Things cease to be exclusively and solely material when, though they may be divisible in a certain respect, they are nevertheless indivisible in another respect. Plants, animals, all living organisms, considered simply as objects occupying s.p.a.ce and as therefore having certain dimensions, admit surely of being separated into parts. Trees are cut into logs, sawed into boards; animals are slaughtered and quartered. But considered from the point of view of its peculiar quality, of the essential property which distinguishes it from all other bodies, an organism is not divisible. If we do divide it, each component part ceases to be what it previously was when conjoined with the others. Such a part cannot be preserved; it withers, it decays, and is dispersed, so that the whole can never be reconst.i.tuted. The various parts of an organism, considered as such, are inseparable, because each of them is and maintains itself on the strength of its relations to the others, forming with them a true and essential unity. If we however try to find out what this unity is by which all the limbs are indissolubly held together, we shall discover nothing which can be observed and represented spatially, nothing endowed with dimensions, however small, after the manner of the several limbs which this unity fuses within itself and vivifies.
If unity which is the life-giving principle of every organism could be spatially represented, or in other words, if it were something material, it would be one of those very limbs that have to be unified, and could not then be the unifying principle itself. Hence the vanity of the efforts on the part of materialistic physiologists who obstinately strive to explain life by observing the parts which compose the organic ma.s.s, by studying the concurrence of their processes, their chemical relationships, and their mechanism. A material being, organically const.i.tuted, is something more than a material thing pure and simple: it announces already a higher principle; it presages the spirit.
But the things that we all agree to regard as spiritual defy absolutely every attempt at division. A poem may be considered in a certain way as material, and may accordingly be divided into various parts,--stanzas, lines, words. But it is clear that such a separation cannot have the value which we a.s.sign to the divisions of things material. For in their case every part can stand by itself, and is in no way deprived of its characteristic being; whereas every part of a poem, stanza, verse, word, calls out and responds to every other part; and if isolated from them, loses the meaning which it had in the context; or rather it loses every meaning, and consequently perishes. It is true that by conjectures we interpret even very small fragments of ancient poems. But we do so only in so far as we claim the possibility of restoring approximately the entire poem in which the given fragment may live, by which it may be restored to life. Likewise all the words lined up in dictionaries are as so many bleeding limbs of living discourses, to which they must somehow or other be ideally reconnected, if we are to understand what they really were and what functions they had. Multiplicity of parts in things of the spirit is only apparent: it must be reduced to indivisible unity, from which every element of the multiplicity derives its origin, its substance, and its life, so that we may give to it a real meaning and a foundation.
Nor is this the only unity possessed by the things that are a.s.sumed to be spiritual. We have already considered the unity whereby, for example, the words of a poem cannot be separated from the poem itself, in which each of them acquires a particular accent, a particular expression, and therefore a particular individuality. We shall now consider another unity. He who really perceives a poem is not confronted by an observable thing, compact if you will, unseverable and united, but none the less independent of human personality. Poetry is only understood when in the flowing unity of its verses and in the continuous rhythm of its words we grasp a sentiment in its development, a soul"s throb in a moment of its life, a man, a personality. The poetry of Dante is very different from that of Petrarch, because each is the expression of a powerfully distinct personality. Any composition of these poets is understood and enjoyed only when we feel in it the personal accent which distinguishes one poetical personality from the other. A poet without individuality has no significance whatsoever, and therefore no existence as a poet.
But the real artist leaves his imprint more or less markedly in all his productions, so that in every given instance, over and beyond the variety of the subject matter, we feel the living soul of the poet. A poem then is the poet; it is a person and not a thing. And the same can be said, as we can easily see, of all things that are commonly called spiritual.
But in addition to things material, it seems that there are immaterial ones which do not pertain as one"s own to any particular person. The ideas of which we had occasion to speak before,--immaterial ent.i.ties, not perceptible by the senses, but thinkable by the intellect, and which severally correspond to all sorts or species of the various material things,--were once conceived as things by philosophers, and they are still so conceived to-day by the majority of men. It is not requisite that one actually think them; it is sufficient that they be in themselves thinkable. As a matter of fact, they may or may not be thought, no differently therefore from any of the material objects which are not created by our senses, but must already exist in order that our senses may perceive them. These ideas are many, in a manner corresponding to the material objects; and they are all different.
They mirror, so to speak, the multiplicity of material things in whose semblance and likeness they were devised. There are horses in nature, and there is the idea of the horse by which we are able to recognise all the animals that belong to that species. There are dogs, and there is the dog which we rediscover in every one of them.
And there are flowers and the flower; and pinks, roses, and lilies, as well as the pink, the rose, and the lily; and likewise iron, copper, silver, gold, lime, water, and so on, to infinity. It is impossible to set a limit to ideas, because it is not possible ever to stop dividing, distinguishing, subdividing that nature which unfolds itself throughout s.p.a.ce.
This boundless mult.i.tude of ideas, through which our mind can rove, surely has no spatial extension. But because of the necessity of conceiving any mult.i.tude as existing in some kind of s.p.a.ce, it was thought proper to posit an ideal s.p.a.ce in addition to the physical one.
In other words, metaphorical dimensions were added to dimensions properly so called. But whether spatially or not, we strive to conceive ideas as many, each one of them existing by itself, and susceptible of being thought independently of the others. In reality however we never succeed in thinking them except as bound together and forming a system, in such a way that no single one of them can be thought except by thinking the others with it. Take man as an instance: each one of us has intuitively the idea of man, but this idea is not possessed like a word of which we may not even know the meaning. In thinking the idea we must think something which is its content. If we know what man is, we must be able to attribute a content to the idea of man. We may say, as the ancients did, that man is the laughing animal, or the speaking animal, because he is the only animal capable of expressing the emotions of his soul by laughter or by the inflection of his voice; because, in other words, he is the only animal who is conscious of what goes on within him. Or perhaps we might say that man is the reasoning animal, and we think this idea when we have thought the idea of _animal_ and the idea of _reason_. But can the idea of animal be thought by itself alone? It, as well as the idea of reason, must have a content; that is, each must be connected with other ideas, without which it would be deprived of all consistency.
And so the mind that begins to think one single idea is compelled, almost dragged, to pa.s.s on to another, then to a third, and so on indefinitely. It finds itself in the condition of the man who tried to grasp a single link of a chain, just one, and found that he could not have it except on condition of taking the whole chain. So it is with ideas. We may not be capable of encompa.s.sing all of them in one single thought; but whenever we try to fix any one of them in our mind, it presents itself to us as a knot in which many other ideas are interlaced, twisted, and entangled. They form an infinite chain, in which it is not possible to think the first link or the last one, because the beginning is welded to the end, and we turn and turn and never reach the last. Is not this the nature of the ideas as we see them, as they const.i.tute the field from which we must harvest all our possible thoughts?
Ideas are not, therefore, a true multiplicity, because they are not things, either material or ideal, and because they do not occupy any s.p.a.ce whatsoever. Our imagination may present them to us as so many lights of an ideal sky; but our intelligence warns us that they cannot be separated one from the other and placed side by side. As I have already said: when we think one, we think them all. Or in any event we should, if we had mastered all that there is to be known. So that to our thought ideas appear as const.i.tuting one unique whole, a unity, that something which we call science, truth, knowledge. They are not a mult.i.tude, for the simple reason that in multiplicity they would be unthinkable. Their connection with and partic.i.p.ation in an absolute unity come from the fact that they are the object of thought, and are therefore submitted to its activity, whereby they are ordered, correlated, organised, unified. In order that we may say that one idea contains another, or many others, we must a.n.a.lyse this first idea and define it. This first idea must be distinguished from the others, and they likewise among themselves. It is not therefore sufficient to say that there are these ideas, motionless, inert, lifeless, as they necessarily would be if they existed _per se_, as objects of mere possible contemplation. There must also be some one to a.n.a.lyse them, define them, and distinguish them. It is not enough to have the material of thought, we need thought also to mould and fashion this material, turn it effectively into thought stuff, reduce it to something susceptible of being thought. Ideas as things would in no way be related among themselves. But they do have that relationship which is generated by thought as it thinks them. Thought generates this relationship not as a fixed one, as would be the case if it were inherent in the things themselves; but as a relationship which is being formed by degrees, and which is continuously changing and developing. No ideal, abiding science, existing only as the object of a vague phantasy, can therefore result from this relationship. It const.i.tutes instead a science which is ever re-formed and is never formed; it gives to the ideas an ever renewed aspect: it matures them, elaborates them, perfects them, by concentrating on each one of them the constantly increasing light of the system into which it closely binds them.
Ideas, then, as we really think them, are not a minutely fractioned and scattered multiplicity. Nor are they a ma.s.s of concurrent elements. They are Thought as it becomes articulate, and gains distinctness by these many Limbs, by these ideas, which exist, all of them, in the process by which they are gradually formed, developed, and complicated, and arrayed in an order which is constantly being renewed and which is never definitely perfected.
There are not then many ideas; there is one Idea, which is Thought. Only in a metaphorical sense can we consider them as things; and, properly speaking, they are the human person itself as actualised in thought, which is busily occupied in the construction of knowledge. They are an indivisible unity, in which each idea is found collaborating with every other one so as to answer the questions which Thought constantly propounds. They are the human person, not the persons; for we have already concluded that only in an abstract sense is it possible to speak of many persons; concretely there is but one universal Person which is not multiplicable.
There are not, then, going back to our original division, persons and things, material and spiritual. At the most there is one person, Man, and there are the material things which const.i.tute this nature, as it occupies s.p.a.ce, and in which we too believe we have a place, in as much as we consider ourselves beings of nature. Nothing beyond this can be conceived: on one side a sole immultiplicable reality, on the other a manifold reality, indefinitely divisible.
Here we might perhaps stop considering the special interest that called forth this inquiry. For no one could possibly suppose for a moment that culture could be placed in the midst of material things rather than in the spiritual reality which is a person. However, since the intimate nature of this spiritual reality which we call culture is not yet clearly revealed, we must continue our investigations, and give more attention to this division which for a moment we thought might be final.
I mean the division of the world into persons and things: the equipoise of spirit and matter.
Do we really _think_ this matter as we say we do, and which we believe we are justified in opposing to the spirit, in as much as the spirit is unity or universality, and matter, in its entirety, in every one of its parts, in everything, is an indefinite multiplicity? Matter can in truth be thought only on condition that it be possible to think multiplicity, that pure multiplicity which is the characteristic quality of matter.
What then is the meaning of multiplicity? In absolute terms we call multiple that which consists of elements each one of which is quite independent of all the others, and absolutely devoid of any and every relationship with them. The materialist conceived the world as an aggregate of atoms, separated one from the other and having no reciprocal relevance of any sort whatsoever. In the world of pure quant.i.ty, which is the same as absolute multiplicity, mathematical science claims the knowledge of units indifferent to their nexus, and therefore susceptible of being united and separated, of being summed up and divided, without any alteration taking place within the individual unit itself. Numerical units are therefore pre-eminently irrelative.
But the concept itself of the multiplicity of irrelative elements is an absurd one. In order that we may conceive many unrelated elements we must, to start with, be able to conceive a couple of such elements. Let us take A and B, absolutely unrelated, and such that the concept of one will contain nothing of the other"s, and will therefore exclude it from itself. If A did not so exclude B, something of B would be found in A, and we could no longer speak of the two elements as irrelative.
Irrelativity means reciprocal exclusion, a capacity by which each term is opposed to the other, and prevents the other from having anything in common with it. Without this reciprocal action whereby each term turns to the other and excludes it from itself, establishing itself as a negation of it, there would be no irrelativity. But this action by which each term is referred to the other so as to deny it, what is it but a relationship? Every effort therefore tending to break up reality into parts completely repugnant amongst themselves, mutually excluding one another, and therefore reciprocally indifferent, results in the very opposite of what was intended, viz.: the relative in place of the irrelative, unity instead of multiplicity.
Neither duality nor multiplicity is conceivable without that unity whereby the two engender that whole in which the two units are connected, even though they mutually exclude one another: without that unity which fuses and unifies every multiplicity determined in a number, which correlates among themselves the units which const.i.tute the number.
We could strip multiplicity of all unity only by not thinking it. But then in the gloom of what is not thought, multiplicity truly enough would not be unity, but it would not even be multiplicity, because it could not be anything at all. Or, if we prefer, it would be absolutely unthinkable.
Thought then establishes relationships among the units of the multiple, and thus const.i.tutes them as the units of the manifold, and as forming multiplicity. It adds and divides, composes and decomposes, and variously distributes, materialising and dematerialising, so to speak, the reality which it thinks. For it materialises the reality when it conceives it as manifold: but it can conceive it as such only by unifying it, and therefore by dematerialising it and reabsorbing it into its own spiritual substance.
Matter is a manifold reality, without unity. What it is we already have seen: a material reality, and as such divisible into parts, placed in the world in the midst of a congeneric mult.i.tude. Now, since pure multiplicity is not conceivable except on condition that we abstract from that relationship to which the reciprocal exclusiveness of manifold elements is reduced, it is evident that matter and things are abstract ent.i.ties. Thought stops to consider them, and regards them as existent, only because it withdraws the attention from that part of itself which it contributes to the making of the object represented. Thought therefore prescinds from that unity which material things could not by themselves contain, but from which it is impossible to prescind absolutely unless we wish to be reduced to an absurd conception.
Objective things then, the world of matter itself which we are wont to oppose in equipoise to the person, are in truth not separable from it.
For matter has its foundation in thought by which the personality is actualised. Things are what we in our own thought counterpose to ourselves who think them. Outside of our thought they are absolutely nothing. Their material hardness itself has to be lent to them by us, for it ultimately is to be resolved into multiplicity, and multiplicity implies spiritual unity.
This then is the world: an infinity of things all of which have however their root in us. Not in "us" as we are represented ordinarily in the midst of things; not in the empirical and abstract "us" which feeds the vanity of the empty-headed egoist, of him who has not the faintest notion of what he really is, who can therefore think of himself only as enclosed within the tight husk of his own flesh and of his particular pa.s.sions. No! they are rooted in that true "us" by which we think, and agree in one same thought, while thinking all things, including ourselves as opposed to things. And he who fails to reach this profound source, this root from which all reality receives its vitalising sap, may indeed get a blurred glimpse of a blind, inert, material mechanism, but he cannot even fix and determine this mechanism. He cannot upon further reflection stop at the conviction that it is in truth, as it appears in semblance, something real, for it reveals itself to him as so absurd as to become unthinkable. The world then is in us; it is our world, and it lives in the spirit. It lives the very life of that person which we strive to realise, sometimes satisfied with our work, but oftener unsatisfied and restless. And there is the life of culture.
It is not possible to conceive knowledge otherwise than as living knowledge, and as the extolment of our own personality. This is our conclusion. We shall, later on, derive from it two corollaries that are very important for teachers, in as much as they bear directly on the problems of education.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] _I Promessi Sposi_ ("The Betrothed").
CHAPTER VI
THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE
From the concept of the spirituality of culture, we derive all the fundamental propositions of pedagogy. But in as much as this conception of culture coincides with that of personality, or of the spirit, it is evident that all the fundamental propositions of the philosophy of the spirit are also derived from it. In fact, we separate pedagogy from the philosophy of the spirit only because of didactic convenience. To determine, then, the attributes of culture, by which education becomes actual, we have but to consider the nature of the spirit and endeavour to define its attributes. This way we must follow if we are ever to acquire a thorough comprehension of the principles of the several theories of education, principles which are but the laws immanent to the life of education itself in its effective development.
The a.s.sertion that "culture is the human spirit" means nothing unless we first define this spirit and understand its attributes. We cannot possess a concept which is not determined; and the determinations of a concept are the const.i.tuent attributes of the reality which we strive to conceive, and which is not thinkable if deprived of any of these attributes. The following example, appropriate even though trite, will make my meaning clearer. Physical bodies cannot be conceived without also conceiving gravity. Gravity is then an attribute of the physical body, and as such it determines the concept of it. In the same way, to conceive the spirit is to embrace with thought the concepts which are absolutely inseparable from the concept of the spirit.
This inquiry into the nature of the attributes of culture, though it constantly progresses towards a satisfactory solution, yet seems at times to be losing ground on account of the ever-increasing difficulties that beset its advance. It is true, no doubt, that human thought, driven by the irresistible desire to know itself, has made some headway towards mastering the concept of itself. Philosophy has indeed progressed, and the modern world can proudly point to truths unsuspected by the thinkers of antiquity. But the a.s.siduous and prolonged toil of thought engaged in this task has at all moments disclosed new difficulties; it has ever been busy sketching new concepts which subsequently prove immature and in need of further elaboration, and has been pushing its investigations to such depths as to make it difficult to follow its lead without sometimes going astray, without frequently stopping in utter weariness at the roadside.
Men talk learnedly nowadays of the human spirit, but with a doctrine which is often insufficient or, as we say, not up to date. They have stopped at one of those wayside concepts where thought no doubt pa.s.sed and temporarily halted, but from which it moved on towards a more distant goal. For while this long history of the endeavours by which man struggles onward towards the understanding of his own nature is the basis on which modern philosophy builds its firm concept of the spirit, yet for those who have not attained the vantage ground of this modern philosophy, this history is unfortunately a very intricate maze; it is the bewildering
"selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte"[3]
from which it is difficult ever to issue. And therefore it is much easier, as Dante once remarked, to teach those who are completely ignorant than those who have a smattering of philosophy. But to-day culture is so intimately connected with philosophical speculation that the greater part of educated men profess this or that system without being aware of it. And when such men do take up the study of philosophy _per se_, they no longer possess the mental ingenuousness, the speculative candour, which would enable them to grasp the obvious, evident, incontrovertible truth of the most profound philosophical proposition.
This inquiry then is difficult. It demands either a long, methodic, laborious study of the history of philosophy conducted with critical vigour, or that unyielding tenacity of the mind which is the surest sign of sound spiritual character; that steadfast firmness by which man, once in possession of a clearly irrefutable, truly fundamental truth, rigorously excludes from his soul all the allurements of prejudice, all convictions formerly entertained, even though extremely plausible, if they contradict his Truth. For he trusts that these perplexities, these difficulties which he is not now in condition to explain, will be removed in virtue of that very thought to which he has confidently committed himself.
This unflinching resolve is the courage of the philosopher, who has never feared to brave common sense, and single-handed to marshal against the mult.i.tude the array of his seemingly absurd a.s.sertions, which however, in the progress of their reciprocal integrations, have subsequently contributed to redeem this very mult.i.tude from error,--from that error which is intellectual misery, social wretchedness, economic, political, and moral dest.i.tution. Because of this inflexible firmness the philosopher has never dreaded that boundless solitude, that thin atmosphere to which he is uplifted by thought, and where at first he has the sensation of fainting away into the rarefied air.
We must then muster up courage and relinquish all the ideas which we once accepted, even though they still tempt us with superficial glitterings of truth, when once they have proved themselves to be in contradiction with experience. For I too hold experience to be the touchstone of all our thoughts, philosophy not excluded. But I insist that we be careful lest we confound the mockery of the first puppet that dupes our imagination with genuine experience; that in as much as every man speaks of experience in exclusive accordance with whatever concept he has been able to form of it, we too determine beforehand what our conception of it is. Now I say that no concept of experience can be validly entertained which does not take into account that truth which presents itself to us as truly fundamental and therefore to be used as an indispensable basis for all subsequent conceptual constructions.
Such fundamental truth we have previously attained when we established that "We" are not what we seem to be in the dim empirical representation of our personality, a thing among things. Our "Self" is the deeper one by means of which we see all things in whose midst our other self too is discernible. The reality of this, our deeper "self" which cannot be conceived as a thing, without which nothing can be conceived, in the same way that the trunk, the branches, and the boughs are not possible without the root from which the tree issues, is a truth which we may never grasp, but if we do, we shall forever be compelled to see in it the source of all other possible truths, including the concept of experience. For once we have securely mastered it, we will be convinced that it is impossible to conceive whatever is considered and thought of as const.i.tuting this world otherwise than as this world which _we_ see, which _we_ touch, and which, in short, we look upon as the contents of _our_ experience: and that it is also impossible to conceive this experience without referring it to _us_ who have it not as an object of possession but as an activity which we exercise. So that nothing, absolutely nothing, can be thought when the relationship between things and experience, and again the rapport between experience and ourselves is obtained, without thinking the deep reality of this our "self." We may again close our eyes to this reality or hold it in abeyance, but we can do so only after we have effaced every notion of the two relationships just mentioned, and when we again have immersed ourselves in the mystery of things, in the gloom of their apparent independent existence, of their ever self-defeating multiplicity.
Against this reality of the profound "us" which is the genuine spiritual reality, there are innumerable and awe-inspiring difficulties. They are difficulties that so violently oppress our minds and our hearts as to dismay us, and almost force us to give up this concept of a reality on which all other realities depend, and which cannot but be one alone, and infinite, and really universal.[4] Alone, because in it all opposites must coincide: the good and the evil, what is true and what is false, life and death, peace and war, pleasure and pain, yours and mine,--all things, in short, that we have been obliged to sunder and distinguish in order to take our bearings and meet the exigencies of life. Formidable difficulties indeed! And they are the problems of philosophy. It would be childish and senseless to dispose of them by ignoring that concept from which they derive. It is the philosopher"s task, it is the strict duty of human thought to face the problems as they rise out of the positions which it has captured in its onward march. For to yield ground, to turn the back to a truth which has been demonstrated to be indispensable, that is impossible.
Those who wish to orient themselves in the world to-day must, before all, cling to this: that the basis of every thinkable reality is our spiritual reality, one, infinite, universal,--the reality which unites us all in one sole spiritual life; the reality in which teacher and pupils meet when by their reciprocal comprehensions they const.i.tute a real school.
What then is this one, infinite, universal reality? Is this question truly unanswerable as it seems to be, as it has often in the past been declared to be? For, it has been argued, in order to give an answer, whether here or elsewhere, we must somehow think the reality to which the answer is referred. We must think it and therefore distinguish it from all the others, and so presuppose it as one existing among many and as forming with them a multiplicity; and this is the very opposite of that reality which we are striving to think.
Or, in other words, when we try to say what the subject is, we must, somehow, set it as the object, and thus convert it into what is the opposite of the subject. Or again: the subject cannot think itself, because if it did, it would split into the duality of itself as thinking and itself as thought, and what is thinking is not what is thought. But all these objections together with many others of the same force that are ordinarily raised against radical idealism have but one single defect; which is such, however, as to make it hopeless for the idealist ever to succeed in being understood by those that resort to this kind of argument. These opponents, strangely enough, miss the most elementary meaning of the terms with which they claim to be familiar. They fail to see that when the idealist says "subject," he cannot possibly mean by it one abstract term of the relationship _subject-object_, which, because of this very abstractness, is devoid of all consistency. The _ego_ is called "subject," because it contains within itself an object which is not diverse but identical with it. As a pure subject it is already a relationship; it is self-affirmation and therefore affirmation of an object, but of an object, be it remembered, in which the subject is not alienated from itself; by which, rather, it truly returns to itself, embraces itself, and thus originatively realises itself. In order to be _I_, I must know myself, I must set my own self in front of myself. Only thus I am I, a personality, and "subject," the centre of my world or of my thought. For if I should not objectify myself to myself, if in the endeavour to free myself completely from all objectivity, I were to retreat into the first term,--a purely abstract one,--of this relationship by which I posit myself, I should remain on the hither side of this relationship, that is of that very reality in which I am to realise myself. So then by this inner objectification the subject does not at all depart from itself. It rather enters into its own subjectivity, and const.i.tutes it. Surely man may, Narcissus-like, make an idol of his own self: he may worship himself in a fixed semblance already determined and crystallised. But in so doing, he materialises himself, makes his person into a thing, looks away from his true spiritual life, misses self-consciousness, averts his thought from his own intimate being. This self-conversion from person into thing takes place, not when we think of ourselves, but rather when we fail to do so.
Philosophy then, as the thinking of the Spirit in its absolute subjectivity, is the Spirit"s own life. For the spirit lives by const.i.tuting itself as the ego, and it does this by thinking itself, by acquiring consciousness of itself. And while philosophising then, we cannot but ask what is this one infinite universal reality which is our _Self_ and is called the spirit. We cannot dispense with this inquiry into the attributes of the spirit, which is at the same time the inquiry into the attributes of culture.
The examination of the possibility of this investigation has carried us, without our being aware of it, into the very midst of the inquiry itself. For what we considered as an elementary meaning of the word "spirit," the _ego_, which is not something in unrelated immediacy, but which const.i.tutes itself, posits itself, realises itself in that it thinks itself and becomes self-consciousness,--this is also the ultimate characteristic which can be a.s.signed to the spirit, or to man himself, that is, to what in man is essentially human. If we examine all the other differences that have been a.s.signed or could be found by which the spirit is distinguishable from things, we shall find, after due reflection, that they all cease to have a real meaning as soon as we neglect the most profound characteristic of spiritual reality, viz., that this reality is generated by virtue of consciousness. Every form of reality other than spiritual, not only is presented to thought as not conditioned by consciousness, but seems to afford no possibility of being thought (in relation to consciousness) otherwise than as conditioning this very consciousness. And when we say of the spiritual being that it does not know what it is, that it is not acquainted with itself, that it therefore remains concealed from itself, we conceive then its spiritual being in a manner a.n.a.logous to that by which we conceive material or bodily being,--externally visible, but internally unknown. And we say that the individual fails to grasp his own moral nature, because in fact we make this moral being into something natural, similar to that which is attributed to each one of the things that the spirit sets in opposition to itself.
But the spirit has no nature of its own, no destiny to direct its course, no predetermined inevitable lot. It has no fixed qualities, no set mode of being, such as const.i.tute, from the birth to the death of an individual, the species to which it belongs, to whose law it is compelled by nature to submit, whose tyrannical limits and bounds he can never trespa.s.s. The spirit, we have seen, cannot but be conceived as free, and its freedom is this privileged att.i.tude to be what it wants to,--angel or beast, as the ancients said; good or evil, true or false, or, generally speaking, to be or not to be. To be or not to be man,--the spirit, that which he is, and which he would not be if he did not _become_.
Man is not man by virtue of natural laws. He _becomes_ man. By man I do not mean an animal among animals, held to no accounting of his deeds, who comes into the world, grows, lives, and dies, unaware. Man from the time he considers himself such, and in so far as he considers himself such, _becomes_ through his own efforts. He makes himself what he is the first time he opens his eyes on his inner consciousness and says "_I_,"--the "I" which never would have been uttered, had he not been aroused from the sluggish torpor of natural beings (such as our phantasy represents them) and had not started thinking under his own power and through his own determination.
This freedom which is man"s prerogative offers merely an external view, has a very hazy consistency, and appears as something illusory, only because we do not define it exclusively as autonomous becoming or self-making. For in fact "becoming" is ordinarily understood in a way which does not admit of being considered as man"s prerogative. Does not every living being _become_? The plant vegetates only because it too has an inborn potency by which it is forced from one stage of development to the next, from which in this process it acquires the mode of being which is peculiarly its own, which it did not have before, which no other being could from the outside have conferred upon it. And yet the plant is not a person but a thing: it is not spirit, but a simple object, and as such it is endowed with a definite nature and moved by a definite law, which is the very ant.i.thesis of the freedom which is peculiar to the spirit.