This idea evidently must not be confused with the purely subjective ideas which we spoke of above, and which as such are extraneous to reality. This idea is reality itself idealised. It is to this idea, for instance, that we all appeal when we affirm the existence of a justice superior to that of which man is capable, of a justice in behalf of which man is in duty bound to sacrifice his private interests, and even his life. This idea we have in mind when we speak of a sacred and inviolable right, whereas in daily practice there is perhaps no right which is not more or less trampled upon. This idea is before us when we consider truth in general: truth which is indeed real, even though it may not be seen or felt, much more real than physical nature, for nature comes to life and dies and constantly changes, while truth is motionless, impa.s.sible, eternal. In its bosom then we must try to find everything that we want to accept as not illusory.
But in subst.i.tuting the conception of an ideal reality for the conception of a material one, reality as a whole continues to be something contradistinguished from us, an object indeed of our thoughts, but one which cannot be conceived as it is in itself except by abstracting it from our own thought.
We, then, who open our eager eyes in the endeavour to discover, to know, to orient ourselves, to live in the midst of a known and familiar world; we, thinking beings, and not simply things of nature, beings who as such affirm our personality in the very act of saying _We_, we then are of less account than the earthworms which crawl along until they die unknown to the foot that crushes them. We are nothing because we do not belong to reality; we deceive ourselves into believing that we are doing something on our own account, but in truth we renounce every desire of doing or creating something original, something we might really call ours; and we abandon ourselves, we drift away confused with external reality and submerged under the irresistible current of its laws.
This conception of life, which I have given only in its barest outline, is a very common one. For thousands of years it has persisted in the philosophical field, the nourishment and the torment of the greatest intellects of humanity. But humanity could not rest satisfied with a world conceived in such a manner; with a world which, whether we call it nature or idea, is at bottom always nature. For by nature we understand not only that reality which is in s.p.a.ce and time, but also every reality which is not the product of our will, nor the result in general of that spiritual activity, which in a manner peculiar to all human acts reveals a diversity of values, extending from the sublimity of heroism and of genius to the lowest depths of cowardice and to the gloom of sloth. Nor can it be considered as the product or result of a process; for it is immediate reality, original and immutable. In a world which is Nature, man is an intruder, a stranger without rights, without even real existence. As a being, he is destined to be suppressed; nay, he does not even exist. And his life, with all his aspirations, his needs, his claims, is but a fallacious illusion which will sooner or later collapse. Man cannot help succ.u.mbing in a world where there is no place for him. Therefore a more or less cloudy gust of pessimism lowers over the consciousness that has stopped at this conception of reality.
Leopardi is the most eloquent expression of the intense misery to which man is condemned in such circ.u.mstances, or to which rather he condemns himself. He condemns himself because he has it in his power to conceive reality otherwise. For let him ponder seriously and he will succeed in convincing himself that the naturalistic conception of reality is absurd. Philosophy has so demonstrated this truth, that he who now strives eagerly to attain a moral point of view in harmony with established principles can no longer repeat that note of pessimism, can no longer a.s.sert that the world is nature, or that it is the eternal idea from which nature is derived and by which it is made intelligible.
Such views are no longer tenable.
The teacher who, because of his lofty mission, claims the right of forming souls, of arousing those powerful moral energies which alone empower man to live as a human being, may not, must not be ignorant of the fact that the contention of naturalism, which makes of the world an abstract reality, presupposed by the human spirit and therefore anterior and indifferent to it, is a belief that has been superseded and surpa.s.sed by modern thought. The teacher too can easily grasp this view, for in gathering all the arguments by which, along different lines, the new conception of reality has been attained, we find that the whole matter reduces itself to a simple and very easy reflection. Very easy in itself, though it may seem difficult to the greater part of us,--to the superficial thinkers, to the absent-minded, to those who lack the strength necessary to face the great responsibility imposed upon us by the truth which is derived from this reflection.
For naturalism reduces itself to the affirmation that we think nature, but do not ourselves exist; nature alone exists. We do not exist and yet we think, and we think of nature as existing. We do not exist and yet nature exists, of whose existence we have no other testimony than our thoughts. And if thought is a shadow, what will reality then be? The "dream of a shadow," in the words of the Greek poet. Is it possible for us to stop at this conclusion? Is it possible for an inexistent thing to vouch for the existence of something which we know only from its attestations? Such is the absurd position we are forced into when we a.s.sume that Thought, in equipoise with reality, remains outside of it and leaves it out of its own self.
We give the name of realism to that manner of thinking which makes all reality consist in an external existence, abstract and separate from thought, and makes real knowledge consist in the conforming of our ideas to external things. By idealism on the other hand we mean that higher point of view from which we discover the impossibility of conceiving a reality which is not the reality of thought itself. For it reality is not the idea as a mere object of the mind, which therefore can exist outside of the mind, and must exist there in order that the mind may eventually have the means of thinking it. Reality is this very thought itself by which we think all things, and which surely must be something if by means of it we want somehow to affirm any reality whatsoever, and must be a real activity if, in the act of thinking, it will not entangle itself in the enchanted web of dreams, but will instead give us the life of the real world. If it is not conceivable that such activity could ever go forth from itself and penetrate the presumably existent world of matter, then it means that it has no need of issuing from itself, in order to come in contact with real existence; it means that the reality which we call material and a.s.sume to be external to thought is in some way illusory; and that the true reality is that which is being realised by the activity of thought itself. For there is no way of thinking any reality except by setting thought as the basis of it.
This is the conception, or, if you will, the faith, not only of modern philosophy, but of consciousness itself in general, of that consciousness which was gradually formed and moulded under the influence of the deeply moral sentiment of life fostered by Christianity. For it was Christ that first opposed to nature and to the flesh a truer reality,--not the world in which man is born, but that world to which he must uplift himself: that world in which he has to live, not because it is anterior to him, but because he must create it by his will: and this world is the kingdom of the spirit.
In accordance with this conception there is, properly speaking, no reality: there is a spirit which creates reality, which therefore is self-made and not the product of nature. The realist speaks of external existence, of a world into which man is admitted and to which he must adapt himself. But the idealist knows only what the spirit does, what man acts. A nature, ever at work in the progress of the spirit, throbs in the soul of man, who with his intellect and his will re-creates it by its restless, unceasing motion. It is a world which is never created, because the entire past flows and becomes actual in that form which is peculiar to it and in which it exists, namely, the present,--history in the incessant rhythm of its becoming, in the ever-living act of self-production.
On what side of the controversy should the teacher stand who means to absorb into his soul the life of the school? Will he with the realists believe in a reality which must be observed and verified? Or will he as an idealist trust that the only world is the one which is to be constructed by him; that in all this task he can rely only on the creative activity of the spirit that moves within us, ever unsatisfied with what is, incessantly aspiring for what does not yet exist, for what must come to be as being the only thing which deserves to exist and to fulfil life?
There are then these two ways of conceiving culture, the realistic and the idealistic. By the former we are led to imagine that man"s spirit is empty, and that no nourishment can come to it except from the outside world, from those external elements which he can acquire because they exist prior to the activity by which he a.s.similates them. The latter, admitting only what is derived from the developing life of the spirit, can conceive of culture solely as an immanent product of this very life, and separable from it only by abstraction.
It is evident that the ordinarily accepted view of educators to-day is realistic rather than otherwise. The ideal and therefore the historical origin of the school itself is intimately connected with the realistic presupposition. For the school begins when man for the first time becomes aware of the existence of a store of acc.u.mulated culture which should be protected from dispersion. Grammar, for instance, exists before the notion of teaching it arises. Men already possess a language when they make up their minds to teach it to their children. Self-taught and inventive genius, by new observation and discoveries, gives rise to new disciplines; and men, discovering the value of such disciplines, determine to inst.i.tute a school where they may be cultivated and handed down to the coming generations. In general then, first comes knowledge; then the school as a depository of it. It may be granted that the progress of learning is made possible or at least accentuated by educational inst.i.tutions; but the fact remains that the school is founded on pre-existing knowledge. Science, arts, customs must exist before they can be taught to others, and they do exist, but not in the spirit of the one who is to acquire them, who must appropriate them as they are in themselves. The _Iliad_ exists: Homer sang: the poems attributed to him were collected into an epic from which we learn of the beliefs, of the aspirations, and of the memories that were dear to the ancient Greeks, and every cultivated person to-day must derive from them his own spiritual substance. The teacher shows to his pupils how best to read, how to understand that epic which is a treasure of the past bequeathed not only to the modern Greeks but to humanity in general. For we all profit from this inherited spiritual wealth in the same manner that every man that comes into the world enjoys the light and the heat of the sun which he surely did not kindle in heaven.
The fact that culture, as the subject matter of education, exists before the exercise of that spiritual activity which can be educated only through its means, seems to the realist a condition without which the school cannot arise. Only as culture develops and spreads does the school grow and expand; and, in the progress of civilisation, as culture becomes specialised, the school is correspondingly differentiated into inst.i.tutions of ever-growing specialisation. For the school can but follow and reflect the advance of science, of letters, of art,--of humanity in general in all it strives to perpetuate.
All this evidently can be maintained only from the point of view of the realist. For him the school is concerned not with those that already know and therefore have no need of it, but for those who are still ignorant. For them it is inst.i.tuted; it ministers to their needs, and is therefore adjusted in the direction in which it believes their spirit should be oriented. In the school of physicians, there is not medicine but the learning of it, for if the art of healing were already mastered as it seems to be in the case of the professors, there would be no need of a medical school. There is indeed the professor in the lecture room; but he is there only for the learners, and his role has no meaning except in relation to their needs. He is the possessor of science, and as such he teaches and does not learn. The school then is not the possession of culture, but the development of a spiritual life aspiring to this possession; and this aspiration is possible because of the existence of the teacher who has already mastered it, who possesses it, not as his own property, but as social wealth entrusted to him for the use of everybody. He himself is only an instrument of communication.
Culture antedates him; it does so even when he is the author of it. For it is not possible for him to impart it to others until he has first elaborated it himself, and not until the merits of his contributions have been in part at least recognised by the world.
The school to the realist presupposes the library. The teacher needs books, plenty of books in order to increase his knowledge and thus become better acquainted with that world through which he has to pilot his pupils. In the books, then, in the long shelves, culture lives: in the innumerable volumes that no one ever hopes to read; in the shelves which contain a world of beautiful things, and so valuable that man, as Horace says, should spend sleepless nights in order to acquire them, should endure cold and heat, fatigue and sacrifice. For humanity, we are told, lives in those volumes to which the teacher must somehow link himself if he intends to advance properly, to live the life which our forefathers have generously endowed for us, and to protect our spiritual inheritance from dispersion. In this atmosphere he must live; he must plunge in that spiritual sea which rolls limitless across the centuries.
The pupil looks out upon this ocean which allures every man who is born to the life of culture. At first he clings to the sh.o.r.e, dreads the water, and asks to be helped until he has at least become familiar with the element. Who will encourage the beginner to leave the dry land and plunge into the deep where he would meet sure destruction? He must first be trained in some sheltered cove, where protected from the violence of the tumultuous surf, from the might of the indivisible ma.s.s of the ocean, he may gradually learn the ways of the deep.
The student must accordingly begin with a definite book; he must be saved from the haunting power of the library, which draws the youthful mind towards every volume, towards every subject. In the mult.i.tude of books, not all of them read, not all of them readable, thought founders, sees nothing, thinks nothing, is unable to rest in any of the things which he imagines exist in the vast library shelves. He must choose. Let him select, say, Dante. He reads the _Divine Comedy_, the poem written by that great Italian who has been dead these six centuries and now rests at Ravenna, no longer mindful of his Francesca, of his magnanimous Farinata, of his kindly master Brunetto, or of Beatrice. Dante created his miraculous world, he breathed life into his characters, wrote the last line of his last canto, smiled in rapture at the divine beauty of his creation, now complete and perfect, and died. His ma.n.u.script was copied thousands of times; and after the discovery of printing, millions of copies were made. In one of these we now are able to find it, this divine poem, just as it was written,--for we want it exactly as it flowed from his pen without the change of a letter, without the omission of a comma. And this volume is an example of what exists in a library,--of the culture that teachers strive to find there, and thence communicate to their pupils!--something that belongs to the world, something which is a part of reality, which men therefore can grasp, if they want to, just as they can get to know the stars and the plants, and all things of nature. The _Divine Comedy_ can be realistically conceived in respect to us who open the volume and prepare to read it, for the reason that it already exists and arouses our desire. If we had left it on the shelf where it was resting, it would have had exactly the same existence. What we find in the volume, as we read of that land of the dead which is much more living than all the living beings who surround us in our daily life, would all of it have been in that book, would have continued to be there, even if we had never opened it.
But is it really so? If we reflect a while we shall see that this is not the case. The book contains exactly what we find there, what we are capable of finding there, nothing more, nothing less. Different persons discover in it different things, but it is nevertheless obvious that for each individual the book contains only what he finds in it; and in order to be able to say that the book contains more than what a given reader discovers in it, it is necessary that some other person should find that something more; and that the text contains this additional beauty is only true for him who discovered it and for those who seek it after him.
Dante waited for centuries for De Sanctis[1] to appear and to disclose the meaning of Francesca"s words. Therefore it has been said that to understand Dante is a sign of greatness. Abstractly considered, of course, the poet is what he is, but only in the abstract. In the concrete, Dante is the author whom we admire and appreciate proportionately to our power. For as we read the poem in accordance with our training, and the development of our personality, Dante is grafted on a trunk which did not exist before us, which, on the contrary, is our very life; and before this life is realised, evidently none of those things can be found there which actually come into being in the process of its realisation. So that if we had not read the book, far from its being true that everything we found in it would still continue to be there, nothing would remain of what we find in it, absolutely nothing.
We have said nothing of "what _we_ find." But if we consider the matter we shall see that what we find is everything; everything for me; everything for everybody. Only that can come out of a book which the reader with his soul and with his labours is capable of getting out of it; and in consequence of these labours and in virtue of his soul he is able to say that a certain book has a content. In fact, to return to our example, the _Divine Comedy_ which we know, the only one which we can know, the only one which exists, is the one which lives in our souls, and which is a function of the criticism that interprets it, understands it, and appreciates it. That _Divine Comedy_ therefore did not close the circle of its life on the day when Dante wrote the last line of the last canto; it continued to live, still continues to exist in the history, in the life of the spirit. Its life never draws to a close. The poem is never finished.
This is true of the poem of Dante; it is true of everything which we conceive of as inherited from our great predecessors, from those who built up the patrimony of human culture. Culture then is not before us, a treasure ready to be excavated from the depths of the earth, awaiting to be revealed to us. Culture is what we ourselves are making; it is the life of our spirit.
Abstract culture, on the contrary, is merely as realistically conceived.
It slumbers in the libraries, in the sepulchres of those who lived, who pa.s.sed away and created it once for all. It belongs to the past, to the things that have died. But the past, if we really mean to grasp it, if we want to see it close by as something that is and not merely as an abstraction, the past itself, becoming the present, made into that actuality which we call living memory, is history,--history constructed by us, meditated by us, re-created by us, in accordance with our abilities;--and with our powers of evocation we awaken the past from its slumber and breathe into it the life of the spiritual interests, of the ideas, of the sentiments that are, after all, the living substance in which the past really survives, in which it is real. In the same way the only culture that can be bestowed upon the spirit, the only one that admits of being concretely taught and learned, the only one that can be sought, because it is the only one that really exists, is idealistic culture. It is not in books, nor in the brains of others. It exists in our own souls as it is gradually being formed there. It cannot therefore be an antecedent to the activity of the spirit, since it consists in this very activity.
This must be the faith of all those who cannot bring themselves to believe that they are strangers in this world, and that they have come here to exercise a function which is not their own. For the world in general, and the sphere of culture in particular, is not completed when we arrive upon the scene. This is why human life has a value, why education is a mission.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Francesco de Sanctis, a great Italian critic, whose "History of Italian Literature" is still unfortunately inaccessible in English.
CHAPTER V
THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE
The idealistic conception of culture enables us to get an initial understanding of the spirituality of the school. This spirituality is surely felt by all those who live within the cla.s.s-room; but it should be understood in the most rigorous and absolute manner by those who wish to have a deeper consciousness of the extreme delicacy of the tasks performed and the words uttered by those who enter it with the sincere heart and the pure soul of the teacher.
The school is obviously not the hall which contains the teacher and the pupils. These may have a hall, may even have the teacher, without yet possessing the school, which consists in the communication of culture.
This culture, we have seen, is not really pre-existent to the act which communicates it; it is not to be found in books, not to be looked for in an ideal transcendent world, not to be demanded of the teacher. It is only in the spirit of the person who is in the act of learning. It is there in the manner in which it is possible for it to be there, not comparable to any presumed form of pre-existing culture. The school gains its existence entirely in the soul of the learner.
Knowledge is not to be found beyond the bounds of the human spirit. I insist on this conception because I am well aware that the minds of many rebel against this conclusion, no matter how irrefutable its grounds may be. For they ask: what then is the learning which we ascribe to the master minds of humanity, now indeed dead but still active in their works? They also ask how we are able to think and account for that learning which we feel we are not originating, which we know we are re-acquiring for ourselves after it has many times been in the domain of others.
Can we really consider as non-existent what we as yet do not know, may perhaps never know, but which is none the less capable of being known?
When we are filled with reverence for the glory of men whose learning surpa.s.ses our powers, are we the victims of an illusion? Are we prevailed upon by ignorance and lack of reflection? And how then can we justify the cult which every civilised man consecrates to the mighty spirits--philosophers, poets, artists, and heroes--who added so much to the moral fund of humanity? Was there not a Dante six centuries back, who composed a lofty poem, which was admired by everybody, at a time when we, who now read it and bring it to life in our souls, were still so far removed from the entrance of this life?
The answer to all these questions is very simple, so simple that we must be careful lest we miss its significance. All this lore of the past which we strive to preserve surely does exist; it does contain all the names which are sacred to the memory of humankind. The _Divine Comedy_ has been written and no longer awaits its Dante. But this lore of the past, as we for brevity"s sake call it, is nothing else than what _we think_ as such. History, as it unfolds itself from century to century, is never compressed within a past which because of its completeness might be made to exist beyond the present and in opposition to it; but it exists in a past which is in the present as a plant that grows or an animal that lives, never adding anything new to the old, always transforming the old into the new; at no time, therefore, having anything but what is new, never being anything else but the new. In history, thus comprehended, we to-day are but one person with the men who thought before us, with the poets, the philosophers, the spiritual creators of the past. With them we are a person that grows and develops, ever acquiring, never losing; a single being that apprehends and recalls and constantly makes all his past bear fruit in the present. Our childhood has not completely pa.s.sed away into nothing: it keeps returning to the ever-busy phantasy that tenderly fondles it, cherishes it, idealises it into poetry. If we consider this childhood as something that once was, that existed in utter ignorance of this poetry that was yet to be written, that could not then be written, surely this infancy is quite dead; we should rather say that it never existed. But it does live as the childhood which is a recollection, which arouses feelings, and such feelings as are at a given moment the actual sentiment of the adult. Once in the years long gone by a kindly word reached the depths of my soul. We all have heard in the years long gone by some such kindly words that in the mystery of our childish mind appeared as a revelation.
Such words as fall from the lips of a mother and inspired by her tender affection have the secret power of appeasing us in a moment of rage, and of making us feel the gentle sweetness of that goodness which is made of love. We may since have forgotten that word, and the circ.u.mstances in which it was uttered: but it is none the less true that on that day our soul was modified and became endowed almost with a sixth sense. This sense has enabled us subsequently to perceive so many things that are beautiful in life, and it in turn grew stronger because of frequent use and increasing exercise, until it finally became the most potent organ of our moral personality. Here too our development has been a constant acquiring with no losing: a preserving of the past by which it was converted into the present, and therefore annulled as past pure and simple.
Such is the moral development of man, who believes himself an individual, but is in truth humanity considered momentarily in one of its fragments. Such is history: the unfolding of the spirit in its universality. It is not therefore difficult to determine what is the past culture in which we desire to graft our present one. It is our own actual culture in so far as it is not the patrimony, not the spiritual life of the isolated individual, of a particular being; but is instead the life of the spirit in its universality, the development of the human personality taken in its effective, historical concreteness.
The past with its entire content is a projection of our actual consciousness, i.e., of the present. But we must not give this proposition a sceptical sense. As I have already pointed out, the present neither in the particular individual nor in the universal history of the spirit, is sundered from the past by that abyss which is ordinarily seen from a materialistic point of view. The past is one and the same thing with the present. The past _is_ the present in its inmost substance; and the present is the past that has matured. The grain of wheat which was buried in the furrow is now no longer to be found under the glebe. It lives, multiplied in the ear of wheat. The seed as such was decomposed and destroyed in the soil; it is there no more, it sprung thence as a blade of gra.s.s, it grew, was transformed, still is, still lasts, and will continue to endure in other forms. Where is it now? Why, in whatever form it may now have a.s.sumed. It is the past in the present, as the present.
So then, what is Dante the poet who towers over the centuries, the object of our admiration, the master of all who speak and use the Italian language? He is the lordly poet of the fourteenth century, not because he then lived his own individual life, but because he survives to-day in us who think him, who appreciate him even when we are not fully acquainted with him. In this sense he lives in us, as the seed does in the ear of corn.
I have just hinted at the possibility of appreciating something without fully understanding it. I wanted to make clear how impossible it is to separate, with a clean cut, knowledge from ignorance. It is far from true that before taking up a certain science we know absolutely nothing about it,--that the boy who goes to school for the first time is completely devoid of all knowledge, or that he who is in quest of a book which he has never read can in no way whatever speak about it.
For fair renown begets love for the unseen person, as the poet reminds us and as experience often teaches. Frequently we know of the existence and the beauty of a woman whom we have never seen, but who is not therefore completely unknown to us. So also many of us desired to go to school long before we had seen the inside of a cla.s.sroom. What is dearer than the joy foretasted at the first imaginings of school? We look forward to that new life upon which we are about to enter in the company of our bigger brothers and of our older playmates. They have told us so many things about it. From their accounts and from the fond memories of our parents we already know the school before we approach it, and its pleasing aspects invite us into the cla.s.sroom.
For the same reason we search for books we have never seen, and we are drawn towards new studies and pursuits. There is no leaping from ignorance to knowledge, as from pitch darkness to noon-tide brilliancy.
The transition is imperceptible, as when the dim morning twilight merges into the first glimmerings of dawn, which in turn fade away under the dazzling flashes of sunrise. And even from the midst of darkness we yearn for a world which though unseen is somehow present to our consciousness, already illumined by our thought, warmed by our sentiments. Or, in other words, the culture which we do not yet possess, and which we expect to get at school, is already implanted in our mind, where it will sprout and grow and bear fruit, fused and confused with the life of our spirit.
Having now reached this point, can we define culture? I am inclined for a moment to a.s.sume the role of Don Ferrante in Manzoni"s novel.[2] By pedantic ratiocinations he proved that the plague could not be a contagious disease: "for," he said, "in nature everything is either a substance or an accident." Contagion, he then went on to prove, could neither be the one nor the other; therefore the plague was but an influx of the stars, and there could be no use in taking precautions; and having proved this, he fell a victim to the epidemic, and died cursing the stars like an operatic hero. Let us follow for a moment in the footsteps of this pedant, whose method, ridiculous as it may seem, has had nevertheless a glorious history, and one which Manzoni himself admired.
I say: We can think only and we do think only two kinds of reality,--person or thing. Every one of us is naturally drawn to this distinction; and when we have formulated it, we feel more or less vaguely, more or less clearly, that every possibility is comprised within these two terms, that outside of them it is impossible to think any reality whatsoever. The reason is this: if we think, if we act, if we live, we inevitably place ourselves in a situation such that we on one side are as centre, as beginning, or as subject of our activity; and on the other side are the objects toward which our activity is directed and by which it is terminated. _We_ therefore as subject of the entire surrounding world; and _this world_ as the end of our thoughts and of our scientific inquiries, end of our desires and of our practical activity; the world which is represented in our consciousness, and which we strive to dominate by our labours, and our reason. Can there be anything else beside _us_ and what _we_ think?
The world which we think and which we oppose to ourselves seems at first to contain different kinds of objects. There seem to be both persons and things; simple objects of cognition which we ordinarily call _things_ which can never become subjects; and persons who at first are represented to us as objects of our knowing, of our love, and of our hatred, as ends of our activity; but who under a closer scrutiny are transformed before our eyes into knowing and acting subjects, who, in other words, become just exactly what we are. But when we really get to know these beings that surround us as subjects on an equal basis, then we cease to consider them as objects of our cognition, and as solely endowed with that material objectivity which at first put them in the same category with the inanimate things, with plants and animals. We then find them close to us, very close: fused with our own spiritual substance. We feel them to be our fellow men, our kinsmen, with whom we const.i.tute that person of whose existence I am aware every time I say _We_: the person we must take into account whenever we wish to affirm our personality in a concrete manner, the only person, the one subject, the true subject of human knowledge and of human activity. The subject which knows and acts as a universal in the interests of all men, or rather in behalf of the _one man_ in whom all single individuals are united and with whom they are all identified.
Then if we give a rigorous and exact meaning to the expressions, "We and what is before us," "We and the objects," "We and the World," we have a correct cla.s.sification of all thinkable reality differentiated into persons and things, but with the understanding that all persons are in reality one Person.
One _person_, and things innumerable! As we look about us, we find the horizon peopled with thousands and millions and infinite quant.i.ties of objects, which may one by one attract our attention, and may be gathered up in the vast, unbounded picture surveyed by the eye as it moves on from thing to thing, incessantly, without ever reaching the last. The world which we first discover is the world of matter, of things which strike our senses. This world rushes impetuously into our mind at the beginning of our natural experience. And these material objects are many not only _de facto_ but also _de jure_. They must be, they cannot but be many if we are to consider them as material things. It is their peculiar nature, it is their very essence to be an indefinite mult.i.tude.
A material thing means a thing occupying s.p.a.ce. And s.p.a.ce is made up of elements, each one of which excludes all the others and is therefore conceived independently of the others, must so be conceived. For it is the very nature of s.p.a.ce to be divisible. When it is narrowed down to a point and cannot be further subdivided, then it ceases to be s.p.a.ce. Its divisibility signifies that s.p.a.ce is nothing more than the sum of its parts; that it contains nothing in addition to these parts; that it therefore resolves itself into them without at all losing its being and without any of the parts being deprived of anything which was theirs in the whole. In fact, if anything were lost of the entire whole, this loss could not but be felt in each single part. A book, considered as a material thing, is composed of a certain number of printed leaves st.i.tched together; and if the leaves fall apart, they may be brought together again so that they will compose the same book as before. An iron rod weighs the same before and after it has been broken up into parts.