which, as such, is neither admirable nor blameworthy; but when separated from character becomes vice and folly. Hence the admiration that has even become a literary fashion, for the dissolute, for the violent, for homicides, for the criminals of the public prisons, illustrated by a few courageous and energetic souls among them, whereas they are as a rule weak, vile, and turbid.

False doctrines as to the connection of virtues and vices.

Various theories are also erroneous, in which it has been sought to establish the relation between the passions and the will, temperament and character, passions and temperament being understood as vicious passions and evil temperament; that is, not in themselves, but in their antithesis to the rational will: hence the vain and paradoxical attempts to join together and harmonize virtue and vice. Thus it has been maintained that in certain vices are foreshadowed the virtues which will or can be developed from them; for instance, military valour in ferocity, industrial capacity in greed; whereas ferocity and greed are wilful acts and contradictions incapable of generating any virtue, as is seen in the customary cowardice of the ferocious and the ineptitude of the greedy and covetous. Such a connection of virtues and vices has on other occasions been presented as a mixture or co-temperament, and it has been affirmed that the vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as do poisons into the composition of medicines. Finally, virtue and vice have been placed in causal relation, and the causes of civil progress have been found in human vices. But the vices, as they are not the antecedents, so are they neither the ingredients nor the causes of the virtues. These are strength, those the lack of strength. It is generally affirmed that in every individual the virtues are accompanied by their correlative vices, but if this possess some approximate value as an empirical observation, strictly speaking it has none, because men can be conceived and are actually found, whose virtue, far from yielding to excesses and to vices, is eurythmic and temperate. But perhaps that common saying aims at something else that it fails of explaining well; namely, that every power has its impotence and every individual his limit; but this does not mean vice or defect; it is nothing but the tautological affirmation that the part is not the whole and the individual not the universal.

The universal in the individual and education.

But if the individual do not exhaust the universal, the universal lives in individuals; Reality in each of its particular manifestations. Therefore the affirmation of the right of individuality does not deny the right of universality; or it denies it only in that abstract form in which, to tell the truth, it is by itself denied. The individual is under the obligation to seek himself, but in order to do this he has also the obligation of cultivating himself as man in universal. A school that represented simply a cultivation of individual aptitudes, would be a training, not an education, a manufactory of utensils, not a nursery of spiritual and creative activities. The true specialism is universalism, and inversely, which means that if the universal do not act without specializing itself, yet specialization is not really specialization if it do not contain universality. If the two terms that are by nature indissoluble be divided, there remains only fruitless generalization or stupid particularization, and if our times have sinned in this latter respect, other times have sinned in the opposite. He is well-balanced who between these two forms of degeneration both knows and fills his own proper and individual mission so perfectly that he fulfils at the same time with it and through it the universal mission of man.

V.

DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRESS

Multiplicity and unity: development.

The demonstration hitherto developed, that evil is negativity or contradiction, and that this contradiction takes place owing to the multiplicity of the desires in respect to the singleness of character of the volitional act, gives rise to the further question: Why should there be such a multiplicity, concurrent with the demand for unity, and thus be generated strife and contradiction? Here it would be fitting to observe that we must have filled our mouths very uselessly for a century with the word evolution, if such a question as this be renewed, or we remain bewildered and embarrassed before it. For the reason of that fact, which seems without a reason, is to be found precisely in the concept of "evolution." This concept resumes most ancient views, and has been substituted in modern times for that of an immovable Reality, of a God who exists perfect and satisfied in himself, and creates a world for his own transitory pleasure; or for a complex of beings, eternally the same, with variations that are only apparent. The concept of evolution has entered so profoundly into the blood and bones of modern man that even those repeat it who would be incapable of analyzing and understanding it; even the least acute of all, the positivist philosophers who like to call themselves "philosophers of evolution."

Becoming as synthesis of being and not-being.

But before it acquired, as a vague and confused formula, so great a publicity as quite to amount to popularity, a philosopher of genius had analyzed and synthetized it, induced and deduced it in an unsurpassable manner, with the speculative formula of reality as becoming; that is, as synthesis of being and not-being, being and not-being being thus unthinkable separately, and only thinkable in their living connection, which is becoming and development (evolution). Reality is development, that is, infinite possibility that passes into infinite actuality and from the multiplicity of every instant takes refuge in the one, to break forth anew in the multiple and produce the new unity. The inquiry into the dialectic of the volitional act enters in this way into the very heart of reality. In order to deny multiplicity, contradiction, evil and not-being, it would be necessary to deny at the same time unity, coherence, good and being.

Nature as becoming. Its resolution in the spirit.

But if by the theory that has been recorded we have explained the necessity of evil for good, or the necessity of the not necessary for the necessary in the volitional act of man, the identification of the volitional act, which is man's, with reality which is of the universal whole, might seem to be too audacious. For (it will be said) the complex of other beings, that we are wont to separate from the complex of human beings and to oppose to it as nature, either is motionless and does not develop, or develops without any consciousness of good and evil, of pleasure and pain, of value and disvalue. Both theses have been maintained and nature has been represented, now as without history, now as developing itself in an unconscious or mechanical manner. But the contradictions and absurdities of both theses have been together perceived. "Motionless beings" is a phrase without meaning, to such a degree that even empirical science has everywhere pushed its way into history, and has talked of the evolution of animals and vegetables, of the chemical elements, and even of a history of light and heat. The other expression, "unconscious beings," is not less empty, because being and activity are not otherwise conceivable save in the way that we know our being, which is consciousness; and although empirical science certainly points to more and more rudimentary and tenuous forms of consciousness in beings, always differently individualized, yet it has never been able to demonstrate the absolutely unconscious. If so-called nature be, it develops, and if it develop, cannot do so without some consciousness. This deduction is not a matter of conjecture, but a logical and irrefutable consequence. What is there, then, that persists in men's souls, as an obstacle to the acceptance of this consequence, in accordance with the profound belief of humanity in a community of all beings with one another and with the Whole, as manifested in philosophies and in religions, in the speculations of the learned and in ingenuous popular beliefs? A scholastic prejudice, an idol of the intellect, the hypostasis of that concept of "nature" that Logic has taught us is nothing but the abstract, mechanicizing, classifying function of the human spirit; a prejudice arising from the substitution of the naturalistic method for reality, by which a function is changed and materialized into a group of beings. Those idealists were also slaves of the error of a like hypostasis, who, though they thought everything as an activity of the spirit, yet stopped when face to face with Nature, making of it an inferior grade of the Spirit, or, metaphorically, a spirit alienated from itself, an unconscious; consciousness, a petrified thought, and creating for it a special philosophy (as though all the other did not suffice), entitled precisely, Philosophy of nature. But modern thought knows henceforth how man creates for his use that skeleton or mannequin of an immobile, external mechanical nature, and he is no longer permitted to fall back into equivoque and substitute this for entity or for a complex of entities. Nor should he find any difficulty in discovering everywhere activity, development, consciousness, with its antitheses of good and evil, of joy and sorrow. Certainly the stars do not smile, nor is the moon pale for sorrow: these are images of the poets. Certainly animals and trees do not reason like men; this, when it is not poetry, is gross anthropomorphism. But nature, in her intimate self, longs for the good and abhors the evil, she is all wet with tears and all a-shiver for joy; strife and victory is everywhere and in every moment of universal life.

Optimism and pessimism; critique.

This conception of reality, which recognizes the indissoluble link between good and evil, is itself beyond good and evil, and consequently surpasses the visual angles of optimism and pessimism—of optimism that does not discover the evil in life and posits it as illusion, or only as a very small and contingent element, or hopes for a future life (on earth or in heaven) in which evil will be suppressed; and of pessimism, that sees nothing but evil and makes of the world an infinite and eternal spasm of pain, that rends itself internally and generates nothing. It confronts the first with the fact that evil is truly the original sin of reality, ineliminable so long as reality exists, and therefore absolutely ineliminable as a category: the second, with the other category the good, equally ineliminable, for without it evil could not be. And it is easy to show how the optimist declares himself a pessimist, the pessimist an optimist, out of their own mouths. The setting free from individuality and from will, which the pessimist proposes as a radical remedy, is the remedy that reality itself applies at every moment, for we free ourselves from the contradiction of individuality and of wilfulness by the affirmation of the rational will, with which the same pessimist cannot dispense, for the effectuation of his programme of ascesis or of suicide, which, according as it is understood, is either not a programme, or a programme altogether capricious and without universal value. In truth, there is no need to oppose a eulogy of Life with a eulogy of Death, since the eulogy of Life is also a eulogy of Death; for how could we live, if we did not die at every instant?

Dialectic optimism.

The dialectic conception of reality as development, that is, as a synthesis of being and not-being, can certainly be termed optimistic, but in a very different signification to that of abstract optimism. The synthesis is the thesis enriched with its antithesis, and the thesis is the good, being, not the bad or not-being. But who will wish seriously to oppose this logical consequence? Is it not a fact that men hope and live, although in the midst of their sorrows? Is it not a fact that the world is not ended and does not appear to have any intention of ending? And how would that be possible, if the moment of the good did not prevail, just because the positive prevails upon the negative and Life constantly triumphs over Death?

Concept of cosmic progress.

This continuous triumph of Life over Death constitutes cosmic progress. Progress, from the point of view whence we have hitherto regarded it, that of individualized activity, is identical with activity; it is the unfolding of this upon passivity. Every volitional act, like every theoretical act, is therefore to be considered in itself, that is, only in relation to the given situation from which it breaks forth. In every new situation the individual begins his life all over again. But from the cosmic point of view, at which we now place ourselves, reality shows itself as a continuous growing upon itself; nor is a real regress ever conceivable, because evil being that which is not, is irreal, and that which is is always and only the good. The real is always rational, and the rational is always real. Cosmic progress, then, is itself also the object of affirmation, not problematic, but apodictic.

Objections and critique of them.

The difficulties that can be and are opposed to this thesis all arise from the confusion of the truly rational with that which is falsely so called, between the true real and that which improperly assumes this name, that is, between the real and the unreal. Thus will be remembered the instance of the end of the great Græco-Roman civilization, without adequate parallel in universal history, followed by the return of barbarism in the Middle Ages; or the common example of the shipwreck of noblest enterprises; or (to remain in the field that more nearly interests us) the philosophic decadence, owing to which, a mean positivism was able to follow the idealism of the beginning of the nineteenth century, which stands to the former as the eloquence of an Attic orator to the stuttering of an ignorant school-boy. Did the Middle Age, then, represent an advance upon that Rome, whose memory lingered in the fancy as an image of lost dignity during that same Middle Age? Was the victory of European reaction over the citizen civilization of the Revolution and of the Empire progress? and in Lombardy, the new Austrian domination following upon the Kingdom of Italy? or in the Neapolitan provinces the Bourbon restoration after the Republic of 1799 and the French Decanate? Was Comte an advance upon Kant, Herbert Spencer upon Hegel? But different points of view are confused under the same name in these questions, and, therefore, we do not succeed in immediately arranging those facts beneath the principle that has been established. It is therefore necessary to analyze. It will then be immediately seen that ancient civilization, in what it possessed of truly real, did not die, but was transmitted as thought, institutions, and even as acquired aptitudes; hence it kept reappearing in the course of the centuries and still keeps reappearing: it certainly died in what it had of unreal, that is to say, in its contradictions, for instance, in its incapacity to find political and economic forms answering to the changed conditions of spirits. In like manner, the Middle Age, which was evidently in part progress, because it solved problems left unsolved by the preceding civilization, posed others that it did not solve and that were solved in the succeeding centuries; but if the posing of these new problems, which, while destroying the old, failed to substitute provisionally anything, was apparently not progress, neither was it regress, but the beginning of new progress. The same is to be said of precursors, conquered in their time, but conquerors in history, of the restorations and reactions that are so only in name, because they contain in themselves that with which they contend, if for no other reason, then for the very reason that they contend: of heroes and initiators, who were conquered and martyrized, yet knew that they were triumphing and did triumph in dying; the cross and the pyre will become symbols of victory: in hoc signo vinces. And finally, if the positivism of the second half of the nineteenth century seem as a whole so greatly inferior to idealism, that comes from its not being philosophy at all, but a hybrid jumble of natural sciences and metaphysic, thus intensifying an error that already existed in germ in idealism, and fecundating the problem for a better solution. Many philosophers living to-day are inferior to Socrates, because they have not even risen to the knowledge of the concept; but those who in our day have attained to the level of Socrates, are superior to him, because besides his thought they contain in themselves something that Socrates had not; and those philosophers who are logically on a level with Protagoras, surpass him, just because they are the Protagorases of the twentieth century. There is therefore never real regression in history; but only contradictions that follow upon solutions given, and prepare new ones.

Individuals and History.

The solutions, once attained, are acquired for ever; the problems that have once been solved, do not again occur, or, which is the same thing, they recur in a different way to those of the past. The web of History is composed of such labours, to which all individuals collaborate; but it is not the work and cannot be the purpose of any of them in particular, because each one is exclusively intent on his particular work, and only in rem suam agere, does he also do the business of the world. History is happening, which, as has been seen, is not to be judged practically, because it always transcends individuals, and to these and not to history is the practical judgment applicable. The judgment of History is in the very fact of its existence: its rationality is in its reality.

Fate, Fortune, and Providence.

This historical web, which is and is not the work of individuals, constitutes, as has been said, the work of the universal Spirit, of which individuals are manifestations and instruments. In this way are implicitly excluded those views which attribute the course of things to Fate, to Fortune, or to Chance, that is, to mechanism or caprice, both of them insufficient and one-sided, like determinism and free will, each one invoking the other when it becomes aware of its own impotence. The idea of mechanical origin, of an evolution that takes place by the addition of very minute elements, is now being abandoned, even for that fragment of history called History of Nature (the only true and possible Philosophy of Nature), in which is beginning to reappear the theory of successive crises and revolution, and the idea of freedom, whose creations are not to be measured or limited mathematically. But the supreme rationality that guides the course of history, should not, on the other hand, be conceived as the work of a transcendent Intelligence or Providence, as is the case in religious and semi-fanciful thought, which does not possess other value than that of a confused presentiment of the truth. If History be rationality, then a Providence certainly directs it; but of such a kind as becomes actual in individuals, and acts, not on, but in them. This affirmation of Providence is not conjecture or faith, but evidence of reason. Who would feel in him the strength of life without such intimate persuasion? Whence could he draw resignation in sorrow, encouragement to endure? Surely what the religious man says, with the words "Let us leave it in God's hands," is said also by the man of reason with those other words: "Courage, and forward"?

The infinity of progress and mystery.

The Spirit, which is infinite possibility passing into infinite actuality, has drawn and draws at every moment the cosmos from chaos, has collected diffused life into the concentrated life of the organ, has achieved the passage from animal to human life, has created and creates modes of life ever more lofty. The work of the Spirit is not finished and never will be finished. Our yearning for something higher is not vain. The very yearning, the infinity of our desire, is proof of the infinity of that progress. The plant dreams of the animal, the animal of man, man of superman; for this, too, is a reality, if it be reality that with every historical movement man surpasses himself. The time will come when the great deeds and the great works now our memory and our boast will be forgotten, as we have forgotten the works and the deeds, no less great, of those beings of supreme genius who created what we call human life and seem to us now to have been savages of the lowest grade, almost men-monkeys. They will be forgotten, for the documents of progress is in forgetting; that is, in the fact being entirely absorbed into the new fact, in which, and not in itself, it has value. But we cannot know what the future states of Reality will be, in their determined physiognomy and succession, owing to the "dignity" established in the Philosophy of the practical, by which the knowledge of the action and of the deed follows and does not precede the action and the deed. Mystery is just the infinity of evolution: were this not so, that concept would not arise in the mind of man, nor would it be possible to abuse it, as it has been abused by being transported out of its place, that is to say, into the consciousness of itself, which the spiritual activity should have and has to the fullest degree, that is, the consciousness of its eternal categories.

Illegitimate transportation of the concept of mystery from history to philosophy.

The neglect of the moment of mystery is the true reason of the error known as the Philosophy of history, which undertakes to portray the plan of Providence and to determine the formula of progress. In this attempt (when it does not affirm mere philosophemes, as has very often happened), it makes the vain effort to enclose the infinite in the finite and capriciously to decree concluded that evolution which the universal Spirit itself cannot conclude, for it would thus come to deny itself. In Logic that error has been gnoseologically defined as the pretension of treating the individual as though it were the universal, making the universal individual; here it is to be defined in other words as the pretension of treating the finite as though it were the infinite, of making the infinite finite.

Confirmation of the impossibility of a Philosophy of history.

But the unjustified transportation of the concept of mystery from history, where it indicates the future that the past prepares and does not know, into philosophy, causes to be posited as mysteries which give rise to probabilities and conjectures, problems that consist of philosophical terms, and should therefore be philosophically solved. But if the infinite progress and the infinite perfectibility of man is to be affirmed, although we do not know the concrete forms that progress and perfectibility will assume (not knowing them, because now it imports not to know, but to do them), then there is no meaning in positing as a mystery the immortality of the individual soul, or the existence of God; for these are not facts that may or may not happen sooner or later, but concepts that must be proved to be in themselves thinkable and not contradictory, or to determine in what form they are thinkable and not contradictory. Their thinkability will indeed be a mystery, but of the kind that it is a duty to make clear, because synonymous with obscurity or mental confusion. What has so far been demonstrated has been their unthinkability in the traditional form. Nor is it true that they correspond to profound demands of the human soul. Man does not seek a God external to himself and almost a despot, who commands and benefits him capriciously; nor does he aspire to an immortality of insipid ease: but he seeks for that God which he has in himself, and aspires to that activity, which is both Life and Death.

VI

TWO ELUCIDATIONS RELATING TO HISTORIC AND ÆSTHETIC

The relation of desires and actions; and two problems of Historic and of Æsthetic.

From the consideration of the practical activity in its dialectic, and in particular from the theory relating to desire and to action, shines forth, if we mistake not, the full light that has hitherto perhaps been invoked in vain upon certain capital points of Historic and Æsthetic, which, when treating of those disciplines, we were obliged either hardly to touch upon, or to develop in a manner altogether inadequate. The reason of this was that an adequate development, to be convincing, demanded as presupposition, a minute exposition as to the nature, the relations and the constitution of the practical activity, all of them things that could not be treated incidentally.

History and art.

History or historical narrative is, as we know, very closely related to art, in contradistinction to the abstract sciences, since both art and history do not construct concepts of class, but represent concrete and individuated facts. History, however, is not art pure and simple, but is distinguished from it, because artistic representation is in it continually illuminated with the critical distinction between the real and the possible, what has happened and what has been imagined, the existing and the inexisting, with the consequent determinations connected with them, as to this or that particular mode of reality, event, and existence, that have taken place. In every historical narrative are always to be found, understood or implied, the affirmations that the narrative is real, that a different narrative would be imaginary, that the reality of the event in question properly belongs to this or that concept of politics, rights, war, diplomacy, economy, and so on. All this is quite absent from art, which is by nature ingenuous and free of critical discernment; so much so, that hardly have its representations become objects of reflection, than they are dissolved as art, to reappear with a changed appearance (no longer youthful, but virile or senile), as history.

The concept of existentiality in history.

But if this distinction between art and history be precisely determined gnoseologically, when it has been said that in history the predicate of existentiality is added to mere representation (and, therefore, all the other predicates connected with the case, referring to the various forms of existence), and that therefore, the representative and artistic form of history contains in itself rational and philosophical method as precedent, yet there always remains the ulterior philosophical problem: What is the origin of that predicate of reality or existentiality on which all the others lean? We have already demonstrated that it was altogether inadmissible to derive it from a mysterious faculty called Faith, or to consider it as the apprehension of something extraneous to the spirit in universal, as a datum or position. And we also stated that if the spirit recognize its existence, yet it cannot attain to the criterion elsewhere than from itself; which criterion was nothing but the first reflection of the spirit upon the practical activity itself, giving rise to the duplication of reality that has happened and reality only desired, or of reality and irreality, of existing and inexisting.

Its origin in the Philosophy of the practical: action and the existing, desires and the unexisting.

All this now becomes a simple consequence of the connection that has been made clear between desire and action. The cognoscitive spirit, when it apprehends and ideally remakes this connection, has, in enunciating it, also enunciated for the first time the couples of terms that we have already mentioned and that variously express the criterion of existence. To distinguish desires from actions is tantamount to distinguishing the unreal from the real, the existing from the unexisting, and to think the practical act is tantamount to thinking the concept of existence and of effectual reality. For the determination of the relation between desire and action, and only for that, the criterion of existence is not necessary, because that relation is itself that criterion. To say "this is a desire" means, "this does not exist"; to say "this is an action" means, "this exists." The desires are possibility; the resolutive and volitional act or action, is actuality. And it is also evident that existent and inexistent are not separable, as though the inexistent were heterogeneous to the existent; the inexistent exists in its way, as possibility is possible reality; the phantasm exists in the fancy and desire in the spirit that desires. Thus the posing of the one term is also the posing of the other, as correlative. What is repugnant and contradictory is the introduction of the one term into the other. This takes place, for instance, when in narrating the history, reality that has happened is mingled as one single thing with reality dreamed of or desired, and history is turned into legend.

History as distinction between actions and desires, and art as indistinction.

It can be said that history always represents actions, and in this is implicit that it represents at the same time also desires, but only in so far as it distinguishes them from actions: history, therefore, is perception and memory of perception, and in it fancies and imaginations are also perceived as such and arranged in their place. And it would also be possible to say that art represents only desires, and is therefore all fancy and never perception, all possible reality and never effectual reality. But since to art is wanting the distinctive criterion between desires and actions, it in truth represents actions as desires and desires as actions, the real as possible, and the possible as real; hence it would be more correct to say that art is on the near side of the possible and the real, it is pure of these distinctions, and is therefore pure imagination or pure intuition. Desires and actions are, we know, of the same stuff, and art assumes that stuff just as it is, careless of the new elaboration that it will receive in an ulterior grade of the spirit, which is indeed impossible without that first and merely fantastic elaboration. Likewise when art takes possession of historical material, it removes from it just the historical character, the critical elements, and by this very fact reduces it once more to mere intuition.

The purely fantastic and the imaginary.

It must further be noted that the purely fantastic, which is the representation of a desire, must not be confounded with the mechanical combination of images, that can be made idly, for amusement, or for practical ends. This operation (analogous to that of the intellect upon the pure concepts and representations, when it arbitrarily combines them in the pseudo-concepts), is secondary and derivative; and it presupposes the first, which provides it with the material that it cuts up and combines. Nothing is more extraneous and repugnant to poetry than this artificial imagining, precisely because it is external and repugnant to reality. Hence his would be a vain objection who should coldly and capriciously combine the most different images and ask for an explanation of the whole, with desire as the fundamental principle. Such combinations as these, since they do not belong to poetry, are void of real psychical content.

Art as lyrical or representation of feelings.

But if the relation between desire and action be the ultimate reason for the distinction between art and history, and this distinction be the theoretical reflection of that real relation, the conception of art as representation of volitional facts, taken in their quite general and indeterminate nature, in which desire is as action and action as desire, reveals why art affirms itself as representation of feeling, and why a work of art does not seem to possess and does not possess value, save from its lyrical character and from the imprint of the artist's personality. The work of art that reasons or instructs as to things that have happened, and finds a substitute for intimate and lyrical connections in historical reasonings and connections, is justly and universally condemned as cold and ineffectual. We do not ask the artist for a philosophical system nor for a relation of facts (if all this is to be found in his work it is per accidens), but for a dream of his own, for nothing but the expression of a world desired or abhorred, or partly desired and partly abhorred. If he make us live again in this dream the rapture of joy or the incubus of terror, in solemnity or in humility, in tragedy or in laughter, that suffices. Facts and concepts, and the question as to the metaphysical constitution of reality and how it has been developed in time, are all things that we shall ask of others.

Identity of ingenuous reality and feeling.

It may seem that in this way the field of art has been much restricted and the ingenuous representation of the real excluded from it. But this ingenuous representation is just the representation of reality as dream. For reality is nothing (as we henceforth know) than becoming, possibility that passes into actuality, desire that becomes action, from which desire springs forth again unsatiated. The artist who represents it ingenuously, produces the lyric for this very reason. For him there is no necessity to reach it from without, as a new element: if he do this, he is a bad artist, and will be blamed as a hunter of emotions, emphatic, convulsive, wearisomely sentimental, forcedly jocose, an introducer of his own caprice into the coherence of the work, a confounder of his empirical with his artistic personality, which exists in the empirical individual, but is not equivalent to it. The feeling that the true artist portrays is that of things, lacrymae rerum; and by the identity of feeling and volition, of volition and reality already demonstrated in the Philosophy of the practical, things are themselves that feeling. The characteristic that Schelling and Schopenhauer noted in music, of reproducing, not indeed the ideas, but the ideal rhythm of the universe, and of objectifying the will itself, belongs equally to all the other forms of art, because it is the essence itself of Art, or of pure intuition.

Artists and the will.

An obvious confirmation of this theory is also the empirical observation often made, that the men who lose themselves in desires are rather poets than men of action, dreamers rather than actors; and in respect to this, that poets who seem to have the soul overflowing with energetic plans, magnanimous loves, and fierce hatreds are the most incapable in the field of action, and the worst of captains in practical struggles; because those plans, those loves and hates, are not will, but desires, and desires already weakened as such, because they are no longer in process of volitional synthetization, but have become the objects of contemplation and of dream. He who reads the biographies of artists, or has dealings with artists in daily life, almost always has the impression that their gusts of passion are nothing but poetry about to break forth, as a green bud that opens and breaks the brown sheath. And if this process be painful, that is because every travail of birth is painful. One sees, indeed, how everything generally ends par des chansons. A fine poem and the sufferer is calm again.

Actions and myths.

This also explains why individual actions and practical collective movements are accompanied with hopes, beliefs, and myths. These have no logical or historical truth, but it is on the other hand impossible to criticize them, because they are not error, but fantastic projection of the state of soul of individuals and groups of individuals in action, and testify to the existence of desires ready to transform themselves into will and action. Utopias are poetry, they are not practical acts; but beneath that poetry there is always the reality of a desire that is a factor of future history. Hence it also happens that poets are thought of as seers, when the utopia of to-day becomes the reality of the morrow. The Utopian and semi-poetic Address of the Italian patriots to the Directory of June 18, 1799,[1] the not less Utopian Proclamation of Rimini of 1815, the song of Manzoni, in which rang out the fateful verse,

We shall not be free if we are not one,

will become, for the Italians of 1860, effective action and historical event.

Art as the pure representation of becoming and the artistic form of thought.

Pure intuition, ingenuous representation of reality, representation of feeling, lyricism and personal intonation, are then all equivalent formulæ, all of them definitions of the æsthetic activity and of art. And it would be superfluous to repeat that art thus characterized remains the concrete form of the superior theoretical grades of the spirit. In fact, logical thought or concept is also volition, owing to the unity of the spirit, and the representation of such volition is the logos made flesh, the concept that incorporates itself in language, palpitating with the drama of its becoming. What word of man is there that is not personally and lyrically coloured, whether he communicate the truth of science or narrate the incidents of life? And how could we deny a place among the dramas that agitate human life and art portrays, to that drama of dramas, which is the drama of thought and of the historical comprehension of the real?

VII

HISTORICAL ANNOTATIONS

The problem of freedom.

I. For the reasons stated in their place, a history of the concept of freedom would end by becoming almost a general history of philosophy. Denied in different ways in the mechanistic and deterministic conceptions (from the Stoics to Spinoza), and in the theological and arbitraristic (from Epicurus to St. Augustine and the mystics), that concept afterwards continually assumed a more and more conciliatory form; an indication that the question must be put in an altogether different way. This movement culminated in the Kantian theory, in which freedom, defended against the psychologists, is withdrawn from natural causality and affirmed a priori, as causality by means of freedom; but, at the same time, Kant did not succeed in fully justifying it, owing to his failure in the solution of the antitheses, the defect of the Kantian philosophy, which never really became a system. The embarrassments and absurdities to which the unsolved antithesis between liberty and causality gives rise, are sufficiently exemplified in a proposition to be found in the Critique of Practical Reason: "It would be possible to foresee what man will do in the future, if we possessed all the facts; yet he would be perfectly free."[1] But notwithstanding these contradictions and embarrassments, the energetic affirmation of the principle of freedom by Kant (which had an altogether special certitude in Kant, in respect to the other two postulates of the practical reason, God and immortality, from which in this respect it was distinguished) helped to make prevalent the conviction of the impossibility of eliminating that concept or of escaping from it, and made of it the field of battle, where the fortunes of philosophy were decided. The problem of the freedom of willing is really solved or near to a solution, in those philosophies which do not fatigue themselves with it as a particular problem, but treat of it as something to be understood of itself, provided there be a non-mechanistic conception of reality, such as would not need special defence. This happens, not only with sentimentalists and mystics such as Jacobi and Schleiermacher, but also and above all in the Hegelian philosophy. Perhaps no philosopher has been less occupied with the problem of liberty than Hegel, just because he was always occupied with it. The will is free (he contents himself with saying); freedom is the fundamental determination of the will, as gravity is of matter; thus as gravity is matter itself, so is freedom the will. Hegel consequently saw true in the contest between arbitrarism and determinism, recognizing in determinism the merit of having given its value to the content, the datum, in opposition to the certainty of abstract auto-determination, so that freedom understood as free will is considered to be illusion. Free will is both determined and indetermined.[2] But how Hegel could conciliate this theory of freedom with the mechanistic concept of nature that persists in him is another question. His failure to attain to this conciliation was perhaps among the reasons that made his profound solution of the antithesis between determinism and indeterminism seem a vain playing with words.

After Hegel, a return was made to the Kantian doctrine, variously modified, in which is posited, now a double causality, now a composition of diverging forces, now a double point of view, now two worlds, the one included in the other and dominated, the one by the principle of the conservation of energy, the other by that of increase. Such contradictory doctrines are to be found for example in Lotze and Wundt, to the latter of whom belongs the formula that the causal explanation is certainly to be applied to spiritual facts, but a parte post, not a parte ante[3] The philosophy of Bergson represents in a certain way a return to the sound idealistic view, which declares that the dilemma of determinism and indeterminism is surpassed.[4]

The doctrine of evil.

II. The conception of the relation between bad and good, as reality opposed to reality, is mythological and religious (Parseeism, Manichæism, Jewish-Christian doctrine of the devil, etc.). But evil had already begun to reveal itself to the philosophical reflection of the ancients as the unreal, the not being; and this is explicitly affirmed in Neoplatonism. It was not, however, possible to understand this function of unreality, real in its way, without a general dialectical conception, which became very slowly mature. Without a dialectic conception, evil, conceived as unreality, becomes mere illusion, not so much a moment of the real as an equivocation of man philosophizing. This is clearly to be seen in Spinoza, who opposes the full laws of reality to the narrow laws of human nature, saying: Quidquid nobis in natura ridiculum, absurdum aut malum videtur, id inde venit quod res tantum ex parte novimus, totiusque naturae ordinem et cohaerentium maxima ex parte ignoramus, et quod omnia ex usu nostrae rationis dirigi volumus, cum tamen id, quod malum esse dictat, non malum sit respectu ordinis et legum universae naturae; sed tantum solius nostrae naturae legum respectu. For indeed, if evil, error and wickedness were something that had essence, God, who is the cause of all that has essence (continues Spinoza), would also be the cause of evil, of error, and of wickedness. But this is not so, because evil is nothing real. Neronis matricidium (he observes) quatenus aliquid positivum comprehendebat, scelus non erat: nam facinus externum fecit, simulque intentionem ad trucidendam matrem Orestes habuit, et tamen, saltem ita uti Nero, non accusatur. Quodnam ergo Neronis scelus? Non aliud quam quod hoc facinore ostendit se ingratum, immisericordem ac inobedientem esse. Certum autem est, nihil horum aliquid essentiae exprimere, et idcirco Deum eorum non fuisse catisam, licet causa actus et intentionis Neronis fuerit[5] But Spinoza was not able to determine in what sense Nero was really ungrateful, implacable, and disobedient, nor in what way such a judgment could be justified, owing to his idea of Substance, not as subject, spirit, activity, but as cause.

Kant did not succeed in understanding the nature of evil; for him good and evil were "the categories of freedom,"[6] and the view of Fichte who makes the radical evil to be vis inertiae, laziness (Trägheit,) which is in nature and in man as nature,[7] represents progress in respect to the Kantian position. But only with the Hegelian dialectical view of evil, understood as negation, is evil at the same time given its right place; and its unreality, contradiction, which is no longer the product of illusion of thought, but of things themselves, in intimate contradiction with one another, if it be a blemish, is shown to be the blemish, not of human thought, but of reality.[8]

Decision and freedom.

III. Free will, too, is not considered as a quality and character of complete liberty, but as its negation, will as contradiction, in the Hegelian philosophy. It was preceded in this respect, not only by Kant, but also by Descartes. Descartes wrote of the decision of indifference: Cette indifférence que je sens lorsque je ne suis point porté vers un côté plutôt que vers un autre par le poids d'aucune raison est le plus bas degré de ma liberté, et fait plutôt paraître un défaut dans la connaissance qu'une perfection dans la volonté: car si je connaissais toujours clairement ce qui est vrai et ce qui est bon, je ne serais jamais en peine de délibérer quel jugement et quel choix je devrais faire; et ainsi je serais entièrement libre, sans jamais être indifférent.[9]

Among the false formulæ of the freedom of choice can be mentioned that of Rosmini, who calls it bilateral freedom, or that of performing or not performing a given action.[10] But since the spirit cannot be reduced to complete passivity, not to perform a given action is equivalent to performing a different one; and if this other action that presents itself before us be also not willed by us, then it will be another, and so on. Thus it is not a question of bilaterality, but of multiplicity of tendencies: not of the choice between two volitions, but of the synthesis of many appetites in one, which is the will or freedom.

Conscience and responsibility

We may mention the disputes that have been preserved in the Memorabilia as to the greater responsibility of him who knows more (or wills more), as compared with him who knows less (or wills less), as to whether he that acts voluntarily be more unjust than he who acts involuntarily (ὁ ἑκὼν ἤ ὁ ἄκων). In this connection it is to be observed that he who voluntarily does not write or read well is certainly more grammatical than he who reads and writes ill through ignorance; and therefore that he who commits injustice while knowing what is just, is more just than he who commits it because he does not know what is just; and that he is better, who says what is false when he knows what is true, than he who says what is false, not knowing what is true. The dispute leads to the celebration of knowledge of self, or, as we should say, of knowing and possessing oneself.[11]

These thoughts are discussed anew in the Hippias minor, where the multiple difficulties are placed in relief and a conclusion reached that does not even satisfy those who propose it.[12] It is henceforward clear that the question must be solved in the sense that he who is conscious of sinning is certainly a sinner, whereas he who is not conscious of so doing, does not sin at all; but this being even incapable of sinning is in itself a sin, and places the man who is in such a condition yet a degree lower. In the polemic of Pascal with the Jesuits—who maintained that in order to sin it was necessary to be conscious of one's own infirmity and of the suitable remedy, the wish to be healed and to ask it of God—the Jesuits were theoretically on the side of reason. Croira-t-on, sur votre parole (wrote Pascal), que ceux qui sont plongés dans l'avarice, dans l'impudicité, dans les blasphèmes, dans le duel, dans la vengeance, dans les vols, dans les sacrilèges, aient véritablement le désir d'embrasser la chasteté, l'humilité et les autres vertus chrétiennes? Nevertheless, it is inevitably so, if those acts of theirs are to be judged to be vices (and if they really are so). Hegel places himself on the side of Pascal, who accepts and refers to the following argument and reduction to the absurd: Ils seront tous damnés ces demi-pécheurs qui ont quelque amour pour la vertu. Mais pour ces francs-pécheurs, sans mélange, pleins et achevés, l'enfer ne les tient pas: ils ont trompé le diable à force de s'y abandonner.[13]