But we believe on the other hand that man derives from no one but himself the principles and the causes of his actions. So that whenever we see in his conduct the necessary effects of causes that have acted on his character or momentarily on his will, we cease to consider such acts as partaking of that moral value through which man"s conduct is really human and completely sundered from the instinctive impulses of the lower animal, and even more so from the behaviour of the forces of inanimate matter.
We may in certain moments deny a man"s humanity, and see in his conduct only brutal impulse, fierce cruelty, and unreasoning b.e.s.t.i.a.lity. In such moments we cannot stop either to praise or to blame him. We do not even strive to reason with him, for we feel that arguments would produce no impression on his obdurate consciousness. Only through force can we defend ourselves from his violence; against him we must use the same weapon that we rely upon in our struggle with the wild beasts and the blind forces of nature. We then become aware that our soul refuses to recognise such an individual as a man. We esteem man to be such only when we believe that we can influence him by words, by arguments that are directed to reason, which is the birthright of man, and when we are able to prevail upon those sentiments of his which, as peculiarly human, appear to be almost the foundation and the understructure of rational activity. This reason and these sentiments it must be remembered are the peculiar const.i.tuents of human personality. They cannot be imparted to man from the outside. They are in him from the very start even if only as germs which he must himself cultivate, and which will, when developed, enable him to act consciously, that is, with full knowledge of his acts. This knowledge is twofold, for he knows what he is doing, and he knows also how his actions must be judged. And so all the causes that bear on him are practically of no weight in determining a course which he will take, if he is a man, only after the approval of his own judgment. What is more natural than to avenge an insult, and to harbour hatred against an enemy? And yet from the viewpoint of morals, man is worthy of this name only in so far as he is able to resist his overpowering pa.s.sions and to release himself from that force which compels him to offset harm with more harm, and meet hatred with hatred.
He must pardon; he must love the enemy who harms him. Only when a man is capable of understanding the beauty of this pardon and of such love, only when, attracted by their beauty, he acts no longer in compliance with the force of instinctive nature, does he cease to count as a purely natural being, and lift himself to a higher level into that moral world where he must progressively exhibit his human activities. Whether man is equal to this task or not, we must demand that he satisfy this requirement before we admit him into the society of mankind. He must have in himself the strength to withstand the pressure of external forces which may act on his will, on his personality, on that inner centre from which his personality moves towards us, speaks to us, and thus affirms its existence. We make these demands on him; and as we extol him when by his deeds he shows sufficient capacity for his human role, so we also blame him every time we find him through weakness yielding to these forces. And the import of our blame is that he is responsible for not having the power which he should have had.
It is of no importance that out of compa.s.sion, or through sympathy for human frailty, we lighten or even entirely remove the burden of our censure. Our disapproval of the deficiency, even though unexpressed, remains within us side by side with the conviction that the delinquent may do a great deal, nay, must, aided by us in the future, do everything in his power to meet successfully the opposing forces of evil. We surely cannot abandon the unfortunate wretch who through moral impotence--whether it be the craven submissiveness of the coward, or the undaunted violence of the overbearing brute--commits an evil deed. We feel it our duty to watch over him and help him on the road to redemption, because of our firm conviction that he will eventually redeem himself; for he is after all a man like the rest of us, and possesses therefore within himself the source and principle of a life which will raise him from the slough in which he lies immersed.
There is, however, a pseudo-science which, on the basis of superficial and inaccurate observations, dogmatically a.s.serts that certain forms of criminality give evidence of original and irremediable moral depravity; and that therefore persons tainted with it are fatally condemned never to heed sufficiently the voice of duty and ever to yield to their perverted instinct, which presses unrestrained from the depths of their being at the slightest provocation and on the occasion of the most insignificant clash with other human beings.
This is the doctrine of the modern school of criminal anthropology which has spread throughout the world the fame of some Italian writers. Though their influence is now on the wane, their observations on the pathological nature of criminal acts have contributed to establish the need of a more humane treatment of offenders,--more humane because rational and effective.
Their doctrine falls in with a series of systems which at all times, and always for materialistic motives,--materialistic even though disguised under religious and theological robes,--have denied to man that power which we call liberty, compelling him therefore to bend down under the stress of universal determinism, and to behave as the drop that forever moves with the motion of the boundless ocean, an insignificant particle of the entire watery ma.s.s. What force intrinsic to this drop could ever stop it on the crest of the wave which hurls it forward? Man, they say, is no different from this drop: from the time of his birth to the instant of his death, hemmed in by all the beings of nature, acted upon by innumerable concurrent causes, he is pushed and dragged at every moment by the irresistible current of all the forces of the entire ma.s.s of the universe. At times he may delude himself into believing that he has lifted his consciousness out of the huge flood, that it is within his power to resist, to stop it as far as he is concerned, and to control it; that, in short, it rests with him to fashion his own destiny. But alas! this very belief, this illusion is the determined result of the forces acting upon him: it is the inevitable effect of the play of his representations,--representations which have not their origin in him, but have been impressed upon him by outside forces. So that the illusion of independence is but a mocking confirmation of the impossibility of escaping the rush of fatal currents.
I shall not here give a critical presentation of the arguments by which systems such as these have established the absence of freedom in man.
In our present need, a single remark will suffice, and will permit us, I believe, to cut the discussion short. A great German philosopher, who had conceived science and reality, which is the object of science, in such a way as to preclude the possibility of finding in reality a place for man"s freedom, noticed that freedom, in spite of all the difficulties which science encounters in accounting for it, corresponds and answers to an invincible cert.i.tude in our soul, invincible because a postulate of our moral conscience. That is to say, that whatever our scientific theories and ideas, we have a conscience which imposes a law upon us,--a law which, though not promulgated and sustained by any external force, or rather because of it, compels us in a manner which is absolute. This law is the moral law. It requires no speculative demonstration. The scrutiny of philosophers might not be helpful to it. It rises spontaneously and naturally from the intimate recesses of our spirit; and it demands from our will, from the will of the most uncouth man, an unconditional respect. What sense would there be in the word duty, if man were able to do only those things which his own nature, or worse still, nature in general, compelled him to do? The existence of duty implies a power to fulfil it. And the cert.i.tude of our moral obligations rests on the conviction that we have within us the power to meet them. We can answer the call of duty because we are free.
This consideration, important as it is, cannot however be considered as sufficient. For this moral conscience, this cert.i.tude with which the moral conscience affirms the existence of an unavoidable duty, might also be an illusion determined in us by natural causes. Nothing hinders us from thinking thus, and surely there is no contradiction implied in this explanation, which in fact because of its possibilities is offered by the philosophers of materialism.
But the need of liberty is not solely felt when we strive to conceive our moral obligations; freedom is not only the ground for existence, the _raison d"etre_ of moral law, as Kant thought--for he is the philosopher to whom I alluded above;--no! freedom is the condition of the entire life of the spirit. And the materialist who, having destroyed liberty as a condition of moral conduct, believes that he is still able to think, that his intellectual activity can proceed undisturbed after his faith in the objective value and in the reality of moral laws has been abandoned, such a materialistic thinker is totally mistaken. For without freedom, man not only is unable to speak of duty, but he cannot speak at all,--not even of his materialistic views. This is the same as saying that the negation of liberty is unthinkable.
A brief reflection will make this clearer. We speak to others or to ourselves in so far as we think, or say something or make affirmations.
Let us suppose that ideas be present to our minds (as people have sometimes imagined) without our looking at them, without our noticing them. Such ideas would have offered themselves in vain, in the same way that many material objects remain unseen before us, because we do not turn our gaze toward them. Every object of the mind, that is, every thought, can only be thought because in addition to it we too are in the mind: our mental activity is there, the ego of the thinking man, the subject which is ready to affirm the object. And thought proper consists in this affirmation of the object by the subject. Now, the subject, that is, man, must be as free in the affirmation of his thought, by which he thinks something, as he must be free in every one of his actions in order that his action be truly his, and really human. In fact, we demand of man that he give an account of his thoughts as well as of his deeds.
We evaluate not only what he does, but also what he thinks; we praise him or we disapprove of him because of his sayings, that is, his thoughts, and we call upon him to correct those thoughts which he should not entertain. In this way we indicate our conviction that the thought of each one of us is not simply a logical consequence of its premises, not an effect determined by a psychic mechanism set in motion by the universal mechanism of which our individual psyche is a part; we are convinced that thought depends upon man, upon his capacity, upon his personality, which is not controlled by any mechanical forces, nor subject to premises which he may no longer modify once he has accepted them. We are the masters of our thinking; and if the vigour of the human personality is indeed shown by the steadfast constancy whereby in practical life we pursue a hard and toilsome course toward an arduous goal, it is revealed just as much by the quickness, the readiness, the a.s.siduousness, the lack of prejudice, the love which we manifest in our search after truth.
It has therefore been said that cognition in man has moral value, and that on the other hand the will is operative in the act of the intellect. Such distinctions are dangerous. But whether we call it will or intellect, the activity which makes us what we are, by which we actualise our personality, also by thinking, it is certain that it is a conscious and discriminating activity, through no force of gravity precipitating on its object, but approaching it with selective freedom of determination. And in the manner that every action aims at the good, because it seems good, and appears in contrast with evil, so every cognition is the affirmation of what to us is or seems to be a truth in opposition to error and falseness. Without the ant.i.thesis of good to evil there would be no moral action: without the ant.i.thesis of the true to the false there would be no cognition. But the existence of this ant.i.thesis implies a choice and therefore the liberty of choosing.
Should we deny freedom, and consequently abandon man to the determinism of the causes acting upon him, we should deny the possibility of distinguishing between good and evil, between true and false. The materialist, therefore, when he rejects freedom, is compelled to affirm that the value which moral conscience attributes to goodness is devoid of any real grounds, and what is worse, that his very statement is thereby stripped of all the value of truth. For he must be inwardly convinced that what he thinks has no reason to be thought and therefore cannot be thought.
The negation of freedom leads to this _absurdum_, to this impossible thought, which is the Thought that is being thought as such, and yet does not admit of being thought. Man, in so far as he thinks, affirms his faith in freedom, and every attempt on his part to uproot this faith from his soul is but a glaring confirmation of its existence. This observation, properly grasped, is sufficient to establish human freedom on a solid ground.
Freedom, moreover, which man needs in order to be human, cannot be, as some have supposed, a relative liberty, limited and restricted by certain conditions, for conditional liberty does not differ from slavery. Here indeed is the very crux of the problem. Every one would readily admit the existence of a limited freedom, and the divergence would then be reduced to a question of degree. But the fact is that freedom must be absolute or not be at all. Matter, that is, every material object, is not free for the very reason that it is limited; whereas the spirit--every spiritual act--is free because it is infinite, and as such not relative to any thing, and therefore absolute.
Any limitation of the spirit would annihilate its liberty. The slave is such because his will is constrained within the bounds imposed upon it by the master"s volition. The human spirit is not free in the presence of nature because nature envelops it and enfolds it within narrow confines, which allow only a certain development; and this development therefore cannot be looked upon as a grant of nature but rather as a condemnation, in that it marks out boundaries which cannot be trespa.s.sed. The lower animal is not free because even if its actions seem to imply a rationality not very different from that of man, yet in reality its acts, differently from the doings of man, follow the straight line pre-established by instinct, which admits of no original power and allows no individual creation. If there is a limit, there must be something limiting and something limited; there must be a necessary relationship of one to the other, so that the thing limited can in no way free itself from the consequences of this relationship. These consequences are summed up in the impossibility of _being all_, or in other words in the necessity of remaining within limits, and to obey therefore the untransgressable laws set by one"s own nature. This necessity which binds every natural being to the laws of its own nature, this impossibility of being aught else than what is appointed by nature, to be a wolf of necessity, and of necessity to be a lamb; this is the hard lot of natural beings, this is the destiny from which man is ransomed by the power of his freedom.
The sculptor in the fervour of his inspiration, which proceeds from the image that lives in his phantasy, searches eagerly for the marble with which, as though from the very bosom of nature, he may call to life the phantom of his mind. He fails in his search, and his chisel remains, must need remain, inactive. The artist then in the utmost intensity of his creation is baffled by an external impediment, by an obstacle of nature which therefore seems to have the power of limiting his creative power. But when we consider what the artist has created in the statue itself, in this living image of marble, we find nothing that is material. The artist has transfused into the stone an idea, a sentiment, a soul, which we, under the influence of the ravishing power of artistic beauty, are able to seize to the exclusion of all material attributes; as though we no longer possessed eyes for the whiteness of the marble and were deprived of the muscle which gives us the impression of its physical weight. When we are able thus to spiritualise the statue--and we do so every time we get to know it as a work of art--then all limitations that might be imposed on the creative power of the artist disappear. For we see no longer the artist"s phantasy, and then his arm, and then his hand, his chisel, the block which he is carving; all we see is the phantasy soaring untrammelled in the infinite world of the artist, with his arm, his hand, his marble, his universe which is totally different from the universe in which the men live who quarry the marble and move it and sell it.
There is a point of view from which we see the spirit limited and enslaved by the conditions in which its life is unfolded. But there is a higher point of view to which we must ascend if we are bent on discovering our freedom. If we say, as the psychologists do, this is a soul and this is a body, here are sensations, there is motion, this is thought within us and that is the world outside of us, then we are obliged to consider the spirit as conditioned by physical happenings to which in some manner our internal determinations correspond. It is not possible to see without eyes and without the light that strikes them. It is equally impossible not to see when we have eyes and are surrounded by light, and according to the greater or lesser velocity of the luminous waves, we shall of necessity discern now one colour and now another. And the objects thus seen by us will determine our thoughts; and in turn our volitions will depend upon these thoughts; and our characters will be shaped accordingly, and we shall be this or that man in conformity with the determination of circ.u.mstances. Man, according to this conception, will be the result of time, of place, of environment, of everything except of his own self.
But there is a higher point of view than the one I have just described, and to it we must rise, if we mean to understand our nature,--this marvellous human nature which was first disclosed to our consciousness at the advent of Christianity and in the course of time made more and more manifest, until it now loudly proclaims in us our human dignity exalted above the forces of nature, and is empowered by its cognitive faculty to dominate these forces, which must bend to man"s purposes without ever blocking or obstructing his progress. Whosoever says: here is a body and there is a soul--two things, one outside of the other--such a man does not consider that these two things are two terms distinguished and differentiated by thought in the bosom of thought, that is to say, of the soul: of that soul which is truer than the other for the obvious reason that the latter thinks and therefore reveals its soul-nature by its own acts, whereas the former is the object of thinking, is a thing thought, and may therefore be a fallacious ent.i.ty, an idolon, and a simple _ens rationis_, like so many other things that are thought and are subsequently found to have no kind of subsistence.
In speaking of sensation and of motion which generates or somehow conditions sensation, we lose sight of the fact that sensation is truly enough a determination of consciousness, but in the same manner as the motion which is encountered in consciousness when the latter, in thinking, among other things thinks the displacement of objects in s.p.a.ce.
For everything is within consciousness, and no way can be devised of issuing forth from it. We say that the brain is external to consciousness, and that the cranium encloses the brain, which in turn is enveloped by s.p.a.ce luminous and airy, s.p.a.ce filled with beautiful plants and beautiful animals; yet the fact remains that brain and skull and everything else are the potential or actual object of our thinking faculty, and cannot but remain therefore within that consciousness to which for a moment we supposed them to be external. We may start thinking, keeping in mind this indestructible substance of our thought; and as we proceed from this centre in which we have placed ourselves as subjects of thinking, and advance towards an ever-receding horizon, do we ever come in sight of the point where we must pause and say: "Here my thought ends; here something begins that is other than my thought"?
Thought halts only before mystery. But even then it thinks it as mystery, and thinking it, transforms it, and then proceeds, and so never really stops.
Such being the true life of the spirit, rightly have we called it universal. At every throb it soars through the infinite, without ever encountering aught else than its own spiritual actualisations. In this life, such as we see it from the interior when we do not fantastically materialise it with our imaginations, the spirit is free because it is infinite.
Education then posits this liberty in the pupil, for it presupposes in him a susceptibility of development,--educability, as we may call it.
The learner could not possibly be educable, that is, susceptible of receiving instruction, unless he were able to think. But thinking, we have already seen, signifies freedom. And not only is freedom presupposed by the educator, but it is the very thing he is aiming at in his work. As a result of his teaching, liberty must be developed in the same manner that the capacity for thinking and all modes of spiritual activity are developed. For the development of thought is a development of reflection, a constant increase of control over our own ideas, over the content of our consciousness, over our character, over our whole being in relation to every other being. And this growth of power is what we mean when we speak of the development of our freedom. It has been said, in fact, that education consists in liberating the individual from his instincts. Surely, education is the formation of man, and when we say man we mean liberty.
Here we stumble upon our antinomy. How are we to reconcile this presupposition and this aim of the educator with his interference in the personality of the pupil? This interposition surely signifies that the disciple must not be left to himself and to his own resources; that he has to clash with something or somebody that is not his own personality.
Education implies a dualism of terms, the teacher and the learner; and it is this dualism which destroys the freedom, which sets a limit, and therefore annihilates infinity in which freedom consists. The disciple who encounters a stronger mastering will, an intellect equipped with a mult.i.tude of ideas, with an experience which forestalls his own powers of observation, and his innate zeal for investigation, sees in this more potent personality either a barrier obstructing his progress towards a goal which he spontaneously would attain; or else a goad which hurries him along the way which he would have indeed chosen of his own accord, but along which he would have liked to advance freely, calmly, joyously, as our Vittorino da Feltre would have it, and without any unwelcome compulsion. This pupil then would want to be left alone in order that he might be free, as free as G.o.d when as yet the world was not and he created it out of nothing by his joyous _fiat_, symbol of the loftiest spiritual liberty.
For these reasons we have come to believe that the most serious problem of education is the agreement between the liberty of the pupil and the authority of the teacher. Therefore great masters who meditated on the subject of education, from Rousseau to Tolstoi, have exalted the rights of liberty, but have fallen into the opposite extreme of denying the duty to authority, and have pursued in their abstractions a vague and unrealisable ideal of negative education.
But we must not cling to negatives. It should be our purpose to construct, not to destroy. The school, this glorious inheritance of human experiences, this ever-glowing hearth where the human spirit kindles and sublimates life as an object of constant criticism and of undying love, may be transformed, but cannot be destroyed. Let the school live, and let us cling to the teacher and maintain his authority, which limits the spontaneity and the liberty of the pupil. For this limitation is only apparent.
Apparent, however, when we deal with true education. For the school has for centuries been the victim of a grave injustice. People have been led to consider the cla.s.sroom as a place of confinement and of punishment, and teachers have been cruelly lashed by the scourge of ridicule cracked in the face of pedantry. Through this injustice, the school has been burdened with faults that are not its own, and teachers, genuine educators, have been confused with the pedantic drill-masters that are the negation of intelligent education and of inspired ethical discipline. In order to see whether education really limits the free activity of the pupil, we must not consider abstractly any school, which may not be after all a school. We must examine an inst.i.tution at the moment and in the act which realises its significance--when the instructor teaches and the pupils are learning. Such a moment should at least hypothetically be granted to exist.
Let us take a concrete example and consider a teacher in the act of giving lessons in Italian. Where is this something which I have called the Italian language? In the grammar, perchance? Or in the dictionary?
Yes, partly. Provided grammar can invest its rules with the life of the individual examples that together const.i.tute the expressive power of the living language; and provided the dictionary does not wither up all words in the arid abstraction of alphabetical cla.s.sification; does not hang each of them by itself as limbs torn from the living body of the speech in which they had so often resounded and to which they will be joined again in the fulness of life and expressiveness; but does instead incorporate, as every good dictionary should, complete phrases, living utterances of great authors or perhaps of that nameless many-souled writer that somewhat confusedly is called the people.
But more than in the grammar and more than in the dictionary, the word is and exists in the writers themselves. The teacher should there point it out, as he guides his pupils through the authors who were able to express most powerfully our common thoughts. To his students who are striving to learn the language--that is the writers--he reads for example the poems of Leopardi. The poet"s word, his soul hovers over the cla.s.sroom, as the master reads. It penetrates into the minds of the pupils, hushes every other sentiment, removes every other thought, and throbs within them, stirs them, arouses them. It becomes one with the soul of each pupil, which speaks to itself a language of its own, using, truly enough, the words of Leopardi, but of a Leopardi who is peculiar to each of the listeners. Under this spell, the pupil who hears the poet"s word echoing in the depths of his being, will he stop to reflect that this word is the echo of an echo? That he is under the influence of something repeated after a first utterance? Our own experience answers: No! But if any of the audience become absent-minded, if they should lose the rapt delight of poetical exaltation communicated to their soul by the teacher"s voice, and should say that the word they hear is not their own but the master"s, or rather, the poet"s, then they would commit a serious blunder. For the word they intently listen to in their soul is their own, exclusively their own. Leopardi does not impart any poesy to him who, through his love, his study, and the intensity of his feelings, is unable to live his own poetry. And Leopardi (or the teacher who reads him) is not materially external to the enraptured listener; he is his own Leopardi, such as he has been able to create for himself. The master, as St. Augustine long ago warned us, is within us.
He is within us even if we see him in front of us, away from us seated in his chair. For in so far as he is a real teacher, he is ever the object of our consciousness, surrounded and uplifted in our spirit by the reverence of our feelings and by our trustful affection. He is _our_ teacher, he is our very soul.
The dualism then is non-existent when we are educating. We do notice it before, and we are thus brought to examine the antinomy; but the difficulty is removed by the very act of education itself, by the first word that comes to the pupils" ears from the lips of the teacher. The dualism however cannot be resolved if the master"s word fails to reach the pupils" soul, but then under those circ.u.mstances there is no education. But even in such cases, if the teacher is not sluggish, if he displays a real spiritual power, the abiding existence of the barrier between the two minds proves helpful to the spiritual growth of the learner, who, because of his incoercible freedom, is impelled by the insufficiency of the master to affirm his personality with increased vigour. So that the school is a hearth of liberty, even in spite of the intentions of the teacher. A school without freedom is a lifeless inst.i.tution.
CHAPTER IV
REALISM AND IDEALISM IN THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE
We found it necessary in the previous chapter to pa.s.s from the abstract to the concrete in order to arrive at the truth. The universality of the individual was made clear when for the empirical concept of the individual, abstractly considered, we subst.i.tuted the deeper and more speculative one of the individual himself in the concreteness of his relationships. In like manner, the fundamental antinomy of education was resolved as soon as we replaced the abstract idea of the dualism of teacher and pupil, by the idea of their intrinsic, profound, unseverable unity as it gradually works out and is actualised in the process of education. We were enabled therefore to conclude that the real teacher is within the soul of the pupil, or, better still, the teacher is the pupil himself in the dynamism of his development. So that, far from limiting the autonomy of the disciple, the master, as the propulsive element of the pupil"s spontaneity, penetrates his personality, not to suppress it, but to help its impulses and facilitate its infinite development.
The same method of resorting to the concrete now leads us to the determination of a third essential element in the process of education.
We have spoken of the master, and we have spoken of the pupil,--of the latter as becoming actual as universal personality, of the former as becoming identical with this same personality. We must now take up the connecting link between the two, that is, culture. By culture we mean the content of education, the presupposed heirloom which in the course of time must pa.s.s from the teacher to the pupil. This spiritual content, in being apprehended, appears under different aspects: as erudition and information; as formation of personal capacities and training of spiritual activities; as art and science; as experience of life and as concept and ideal of existence; as simple cognition and as a norm of conduct. It includes everything that comes within the scope of teaching, and from whose value education derives its peculiar worth.
Culture, so defined, may be conceived of in two ways; and in as much as their differences are highly significant in the sphere of education as elsewhere, we must now somewhat carefully consider them.
These two ways correspond to two opposite conceptions of reality, and as such they pertain to philosophy. But men in general constantly have recourse to them, and so it happens that people frequently indulge in philosophic speculations without knowing it; and much philosophising goes on outside of the schools of the specialists, who are few compared to the great number of those who in their own way handle genuine concepts of philosophy.
Let us begin from the most obvious of these concepts, from the one which is fundamental and original to the human mind. Our whole life, if we consider the data of experience, seems to unfold itself on the substratum of a natural world, which therefore, far from depending on human life, represents the very condition of it. In order to live, to act, to produce, or in any way to exercise an influence on the external world, we must, first of all, be born. Our birth is the effect of a life which is not our life, which step by step rises and grows and spreads until it gathers all nature within itself. This nature existed before we were born, it will continue to be after we are all dead. Men draw their life from an organic and inorganic nature which had to exist in order that they might come into being. When nature will cease to provide these conditions, human life, according to this point of view, will come to an end; but nature, transformed, chilled, darkened, dead, will yet continue to be.
On this living trunk of nature our own life is grafted; animals come into existence, and among animals the human species. Each of us, as he comes into the world, finds this nature, developed, abundant, diversified in millions of forms, traversed by innumerable forces, organised up to the most highly developed structures, man included. We find this nature, and we begin to study it. We examine its parts one by one, their complexity, and the difference of their functioning. For each one of them has its peculiar way of being and of acting; it has its "laws." The aggregate of these laws, mutually corresponding, and integrating one another, const.i.tutes the natural world--reality--as it stands before us. With this external reality we strive to become acquainted; and in order that we may live in it we either adapt ourselves to it, or adapt its conditions to ourselves. In this reality too we acquire the knowledge of the needs of our organism and of the means by which they may be satisfied,--the ratio, so to speak, between natural desires and controlled resources.
We are also told that our organism is in constant change and hurries on to its destination, to our death, which we abhor as pa.s.sionately as we cherish life, but which we accept because such is the law of human life, fatal and inexorable; for reality is what it is, and we must adapt ourselves to it.
But if reality appears as const.i.tuted before us, as therefore conditioning our existence, and as existing independently of us; if it is indifferent to reality whether we be in it or not; if we are truly extraneous to it, the conclusion must then be drawn that we, from the outside, presume to know reality and to move about it without being this reality itself or any part of it. For all reality is thought by us as a connected whole, though indeed vaguely; in its totality it is regarded as an object known to us, but existing in utter independence of this knowledge of ours. Its whole process is therefore complete in objective nature, which conditions our spiritual life, and this in turn can mirror reality but can never be a part of it.
This then is the primitive and fundamental concept that the human mind forms of reality. In consequence of it man feels that he is enclosed within himself: he knows he is producing the dreams and the fair images of art; that he can construct inwardly abstract geometrical figures and numbers; that he can generate ideas. But he also feels that between these ideal creations of his own, and the solid, sound, real living forms of nature, there is an abyss. He must, indeed, fall in with nature, in the process of generating other living beings of flesh and blood. He must avail himself of nature by first submitting to its unfailing laws, if he intends to give body, that is, real existence, to the ideal conceptions of his intelligence. On one side then we have thought; on the opposite side reality,--that reality, Nature.
This conception at a certain moment is transformed but not substantially changed. As we begin to reflect, we notice that this nature, as known to us, is not the real external nature, the nature which is unfolded in time and s.p.a.ce, which we see before our eyes, an object perceptible by our bodily senses. We conclude then, that nature as known to us is an _idea_; that Nature is one thing and the idea of nature another. And if we think this perceptible nature and have faith in its reality and in the reality of its determinations, this nature in which reality is made to consist is the nature which is within our thought,--the idea of nature; or in other words, thought considered as the content of our mind. This thought is the aim of all the inquiries by which we strive to become thoroughly acquainted with nature, and which we finally discover or at least ought to discover when we succeed in attaining true knowledge. We say that we know nature only when we are able to recognise an idea in nature: that is, an idea in each of its elements, and a system of ideas in the whole of nature. So that what we know is not really nature as it presents itself to our senses, still less nature as it is, before it has impressed our senses; but nature as disclosed to us by thought, as it exists in thought--i.e., the idea. And this idea must be real, otherwise nature, which has its truth in the idea, could not be real. Not only is it real, it is that reality itself which a moment ago we were led to think of as consisting in external perceptible nature.
This reality makes the life of our thought possible, but it is not a product of this life. It is a condition and a prerequisite of thought, and as such it does not exist because we think it: but rather we are able to think it because it exists. It is eternal truth, at first unknown to man, then by him desired. In quest of it he gradually lifts on all sides the veil which hides it from his eyes, without however hoping that it will ever entirely disclose to him its divine countenance.
According to this transformed point of view, then, reality, which in the first instance appeared to be natural, that is physical or material, has now become ideal. But even thus it remains extraneous to thought, and unconcerned with the presence or the absence of it; transcending the entire life of the human spirit, and incessantly subject to the danger of error. Whereas the idea as a complexus of all ideas that can be thought (but have not been thought, or rather have not all been thought) is the beacon of light that guides the way of man in the ocean of life; it is Truth pure and perfect.