From Kant To Croce Modern Philosophy in Italy, 1800 1950

FROM KANT TO CROCE
MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN ITALY, 1800−1950

THE LORENZO DA PONTE ITALIAN LIBRARY
General Editors
Luigi Ballerini and Massimo Ciavolella,
University of California at Los Angeles
Honorary Chairs
Honorable Dino De Poli
Mr Joseph Del Raso Esq.
Ambassador Gianfranco Facco Bonetti
Honorable Anthony J. Scirica
Advisory Board
Remo Bodei, Università di Pisa
Lina Bolzoni, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Francesco Bruni, Università di Venezia
Giorgio Ficara, Università di Torino
Michael Heim, University of California at Los Angeles
Rachel Jacoff, Wellesley College
Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University
Gilberto Pizzamiglio, Università di Venezia
Margaret Rosenthal, University of Southern California
John Scott, University of Western Australia
Elissa Weaver, University of Chicago
FROM KANT TO CROCE
Modern Philosophy in Italy

1800–1950
Edited and translated with an introduction by

Brian Copenhaver and Rebecca Copenhaver
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2012
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada
isbn 978-1-4426-4266-9
Printed on acid-free paper
The Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Copenhaver, Brian P.
From Kant to Croce : modern philosophy in Italy, 1800–1950 /
Brian P. Copenhaver, Rebecca Copenhaver.
(Lorenzo da Ponte Italian library series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-4426-4266-9
1. Philosophy Italian – 19th century. 2. Philosophy, Italian – 20th century.

3. Philosophers – Italy – Biography. I. Copenhaver, Rebecca, 1971–
II. Title. III. Series: Lorenzo da Ponte Itallian library series
b3601.c66 2011 195 c2011-904229-0
This book is published under the aegis and with financial assistance of:
Fondazione Cassamarca, Treviso; the National Italian American Founda-
tion; Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Direzione Generale per la Promozione
e la Cooperazione Culturale; Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali,
Direzione Generale per i Beni Librari e gli Istituti Culturali, Servizio per
la promozione del libro e della lettura.
The University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial

assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the
Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its

publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP)
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
Part I: Introduction 1
1 A Strange History (Bobbio I) 3

2 Idealism and Sensism (Rosmini I) 7
3 Philosophies Imported and Contested (Galluppi I) 11
4 Experience and Ideology (Galluppi II) 14
5 Restoration and Reaction (Rosmini II) 24
6 The Mother Idea (Rosmini III) 27
7 Primacy (Gioberti I) 36
8 The Ideal Formula (Gioberti II) 40
9 A Natural Method (Mamiani) 45
10 Revolution and Recirculation (Spaventa) 48
11 Facts and Laws (Villari) 53
12 Real and Ideal (De Sanctis) 60
13 Resurgence (Fiorentino and Florenzi Waddington) 66
14 Matter and Idea (Labriola) 77
15 No Speculative Movement (Barzellotti) 86
16 A Revelation (Croce I) 90
17 History Under Art (Croce II) 92
18 What Is Distinct? (Croce III) 99
19 What Is Living? (Croce IV) 106
20 What Is Dead? (Croce V) 112
21 Materialism (Gentile I) 118
22 Idealism (Gentile II) 126
23 Actualism (Gentile III) 131
vi Contents
24 Manifestos (Croce and Gentile) 142

25 Common Sense and Good Sense (Gramsci I) 147
26 The Religion of Liberty (Croce VI) 153
27 Philosophy in Prison (Gramsci II) 159
28 Still a Strange History (Bobbio II) 163
Notes to Part I 173
Part II: Translations 191
1 Galluppi, Elements 193

2 Rosmini, A Sketch 245
3 Gioberti, Primacy 264
4 Gioberti, The Ideal Formula 278
5 Mamiani, Renewal 312
6 Spaventa, Italian Philosophy 343
7 Villari, Positive Philosophy 371
8 De Sanctis, Realism 401
9 De Sanctis, The Ideal 413
10 Florenzi Waddington, Pantheism I 418
11 Florenzi Waddington, Pantheism II 422
12 Fiorentino, Vico and Kant 429
13 Fiorentino, Positivism 447
14 Labriola, Materialism 463
15 Croce, The Concept of Art 484
16 Croce, Logic 515
17 Croce, The Philosophy of Hegel 533
18 Gentile, Praxis 642
19 Gentile, Idealism 665
20 Gentile, The Act of Thinking 683
21 Gentile, Actual Idealism 695
22 Manifesto I 706
23 Manifesto II 713
24 Gramsci, Introduction to Philosophy 717
25 Croce, Liberty 753
26 Gramsci, Letters 762
References 779
Name Index 805
General Index 825
Preface and Acknowledgments
Because of what it is – the history of a modern nation’s philosophy for

more than a century – the story told in this book is important, and we
hope to have told it in an illuminating way, by providing two things: a
collection of (mostly) short pieces by leading philosophers of the period;
and an introduction to those texts that is also an episodic history of the
philosophy of the period. By limiting ourselves to a dozen or so figures of
the first magnitude, we have omitted others of like interest. A different
story and a richer one would include Acri, Berti, Cantu, De Meis … and
whole alphabets of voices that will be mainly silent here.
Other stories can be told about Italian philosophy in other periods. In
fact, some are already familiar to anglophone readers because many phi-
losophers who worked in Italy in ancient, medieval, and early modern
times – from Pythagoras to Vico – are prominent in the Anglo-American
canon of Western philosophy. But no such prominence or familiarity
attaches to most of the thinkers studied here, at least from an anglo-
phone perspective. Benedetto Croce, of course, is the great exception:
the end of his long life and career in 1952 marks one terminus of our
story. The other terminus is the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804, near
the start of the nineteenth century. The story then moves from Germany,
and the competing idealisms invented there by Kant and Hegel, to Italy,
where Croce and Giovanni Gentile responded decades later with new
kinds of idealism. Gentile was assassinated before the Second World War
ended, Croce died a few years after the war, and with them ended the era
of Italian philosophy that is our topic.
We have chosen pieces from many genres: textbooks, technical treatis-
es, learned essays, chapters from monographs, political manifestos, talks
to learned societies, notes for university lectures, academic inaugural
viii Preface and Ackowledgments
addresses, philosophical letters, personal letters, unpublished medita-

tions, and unpublished drafts of philosophical studies. Except for one
– Croce’s post-mortem on part of Hegel’s philosophy – they are relatively
short, and when we could, we have kept them intact, without omitting
parts of them.
Again, when it was feasible, we have used first editions or other early
versions of works that sometimes had long afterlives – the point being
to tell the story as it happened at some particular moment. Croce and
Gentile, for example, because they attained eminence and kept it for
decades in highly charged political circumstances, often republished
and revised their early writings in situations that invited changes of word-
ing or content. In such cases, although the excellent new national edi-
tions usually (and correctly) reflect the latest state of the text during the
author’s lifetime, we have tried to look at the issues through evidence
less carefully sorted by the authors, hoping that it might be more faithful
to an original moment.
The originals of texts not yet available in critical editions are some-
times erratic in orthography, punctuation, typography, and other details,
and in translating them we have aimed for consistency rather than mir-
roring the state of any text exactly. In the same spirit, bibliographical
form has been lightly regularized in some notes composed by the origi-
nal authors. In most cases, however, notes to the translations are by the
editors. When this is not so – when notes or parts of notes are by the
authors – those parts will be identified by the symbol [a], whereas the
symbol [e] will identify parts of notes added by the editors. Where nei-
ther [a] nor [e] occurs in a note, the editors have written it. Where the
symbol [a] occurs, cross-references will refer to page numbers in the
original Italian text and may not correspond to the English translation.
Because our Introduction is substantial, we have tried to minimize edi-
torial notes; nonetheless, these vary in scope and purpose. In Galluppi’s
account of Kant, for example, which was formative not just for the direc-
tion of later Italian philosophy but also for its terminology, references
to Kant’s German are meant to illuminate Galluppi’s Italian (and hence
our translation), not to identify Galluppi’s source by chapter and verse.
On the other hand, although Croce does not usually bother with cita-
tions in his attack on Hegel, it is sometimes possible to locate the state-
ment by Hegel that Croce has in his sights, and doing so is often crucial
to understanding him – Croce, that is. We cite the same references in
the notes to the Introduction and in the notes to our translations. For
some works the references list multiple editions because more recent
Preface and Ackowledgments ix
authors, like Croce and Gentile, used versions of texts unknown to ear-
lier authors, like Gioberti and Rosmini. Even for the same author, styles
and motives of citation vary widely in the texts translated here, in part
because they differ so much in genre and format.
When we started this project about six years ago, one of us was working
on Thomas Reid, the other on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Because
Eugenio Garin’s classical study of Pico had been published in 1937,
and because Pico and Garin were both Italian philosophers, questions
emerged about the philosophical background in Italy for Garin’s early
views on Pico. And since Garin had formed his views during the venten-
nio, questions followed about the Fascists, Fascist culture, Gentile and so
on, and these led to more questions about earlier Italian philosophers –
Rosmini, Gioberti, Spaventa, and others – of whom Gentile was an acute
reader and about whom he wrote abundantly. Then it became clear that
in these earlier chapters of Italian philosophy Thomas Reid was remark-
ably influential. We studied Reid’s Italian influence in Copenhaver and
Copenhaver (2006), and in Copenhaver and Copenhaver (2008) we
moved on to Croce. We have used both articles for our Introduction.
We thank Remo Bodei, Alexander Broadie, Antonio Capuano, Mas-
simo Ciavolella, Michele Ciliberto, Roberto Esposito, David Glidden,
Harvey Goldman, Emanuele Levi Mortera, Hans Lottenbach, Rosella
Pescatori, and Donald Verene, for their criticism and advice. And for the
inextinguishable fire of inspiration we thank Benedetto Croce, that great
ironist, who, in making the case that history must be brought under the
general concept of art, asked this question: ‘Truly, what psychological
novel is more interesting than the history of philosophy?’
Finally, we have dedicated this book to one mother, one wife, and the
same extraordinary person – Kathleen Copenhaver – who might not
answer Croce’s question as we might like it to be answered.
Brian Copenhaver
Rebecca Copenhaver
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PART I
Introduction
1
A Strange History
(Bobbio I)
When Norberto Bobbio died in 2004, an obituary in the Guardian

recorded his passing and remembered his career for that newspaper’s
anglophone readership. The Guardian praised Bobbio as ‘Italy’s leading
legal and political philosopher,’ noting that he was also ‘one of the most
authoritative figures in his country’s politics. His status was marked by
the Italian president’s immediate departure for Turin to be among the
first mourners, and an extensive discussion of his writing in the media.’1
For an American president (or, these days, an English prime minister)
to rush to the funeral of a philosopher, even a very great one, is
hard to imagine – especially if the deceased philosopher had per-
sistently attacked that dignitary in the mass media. The Guardian article
goes on to explain how such a thing came to pass in Italy, and not long
ago.
Bobbio grew up in the industrial city of Torino in a wealthy family
that sympathized with Fascism, but in his hometown university he also
talked with left-wing intellectuals at a time when such conversations
were risky – during Mussolini’s regime, the ‘twenty years,’ as Italians call
that tormented time.2 Publishing on logic, analogy, existentialism, and
phenomenology, he won his first chair at Siena in 1940, and towards
the end of the war he spent time in prison. After the occupation, Bob-
bio ran unsuccessfully for public office, but his academic career pros-
pered. He also began writing regularly for La Stampa, one of Italy’s
leading national newspapers, and he brokered crucial transactions
between Italy’s two leading political groups, which aggregated around
the Communists and the Christian Democrats. ‘In the year of his retire-
ment,’ explains the Guardian,
Part I: Introduction
‘he was nominated by the Italian president to one of the five life senator-
ships, and sat in the upper house as an independent socialist. Indeed, in
1992, he came close to being elected president as a compromise candidate.
But he confessed to finding decision-making difficult.’3
At the end of the day, then, Bobbio was a philosopher.

But Bobbio was more than what the anglophone world calls a ‘pub-
lic intellectual.’ He was an active, effective, and famous politician on a
national scale. The same can be said of most of the Italian philosophers
studied in this book, all of whom were active politically and publicly in one
degree or another. This fact alone makes the history of modern Italian
philosophy unlike anything that could have been observed about prac-
titioners of that discipline in England or the United States. To be sure,
some philosophers in these countries have been active and prominent
in national politics: Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell,
and John Dewey are conspicuous exceptions to the rule that for most
Anglo-American philosophers the effective reach of their public politics (as
distinct from their political activity as private citizens) has not gone far
beyond the walls of universities. Quite a different experience had been
common for Italian philosophers since the French Revolution, and Bob-
bio continued this tradition of public engagement into our own time.
In Bobbio’s hands, then, newspapers were a medium for philosophi-
cal messages, as in his opinion piece published by Il Contemporaneo in
1955, in an issue that printed several reflections on the ten years that
had passed since the end of the war. Placed next to an article about Anto-
nio Gramsci (1891−1937), who in those days was a figure of revolution-
ary reverence in Italy, Bobbio’s essay is titled ‘Our Speculative Genius.’4
This is how it starts:
It seems to me that the major result of these ten years of free discussion is
that we have discovered – up to the point of considering them intolerable
– our cultural deficiencies. And that’s all. That these deficiencies have then
been healed we lack the courage to affirm. You might actually say that in
looking for remedies … we have fallen back into some of our old mistakes.
I’m talking mainly about philosophy … Fascism fostered our complex of
cultural and moral ‘primacy,’ having found the ground already richly seed-
ed with idealism.5
Writing as a philosopher, Bobbio surveys the cultural scene in post-war

Italy, finds it wanting, and puts the blame on philosophy. He also remem-
4
A Strange History (Bobbio I)
bers the crimes of Fascism, of course, which he connects with ‘idealism’

and ‘primacy.’ The former term would have been understood by edu-
cated English readers at the time: what Bobbio means by ‘idealism’ is the
legacy of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, especially as developed by J.G. Fichte and G.F.W. Hegel before
1831 and imported to Italy a little later.
The word ‘primacy,’ however, would have mystified most anglophone
readers, although Bobbio’s Italian audience knew exactly what he was
talking about. He has in mind a political historiography invented by
Vincenzo Gioberti (1801−52), one of the nineteenth-century thinkers
studied in this book. Briefly, Gioberti’s very influential theory was that
Italy was the source of all Europe’s wisdom, including the philosophical
kind: hence Italy’s primacy.6 In 1955, of course, few Italians thought of
Italy as primary in any way, except patriotically – di cuore. Nonetheless, as
Bobbio explains,
from Gioberti’s ideas and their descendants during years that were decisive
for our intellectual development, we learned a strange history of European
thought. According to that theory, philosophy had already blossomed and
matured in Germany with Hegel but withered away there and was trans-
planted to Naples and environs, where it seemed to be acclimatized finally
and permanently, having gained new vigor and having sprouted new shoots,
as it prepared to spread its shadow from that spot over the whole world.7
The implication is that Mussolini’s imperial fantasies had been nour-

ished by earlier dreams that Italian idealism would conquer the world
intellectually. According to Bobbio, this improbable vision put Ital-
ian thinkers in the habit of ignoring any more realistic thoughts from
abroad. ‘Anything written outside of Italy,’ he explained,
was most often treated as a heap of nonsense and foolishness, if not just as
boring stupidity. The attitude to different currents of thought was either
pity or impatience. Guido De Ruggiero (my choice of a respectable person
and an anti-fascist is deliberate) took upon himself the thankless task of the
fearless gravedigger. His History of Contemporary Philosophy – I don’t know if it
is still read – was a string of miscarriages, justly interrupted and sagaciously
punished by the Providence of History, as we awaited the splendid era of
Italian idealism. Anything new in the air, and ten pages of summary con-
demnation in La Critica would make the air fit to breathe again.8
5
La Critica is the journal that Benedetto Croce (1866−1952) and Gio-

vanni Gentile (1875−1944) launched in 1903.9 Until 1943, and even
during the two decades of Fascism, Croce used it to maintain his enor-
mous authority – surpassed only by Gentile’s in a different register – over
Italian intellectual life. De Ruggiero, originally a follower of Gentile in
the time when he and Croce began to part ways, had run afoul of the
great man as early as 1913. The depth and duration of Croce’s power,
and of Gentile’s, over people like De Ruggiero is at the centre of Bob-
bio’s complaint. Although positivism, pragmatism, neo-scholasticism,
a nascent existentialism, and other philosophical traditions never fell
silent in Italy, the voices of the mighty idealists rang very loud. The two
of them – Croce mainly through words, Gentile often through institu-
tions – dominated Italian thought for decades, at first in a great cultural
partnership, eventually by unremitting political enmity.10
Either way, their warring versions of idealism were for many years the
prevailing options in Italy, until Bobbio could condemn idealism in 1955
(three years after Croce’s death) as the source of Italy’s misunderstand-
ing of herself. By that time, however, idealism, its predecessors and its
rivals, had lived a long life in Italy, sketched in the introduction to this
book and illustrated by writings of philosophers whose names are mostly
unknown outside the peninsula.
6
2
Idealism and Sensism
(Rosmini I)
Consider two lists of thirteen names each: first, Pythagoras, Parmenides,

Empedocles, Cicero, Plotinus, Anselm, Aquinas, Bonaventura, Machi-
avelli, Bruno, Campanella, Galileo, and Vico; next, Galluppi, Rosmini,
Mamiani, Gioberti, Spaventa, Villari, De Sanctis, Fiorentino, Florenzi
Waddington, Labriola, Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci.11 What these names
have in common is that they all belonged to Italians, either by birth or
by residence. All were also philosophers, but the second group, except
Gramsci, Croce, and perhaps Gentile, is invisible in the current anglo-
phone history of philosophy. And yet the cause of their obscurity is a
reason for remembering them: the story of philosophy in Italy from Kant
through Croce is so remarkable, not only by Anglo-American standards
but also from a European (or ‘Continental’) point of view, that under-
standing it better will illuminate the larger history of the discipline.
The heart of the Italian anomaly, very briefly, is that idealism of a
Hegelian kind thrived in Italy long after it had expired elsewhere, until
after 1952, when Croce died and the catastrophe of Fascism and two
world wars could finally be addressed from other philosophical perspec-
tives. Until then, the liberal Croce and the Fascist Gentile dominated
Italian culture, and the philosophy favoured by them was the ideal-
ism on which, at first, they had collaborated, until theory and practice
made them bitter enemies. Meanwhile, much of Italian philosophy had
become hostage to their eventually antagonistic systems, confining their
friends as much as their enemies. An ideological history of philosophy,
tuned to the story of the new Italian nation, was another part of the
lasting framework that Gentile and Croce created – Gentile especially.
Seeing his own ‘actual idealism’ as the telos, in a Hegelian sense, of what
had gone before, Gentile produced what is still the grand narrative of
post-Kantian thought in Italy. The thirteen Italians studied here are key
figures in Gentile’s story.12
In this version of the history of Italian philosophy, Antonio Rosmini
(1797−1855) is an ancestor of Gentile’s idealism, along with Pasquale
Galluppi (1770−1846), Rosmini’s most distinguished predecessor, and
Terenzio Mamiani (1799−1885) and Vincenzo Gioberti, his most out-
spoken opponents. All four philosophers were active in the first half of
the nineteenth century, and all but Galluppi lived through the Napo-
leonic Wars, the Restoration, the Revolutions of 1820−1 and 1831, the
more turbulent Revolutions of 1848−9, and their disheartening after-
math. Only Mamiani survived to see Italy become a united nation in
1860, but all four had parts to play, sometimes leading parts, in the birth
of modern Italy.13
Two of these philosophers, Mamiani and Gioberti, wrote extensively
about earlier Italian thought, from antiquity onward, as the root of all
Western philosophy, thus linking current affairs with Italy’s glorious past
and providing the background for Gentile’s later historiography, whose
more immediate inspiration was Bertrando Spaventa, a Hegelian who
wrote mainly after 1860. After Gioberti had announced the primacy
of Italian philosophy, Spaventa offered a more sophisticated view: that
the ancient wisdom revived in Italy during the Renaissance had then
circulated through Europe until Kant and Hegel prepared the way for
another Italian revival in the nineteenth century, coinciding with Italy’s
national unification.14
Consider another list: Aristotle, Berkeley, Condillac, Descartes, Hume,
Kant, Leibniz, Locke, Malebranche, Plato, Reid, Smith, and Stewart.
These are the thirteen non-Italians who figure most prominently in the
historical part of the work that made Antonio Rosmini famous, the New
Essay on the Origin of Ideas, published in 1830.15 The philosophical core
of the New Essay is a theory of ideas, what Rosmini called an ‘ideology,’
presented in the third of its four volumes, after 700 pages of historical
analysis. Rosmini’s history depicts modern, post-Cartesian philosophy as
progressive, moving through two stages of improvement after an initial
collapse when French Cartesians neglected their master’s ‘spiritualism,’
permitting Locke and Condillac to promulgate their disastrous ‘sen-
sism.’ The first effort to overcome this scandal, according to Rosmini,
was the work of ‘the Scottish School,’ led by Thomas Reid and including
Dugald Stewart. The second attempt was Kant’s, building on Plato and
Leibniz.16
Sensism was the main target of Rosmini’s polemics, both philosophi-
8
Idealism and Sensism (Rosmini I)
cal and historical. ‘In the whole history of philosophy,’ he thundered,

‘… no confusion has ever been as vile or as degrading for human nature
as that devised by the sensists of the preceding century, who extinguished
the divine light of human understanding by confining it entirely within
sensations that wild animals have in common with humans; they ignored
the real distinction between sense and intellect, between sensation and
the idea.’17
If the heretic Locke fathered this error, Condillac was his heir and
the arch-heretic of sensism. He led the French away from the spiritu-
al truth that Malebranche had laboured to preserve. ‘Love of system’
persuaded Condillac ‘to reduce Locke’s two principles of sensation and
reflection … to one faculty alone, to sensation,’ which ‘performs two
operations so distinct that they are called by different names … sensing
external things and … judging the same things.’18 Condillac’s mistake
was the gross and infantile blunder of ‘a waxwork sophist,’ as Rosmini
called him, but his superficiality was seductive – even in Italy, where
knowledge of French was as common among educated people as igno-
rance of German, not to speak of English. Writing more than a decade
after Napoleon’s final defeat, Rosmini was still sensitive about the French
connection in a period that he called ‘a time of philosophical servitude.’
When the French battalions swept into a disunited Italy after the Revolu-
tion of 1789, they brought an aggressive culture with them, Enlightened
ideas that would threaten Restoration pieties. From Rosmini’s perspec-
tive, sensism was the philosophical face of this godless evil, the heinous
crime of a secular Enlightenment.19
To make matters worse, the Abbé Condillac had spent ten years in
Italy, tutoring the young Duke of Parma and attracting Italian disci-
ples. With special pride, then, Rosmini notes that it was an Italian who
exposed Condillac’s empty dogmatism even while he still tyrannized the
French. He dates this revelation to 1812, when the physician Michele
Araldi attacked Condillac’s views on natural science, adding that ‘at the
time when Royer-Collard began his lectures in 1811, the only philosophy
in France was Condillac’s.’ Rosmini took these words from the introduc-
tion to the French translation of Reid’s complete works, which Théodore
Jouffroy began to publish in 1828. The Pierre Paul Royer-Collard that
he mentions was a French politician and philosopher who had turned
against Condillac even before Araldi, in 1811. One of Royer-Collard’s stu-
dents was Victor Cousin, the cosmopolitan prodigy who succeeded him
at the Sorbonne in 1815, lectured on Scottish philosophy, and – after
being silenced for eight years by the Restoration government – finally
9
began to publish his lectures in the 1820s. Jouffroy, Reid’s translator, was
also Cousin’s student. Thus, although Reid’s Inquiry had been available
in French since 1768, and hence accessible to Italians, Rosmini’s New
Essay followed another French revival of Reid that was two decades old.
The chronology helps explain Rosmini’s hatred of Condillac, as well as
his admiration for Reid.20
Rosmini’s discussion of Reid and Dugald Stewart fills more than two-
thirds of the first volume of the New Essay, at the end of which Rosmini
asks
‘if there is anything solid, anything that can really be called an addition to
philosophical understanding in the views of the philosophers after Locke
that we have reviewed in this whole volume? … I find nothing that deserves
this status … except the questions raised by Reid about those who accepted
simple apprehension as the first operation of the soul.’21
In the unheroic second phase of his history, which occupies Rosmini for
more than two hundred pages, Thomas Reid turns out to be the only
hero; for that reason, in Rosmini’s view, Reid was also Kant’s most impor-
tant predecessor.
A large part of Rosmini’s motivation for doing philosophy was to
ensure that Roman Catholic theology had a basis in reason; another
powerful motive was resentment of Italy’s intellectual dependence on
foreigners in this critical task. Like other Italians, Rosmini knew that
since Galileo’s time little philosophy done in Italy had won the respect of
other Europeans. Even the brilliant and idiosyncratic Vico came into his
own only in the nineteenth century. In this climate, some of Rosmini’s
immediate predecessors – Melchiorre Gioia, Gian Domenico Romagno-
si, and others – seemed, despite their best efforts, to be mouthpieces for
Condillac, Destutt de Tracy, and the French Idéologues. Rosmini wanted
to silence these ‘materialist and immoral’ ideas and find a native Italian
voice for philosophy.22
10
3
Philosophies Imported and Contested
(Galluppi I)
Born in the northeast of Italy and living most of his life there, Rosmini
looked at first to French rather than German philosophers, even though
Austria had replaced France as the dominant foreign power in Restora-
tion Italy after 1815. Born far to the south, in Calabria, Pasquale Gal-
luppi had meanwhile opened a channel to German thought, though it
was indirect, through French interpretations or translations of German
texts. And this eventual openness to novel influences followed a very
conventional education.23
When Galluppi was born in Tropea, that Calabrian town was part of
the Kingdom of Naples, and Galluppi was the son of an ancient noble
family. His father the Baron sent him to study law at the University of
Naples, but he found the provocative topics of biblical studies and theol-
ogy more attractive. When his elder brother’s death ended Galluppi’s
formal education, family duties called the new heir back to Tropea,
where he married in 1794, eventually fathering fourteen children. Like
many young aristocrats, however, he had also acquired the republican
sympathies that helped make him a local cultural force. He stirred up
a few theological squabbles, but more serious trouble came in 1799
when a failed revolution in Naples caused him to be held hostage as a
republican.24
Galluppi’s first contact with philosophy had come in the local schools
of Tropea, where another Neapolitan, the illustrious Antonio Genovesi
(1713−69), still ruled the Enlightenment curriculum. At first, his deeper
philosophical reading was quite predictable: Wolff, Leibniz, and Des-
cartes were the conspicuous figures from beyond the peninsula. Then
around 1800 he discovered Condillac, who led him to Locke and to
meditating on a philosophy of his own. His first public effort was a short
treatise of 1807, On Analysis and Synthesis, which, despite its title, reflects
no knowledge of Kant. Galluppi’s mature philosophical work emerged
twelve years later, while he also declared himself politically in occasion-
al pieces on freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, and related
topics.25
Beginning in 1819, Galluppi presented his system as a response to
Kant in the six volumes of a Philosophical Essay on the Critique of Conscious-
ness (1819−31). In contemporary terms, his central questions were about
mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and psychology. A stunningly success-
ful companion to the Essay was another six-volume work, the Elements of
Philosophy (1820−7), which saw five editions during Galluppi’s lifetime,
long remained the standard textbook of philosophy in Italy and made its
author famous. But Galluppi’s magnum opus was the Essay, whose title
proclaims its engagement with Kant; it is a long debate with the sage of
Königsberg driven by great historical learning and meant to establish
‘the true philosophy of experience’ in opposition to the critical philoso-
phy. In Galluppi’s story of philosophy prior to his own, the provisional
victor is not Kant but Thomas Reid.26 In 1827 Galluppi followed these
ponderous volumes with something much shorter: his Philosophical Let-
ters on Developments in Philosophy Relating to the Principles of Human Cogni-
tions. Despite its brevity, this original review of modern philosophy from
Descartes through Fichte is of great importance; it has been called the
first substantive history of philosophy written in Italian.27
In 1829, before Rosmini had completed his own New Essay, Galluppi
wrote to tell him that he disagreed with his theory of being, but he cour-
teously sent Rosmini the Elements while explaining that he did not have
a spare copy of his still incomplete Essay. He included another item,
however − the Philosophical Letters in its 1827 version − which Rosmini
then cited in the New Essay of 1830. This shorter edition of the Letters
that Rosmini saw ended with a section on Kant, an early and influential
introduction to the critical philosophy in Italian. But later editions after
1838 added another letter condemning ‘the deeply respected Rosmini’
for obscuring the key point of the objectivity of cognition. Had Rosmini
seen this material before he published in 1830, he might have been less
kind to Galluppi, whom he corrects on a number of points in notes but
treats with great respect in the text of the New Essay.28
Near the end of his life, after two decades of savage battles that eventu-
ally caused the Church to put his books on the Index, Rosmini expressed
regret at Galluppi’s continuing influence on the Catholic faithful. ‘How
can Galluppi be regarded in Rome as a philosopher of sound doctrine
12
Philosophies Imported and Contested (Galluppi I)
when by his subjectivism he puts man in God’s place as the foundation

of truth?’ Even so, by the time Rosmini first encountered Galluppi, his
southern rival was well on the way to fame. In 1831 he was called to
the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics in Naples. He was already a celeb-
rity in Italy, and in the rest of Europe he was an eminent philosopher.
Cousin, the great philosophical fixer of the age, had been a channel to
the non-Italian world since Galluppi had translated Cousin’s Philosophi-
cal Fragments. Cousin then arranged Galluppi’s election to the Académie
Française in 1838, when his last major philosophical effort, the Philoso-
phy of Will (1832−42), was still incomplete. He died a pious Catholic in
Naples in 1846.29
13
4
Experience and Ideology
(Galluppi II)
Galluppi described his philosophy of experience as salvaging Kant’s fail-

ure to find a secure basis for human cognition. He divides the exposition
of this philosophy in the Elements into five parts filling more than six hun-
dred pages. His names for these five parts are ‘pure logic,’ ‘psychology,’
‘ideology,’ ‘mixed logic,’ and ‘moral philosophy and natural theology,’
each of them followed by a ‘summary in questions and answers.’ At the
end of the mixed logic, he also provides an ‘exposition and evaluation of
the transcendental philosophy.’ Translated here are Galluppi’s digest of
Kant, one of the first of its kind in Italian, along with the little catechisms
on psychology, ideology, and mixed logic.30
Galluppi’s psychology is a predictable product of the tradition in
which he was educated. It is a standard empiricist theory of ideas. More
precisely, mental states and operations are modifications of a mind which
is a substance independent of the states and operations that modify it.
Moreover, each of us is conscious of all our mental states and operations,
as Locke had taught, and consciousness is a kind of inner sense. Unlike
Locke, however, Galluppi does not make consciousness as inner sense a
mere analog of sensory perception: in fact, he maintains that every men-
tal state is ‘accompanied by a sensation of it.’31 The mind – or soul – also
has a sensation of itself as modified by its states and operations. Such
modifications of mind are of two kinds: actions, which include willing,
judging, and reasoning; and passions, which include pains and pleas-
ures. Faculties of mind are capacities either to produce actions through
mental activity as an efficient cause or to be affected in certain ways by
the mind’s objects and their properties.
Galluppi regards intentionality as mind’s primary feature: according-
ly, sensibility and consciousness are the two passive faculties that ‘give
Experience and Ideology (Galluppi II)
the mind the objects of its thoughts.’ Objects of sensibility are external,
while objects of consciousness are internal to the mind itself and its mod-
ifications. The first object given to the mind is the ‘I that senses objects
outside it,’ and it is given by consciousness. In other words, the primal
moment of consciousness is reflexive – the mind’s conscious sensing of
its own sensory perception of an external object or property.32
There are also two active faculties that operate on objects given by
sensibility and consciousness: analysis and synthesis. Analysis divides and
distinguishes its objects by acts of attention and abstraction. Attention
separates not only objects that are already naturally independent – such
as a person and the tree next to her – but also those that are independent
of one another but contingently connected – such as a person’s body and
her head. Abstraction separates things that are not metaphysically inde-
pendent: modes and substances, for example. Galluppi is a nominalist:
he holds that universals are nothing over and above the particulars that
instantiate them. Nevertheless, by abstraction we can form the ‘universal
idea of man, tree, body, and so on …’ apart from ‘the determinations
without which they cannot exist.’33 Synthesis unites objects presented
by sensibility and consciousness in three ways: real, ideal, and imagina-
tive synthesis. Real syntheses are judgments affirming modes that actu-
ally inhere in various subjects. Ideal syntheses are judgments expressing
merely logical relations – such as the ‘equal to’ relation. Ideal syntheses
may be objective or subjective: objective if the terms of the relation are
existing objects; otherwise subjective. Imaginative syntheses form com-
plex ideas of various objects. If the object is physically and nomologically
possible, the imaginative synthesis is practical; if not, it is poetic.34
Galluppi adds one more active faculty: imagination, of which memory
and recollection are species. Each reproduces a past perception – which
is why it is a species of imagination – plus an additional perception of
having had that past perception and recognizing it as such. The law
of association of ideas governs this recognition. When perceptions are
reproduced directly, as one perception gives rise to another by the law
of association (I perceive the preacher standing before me as the same
preacher I saw last Sunday, for example), the recognition is a memory.
When perceptions are reproduced indirectly by memories of other per-
ceptions (I recall an acquaintance after he reminds me that we have
already met), the recognition is a recollection.35
Up to this point, nothing in the Elements differs greatly from other
accounts of cognition current in the early nineteenth century. Unlike
Galluppi’s psychology, however, his ideology departs markedly from tra-
15
ditional empiricism. He claims that the first object given the mind is
given by consciousness rather than sensibility, and that the cognitions
necessary for human understanding are derived from that first object,
which is the ‘I that senses something outside the I.’36 Such ‘primitive
cognitions’ are data of experience, but not of sensibility.37 Galluppi thus
discards the key distinction between sensation and reflection used by
Hume to argue that we have no legitimate ideas of causation, substance,
identity, and so on. Galluppi’s primitive cognition is experiential because
it involves a sensation that is also a perception inasmuch as it is of something
real. The sensation that directs the mind to the ‘I that senses something
outside the I’ is a sensation of consciousness rather than of sensibility.
Since it directs us to real objects and their relations – primitively, the
I and the something outside the I – this first cognition is the ground
of the objective cognition of substances, modes, and relations, but this is
ruled out, according to Galluppi, by Hume’s system and by Kant’s. If the
primitive cognition and the sensation that directs it are analysed, the
analysis will ground ideas of substance and mode as well as of cause and
effect. The I is a substance, and its sensing of something outside it is a
modification of itself. No mode exists independently of the substance
that it modifies, but analysis abstracts the one from the other and forms
a real cognition of both from the data of experience. Likewise, the I is an
efficient cause of its own willing, and the effects of its willing are given
in experience. No effect exists independently of its cause, but – as with
modes of substances – analysis abstracts one from the other and forms a
real cognition of both from the data of experience.38
According to Galluppi, the only real relations – relations that do not
depend on the mind – are of substances with modes, and of causes with
effects. Logical relations such as identity, difference, equality, and ine-
quality, as well as spatio-temporal relations, are merely ideal in the sense
that they are nothing over and above the mind’s organization of its own
thoughts and the objects of its thoughts. The items organized are real,
but the organizing principles are ideal. Our idea of duration, for exam-
ple, is not derived from an experience of duration; rather it is derived
from experience of a particular type of causal relation: generation. We
experience effects of generative causes, and because effects presuppose
prior causes, we form an idea of duration from these experiences.39
Galluppi’s ideology ends with a proof of the existence of the Absolute,
which depends on other proofs: first, that there is no effect without a
cause; next, that an infinite series of effects is impossible. To establish the
first point, Galluppi uses a proof by cases:
16
1. An effect is something that comes to be;

2. what comes to be either (a) does not depend for its existence on some-
thing else, or else (b) it does so depend;
3. but if (a) it does not depend, it is not an effect, which eliminates the en-
tailment that there is an effect without a cause;
4. and (b) if it does so depend, that on which it depends must be an efficient
cause of its existence.
Next comes his proof that there cannot be an infinite series of effects.
For a closed finite series of effects – A, B, C, D, E – wherein each effect
depends for its existence on the item preceding, if we posit the series,
we will posit at least one effect without a cause: in this case, A. But no
effect is without a cause, so such a series is impossible. What is true of
a series of five effects will be true of any other series, including an infi-
nite series. Thus, an infinite series of effects is also impossible. In other
words, whether the series is finite or infinite, its first member cannot be
an effect at all since effects, by definition, have causes.
From these two conclusions, one of them assuming a good analogy
between finite and infinite sequences, Galluppi next infers the existence
of the Absolute:
1. There is no effect without a cause;

2. an infinite series of effects is impossible;
3. that anything exists entails the existence of the Absolute as first cause;
4. but the I exists;
5. and the I is not the Absolute;
6. therefore, the I is an effect of the Absolute, which is its first cause.40
The third premise, which is meant to follow from the two before it, claims
that the existence of any effect depends ultimately on a first cause. The
fourth premise, writes Galluppi, ‘is a primitive truth of fact,’ derived per-
haps from the primitive cognition of ‘the I that senses something outside
the I.’ The fifth premise requires yet another proof, from the indiscern-
ibility of identicals. In a compressed version: the Absolute is immutable,
but the I is not immutable; therefore, the I is not the Absolute. Finally,
the Absolute is the cause of the I, because, while the Absolute can exist
without the I, the I needs the Absolute for its existence. The I’s exist-
ence is thus contingent rather than necessary; hence, it must have been
brought into being by an Absolute which, according to Galluppi, must
be a volitional rather than a natural cause, and therefore intelligent.41
17
The conclusions about the Absolute that end Galluppi’s ideology

obviously depend on scholastic natural theology. The mixed logic that
follows is Galluppi’s epistemology, whose Cartesian ancestry is likewise
obvious, taking this next part of his system even farther from the tradi-
tional empiricism implicit in the psychology.
Galluppi takes primitive cognition to reveal a primitive truth that
admits no proof: namely, that we have some real cognitions. ‘Real’ in
this case describes the cognition of an object (or property) that exists
independently of the cognition. The Cartesian cogito is an example of
the kind of truth provided by primitive cognition: one real thing that
we know is the existence of the I that thinks. The I is equipped with
faculties of consciousness, sensory perception and testimony which are
grounds of judgment, and a ground is legitimate or illegitimate depend-
ing on whether the judgment grounded is true or false, under normal
conditions and proper use. ‘That I am a thing that thinks’ is a judgment
grounded legitimately, and it is this grounding, rather than any proof,
which is its justification.42
Consciousness, sensory perception, and testimony can all be legitimate
grounds of judgments expressing truths of fact. Direct perception of
relations among ideas – a function of consciousness alone – is the legiti-
mate ground of judgments expressing rational or metaphysical truths.
Accordingly, Galluppi once again asserts the primacy of consciousness
by claiming that it is the only direct ground of judgment. All judgments
produced by other faculties, such as sensory perception, memory, and
testimony, derive their legitimacy indirectly from consciousness, which
alone gives us knowledge of the existence and functioning of the other
faculties. His notion of consciousness leads Galluppi to treat perception
as causal and direct: consciousness reveals that perceiving is thinking of
an extra-mental object that causes that same thinking.43
Galluppi argues that sceptics go wrong by trying to prove the primitive
judgments that neither require nor admit proof. Any such proof would
claim two sources of legitimacy: from the faculties that ground the judg-
ments constituting its premises; and from the reasoning that allows infer-
ence from one premise to another. But appeal to these sources makes
the proof viciously circular. (The alternative is a kind of foundational-
ism.) Galluppi also objects to another common form of sceptical argu-
ment: from individual cases of error or disagreement among observers,
the sceptic concludes that all judgments are false or that there is no real-
ity that would make at least one party to a dispute mistaken. Conclusions
of such arguments are more universal than their premises, Galluppi
18
claims, which violates inductive requirements for reasoning. He insists

with Descartes that error is the product of the limitations of the human
mind and of our carelessness about such limitations.44
Galluppi could oppose the sceptics because he thought he had
succeeded where Kant (in his view) failed: namely, in securing the
possibility of knowledge by the account of primitive cognition that cul-
minates in his mixed logic. Before the mixed logic begins, however,
the ideology closes with an ‘Explanation and Evaluation of the Tran-
scendental Philosophy.’ For the most part, Galluppi’s digest of Kant is
just that – a brief account of transcendental philosophy as presented in
the first Critique.45 The text closely follows the order of Kant’s master-
piece; its textual accuracy and detail are striking, especially in so brief
a statement. Indeed, Galluppi sometimes seems impatient with himself,
occasionally interrupting his exposition with succinct objections and
criticisms.
Apart from a few rhetorical jabs, the first substantial criticism follows
Galluppi’s exposition of the roles played in cognition by the intuition,
the understanding, and the transcendental unity of apperception. His
objection is a standard one, first offered by F.H. Jacobi and aimed at the
first edition of the Critique.46 At the point where Galluppi intervenes,
Kant has established – among other things – the subjectivity of the notion
of cause: its source is the understanding rather than sensory experience;
and it applies to objects of experience only insofar as causality is one
of the categories of the understanding, which, in conjunction with the
forms of intuition, make objects of experience possible. In particular, the
notion of cause does not apply to objects independently of our experi-
ence. At the outset of his long and intricate argument, however, Kant
has also claimed that knowledge begins when objects affect our sensory
organs. How can objects cause changes in sensory systems, initiating a
process that results in experience, if the causal features of the environ-
ment are themselves a function of experience? ‘A difficulty will surely
emerge as you think about this,’ Galluppi maintains.
‘This philosophy has two canons: that sensation comes to us from objects;
and that we have no informative communication with objects taken by
themselves, called noumena. I do not understand how these two canons
agree with one another – nor how they can be made to agree.’47
He then criticizes Kant for his reaction to Hume’s problem. His argu-
ment is a reductio:
19
1. Transcendental idealism holds that cognition of causal connections origi-

nates in the cognitive faculties;
2. the same system holds that what originates in the cognitive faculties is
subjective;
3. it also holds that what is subjective is necessary;
4. and it agrees with Hume that there are no necessary connections among
the perceptions that constitute empirical objects;
5. therefore, the connections among the perceptions that constitute empiri-
cal objects are not subjective (by 3 and 4);
6. but if such connections are not subjective, they must be objective;
7. therefore, cognition of causal connections cannot originate in the cogni-
tive faculties, contrary to the claims of transcendental idealism.48
The motivation of Galluppi’s familiar (and misplaced) criticisms emerg-

es at the beginning of the ‘Explanation and Evaluation,’ where he intro-
duces the senses of the words ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ as he uses them
to interpret Kant. ‘Subjective means what comes from the mind, from the
cognizing subject, and not at all from the object cognized. The latter, the
component of cognition that comes from the object, is called objective.’
Given Galluppi’s education, this rendering of the subjective/objective
distinction is unsurprising. It arises from the roughly Cartesian distinc-
tion between an inner world of subjectivity, which is direct, immediate,
and transparent, and an outer world represented objectively by ideas
present to subjectivity.49
In some sceptical scenarios, the world outside the mind does not exist,
but representations given in subjectivity nevertheless remain constant:
such representations are regarded as merely subjective, however, rath-
er than objective. When combined with the conception of an ‘inner’
and ‘outer’ world, the distinction between objective representation and
merely subjective representation turns into a remarkably non-Cartesian
distinction between a subjective inner realm populated by mere appear-
ances, and an objective, extra-mental realm populated by things that are
real. Moreover, in the century and a half between Descartes and Gal-
luppi, when many philosophers worried about the origins of ideas, the
foregoing framework suggested a natural etiological reading of the sub-
jective/objective distinction: cognitions originating in the mind alone
are subjective; cognitions originating in normal sensory experience of
extra-mental objects are objective.
Kant himself used ‘subjective’ to mean both ‘originating in the sub-
ject’s faculties’ and ‘lacking application to objects’; ‘subjectivitySF’ and
20
‘subjectivityNO’ are Patricia Kitcher’s labels for the two senses.50 But Kant
did not use ‘objective’ to name a cognition’s having originated in sensory
experience as a property of that cognition. Instead, he called the cogni-
tions that we have by virtue of sensory experience ‘empirical.’ Moreover,
Kant’s core notion of objectivity is not etiological; it is transcendental: a
cognition is objective if it is a necessary condition of the possibility of any
objects of thought and experience at all.
Hence, the differences between Galluppi and Kant are not merely ter-
minological. On Galluppi’s understanding of the terms in play, Kant’s
famous description of the problem of the Transcendental Deduction
becomes a paradox: ‘the difficulty … is namely how subjective condi-
tions of thinking should have an objective validity, that is, yield condi-
tions for the possibility of all cognition of objects.’51 But the problem of
the Deduction (despite its name) is not logical; it is epistemological. It
poses this question: how can cognitions originating in the faculties of a
subject alone have the legitimacy characteristic of objective experience?
For Kant, their legitimacy derives from their being necessary for the
very possibility of objects of thought or experience. Galluppi confuses
his own notion of subjectivity with Kant’s. When Kant claims that cog-
nition of spatio-temporal and causal-substantival features of the world
originates in a subject’s faculties rather than in sensory experience, Gal-
luppi takes Kant’s claim as equivalent to the view that these are not real
features of objects:
‘The transcendental philosophy … treats many objective elements as sub-

jective, and it treats them as inherent in our cognitive faculty, antecedently
to any datum of experience whatever. Moreover, it treats these subjective
elements as in themselves empty of reality and as lasting phenomena.’52
The resulting picture of Kant is not uncommon, and it arose during

Kant’s own lifetime; he produced a second edition of the first Critique
partly to dispel the interpretation, which turns him into an empirical
idealist like Berkeley.
In Berkeley’s non-Kantian world, tables, chairs, and other ordinary
objects are mere appearances in the sense that they are exhausted by
properties having the same status as the secondary qualities introduced
by indirect realists: they are not only subjectiveSF; they are also subjec-
tiveNO. But unlike Berkeley, Kant holds that these ordinary objects of sen-
sory experience are real, substantial, and spatio-temporal. With Hume,
he agrees that cognition – of substance, cause, duration, and other key
21
features of objects of experience and thought – does not and cannot

originate in sensory experience. But he rejects Hume’s claim that the
tribunal of reason finds such cognitions illegitimate. Hence, the goal of
the Deduction is to secure the legitimacy of cognitions that are a priori
in the sense of originating the cognitive faculties themselves. Their legiti-
macy is secured by showing how they are required as interpretative func-
tions that take a manifold given by sensibility and produce conceptions
that exhibit the kind of uniformity and regularity required of genuine
experience rather than mere subjective feeling.
By confusing the notion of a prioricity with the indications of a priori
cognitions, Galluppi further distorts Kant’s notion of objectivity.
‘The philosophy that I am investigating declares the following basic princi-

ple: what is necessary, invariable and universal in our cognitions is subjec-
tive, pure and a priori; by contrast, the accidental, contingent and variable
will belong to the object, will be an objective element.’53
For Kant, universality and necessity are marks or indications of whether

a cognition is a priori, and yet a cognition is a priori not because it is
necessary or universal, but because it originates in the cognitive faculties
themselves, rather than in sensory experience. In other words, a cog-
nition is a priori in virtue of being subjectiveSF. But being subjectiveSF
does not entail being subjectiveNO. Indeed, if the Deduction succeeds,
it does so by showing how subjectiveSF cognitions can be objective pre-
cisely because they are applicable to objects in the strictest sense: they
are conditions of the possibility of knowledge of objects. Kant’s objec-
tivity is not what is accidental, contingent, and variable; it is what is val-
id for all experience. The accidental, contingent, and variable in our
experience, according to Kant, is subjectiveNO – subjective in the sense of
being contingent on the sensory organs and bodily features of particular
individuals.
Given Galluppi’s view of the subjective/objective distinction, it is not
hard to see why Kant’s theory troubled him. By the end of his mixed log-
ic, he wants to have secured the existence of the Absolute. And he agrees
with Kant that the notion of the Absolute does not come from analysis of
sensory experience. Combine this thesis with Galluppi’s further under-
standing of Kant: if the Absolute does not originate from sensory experi-
ence, then, in Kant’s system, it must originate in the cognitive faculties
themselves; but if it originates in the cognitive faculties themselves, it
is a merely subjectiveNO notion. The Absolute becomes as illusory as a
22
straight stick that looks bent in water, and Kant’s transcendental idealism
blocks Galluppi’s lifelong effort to rescue empiricism from the sensists in
a system that would support both theology and science.54
In the end, Galluppi had less success as a champion of bien-pensant
empiricism than as an uncommissioned emissary of the transcendental
philosophy that he opposed. When he began his life-long debate with
Kant in 1819, Born’s Latin translation was the best route to the first Cri-
tique for Italians who could not read German. As more Italians made
direct and indirect contact with Kant, and Galluppi rose to academic
eminence, his persistent engagement with the critical philosophy – espe-
cially in the widely read Elements – gave thousands of young Italians their
first acquaintance with the thinker whom Antonio Rosmini would also
attack as ‘the sophist of Königsberg.’55
23
5
Restoration and Reaction
(Rosmini II)
Galluppi had grown up in the Europe of the ancien régime, of which Ros-
mini had no experience, though he certainly shared Galluppi’s com-
mitment to traditional Christian theism. By the time he entered the
University of Padua to study theology in 1816, Napoleon was on St Hele-
na, and the monarchs of Europe were trying to rebuild what the French
Revolution had destroyed. Like Galluppi’s family, Rosmini’s was noble
and hence in a position to profit from the Restoration. But even after
his ordination in 1821, the young priest was stirred by the Italian patriot-
ism that Italy’s Austrian masters found seditious. Rosmini soon moved
on from his youthful politics to the institutional project that became his
life’s most enduring work. In 1828 he drafted the charter for a new reli-
gious order, the Institute of Charity, grudgingly recognized by Pius VIII
in 1829 and still active today.56
Although followers of Rosmini in contemporary England have trans-
lated a large part of his enormous philosophical output, among profes-
sional philosophers in the anglophone world the readership for it is
small.57 In his own time and place, however, Father Rosmini was a cel-
ebrated figure. His earliest philosophical polemics were aimed at other
Italians – Gioia, Romagnosi, and the poet Ugo Foscolo – judged by the
young priest to have gone over to the Jacobin heresy of sensism. He also
knew some Kantian philosophy even before studying at Padua, and by
the time the New Essay began to appear he had read the first Critique in
Latin.58 This was in the same year, 1828, when he wrote the constitution
for his new order. The shorter philosophical pieces that preceded the
New Essay attracted the attention of reformers in the Catholic Church.
But when he also produced books on moral philosophy, natural law, and
society, Gregory XVI advised him to stick to his writing and stay out of
religious politics, stalling the full approval of the Institute until 1838.
Restoration and Reaction (Rosmini II)
Taking this papal counsel to heart, Rosmini moved to Stresa on Lake

Maggiore, leaving only for brief periods until he died there in 1855. But
his retreat was not purely spiritual. He continued to debate the great
public figures of his day – Lammenais the French reformer, Cattaneo the
Italian republican, and, of course, Cousin, Galluppi, Gioberti, and other
philosophers. Among his philosophical peers in Italy, Mamiani was Ros-
mini’s first major target, but the Jesuits were deadlier enemies. Affronted
by Rosmini’s Treatise on Moral Conscience of 1839−41, the Society declared
war on its author, and hostilities continued until Pope Gregory silenced
both parties. When Gregory died in 1846, many hoped that the next
pope might find a better way to confront modernity than by declaring
the newly invented railroads to be tools of Satan. When the conclave
chose a liberal, joy rang loud in the streets, and then the new Pius IX
invited Rosmini to Rome.
The greatest expectations seemed not too great; even the Jesuits held
their tongues. And yet Rosmini chose this moment to launch yet another
philosophical polemic – this time circulating lectures on Gioberti that
accused him of pantheism. As the events of 1848 raced on, Rosmini
responded with public statements on Italian unity, constitutionalism,
and social justice. Meanwhile, his old rival Gioberti had returned from
exile to join the government in Torino, where he invited Rosmini to
appear and then to undertake a mission to persuade Pius IX to join the
struggle against Austria. The Pope received Rosmini graciously, encour-
aging talk of a red hat, but then the government in Torino fell and Ros-
mini resigned his mission. The Pope kept him close by in Rome until
revolutionary violence shook the city, ending all thoughts of reform in
the Vatican.
Rosmini returned to Stresa, more exposed than ever to his enemies.
When tongues wagged in the Curia, some of his books appeared on the
Index. One was The Five Wounds of the Holy Church, begun in 1832 but
withheld for fifteen years, for obvious reasons. The five wounds that Ros-
mini wished to heal were the Church’s cultural isolation, ignorant clergy,
divided bishops, secularized authority, and exploited property. He pro-
posed that the people and clergy freely elect their own bishops, thus
liberating the Church from corruption while preserving a less powerful
papacy with more integrity. Having made his formal submission to the
condemnation of his vexatious books, Rosmini nonetheless went on to
write more.59 But his replies to his enemies now went unpublished, along
with his Theosophy, a massive revision of his philosophical system, though
he allowed some studies of philosophy and spirituality to appear in print.
He also kept talking with Alessandro Manzoni and other members of
25
his own political generation, as well as the Cavour family, whose time
was still to come. In 1854, the year before the philosopher died, Pius IX
presided over a session of the Congregation of the Index that cleared
Rosmini’s books of blame. But more than thirty years later another pope
– Leo XIII, who declared Thomas Aquinas to be ‘the chief and master of
scholastic doctors’ – extracted forty propositions from Rosmini’s writings
and condemned them once again.60
26
6
The Mother Idea
(Rosmini III)
The reader of the first volume of Rosmini’s New Essay finds herself far
from the turbulence of 1848 and its sad sequel. The scene of this vol-
ume is the Scottish Enlightenment, mainly Reid and other members of
the ‘Scottish School,’ after which the second volume turns to the Ger-
man Enlightenment – to Leibniz and Kant as heirs of Plato. These three
philosophers ‘posited something innate to explain the fact of the ori-
gin of ideas … but what they posited was excessive and arbitrary.’ Plato
was more excessive than Leibniz and Leibniz more than Kant, the most
restrained of the three, who ‘kept as innate only the forms of ideas, leav-
ing it to sense experience to present their matter.’ In another way, how-
ever, Kant went too far, distilling seventeen different forms, by Rosmini’s
count, out of his ‘metaphysical chemistry.’61 Where Kant did too much,
Reid did too little, as Rosmini explains:
‘I have counted Reid among those who put too little of the innate in the
human mind, Kant among those who put too much, even though Kant’s
system is a development of Reid’s. The reason is that Reid did not actually
foresee Kant’s conclusions and posited as innate only an instinct for judg-
ing the existence of bodies, not realizing that it was impossible, once he had
agreed to this, to put a stop to it.62
Rosmini’s understanding – or misunderstanding – of Reid, and of Reid’s

relation to Kant, is only a prelude to a system that he thought superior,
both to the Critical Philosophy and to the Philosophy of Common Sense.
His arguments for this position are long and intricate, filling more than
eight hundred pages of the third volume of the New Essay. Fortunate-
ly, Rosmini also left a number of summaries of his system, including
a Sketch of Modern Philosophy, published posthumously and translated

here. Although Rosmini’s thought evolved after 1830, partly in his many
philosophical polemics, partly in response to political and religious
attacks, the ‘ideology’ summarized in the Sketch is very close to the New
Essay.63
The central question of philosophy for Rosmini is the origin of ideas,
which ‘comes down to finding out where the object of knowledge comes
from.’64 It cannot come from sensation alone, either by inference or
abstraction: this will be Rosmini’s reply to Locke’s sensism. Against Reid’s
nativism he will hold that it cannot originate in a ‘primitive, mysterious
and inexplicable’ faculty of the mind. And to Kant’s idealism his rejoin-
der will be that it cannot arise from the subject’s mental activity.65 After
a historical review of the rise and fall of these systems, parallel to the
account in the New Essay, the ideological argument of the Sketch begins
with two types of cognition, which Rosmini calls intuition and affirmation
or judgment.66
Intuition is the mental operation by which one comes to have – or to
think – an idea. It is not opposed to judgment in the way that passive
sensation is opposed to active understanding. On the contrary, intuition
is an act of the intellect that must precede all judgments. Intuitive cog-
nition for Rosmini is of things as possible, while judgmental cognition
is of things as subsistent or not subsistent. In the act of intuition, ideas
present things as possibilia – things for which subsisting and not subsist-
ing are both possible. In the act of judgment, things presented to the
mind as ideas are then affirmed as subsisting or not subsisting.
Before forming a judgment about a tree, for example, and thereby
affirming or denying its subsistence in the actual world, one must already
have intuited an idea of a tree in the world of possibility. Because the act
of judgment takes as its object what the act of intuition presents, intui-
tion is prior to judgment. Moreover, because the object of judgment is
just the object supplied, as an idea, by intuition, it is intuition rather than
judgment that accounts for the objectivity of cognition. Strictly speaking,
only intuition is cognition of an object; judgment merely affirms or denies
the subsistence of objects already presented by intuition. Judgment is cog-
nition of beliefs about objects as subsisting or not, while intuition is cognition
of possible objects, which are ideas.67 Ideas are the means by which things
are present to the mind. They are different in kind from sensations and
cannot be derived from them, logically or psychologically. They are also
objective because they are general and universal, unconstrained by the
particular realities given in sense impressions. Ideas are objective and
hence representational.68
28
The Mother Idea (Rosmini III)
In fact, Rosmini’s idea has more in common with our notion of a

conception than with empiricist ideas as copies of sense impressions.
Accordingly, just as Rosmini’s idea is like our conception, his act of intu-
iting is like our act of conceiving or apprehending. Such intuiting yields
a mental state with a content, a representational content presented to
the mind. Like conceiving or apprehending, intuiting supplies this rep-
resentational content but does not establish the subsistence or non-sub-
sistence of what is represented. In the act of intuition one thinks an idea,
and by ideas things are presented to the mind as possible. To represent
as subsisting what the idea presents as possible requires another act, a
judgment.
Rosmini also holds that ideas are mental states rather than mental
activities, thus distinguishing ideas from the acts or operations by which
one comes to have ideas.69 Although the idea is objective, the act of intui-
tion is subjective, the act of a subject. By distinguishing the subjective
act from the objective idea, Rosmini wants to keep the subjectivity of
the act apart from the objectivity of the idea. With this boundary clearly
marked, it will not be any act of the subject that endows the idea with its
representational, intentional, objective character, which is a character
that it has essentially. Regarding this essence as an achievement of the
subject – whether by abstraction (as empiricists believe) or by judgment
(as transcendental idealists believe) – is a surrender to subjectivism.
What we cognize by intuition or by judgment is obviously not nothing,
and, so Rosmini asserts, it is also not ourselves; hence, ideas are not us or
modifications of us. Unlike things subsisting in the world, ideas are also
purely possible, existing in a way that the senses cannot detect. Because
objects of cognition are supplied in the first instance by an intuition
that presents only possible objects, and because such objects cannot be
objects of sense, sensation cannot, in principle, be the origin of our ideas
of objects. We cannot sense ideas, yet evidently we know them. Knowing,
concludes Rosmini, is therefore not sensing – ‘a new and conclusive refu-
tation of sensism.’70
If the senses cannot produce ideas, where do ideas come from? To
answer this question, Rosmini examines special features of ideas, starting
with two that he regards as primitive: universality and necessity. Ideas are
universal because they may be realized in indefinitely many individuals
and yet remain self-identical and unexhausted. And ideas are necessary
just because they are possible. Unlike real, finite beings whose subsist-
ence is contingent – beings that might or might not subsist – ideas as
possible objects are necessarily possible: ‘for the possible object, we can
never think that it is not – that it is not possible, in other words.’ One
29
cannot think that the possible idea of a tree is not possible, which con-
vinces Rosmini that ideas are necessary because they are possible.71 From
the two primitive features of necessity and universality, Rosmini briskly
derives two secondary features of ideas, infinity, and eternity. As univer-
sal, ideas are infinite, unlike the finite particulars that instantiate them.
As necessary, they are also eternal: they must be, and so they must always
have been and always will be.
From these exalted properties, Rosmini reminds us, Plato, Augustine,
and Aquinas inferred that ideas are located in God, and on this basis
Malebranche constructed his theory of human knowing as vision in God.
Rosmini describes himself as close to Malebranche – and to Bonaventura
– but he also takes care to distinguish ideas as we have them from ideas
as they are in God. In their divine locale, ideas are identical with God,
so that Christ, who is God, is also God’s Word – simple, infinite, and self-
immediate – while human words and language are discursive, reflecting
the multiplicity and limitations of ideas as received in the merely human
mind. Our ideas retain some features of the divine originals, however,
which persuades Rosmini that ideas must come from God, the long-
sought origin of ideas.72
Rosmini acknowledges, however, that the origin of ideas needs a bet-
ter explanation, especially in light of differences between the human
versions of ideas and the divine. How can such ideas be classified, and
how might classification show how beliefs arise upon judgment from
ideas already intuited? A first classification distinguishes the pure idea of
being, completely indeterminate, from all other ideas, all more or less
determinate. All ideas that are at all determinate must contain the purely
indeterminate idea, which is absolutely without determination and com-
pletely universal. Purely ideal or possible being, in other words, is the
element common to all ideas – including the pure idea itself. Within
the immense but smaller (by one) class of determinate ideas, Rosmini’s
second classification distinguishes completely determinate concrete ideas
from incompletely determinate abstract ideas. A concrete idea of a star,
for example, will include all the star’s properties – its colour, magnitude,
and so on. An incompletely determinate idea of the same star, lack-
ing one or more such properties, becomes more or less abstract. Both
abstract and concrete ideas remain general, however, because both are
universal, not individual. However, if an idea sheds all the properties of
the object presented – if the idea becomes wholly indeterminate – it is
simply the pure idea of being.73
At this point Rosmini divides his quest for the origin of ideas into two
30
branches, one leading to the purely indeterminate idea, the other to its
determinations. The origin of the pure idea of being is God and only
God. But sensation is involved in the origin of our more or less determi-
nate ideas – both abstract and concrete – of such things as stars, trees,
and books.
Every person has the pure idea of being, along with sensations which
are occasions for forming all other ideas as determinations of the pure
idea. When I see a star, the sensation of light is the occasion for add-
ing the determination of luminosity to the indeterminate idea. Various
sensations thus provide occasions for various ideas, all equally possible
but also determinate in varying degree. These ideas then figure in the
act of judging whether the objects presented as possible actually subsist.
This process of judgment is perception. ‘In the judgment by which we
assert that the star is before my eyes – which is called the perception of the
star – the idea is already contained.’ The order of this process – from
pure idea, to more or less determinate ideas occasioned by sensation, to
perception – is not obvious from the phenomenology of perception. It
emerges only from our ability to universalize and abstract.74
Consider two events: a person sees a particular star and has a sensa-
tion; the same person then forms a judgment, thinking ‘this is a being
that gives light.’ Although the second event is a perception that assumes
an idea of the star, the mind can isolate this idea from the rest of the
perception, the sensible and particular part, by the operation of univer-
salization. Universalizing what was perceived, the mind preserves what
Rosmini calls an ‘image’ of the star but subtracts its subsistence, treating
it instead as possible, a pure but fully determined idea.75 The idea of the
star minus only its subsistence is concrete, determinate but still univer-
sal. Having been occasioned by sensation, it is discovered by the mind,
which treats as possible and universal what the sense of sight presents as
subsistent and particular. Concrete ideas formed by the mental opera-
tion of universalization are specific types that can serve as exemplars of
indefinitely many particular individuals, all identical except when they
are individuated. Ideas formed by abstraction are also determinate, but
not completely so. Subtracting the star’s determinations makes the idea
of it more and more abstract, first lacking colour, then magnitude, and
so on. Such generic ideas are unlike the specific ideas formed by uni-
versalization; they are more like descriptions of classes than images of
individual members of classes.76
Having traced all ideas that are determined, in one degree or another,
to sensation by way of mental operations, Rosmini now faces the harder
31
task of finding the origin of the only fully indeterminate idea, the pure
idea of being, which he will call ‘the Mother Idea.’77 If he succeeds, his
‘ideology’ or theory of ideas will be complete; he will have exhausted
the relevant universe, which contains only the indeterminate idea and
its indefinitely many determinations.78 Before taking the final step, he
states eight corollaries of the foregoing argument; he will need them to
establish the grand principles of psychology, theology, and morality that
derive from his ideology.
These corollaries summarize what Rosmini claims to have demonstrat-
ed: the purely indeterminate Mother Idea of Being, prior to all other
ideas, cannot come from sensation, which is determinate, or from men-
tal operations, which only add or subtract determinations. The Mother
Idea is a requirement for any mental operation, in fact; lacking this Idea,
the mind or intellectual soul cannot really be intelligent or rational. If
the absence of the Idea from the soul deprives it of intelligence, while
the presence of the Idea preserves it, Rosmini concludes that the Idea
must be that light of the mind which everyone assumes and no one
defines. But since this illuminating Idea is what makes the human soul
intelligent, the light of the mind is the form of intelligence in the soul.
Taken absolutely, it is the first idea, the Mother Idea, and the idea per se,
prior to all other ideas, productive of them, and entirely independent of
sensation.79
Common sense acknowledges a light of reason that is natural in
humans and distinguishes them from other animals. Rosmini’s argu-
ment has shown, he assures us, that this light is the Idea of Being. We
know from common sense that the Idea is part of human nature, not
acquired but innate, planted there by the Creator. That the Idea is also
self-evident, and thus accessible to common sense, is one of its necessary
features since evidently it is known even though nothing else – nothing
determinate, that is – can make it known. In fact, it is the Mother Idea
that makes everything else known since everything else known must have
being and must be known to have being. At last Rosmini has found the
fundamental principle of his ideology. All ideas – concrete and abstract,
specific and generic – are born of the same Mother Idea of Being, which
is given in nature. Known of itself and not reliant on sensation, this Idea
enters into the definition of all things but is itself undefined, susceptible
only to the sort of description that Rosmini has provided.
From the Mother Idea, which is the first principle of ideology, follow
the first principles of psychology, theology, and morality. From one of
the corollaries previously stated, we know that ideal being is the form or
32
essence of the intellectual soul. Since this essence is not spatial or cor-
poreal, it follows that the soul is spiritual and therefore immortal. Since
the Idea of Being is always being in its essence, the same essence that is
non-spatial is also non-temporal, and yet the union of the Idea with the
human soul is temporal. Hence, non-temporal being, the light of the
human soul, must be prior to the soul; it must be the eternal light of the
intellect that is God. God is also the end or purpose of the immortal soul,
which gives the soul its duty and forms the basis of morality.80
Rosmini’s Mother Idea thus arms him with a comprehensive reply to
godless sensism, whose roots he traced to the ‘immoral’ ideas of Locke
and Condillac, regarding their systems as leading inevitably either to a
sceptical or an idealist dead end.81 The obverse of Rosmini’s antipathy
for Locke was his admiration for Reid, whose negative work refuted the
empiricist theory of ideas, while his positive work replaced empiricism
with a better, though still defective system. The genius of Reid’s theory
of ideas, as Rosmini saw it, was ‘not to go beyond the fact. The fact tells
us that the human mind perceives substance and being, things that do
not fall under the senses and are altogether different from sensations,
yet the mind perceives them on the occasion of sensations.’82
Pitting Reid against Locke, Rosmini depicts Reid’s quarrel with the
older theory of ideas as a disagreement about the primary item of mental
activity. To Locke he assigns the doctrine that the primary and original
activity of mind is simple apprehension, to Reid the view that this activity
is judgment. The result, he maintains, is paradoxical. On the one hand,
judgment cannot be prior to simple apprehension because I cannot
judge something of which I have no apprehension. On the other, appre-
hension cannot be prior to judgment because all original operations
of the mind (except imagination) involve belief in the present or past
existence of the object apprehended. Instances in which I apprehend an
object independently of such a belief are products of abstraction from
previous apprehensions in which belief is ingredient.83
Needless to say, Rosmini takes himself to have eliminated the con-
tradiction that arises from his interpretation of Reid. But is that inter-
pretation accurate? On the point that concerns Rosmini, in fact, Reid
does not disagree with Locke: namely, about whether judgment requires
apprehension of the thing judged. The disagreement is about two other
issues: first, whether judgment is comparison of ideas; second, whether
imagination, which does not involve a judgment about the existence
of the object represented, presupposes perception, which does involve
such a judgment. Reid denies that judgment is comparison of simple
33
ideas; it is an act of the mind that predicates something of an object

presented by conception. He also holds that perception, memory, and
imagination are different in kind rather than degree; that imagination
presupposes perception and memory; and that perception and memory
consist in a conception and belief. According to Reid, any distinction
between conception and simple apprehension will be between the act
ingredient in all operations of the mind (save sensation) and that same
act made an object of reflection by abstracting from the judgment that
naturally attends it in perception and memory. Contrary to Rosmini’s
view of him, Reid does not hold that judgment or belief precedes con-
ception or apprehension – temporally, logically, or metaphysically.84
Despite Reid’s explicit statements to the contrary, Rosmini saw the dis-
pute between Reid and Locke as about awarding primacy either to sim-
ple apprehension or to judgment, and he resolved the putative paradox
as follows: first, innate in each of us is the intuition of the Mother Idea
of being, which is wholly indeterminate, necessary, and universal; sec-
ond, sensations are occasions for forming more or less determinate ideas
through acts of judgment that predicate subsistence to ‘the complex of
sensations received and joined to one another in a given way.’ Rosmini
calls this act of judgment ‘the intellective perception of bodies.’85 Intellec-
tive perception is judgment, but only the universal, undetermined Moth-
er Idea accounts for the intellective nature of perception, and this Idea
is prior to all judgment. Hence, judgment both is and is not the primary
mental act. It is not the primary mental act because mentality itself pre-
supposes a prior act – intuition – by which we think the Mother Idea.
And yet it is primary because, given that we are intellectual beings who
intuit the Mother Idea, our first mental act is to form the idea of subsist-
ing things by predicating subsistence of what gives rise to our sensations.
Simple apprehension does not precede judgment; intuition precedes
judgment. Simple apprehension is achieved by abstracting from ideas of
subsistent things to ideas already formed in intellective perception by an
act of judgment.86
Against this background, Rosmini’s criticism of Reid is not that he
takes judgment to be the primary activity of mind but that he takes
mental activity to be governed by arbitrary, inexplicable, innate laws of
nature. According to Rosmini, Reid’s nativism is correct: we actually pos-
sess innate, a priori knowledge – the Mother Idea of being, which is nec-
essary and universal. But what Reid deems to be knowledge of the first
principles of common sense, though it is innate, is neither necessary nor
universal. It is contingent on laws of the human mind, laws that could
34
have been and could be otherwise than they are, that govern only those
beings whose minds happen to be as they are. Such laws of nature cannot
explain our innate knowledge, Rosmini insists. By leaving perception,
memory, imagination, and all other operations of the mind mysterious
and unexplained, Reid condones the scepticism and idealism that he
seeks to refute.87
Reid’s naturalism is also condemned by its inevitable result: Kant’s
transcendental idealism – a pedigree that would have irked the sage of
Königsberg. If Reid’s mistake was to hold that the objectivity of percep-
tion is secured by regular laws of nature, Kant’s was to secure it solely
by the activity of the thinking subject. Adopting Reid’s notion of the
law-like activity of mind, Kant adds that the laws applied in cognition
have their origin in the mind itself. Only by applying such laws can we
cognize objects, so that ‘our understanding is actually what partly creates
its object on its own.’ If Reid’s world is an illusion that lacks the authority
of reason, according to Rosmini, Kant’s world is a self-created delusion.88
Although Rosmini admires Reid as a progressive force in philosophy,
he therefore accuses him of having planted the seed that grew into that
poison tree. Thus, while agreeing with Reid about ‘the fact’ of what com-
mon sense reveals, he parted ways with him when the fact turned out to
be rooted in naturalism. By itself, concedes Rosmini, Reid’s naturalism
and nativism did not add up to full-blown subjectivism; his error was a
venial sin of omission, and it did not complete the task of securing the
objectivity of ideas. In the hands of ‘the sophist of Königsberg,’ however,
nativism became subjectivism of the most corrosive kind – a critical scep-
ticism that turned dogmatic with Fichte. Kant, as Rosmini misunderstood
him, made the objectivity of ideas an arbitrary effect of the mind itself.89
35
7
Primacy
(Gioberti I)
Like Rosmini, Vincenzo Gioberti was a priest who came of age in post-
Napoleonic Europe, but his faith was less settled than Rosmini’s and his
politics more dissident. He was born in 1801 in Torino, which had just
been annexed to France and remained French until Vittorio Emanuele I
was restored in 1814 as King of Sardinia and Piedmont. Since Gioberti’s
family was lower middle class, a career in religion could be a path to suc-
cess. After studies with the Oratorians and then in the theological faculty
of the University of Torino, he found a post as court chaplain, before tak-
ing his theological degree in 1823 and being ordained in 1825. Besides
the usual diet of ancient, Christian, and Enlightenment classics, he read
Alfieri, Chateaubriand, Foscolo, Manzoni, Schlegel, and other Roman-
tics who lit the fire of his fervent patriotism.90
In the midst of revolutionary turmoil in Torino, Vittorio Emanuele
abdicated in 1821, but the revolutionaries had been plotting with Carlo
Alberto, the abdicated king’s younger brother. Carlo Felice, the older
brother, moved quickly to claim the throne and suppress the revolution,
maintaining control until 1831, when he died and Carlo Alberto succeed-
ed him. Meanwhile, secret societies – from the Sublime Perfect Masters
in the north to the Carbonari in the south – had rallied to the banner of
Italian independence and liberal reform, sometimes gathering enough
strength to organize militarily. By the 1830s, Giuseppe Mazzini’s voice in
these conspiracies was loud, and critical of the new king, whose agents
detected sympathy for Mazzini’s Young Italy in young Father Gioberti
and the ‘academy’ that he organized to discuss politics and philosophy.
The police held Gioberti for a few months before forcing him into exile,
first in Paris, then in Brussels. By 1833, he was writing abundantly, both
journalism and philosophy. In 1834 he published a letter in Mazzini’s
Primacy (Gioberti I)
newspaper, Young Italy, turning Vico and Bruno into icons of Italian reli-
gious identity. A theological Theory of the Supernatural followed in 1838;
an Introduction to the Study of Philosophy in 1840; and in 1843 his most
celebrated work, On the Civil and Moral Primacy of the Italians.91
The Primato stirred the hearts of Gioberti’s countrymen and won him
enormous acclaim. It was a manifesto for an independent Italian nation
that would give its citizens constitutional liberties and achieve unity in
a confederation of regional powers headed by the pope and governed
from Piedmont. In this lengthy polemic, Gioberti reviews the many
fields for which he claimed Italian primacy over the centuries, one being
philosophy. But the seventh and current stage of Italian philosophy, in
Gioberti’s view, was a mere imitation of Scottish and German systems: the
upshot was the need for a native Italian reform of the discipline.92
The key to Gioberti’s reform is ‘protology,’ a metaphysical and practi-
cal realism grounded in legends of the ancient Italic teachings of indig-
enous Pelasgians and of Pythagoreans who colonized Italy from Greece.
Their realism enabled the Italic sages of the West to escape the extrava-
gant pantheisms and dualisms that infected the Orient and thus to grasp
the importance of creation as the essence of God’s relationship to the
universe that he brought into being. Firmly rooted in this native wisdom,
Italian thought endured through six more epochs, from (2) the Roman
era, through (3) the Church Fathers, and (4) the scholastics of the Mid-
dle Ages, until (5) the classicists of the fifteenth century tried to revive a
paganism that no longer suited the peninsula. As Gioberti tells the story,
this new classicism failed just at the moment when Luther was hatch-
ing his heresies. The next generations in Italy, led in a decadent age by
Machiavelli, Galileo, and Paolo Sarpi, abandoned pure philosophizing
for politics and science.93
Vico returned to philosophy, but in his own day (6) he was not under-
stood. The teachings of Descartes – ‘Protestantism applied to philosophy’
– had meanwhile deceived even the Italians with rationalist psychology
and sensism, which had been lurking in Christian philosophy since the
days of Abelard – another French dissident. Gian Domenico Romagnosi
managed to temper ‘the servile habit of Gallic theorizing’ but could not
shake off the French yoke, which others traded for servitude to other for-
eigners like the German, Hegel. Of his immediate predecessors in Italy,
the best in Gioberti’s estimation was Galluppi, who fought sensism with
Reid’s system and made the best that could be made of ‘psychologism.’94
‘Such is the final form of Italian philosophy,’ Gioberti decreed, while
dismissing the seventh age of the Italian intellect as
37
a clever imitation of Scottish and German teachings. Our brave and hon-
oured Galluppi is the Reid of Italy, drawing people back to the truth …
by deep analysis, but without breaking through the boundaries of observa-
tion and experiments. Armed with these implements, Galluppi gloriously
vanquished the sensism of his predecessors … with that shrewd forbear-
ance, experimental and inductive, that produces useful discoveries in the
sphere of internal facts – the application of Galileo’s method to psychology.
But direct sensation is not enough for philosophy to be a science. Sensi-
ble phenomena cannot be completely explained without rising higher and
entering the secret sanctuary of reason. Thus, as the Scottish School was
displaced by the Critical School in the previous period, in our time Rosmini
succeeded Galluppi … cleverly reviving the errors and pretensions of Ger-
man Cartesianism – of Kantianism, in other words.
In Gioberti’s eyes, Reid once again surpasses Kant, not to speak of Ros-
mini, whose second-hand Kantianism he saw as abandoning Reid’s com-
mon sense but gaining nothing in the bargain, producing nothing better
with its subjectivism than the defective empiricism that it sought to
replace. ‘To substitute German rationalism for French sensism,’ Gioberti
concluded, was ‘to leap from the frying pan into the fire, which should
give pause to those few who still see some good in Rosminianism.’95
While in exile, Gioberti had written a book to survey the Philosophical
Errors of Antonio Rosmini (1841−4) and to correct Rosmini’s followers,
but he also drew a polemical portrait of Rosmini’s enemies in The Modern
Jesuit (1846−7), responding to an attack on himself by the flamboyant
Carlo Curci, S.J. After the enormous success of the Primato, Gioberti’s
attack on the Society as the main impediment to unification attracted
Catholics who were encouraged by his very different vision of national
religion as a framework for national politics. The policy was called ‘Neo-
Guelf’ in reminiscence of pro-papal and anti-German positions taken by
Italians in the Middle Ages. And when Carlo Alberto decided that The
Modern Jesuit could be published in Torino, it was a sign that its exiled
author could return, as he did in 1848, elected to the new Assembly and
then acclaimed as its president. But the Neo-Guelf project dissolved in
1849, and Gioberti resigned his office, about a month before the Pied-
montese army was routed at Novara. He died in 1852, once again an
exile in Paris.96
Before all was lost, when Gioberti still thought he could create a uni-
fied Italy with help from the pope, he chose Rosmini as his spokesman
in this crucial negotiation. But when the transactions were philosophical
38
Primacy (Gioberti I)
rather than political, his view of his compatriot was negative – hostile,
in fact, and friendlier to ‘the perception of the Scots.’ Gioberti thought
that he needed Reid and the Scots to support his own ‘Ideal Formu-
la,’ which he had previewed in the Primato and envisioned as displac-
ing Rosmini’s system. Like Rosmini and Galluppi, he also saw himself
as building on Reid’s refutation of the empiricist theory of ideas. Faced
with the claim that ‘a mental entity is the object of our thought,’ he
explained, ‘Reid has thoroughly exposed the falsity of this notion with
regard to knowledge of bodies.’ Reid’s treatment of ideas encouraged
Gioberti to ‘extend his doctrine to the whole intuitive truth, standing
on the same basis as the Scottish philosopher – on direct and objective
evidence, in other words.’ ‘After the direction given to psychology by the
Scottish School,’ Gioberti insisted, the claim ‘that the idea is a subjective
unknown’ is impossible to maintain.97
39
8
The Ideal Formula
(Gioberti II)
Gioberti recorded the brunt of his assault on that claim in the fourth
chapter of his Introduction: ‘The Ideal Formula.’98 His goals there are
two: first, to derive a formula that expresses a judgment which is founda-
tional both ontologically and epistemically; and second, to explain why
the philosophical method of his day (which he calls psychologism) had
failed to find such a formula.
Psychologism, according to Gioberti, depends on reflection, concep-
tual analysis, and imaginative synthesis of ideas to reach ontological con-
clusions about extra-mental reality. This method, he maintains, leads to
sceptical and idealist mistakes in epistemology and naturalist and pan-
theist errors in ontology. By starting with ideas in the mind and confining
philosophy to analysing, synthesizing, and reflecting on ideas, psycholo-
gism reverses the order of nature, making the mind, its activities, and its
contents prior and primitive, when, according to Gioberti, psychology
actually presupposes a deeper ontology. Nonetheless, because Gioberti
needs not just ontological but also epistemic foundations, he certainly
wants the Ideal Formula to be a mental item – a judgment made by a sub-
ject and residing in the subject’s mind. Contrary to psychologism, how-
ever, this judgment is not produced by mental activity; it is revealed to
the mind. Gioberti’s search for an ideal formula is the search for a primi-
tive, foundational, revealed truth that has been obscured by a defective
method, putting psychology where ontology ought to be.99
A successful exposition of this revealed truth, Gioberti concedes, will
need a reflective psychology. But at the centre of that psychology he puts
a distinction between intuition and reflection, and a view of their distinct
roles in the origin of concepts of the real and the possible. Cognizing
possibilia presupposes cognizing realia because an idea of the possible
The Ideal Formula (Gioberti II)
abstracts from an idea of the real. I cognize the real by intuition, but
I cognize the possible by reflecting on ideas presented in intuition.
When I reflect on an idea of the real as an idea, I abstract from it to an
idea of the possible, which lacks concreteness and individuality, thereby
transforming a concrete and particular idea of something real into an
abstract and general idea of something possible.100 Gioberti’s illustration
is the familiar one of a triangle. Having seen that triangle over there, I
acquire an idea of a particular real triangle. Then I reflect on that idea,
as an idea, to get to another idea – an idea of a possible triangle, and of
those there are infinitely many. Having first acquired a concrete idea of a
real triangle, in other words, I then reflect on it to form an abstract idea
of possible triangles. This abstract and general idea, which is of triangles
in general, has none of the particularity of the concrete idea presented
in sensory intuition.101
These distinctions reveal the origins of concrete and abstract ideas
grounded in realia, ideas given first as particular by sensory intuition and
then abstracted and generalized by reflection to form ideas of possibilia.
But Gioberti identifies another type of non-sensory intuition, the ‘primi-
tive intuition’ that presents us with pure reality: Being. Like sensory intu-
ition, this other kind is immediate and direct. It is also non-inferential,
non-discursive, and not the product of any mental activity. Present to this
simple and autonomous intuition are objects as they are in themselves.
Unlike objects of sensory intuition, moreover, these objects are substanc-
es, not properties of substances.102
According to Gioberti, I am presented in primitive intuition with
a judgment that expresses the idea of real Being: ‘Being is necessarily.’
This judgment is unlike others in two important ways: first, it does not
predicate the necessity that it asserts but clarifies it as a property already
inherent in Being; second, it is not my spontaneous and autonomous act
but a revelation to me by Being itself in unmediated primitive intuition.
The judgment that Being reveals in intuition then becomes an object
of my reflection, which – unlike my absolute receptivity to the primi-
tive intuition – requires voluntary, active judgment.103 When I reflect on
the judgment revealed in primitive intuition, Gioberti argues, I form the
reflective judgment that ‘Being is.’ But my reflective judgment gets its
epistemic standing from the judgment already expressed in primitive
intuition. The primitive intuition – as divinely revealed – is objective, cer-
tain, and truth-making for the reflective judgment. The reflective judg-
ment is the primitive human judgment because it is the human mind’s
first act upon being given the primitive judgment as a revelation. Both
41
epistemically and etiologically, the reflective judgment is the basis of

sound philosophizing, but real Being – God – ‘is the first philosopher’
insofar as reflective judgment starts with a prior judgment revealed by
God.104
Gioberti’s view is that when I am presented, immediately and directly,
with real Being in primitive intuition, I have positive experience of the
concreteness, singularity, and individuality of Being, which is absolute
and infinite, lacks nothing, and has no limitations. By contrast, all con-
tingent things are limited, imperfect, and individuated by their various
imperfections, giving rise to my negative experience of their concrete-
ness, singularity, and individuality. Insofar as real Being is unlimited and
without negative concreteness, singularity, and individuality, it is also
abstract, general, and universal. Real Being is thus both concrete and
individual, because its positive reality is maximal, and also abstract and
universal, because it is infinite, absolute, and free of form. Real Being
is thus the synthesis of the real, which is concrete and individual, with
being, which is abstract and general. All real created things depend caus-
ally on real Being, and all ideal, possible things depend on the intuition
of real Being by way of reflection.
Finally, real Being creates speech as a ‘second revelation’ mediating
between the divine judgment given in intuition and the human judg-
ment achieved by reflection. Real Being reveals the divine judgment to
primitive intuition in a linguistic form – a proposition – which reflec-
tive judgment can then communicate: ‘Being is necessarily.’105 The three
words in this statement stand for the three elements of the divine judg-
ment (call them a, R, and b), each of which actually stands for the same
idea – the idea of Being (B) – expressed in three ways: aB RB bB. But to
be explicit and complete, an ideal formula must be composed of two
elements joined by a third, and those three elements must express and
unite three different ideas to form a single, unitary judgment: two of the
ideas must differ both from each other and from the idea of Being, but
they must stand in a relation to the idea of Being that is both correct and
not tautologous. Let ax Ry bz, where x y z, be the form of that formula.
Because real Being uses speech as a ‘second revelation,’ Gioberti
deploys linguistic analysis to determine the next version of the formula
that he needs. The term ‘existence,’ he maintains, is tied to the idea of
Being not only conceptually but also etymologically. He takes the etymol-
ogy of the Latin ex(s)istere (‘appear,’ ‘arise,’ ‘emerge,’ ‘come into being’)
to show that the word itself expresses movement from potency to act.
Its components are the preposition ex (‘from,’ ‘out of’) and the verb
42
The Ideal Formula (Gioberti II)
sistere (‘put,’ ‘plant,’ ‘cause to stand,’ ‘cause to appear’). The preposi-

tion indicates movement from inside to out, and the verb expresses the
concept of substance. The analysis of existere thus takes us to ‘one sub-
stance, found potentially in another, which thereby passes to an actual
state and begins to stand on its own.’ And ‘existence is the reality proper
to an actual substance, produced from a distinct substance that contains
it potentially.’106
Because the idea of some existing substance necessarily entails the
idea of another substance as effect entails cause, the idea of existence
necessarily entails the idea of Being as the first and efficient cause of
existence. The idea of a first and efficient cause, a creative cause (C),
connects the idea of existence (E) with that of Being (B). Being is a
first cause because it is not the effect of a prior cause, and it is efficient
because it produces substances rather than mere forms. As a first and
efficient cause, Being is necessarily a creative cause. Humans are also
efficient causes, but their causal reach extends only to forms, not to
Being itself, and their power to bring about changes of form depends on
the antecedent first cause.107 Gioberti’s candidate for the ideal formula,
‘Being creates existences,’ is composed of (i) a primitive judgment passively
received in intuition and affirming the necessary reality of Being – ‘Being
is necessarily’ – and (ii) a primitive, passive perception of a fact: the fact
that existing things have been created. Intuition thus gives us ideas not
only of Being (B) and existence (E), but also of the fact (C) that unites
them. The primitive judgment (B), that ‘Being is necessarily,’ is necessary
and epistemically foundational. The primitive fact (C) – the fact that the
first and efficient cause creates everything else that exists – is free and
contingent and ontologically foundational. And although created things
exist, the contingent existence (E) that they have is not the same as the
necessary Being (B) of the Creator.108
At this point, Gioberti has found the elements needed for an ideal for-
mula: B, C, and E, where B C E. Since the form of his formula must
be ax Ry bz, where x y z, the form aB RC bE will do, and that is the form
of ‘Being creates existences,’ which thus qualifies as the Ideal Formula.
As plain as that may be, Gioberti complains that philosophers have
obscured the Ideal Formula in two ways: first, by overlooking the special
creative character of what connects existence and Being in the formula,
because, unlike existence and Being, that connective item is an unfa-
miliar dynamic relation rather than the usual static substance; second, by
starting with reflective judgments and ending with ontological conclu-
sions, psychologism reverses the order of nature. Human judgment has
43
an object given to it – revealed to it – by real Being, which makes the

primitive judgment of that object epistemically and etiologically foun-
dational. Treating it as merely derived will yield only scepticism. More
important: by relying on reflection, a subjective, human activity, to dis-
cover an objective, extra-mental reality, psychologism reverses the order
of creation – from Being to existence. According to Gioberti, Being, cre-
ation, and existence are passively given; they are revealed, in intuition
– immediately, directly, and in their natural order – not as inferred by
reflection. Intuition witnesses creation as a fact, witnessing it in the order
of its happening: from Being to existence. In other words, intuition is
given the fact of creation in its objective temporal order. The mind,
writes Gioberti, is the ‘direct and immediate spectator of creation.’109
Reflection, by contrast, represents Being and its creative activity in a
subjective temporal order. Because sensible objects make the strongest
impression on the mind, the reflecting mind begins with ideas of extra-
mental things and then ascends inferentially to Being. By proceeding
in that order, psychologism misses two crucial truths: that reflection on
the idea of real Being presupposes the presentation of real Being to
the mind; and that this presentation itself presupposes that real Being
presents itself – reveals itself – to the mind. Because real Being reveals
itself in the act of creation, and specifically in the form of speech (‘God
said, let there be light,’ and so on), it reveals itself as both ontologically
and epistemically foundational: real Being is at once the creative ground
of existence and the epistemic basis of objective judgment.110
44
9
A Natural Method
(Mamiani)
Gioberti was not the first Italian of his day to look to Scotland for philo-
sophical salvation, nor was he the first to follow Vico in exhorting Italy to
revive past intellectual glories of her own. When Count Terenzio Mami-
ani della Rovere published his Renewal of the Ancestral Italian Philosophy
in 1834, he had been writing for more than a decade. Born in Pesaro in
1799, he made contact in the 1820s with the Florentine literary circle
established by Giovan Pietro Vieusseux, a businessman of Swiss family
who began to publish his Antologia in 1821. Mamiani’s reviews appeared
regularly in this influential new journal, multiplying his personal con-
tacts and building the base for a long life in public affairs.111
The scene of Mamiani’s first success was the Papal States, a large band
of the Italian peninsula that ran diagonally from south of Rome to north
of Bologna. In these papal lands the Restoration was very harsh. Govern-
ment was entirely ecclesiastical, and a reactionary gang called Sanfedisti
opposed the revolutionary Carbonari with their own weapons of terror.
When the repressive Leo XII died in 1829, Austria found a replacement
for him in Pius VIII, a choice that naturally annoyed the French and pro-
voked the young Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte to hatch his own conspiracy
in Rome. This juvenile plot failed, but it sparked protests and fortified
resistance in the northern Papal States, where a revolutionary govern-
ment in Bologna greeted a new pope in 1831 by declaring its independ-
ence. One of the members of the Bologna Assembly was Mamiani, who
became a minister and then an exile when Austria quickly crushed the
uprising.112
The book that Mamiani published in Paris in 1834 was both ideologi-
cal and historical. Like Galluppi, he wanted to embrace idealism and
reject sensism without entirely abandoning empiricism, and he saw a
path to this goal in history – or in mytho-history. Mamiani was inspired

by two earlier Neapolitans: Vico’s star had been rising among Roman-
tic intellectuals; and in 1806 Vincenzo Cuoco had finished his utopian
romance, Plato in Italy. Thus equipped, Mamiani discovered the roots of
a primordial Italian philosophy in the ancient Greek colonies of Sicily
and the peninsula.113 He found that Archimedes had
begun a philosophical restoration in Italy, even though fate opposed his

lofty design. … It seems that the Italic school could not rise … such were
the depths into which extravagant Eleatic dogma had plunged it. In fact,
this same school had produced three great principles of philosophical
method: first, a primal certainty, residing in the subjective state of our con-
sciousness; second, Zeno’s dialectic, containing the results and rules of
the technique of demonstration; third, the intention … to satisfy reason’s
demands by … way of apodictic science. If one wants to add to this the
observational, experimental, and inductive spirit of old Empedocles, the
whole result might include all the best principles of philosophical meth-
od … No thinker of later times has been able to surpass [Archimedes].
Had he been allowed to found a school of wisdom … he would have started
that restoration of all knowledge that was delayed by seventeen hundred
years and more. At that time, with Galileo’s potent help … the principles of
method, the hidden seeds that we have seen surviving in the ancestral Italic
school, finally sprouted.114
Seeking a ‘natural method’ for the progress of science, Mamiani located

its principles in Galileo and the Renaissance philosophers who came
before him. Valla, Leonardo, Pomponazzi, and other early modern fig-
ures are heroes in Mamiani’s history, whereas in Gioberti’s view their
revival of ancient wisdom had failed and left Italy defenseless against
post-Cartesian sensism. Before either Gioberti or Mamiani declared him-
self philosophically, Rosmini had offered his own system as an answer
to sensism, but Mamiani found it wanting, ending his summary of the
New Essay with a poetic rebuke from Dante: ‘man does not know whence
comes understanding of the first cognitions.’ Rosmini replied volumi-
nously in 1836 with The Renewal of Philosophy in Italy Proposed by Count
Terenzio Mamiani and Examined by Antonio Rosmini Serbati, his first sus-
tained salvo as a philosophical artillerist.115
Twelve years later, on the day when Gioberti’s Torino government
asked Rosmini to undertake his mission to Pius IX, Mamiani resigned the
ministry to which Pius had appointed him three months earlier. When
46
A Natural Method (Mamiani)
the reactionaries who controlled the Pope blocked movement towards

lay rule, Mamiani left for Torino to help Gioberti, but he soon returned
to government in Rome, while Mazzini consolidated his power there
and the young Garibaldi entered the Constituent Assembly. By the end
of 1848 the revolutionaries had forced Mamiani out, but he continued
his political work in Genoa and Torino, joining Cavour’s government in
1860 and playing a leading role in public affairs until his death in 1885.
In 1870 he founded the journal that eventually became the Rivista ital-
iana di filosofia, the first national organ of its kind, but by this time he had
turned away from empiricism to a mystical Platonism.116
The motives of Mamiani’s earlier quest for a ‘natural method’ recall
Galluppi’s hopes for a ‘true philosophy of experience,’ without Rosmini’s
or Gioberti’s metaphysical ambitions – and without their philosophical
depth.117 In one sense, Mamiani’s project foreshadowed Italian positiv-
ism in aiming to justify the ways of science to a God-besotted culture. But
since Mamiani claimed to have found the origins of his scientific method
in the glory days of the Italian Renaissance (a French name that he did
not use) – in Bruno, Campanella, and Galileo, not Bacon, Descartes,
and Locke – the same enterprise not only reinforced Gioberti’s boasting
about Italian primacy but also anticipated the less bombastic historiogra-
phy of philosophy that Bertrando Spaventa would offer.
47
10
Revolution and Recirculation
(Spaventa)
If many Italians thought that the antidote for sensism had to be some
kind of idealism, something more modern than the Platonic kind was
already available from the prolific Hegel, who had begun his career
with the Phenomenology in 1807 and died in 1831. Another decade
passed, however, before Italian thinkers took much notice of Hegel,
and by then his reputation was declining elsewhere in Europe. Few Ital-
ians could read him in German, and in any language his books were
hard to find on the peninsula. Some learned about Hegel by travel-
ling and teaching abroad, others from personal contacts with foreign-
ers. Cousin was a crucial agent in these international communications,
but in Italy the first important advocate of German idealism was Ottav-
io Collechi (1773−1847), a defrocked Dominican who had worked
in Russia and Germany before returning to teach privately in Naples.
Collechi was a critic of Galluppi and a devout Kantian who saw Hegel
as a pantheist, but not so the students whom he attracted in the years
before 1848.118
One of these young people was Bertrando Spaventa, who recalled dec-
ades later that ‘even before 1848 Hegel and the earlier German philoso-
phers were known – perhaps better then than now – in Naples; besides
Galluppi, old Collechi studied him, also Cusani, Ajello, Gatti and my
dear friends Tari and Calvello.’ Besides Spaventa himself, other lead-
ers of this first generation of Italian Hegelians, including some outside
Collechi’s Neapolitan circle, were Stefano Cusani (1815−46), Francesco
De Sanctis (1817−83), Stanislao Gatti (1820−70), Domenico Mazzoni
(1783−1853), Giambattista Passerini (1793−1864), and Augusto Vera
(1813−85).119
Spaventa was born in solid, middle-class circumstances in Bomba,
Revolution and Recirculation (Spaventa)
near Chieti in the Abruzzi, in 1817. To prepare their careers, the fam-
ily sent him and his younger brother, Silvio, to a local seminary until
places opened at the prestigious Montecassino around 1838. Although
Bertrando had no wish to be ordained, he deferred to the family’s needs,
and in 1840 he left Montecassino for Naples as a priest, teaching private-
ly there while also learning German and English. He soon made contact
with Collechi’s group and heard his new teacher defend Kant against
Galluppi, but the real excitement among his peers was about Hegel.
When Collechi died in 1847, his students turned the funeral into a polit-
ical demonstration, displaying the kind of Hegelianism that agitated the
authorities in those troubled months before Marx and Engels published
their Manifesto of 1848. Father Spaventa’s eulogy showed more respect
by praising his teacher as the most expert Kantian of his day.120
The official Italian philosopher of the moment, however, was Gal-
luppi, and in Naples his main advocate was Luigi Palmieri (1807−96),
who inherited Galluppi’s chair in 1847. This distinguished appointment
made Palmieri secure, while the younger Spaventa had to open a private
school to earn his living. What Palmieri heard about Spaventa’s teaching
scandalized him, moving him to complain in his prolusione (inaugural
address) that ‘today we are thoroughly infected with Teutonic influences
because there are those among us who would like to inoculate our youth
with German pantheism, especially as it is garbed in the grand and noble
cloak provided by the works of G.F. Hegel.’ Having lost his school to
these complaints, Spaventa turned to private tutoring, and then he lost
his brother’s support as well when the police ran Silvio out of Naples.
Early in 1848 Silvio returned to found an opposition newspaper and win
office in the new government, but when the government collapsed a year
later, he was the first of the former deputies to be arrested. Bertrando,
despite his quieter habits, was then accused of plotting regicide, and
in 1850 he fled to Florence and then Torino, leaving Silvio still behind
bars.121
During the next decade, Bertrando’s career as a political journalist was
meteoric. In 1852 he joined a new magazine, Il Cimento, which took on
the Jesuits and their new periodical, Civiltà Cattolica. Spaventa made him-
self Cimento’s most powerful weapon, and when the magazine folded he
moved his guns in 1855 to a political daily, Il Piemonte, which published
his ‘Jesuit Saturdays’ on a schedule that tracked the Saturday publication
date of the Jesuit journal. Each of his satirical pieces opens with a tel-
egraphic digest – mocking analogous items in Civiltà Cattolica – of recent
Jesuit achievements and insights, such as the following:
49
‘The Virgin Mary, anti-revolutionary; natural effects of the new dogma;

prophecies by Blessed Leonard; universal peace … and papal supremacy
in all things; justifying the Massacre of St Bartholemew’s Day; the arithme-
tic of assassins; preaching against modern education; the need for a new
Massacre of St Bartholemew’s Day against free-thinkers; Father Bresciani’s
candies and sherbets; Michele Amari, hydrophobe; the three thousand syl-
logisms of Père Mantignon.’
While exercising his genius for Rabelaisian comedy, Spaventa continued

to read Hegel from the point of view of the Hegelian Left, seeing ideal-
ism as a philosophy of emancipation. His own thinking, informed by new
German work on the history of philosophy, also responded to Gioberti
and the Neo-Guelf view of Italian history. As Gioberti presented it, Italy’s
primacy was primordial, perennial, and therefore static, whereas Spaven-
ta saw Italy’s intellectual past as dynamic – a progressive exchange of
ideas with the rest of Europe. Historical research – including research
about Giordano Bruno and other Renaissance thinkers devalued by
Gioberti – thus becomes a prelude to understanding philosophy in its
modern condition, and history also grounds a critique of positions taken
by contemporary followers of Galluppi (empiricism), Rosmini (super-
naturalism), and Gioberti (Neo-Guelf ontologism).122
By 1859 Spaventa had won a chair at Modena, but he moved quickly
to Bologna and then Naples, where in 1862 he delivered the prolusione
and lectures best known by the title that Gentile gave them: Italian Phi-
losophy in Relation to European Philosophy. His core notion – that ideas
developed in Italy by Bruno, Campanella, and Vico circulated through
Europe and then returned to Italy by way of Descartes, Spinoza, Kant,
and Hegel – is essentially the same in the various forms through which it
evolved in these years, though the term ‘circulation’ occurs only in the
Bologna prolusione of 1860 translated here:
To pick up again the sacred thread of our philosophical tradition; to revive

the consciousness of our free thought by studying our leading philoso-
phers; to search in philosophies of other nations for seeds received from
the forefathers of our philosophy and then given back to us in new and bet-
ter organized form; to understand this circulation of Italian thought whose
meaning we have mostly lost; to recognize this return of our thought to
itself in the great theoretical insight of our most recent philosopher; to
know, in short, what we were, what we are and what we ought to be in the
movement of modern philosophy, not limbs isolated and cut off, as it were,
50
Revolution and Recirculation (Spaventa)
from the life of the world’s peoples, nor captives bound to the triumphal
chariot of a particular people, but a nation free and equal in the communi-
ty of nations – this, gentlemen, has always been my life’s desire and pursuit.
When the call soon arrived for Spaventa to bring his stirring vision to
Naples, it came from his old friend, De Sanctis, who was now minister
of education. And brother Silvio was running the police. Times had
changed.123
And yet changing times had not eliminated Neo-Guelf opposition to
Hegel in Naples. Since Hegel was a foreigner and Spaventa a Hegelian,
the Giobertians there – including his old nemesis, Palmieri – complained
that he was un-Italian, replying to every objection with Gioberti’s Ideal
Formula, which Spaventa mocked as an amulet or an incantation. ‘There
is no corner of life and existence,’ he wrote,
‘to which they have not applied it, hammering it in by force, like a nail in a
plank. And they think that having this nail in your pocket is enough to solve
every problem. If they need to say that it’s raining or getting hot, they do
not know how to say so except by starting with the Formula. Being creates
the existent: therefore it rains. Being creates the existent: therefore it’s hot.
And so on and on.’124
Having established himself as Hegel’s champion in Naples, Spaventa also

stayed active in politics, but in his own quiet way, never making a speech
in the legislature, to which he was elected several times. Nonetheless,
philosophy and politics were two faces of the same coin for him and his
contemporaries in the new Italy, as in the many debates on the role of
Italy’s ancient Church in a new State. When Mamiani took a conservative
stance on this issue in 1869, he had already found an ally in the positiv-
ist historian Pasquale Villari (1827−1917), who had recently declared
himself philosophically in the widely read prolusione on Positive Philoso-
phy and Historical Method (1866), which is also translated here. Spaventa
exposed the point of this odd alliance between science and faith: if posi-
tivist criticism showed metaphysics to be impossible, it could be handed
over to the clergy at no loss.125
During this same period, however, Spaventa actually called himself
a positivist, meaning only that his idealism would respect the facts of
human history. Starting with Hegel’s logic after his move to Naples,
his philosophical project was to reform Hegelian idealism and make it
intelligible to Italians. Accordingly, his Principles of Philosophy (1867) is a
51
study of logic as metaphysics – or the reverse – in the Hegelian manner,

and his Studies on Hegel’s Ethics (1869) deal with practical philosophy. In
later years, Spaventa sustained his critique of empiricism and defense of
metaphysics, most notably in a study of Kant, Comte, and Mill on experi-
ence. He also kept on with his regular university lectures until he died
in 1883.126
Spaventa’s inaugural address of 1860, delivered at a decisive moment
for Italian politics, was itself a cardinal event in the story of Italian philos-
ophy: by evaluating the previous half-century, the speech sets the agenda
for the future of Italian idealism. Several decades later, both Croce and
Gentile would recognize Spaventa’s key role not only as a pioneering
Hegelian but also as a critic of Italian philosophy who found a way to
rediscover its links with European thought without forgetting its native
character. Addressing the youth of Bologna in their early days as citizens
of a united Italy, Spaventa had polite words of praise for Galluppi, Ros-
mini, and Mamiani but awarded highest honours to Gioberti for having
found a way out of the timid psychologism that he (Spaventa) regarded
as always prey to scepticism. He also saw Gioberti’s system as perfecting
earlier insights of Bruno and Campanella, while framing that earlier era
as the Italian analog of the age of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Final-
ly, he made the case for Vico’s originality in having rescued speculative
thought from vacuous abstraction by embedding it in a theory of history
and human development.127
52
11
Facts and Laws
(Villari)
In the year of Spaventa’s death, Villari published a response to Henry

Buckle’s History of Civilization in England. Inspired by Auguste Comte’s
Cours de philosophie positive (1830−42), Buckle had claimed that historians
could find scientific laws by observing the basic forces of nature, and that
such laws would reach beyond politics to the whole human condition.
Villari was well qualified to introduce Buckle to Italy, having been a lead-
ing Italian voice for historical positivism since the memorable address
that he gave to promote it in 1865. But this native Neapolitan had also
studied with the Hegelian De Sanctis in the heady months before 1848,
when he was arrested and forced to move to Florence and then the Uni-
versity of Pisa. He held the chair of history there until 1865, when he
returned to Florence and its Institute for Advanced Studies. In 1863, two
years after its publication in Italian, Villari’s History of Girolamo Savonarola
and His Times was translated into English and became a best-seller. The
same success greeted the English Niccolò Machiavelli and His Times, which
appeared first in Italian between 1877 and 1882. Before introducing its
protagonist, the English Machiavelli of 1892 gives 230 pages to a general
account of the Italian Renaissance, as influential a statement in its day
as the works of Burckhardt or his English interpreter, John Addington
Symonds.128
Thus, from an anglophone perspective, Buckle’s reviewer of 1883
was the most famous Neapolitan intellectual, but Villari had moved a
long way from his early days with De Sanctis and Hegel. His ‘Positive
Philosophy and Historical Method’ of 1865 had declared allegiance to
positivism in the most conspicuous way: it was a prolusione inaugurating
his appointment to a chair in Florence, which he held until 1913. His
cultural authority was enormous, extending from history and philoso-
phy to the arts and economics, and political ambition of the same scope
brought him elected offices and ministerial appointments. After 1873
he held elective posts several times; in 1891 he was minister of educa-
tion; in 1898 he became president of the Italian Historical Institute and
a member of the Crusca, a very prestigious academy; and in 1902 he was
named president of the Lincei, living fifteen more years to enjoy these
exalted honours.129
Positivism, however, the philosophical position that Villari advocated,
had been in decline since the early 1890s, having reached its peak in
Italy in the previous decade.130 And Villari spoke for only one type of
Italian positivism, the kind promoted by historians and philologists who
wanted to make their scholarship scientific. Other positivists – like And-
rea Angiulli (1837−90) and Salvatore Tommasi (1813−88) – were more
interested in psychology, medicine, biology, evolution, and Darwinism,
especially the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer (1820−1903). The
later career at Padua of the long-lived Roberto Ardigò (1828−1920) was
a persistent focus of contention: he left the priesthood in 1869 when
his commitment to a naturalist theory of cognition compelled him to
break with the Church. Later, in an 1891 essay on ‘Naturalist Positiv-
ism in Philosophy,’ Aristide Gabelli (1830−91) reasserted the claims of
a humanist positivism against the evolutionist naturalism that he found
dogmatic. In the same year, this was also Villari’s aim when he asked, Is
History a Science?131
Villari’s answer starts in a measured way, recalling the rush of enthu-
siasm for Buckle’s effort ‘to transform history into an exact science’ but
also noting how quickly the excitement died. Realizing that history can-
not be a social physics, he nonetheless argues for a scientific historicism
in which positivism is a method rather than a systematic science. It is
this method, unburdened by metaphysical commitments, that historians
must bring to bear on moral and social problems. But just as Spaventa
had denounced Villari’s first positivist declaration of 1865, so Spaventa’s
cousin, Benedetto Croce, was ready to demolish this later statement, at
first dismissively in a work translated here, ‘History Brought Under the
General Concept of Art,’ and then more thoroughly in later works on
historiography.132 Before Villari became a patriarch of positivism in his
later years, he had been its prophet in his youth, a record that made him
too tempting a target for Croce to resist. Generations later than Croce’s
would still remember Villari’s 1865 speech as a manifesto for ‘the ideol-
ogy of the new progressive Italy,’ in the words of Eugenio Garin. Villari
himself noted that ‘at the time I was the first to discuss positivism in Italy,
54
Facts and Laws (Villari)
and so when I published my speech in Politecnico in Milan, a lively debate

started.’133
Taking his inspiration, as so many others had done, from the Kan-
tian requirement for constraints on reason, Villari argued that no sound
thinking can be systematic or metaphysical. Moreover, because historicity
is humanity’s defining feature, sound thinking about the human condi-
tion cannot simply mimic the sciences of nature, which are not histori-
cal. Nonetheless, Villari admired the post-Newtonian sciences for their
incontestable success. He found the progress of the natural sciences evi-
dent in a clear consensus about what the facts are and about the laws that
make the facts coherent. Philosophy, by contrast, had never known such
consensus. In philosophy there was simply no sign of the progress made
by the natural sciences, only an eternal parade of systems contradicting
one another. Metaphysics had been the main arena of ceaseless disput-
ing between monists and dualists, materialists and pantheists, nominal-
ists and realists, Panglosses and Candides, until Kant tried to call a halt
by declaring reason ‘powerless to prove the objective value of its own
ideas. Reason can certainly be said to have an idea of time, space, beauty
and so on, but do these have value outside us? That, according to Kant, is
the question that can have no answer.’ Since unaided reason has no sure
answers, since it has no access to certain and objective first principles,
it is useless to construct any further metaphysical truths or systems on a
foundation that only keeps crumbling.134
If Kant had shown that traditional metaphysical systems were the min-
utes of an interminable debating contest that ‘always ends in ruins,’ his
insight did nothing to stop later philosophers from constructing post-
Kantian or anti-Kantian systems of their own. It was not only tradition
but also basic human instinct that kept raising questions that seemed to
need metaphysical answers. Who am I? What is my purpose? What shall I
do? These and other perplexities also seemed to confound practical mat-
ters of politics, law, morality, and culture, ‘all the sciences that deal with
people and society … the moral sciences.’ Philosophy ought to provide
a foundation for the moral sciences, or so it seemed.135 Since philoso-
phy could never actually secure such a foundation, the old questions got
no final answers and the systems just kept multiplying until ‘the spirit
became weary,’ pushing some impatient critics to an obvious demand: no
more metaphysics. A less drastic measure would not eliminate metaphys-
ics but reform it, recognizing that even a futile metaphysics responds to
something ineliminably human, and hoping that reform might discover
a more plausible metaphysics to ground the moral sciences.136
55
Astronomy had once been astrology, after all, and chemistry had once
been alchemy. Perhaps, by historical analogy, something more sensible
might also come out of philosophy, if some other science could be a
model for it. Such a model could not be a mathematical science, how-
ever, because the origins of mathematics are unknown (leaving no basis
for historical comparison) and its methods of proof and calculation
are useless to the philosophy of Villari’s conception, which had never
proven anything and did not calculate. Perhaps a good model for phi-
losophy would be scientific but not mathematical.137 Another analogy
that is developmental, not just historical, sustains this suggestion. Since
sciences are products of the human mind, all sciences – even philosophy
– should reflect patterns of development that are evident not only in the
lives of human persons but also in the histories of human peoples, as in
the ‘ideal eternal history’ derived by Vico from his studies of antiquity.
A recent theory of the same type was Comte’s positivism, which Villari
treats as the equal of John Stuart Mill’s positivism in its influence on
him.138
Comte, as summarized by Villari, had divided human development
into three stages: theological, metaphysical, and positive. In the primi-
tive theological stage, everything later called ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’ was
done by priests who addressed natural phenomena as if they were divine
persons or gods. In the next metaphysical stage, philosophers interpreted
the same phenomena as products of metaphysical principles, but since
they could never agree on those principles, contradictory metaphysical
systems proliferated. Philosophy, according to Villari, is retarded in its
development, and the philosophers who practise it are still stuck at the
metaphysical stage, unlike the real scientists whose work has advanced to
the highest or positive stage.139
When natural science was at the metaphysical stage – still part of phi-
losophy, in fact – it was all just warring systems and no progress, just like
philosophy as Kant found it. Natural philosophy was not yet science in
the modern sense, but the delay was not from any lack of observing or
reasoning, either inductively or deductively. Speaking of leading Italian
thinkers of the Renaissance, and thinking of them in comparison with
Francis Bacon, Villari notes that they ‘observed, induced and deduced’
without results, until Galileo ‘took the cart of the natural sciences, put
it on wheels and pushed it down the road at high velocity so that the sci-
ences have still not stopped and perhaps will never stop again … [follow-
ing] one of the most extensive revolutions in the history of the human
spirit.’140
56
Galileo’s revolution in method had two parts, negative and posi-

tive. The negative part, preferring ‘just one small and certain truth to
a thousand large truths that are uncertain and hypothetical,’ excluded
the traditional metaphysical quest for essences that had always ended in
frustration. The positive part required induction from phenomena to
laws, followed by repetitions of controlled experiments to verify the laws
thus induced, but never proceeding by reason alone from hypothesis to
hypothesis without intervening experimental checks. The products of
the two-stage method were also two: facts and laws, the latter understood
as relations among facts. Laws are answers to ‘how’ questions, putting
aside the ‘why’ questions that have no scientific answers.141 Galileo’s
method permitted systems only inasmuch as less general laws might be
subsumed under more general laws, a humble goal compared to the
ingenious metaphysical extravaganzas that use ‘why’ questions to ask
about essences. Thinking of Gioberti and Rosmini, Villari describes how
such systems still clashed in his day, but without effect:
‘One philosopher says: being creates the existent, and this is the point of depar-
ture for building a system. But another philosopher says: possible being, and
from here starts a voyage toward a second system. And so it goes with many
other words – the Absolute, the idea, nature, substance – that give rise to just as
many other systems.’
But all was not darkness in Villari’s picture of philosophy. Logic (except
Hegel’s metaphysical logic) had always been capable of clear and certain
conclusions, though with small application to practical human prob-
lems. Villari seems to have thought of logic as an empirical science that
‘observed facts and looked for laws in them,’ a description that applies
more convincingly to the philosophical psychology of the day, in which
he detected signs of progress.142
Nonetheless, after so many centuries of metaphysical web-spinning,
some critics wanted to have done with it and simply eliminate metaphys-
ics as a failed science like astrology or alchemy. Although Villari was
more inclined to reform than to liquidate, he knew that reform would
be difficult. Like any science, philosophy must submit its findings to veri-
fication. But the only means of verification are mathematical and experi-
mental. Since he could find no mathematical proofs or experimental
tests in philosophy, verification seemed impossible. What to do? Should
philosophy just be abandoned as hopelessly pre-positive? Or might it be
possible to repeat Galileo’s scientific revolution in the case of philoso-
57
phy and thereby find a method to verify at least some of philosophy’s

claims?143
Facing this choice, Villari took a pragmatic and restrictive view of phi-
losophy as the study of what is human, while acknowledging that all we
know about humanity is intra-mental. And then, outside the domain of
morality, he limited philosophy’s scope to logic, mind, and epistemology,
insisting that the mental phenomena that inform us about these topics
must be studied as human, contingent, and mutable, not as abstract,
eternal essences. Reason alone, which may be deluded, gives us no reli-
able access to these items. This is the problem: ‘to find a way to get from
the I to what is outside the I by checking and testing the ideas that we
find in ourselves.’ The solution – leaping across the chasm to other
minds – is that ‘this idea that you find in yourself is generally found in
almost all other people.’144
In the case of philosophical ideas about art, for example, we can rely
on ‘the history of art as a check and as a sort of test of our theories.’ In
general, since history has so much to do with politics, society, and moral
choice, history will be a likely place to look for the facts that can serve as
checks on the key philosophical claims of the moral sciences.145 Psychol-
ogy is another promising source of experimental data.
‘After what Vico found – that the laws of the world of nations are the same
as the laws of the human spirit that created this social world – from the one
you can get the science of history and from the other the science of man,
tested and demonstrated. For if history somehow gives you the external
world on which to experiment and verify the inductions of your psychol-
ogy, the psychology then becomes a torch that illuminates history. The laws
of the one, if they are true, must be checked against the other, and vice-
versa.’146
Thus armed with the mutually verifying facts of history and psychology,
Villari had hopes of solving a very large problem for human society, espe-
cially in Italy: namely, ‘to find the institutions that are the better aids to its
progress.’ In this quest, his methodological convictions were as strong as
can be imagined. ‘We are all convinced,’ he claimed, ‘that society’s laws
are as inviolable as those of nature, and that … we should … manage
and make use of them, just as we make use of natural laws and agents.’147
‘Examining the whole human being,’ he continued, ‘from era to era
and year to year, we will find that its life has a constant counterpart in
the life of society and in the history of the human race. Every new idea,
58
every faculty that we observe in the human person, inevitably gives rise
to a new series of social facts,’ and on the basis of those facts we can
proceed scientifically. Metaphysics has never progressed in this way, and
yet the metaphysical ideas pondered by philosophers have been realized
in society as religion, providing data that can be studied historically and
psychologically. From such research we will ‘not get absolute and full
knowledge of God, something … renounced for the present. But [we]
can experiment and use history to test how the idea of God emerged.’ In
this way, we may achieve ‘a practical, positive but also progressive knowl-
edge of the human heart.’148
This positive knowledge will come only from applying ‘the historical
method to the moral sciences … giving that method the same stand-
ing that the experimental method has in the natural sciences. Hence,
positivism is a new method, definitely not a new system.’ It is certainly
not traditional philosophy and does not try to answer all of philosophy’s
questions. Unlike philosophy as previously practised, the positive meth-
od ‘renounces all absolute conclusions,’ limiting itself to the human case
and studying ‘only facts and social and moral laws by patiently checking
the inductions of psychology against history and finding the laws of the
human spirit in the laws of history.’149
59
12
Real and Ideal
(De Sanctis)
Although Villari was a conspicuous target for the young and ambitious
Croce, one of Croce’s heroes was Villari’s teacher, Francesco De Sanctis,
remembered today as the first great literary historian and critic of mod-
ern Italy – above all for his History of Italian Literature (1870−1). Like oth-
er intellectuals of his generation, De Sanctis lived a life fractured by the
epochal events of 1848 and 1860, which compelled him to think about
human affairs in a broader and deeper way. Born in 1817 in the region
of Avellino, east of Naples, he moved to the city in 1827 to pursue liter-
ary studies, meeting Leopardi and founding his own school there at the
age of twenty-two, while also participating in Collechi’s Hegelian group.
In 1849, having joined the failed insurrection in Naples of the previous
year, he fled to Calabria and was arrested as a conspirator in Mazzini’s
Young Italy. He then spent three years reading Hegel while jailed in the
Castel dell’Ovo.150
Released in 1853, he went north to Torino, avoided active politics for
a while, studied Dante but also wrote a poem about his imprisonment,
‘La prigione,’ whose sentiments were both revolutionary and Hegelian.
He then began to produce the essays and journalism that marked him as
a man of the Left and therefore unemployable. To find a job, he left for
Zurich, where he taught literature and wrote until returning triumphant-
ly to Naples in 1860, as governor of Avellino and minister of education,
appointed first by Garibaldi and then by Cavour. He was also elected to
the first national Parliament and raised his public profile by editing a
daily newspaper. The first collection of his essays appeared in 1866, just
before he started work on the History of Italian Literature, which is still in
print. One of his best-known pieces from this period, ‘Science and Life,’
started as a prolusione, following his appointment to the University of
Real and Ideal (De Sanctis)
Naples in 1871. By 1875, however, the Left’s electoral success called him
away from teaching to full-time politics, until bad health made him with-
draw from ministerial duties as well in 1880. He was elected again as a
deputy in 1882 and died in 1883.151
By the time De Sanctis passed away, the academic study of literature
had turned positivist and unfriendly to idealism, even his moderate
kind. Even the young Croce disliked his historicism, though he admired
the criticism nonetheless – thinking better of the many essays than of
the imposing History. It was Croce, however, followed by Gentile, who
made De Sanctis a revered figure for Italian idealists of the twentieth
century. And yet De Sanctis had insisted on limits to Hegelianism: no
dogmas, no triads, nothing a priori, only the two experiential principles
that he thought basic to modernity: ‘becoming as the basis of evolution
and existence as the basis of realism.’ What he meant by ‘realism’ was
much affected by his reading of Émile Zola’s naturalist fiction, which
had begun to appear in 1867. The ‘relentless painter of that vast French
corruption’ understood literature as aiming ‘to approach nature and
reality’ because life itself – not the Beautiful or the Good or the True – is
the object of art. The living always includes both the real and the ideal,
and valuing them both is the critic’s task.152
The occasion for De Sanctis to write in philosophical terms about
‘The Principle of Realism’ was that he had read a book with that title
by Julius von Kirchmann (1802−4), a distinguished German jurist who
also became president of the Philosophical Society in Berlin in 1846.
Having heard a good deal of loose talk in his own country about realism,
De Sanctis set about to reduce the confusion, starting with a declaration
of what realism is not: neither materialism nor sensism nor empiricism.
Although Hegel had condemned empiricism, he would now be obliged
to respect realism because it ‘puts thinking in as lofty a position as the
Idealists do.’153 Idealists go astray, however, when they regard ‘thinking
as the unique and direct source of being because what is highest and first
in being can be learned only from thinking.’ Realists correctly object
that being ‘can be known only by perceiving’ and that ‘the only purpose
of thinking is to elaborate the content of perception.’ Knowledge needs
two instruments, in fact, both thinking and perceiving. But both tools
are forged in experience, which alone gives us our mental objects and
their extra-mental referents – all the being that we can know. Only per-
ception gives us the content of being, however, without which its forms
would be empty thoughts.154
One perverse consequence of this realization, that both thinking and
61
perceiving are necessary, is that philosophers have tried to reduce one to

the other, ending in the unsettled disputes between idealists and mate-
rialists. ‘All the systems of monism are just a game,’ says De Sanctis, and
the false unities of monism lead nowhere or everywhere: ‘depending
on how good the magician is, we can get anything we want.’ A more
useful inquiry, he argues, will start with the two propositions – ‘what is
perceived exists’ and ‘what contradicts itself does not exist’ – whose joint
product is realism. The first proposition tells us that thinking gets all its
content from perception, the second that thinking discovers the truth by
eliminating what is false from the deliverances of perception by forming
concepts, constructing laws, inducing, analysing, synthesizing, and clas-
sifying. De Sanctis acknowledges that his ‘principle of Realism’ is noth-
ing new; Bacon, Locke, and Hume recommended it; Newton and other
natural scientists put it into practice. In fact, it just restates the even older
scholastic maxim that ‘there is nothing in the intellect that was not first
in the senses.’155
De Sanctis also recognizes a type of knowledge that has no content, the
knowledge of forms which is vacuous just because of its purity and which
is therefore the source of the contradictions and antinomies analysed
by Hegel and Kant. Such knowledge is not of contents but of relations,
the infinitely many relations that concepts can have with one another. In
Hegelian terms, a content taken in isolation is a thesis, but its antithesis
is a relation that stands in an infinite series of such relations, a ‘bad infin-
ity’ unless a synthesis resolves it.156 The point of realism is not that there
are no contentless forms or that they have no uses; De Sanctis conceded
that such forms had proven themselves quite useful in mathematics and
the natural sciences. The critical, historical point is that philosophers
have always gone wrong by treating merely relational forms as if they could
provide knowledge of real being. Because they could find no general laws
in the particulars of experience, philosophers detached thinking from
experience in order to make it capable of knowing universals. The result
was that the ‘categories of pure knowledge … became the categories of
primary being, and the Absolute was discovered.’157
To correct the absolutist error, De Sanctis applies a principle of real-
ism that cannot be demonstrated, though he finds it supported by wide-
spread observation and practical use. No one gets through life without
relying on perception and trusting the principle of non-contradiction,
which is enough to persuade him that these two core elements of real-
ism are not just ‘empty formulas.’ They are ‘common to all people’ and
provide ‘a solid foundation from which observation and induction can
62
lead to truth.’ Once perception has been systematically corrected by

thinking, the metaphysical mechanisms of other systems become obso-
lete. Realism too is a system, but not of the absolute kind. The order that
thinking gives to perception is ‘a relational concept to which nothing in
the object corresponds.’ But a provisional, instrumental order is no less
useful for teaching, learning, and discovery, as long as the heuristic is not
mistaken for an ontology.158
The great virtue of realism is that it ‘gets directly to its object’ without
metaphysical encumbrance. Realism needs only perception corrected by
thinking, and derives no ontological conclusions from its methodologi-
cal principles. Although those principles may seem to exclude monism,
a realist will not insist on that metaphysical likelihood. On the contrary,
in all the traditional systems she will discover insights that have their
advantages, as long as they are not exalted as absolutes. As a critic of the
old systems, De Sanctis concluded that ‘the whole point of Realism is to
develop all the richness found in existence.’159 He was happy to see a
thousand blossoms in the garden of metaphysics because he understood
realism not as a global alternative to any and all such theorizing but as a
tool for detecting particular mistakes. All hypotheses must be screened
by perception and critical thinking. Accordingly, realism submits phi-
losophy to ‘the same philosophical test that applies to all the special
sciences. It keeps whatever passes this test. Anything else will be a nice
game but not the truth nor even a start on it.’ Still, the many grand sys-
tems recorded in the annals of philosophy will offer strong inducements
to feigning hypotheses, ‘putting to use all the riches of imagination and
sentiment. The genuine Realist philosopher rejects these aids, even at
the cost of seeming flat and boring.’160
Realism may be dull and homely, but it is not the empiricism that
Hegel rejected: near the end of his essay, De Sanctis emphatically repeats
this point that he has already made. The upshot of the reminder is that
his realism is ‘a recent development of Hegel’s teaching … When what
is obscure and contradictory in Hegel … has been removed, Realism
presents these teachings in their full truth and in a clear form.’ Antici-
pating Croce’s project, De Sanctis thus seems to regard his own account
of remedial thinking as an upgraded version of Hegel’s logic.161 Hegel’s
idealism had been notoriously doctrinaire, however – a warning to pos-
terity that even realism might breed its own dogmas of sensism or materi-
alism. The cautious and correct route for realists will be the one marked
out by Bacon and Galileo, which is not a doctrine but a method, a prop-
erly modest undertaking. And yet De Sanctis worries that as philosophy
63
lowers its sights, ‘many are discouraged and talk about the end of meta-
physics … [and] poetry,’ while his hopes for both are eternal. ‘What are
natural selection, the principle of heredity and evolution, the uncon-
scious and the internal states of atoms but attempts at metaphysics,’ he
asks, adding that ‘these concepts do not come from constructs of pure
speculation, as they used to do … As results of long and patient observa-
tion … they are tools of Realism that construct new kinds of metaphys-
ics … [that] can go nowhere without Realism as [their] passport.’ ‘We
are deep in Realism,’ De Sanctis concludes: ‘the new generation runs
after us with the same passion that made … us … run after Hegel.’162
Realism is the new Hegelianism, De Sanctis suggests. Hegel was surely
an idealist, however, and De Sanctis has been hard on idealism. ‘The
Ideal is dead.’ But wait. ‘The Ideal has risen!’ This paradoxical pair
of ejaculations ends a short piece on ‘The Ideal’ which is even more
occasional than ‘The Principle of Realism,’ but long enough to hedge
a little on realism. Speaking – without much preparation, perhaps – to
the Philological Circle of Naples in 1877, De Sanctis first observes that
the members of the society are bound to do good for one another by a
‘feeling of duty,’ which is a ‘feeling of the Ideal.’ But this sentiment, he
fears, must reflect a split personality. What is this talk about the Ideal, he
wonders, ‘at a time when everything is Real … [and] the Ideal is dead
and buried?’ He responds with a little eulogy for ‘the companion of my
youth … [that] has stirred my heart many times.’163
De Sanctis assumes universal assent to the first premise of his speech:
that infants and savages behave like animals; they differ from civilized
adult humans in acting merely to preserve their lives, in not experiencing
those lives as human. Only the human feeling of belonging to human-
kind will lead to reflection on that feeling, and thus to the moment ‘when
a person conceives an idea of what was a feeling for him the day before.’
The generalizing of human qualities – patriotism, for example – is the
birth of ideas. But ‘ideas become the Ideal … only when … imagination
takes hold of ideas and … produces feeling … in such a way that the idea
becomes like the pillar of fire that guides the human race … taking dif-
ferent forms in art, religion, philosophy and history.’164
How does this becoming come to be? Where does the Ideal come
from? From the Real. By observing real things that are beautiful or ugly,
for example, we think the corresponding ideas, from which we ‘then
create the Ideal of art, which is the Greco-Latin Ideal.’ De Sanctis sup-
poses that because ideals have cultural and temporal boundaries – Egyp-
tian, Greco-Roman, Christian – they may decay if those boundaries break
64
down. But when the decadent ideal turns into a prison, thinking aspires
to freedom, a new ideal. And when freedom is not just for the individual
but for all people, the still higher ideal of humanity emerges. We will
have created ourselves by realizing the progress of history.165
Nonetheless, De Sanctis finds it an odd feature of his time that ‘we
believe that the Ideal no longer exists. And I find not just … Realism …
A still stranger phenomenon … [is our] looking more lovingly today
on our animal part than on the human … thinking more of the mon-
key than of man.’ After Lavoisier and Darwin, the Ideal had faded into
an illusion. Thinking was a residue of chemical reactions, morality an
afterglow of metabolism, so that ‘all the qualities that are really human
appear to be bestialized.’ Ideas are instincts, imagination is a mechanism,
passion is just appetite.166 Peering through the gloom of a re-bestialized
humanity, De Sanctis spots a glimmer of the Ideal. What cheers the old
revolutionary is that modern people have found modern ways to protest
the animal negation of the human. When all ideals have been banished
from reality, the cries of pain must still compete with irony, laughter,
and eruptive rage. And those cries are not the swan song of the Ideal.
They are screams of birth: ‘in laughter, in the grotesque, in comedy, in
pain and in indignation we see nothing more than the sign of something
laboring that will bear is own fruits. At one time’ – before the Revolution,
to be precise – ‘we used to shout, “The King is dead. Long live the King!”
Now I say, “The Ideal is dead. The Ideal is risen!”’167
65
13
Resurgence
(Fiorentino and Florenzi Waddington)
After De Sanctis welcomed realism in his 1872 essay on ‘Science and

Life,’ some critics thought he had surrendered to positivism, though
Croce and Gentile would later deny it. In 1876, when the great critic
published his ‘Principle of Realism,’ Francesco Fiorentino gave an inau-
gural address on the related themes of ‘Positivism and Idealism,’ and
there was no doubt about his idealist credentials, though he acquired
them only after completing an eclectic philosophical education based
on Cousin, Galluppi, and Gioberti.
Fiorentino was born in 1834 near the toe of the Italian boot, in Sam-
biase Catanzaro. He read law before moving to philosophy, at first the
Neo-Guelf kind. Then, before taking his first job in a liceo in Spoleto, he
fought the Bourbons in Calabria. When his very successful study of The
Pantheism of Giordano Bruno appeared in 1861, his account of the mar-
tyred philosopher was passionately nationalist and still Giobertian. But
by 1862, when he took the chair at Bologna recently vacated by Spaven-
ta, he had begun to take German idealism seriously – Kant especially. His
later appointments, accompanied by other important books on Telesio
and Pomponazzi, were at Pisa and Naples, where he ascended again to
Spaventa’s chair in 1883. By that time, Fiorentino stood politically with
the Historical Right and won elective office by opposing the politics that
De Sanctis supported.168
He died in 1884, just before the publication of his most enduring
work, The Philosophical Resurgence [Risorgimento] of the Fifteenth Century, in
the next year. Despite its title, the book is about the Renaissance, the
period so effectively advertised under that French name by a Swiss his-
torian of culture, Jacob Burckhardt, in a book published in German in
1860 – but not until 1876 in Italian. Ignoring the label that Burckhardt
Resurgence (Fiorentino and Florenzi Waddington)
(and Michelet) had made canonical, this first extensive study of Renais-
sance philosophy by an Italian claims to be about a Risorgimento, which
now, both in Italian and in English, is the name not of the period that
Fiorentino studied but of the era in which he lived. Only in the early
twentieth century, while Gentile was reformulating the history of Italian
philosophy, would the current usage of ‘Rinascimento’ and ‘Risorgimen-
to’ become the norm in Italy. In effect, it was Risorgimento politics and
philosophy that made the Renaissance a modern Italian property, dec-
ades after Spaventa had embraced the period that Gioberti disclaimed.
Fiorentino’s book on Quattrocento philosophy was the sequel to Spaven-
ta’s rejection of Gioberti’s historiography, and Fiorentino’s heirs in this
regard were Gentile and Eugenio Garin.169
Fiorentino began to turn Spaventa’s theorizing into concrete histo-
ry in 1868 with his detailed studies of Pomponazzi, Telesio, and other
Renaissance philosophers. As an original thinker, however, he promoted
views that were as much Kantian as Hegelian, aiming at a critique of the
findings of positive science, especially evolutionary biology. The essay on
‘Positivism and Idealism,’ translated here, shows Fiorentino evaluating
the claims of these competing positions.170 Earlier, in letters written from
Bologna in the Spring of 1865, Kant’s was one of the systems that he
sought to relate to Vico’s New Science.171 If Italian philosophy was to have
a voice in the international conversation that Spaventa had described, a
philosophical Vico who not only revises Descartes but also adumbrates
Kant would have something to say to contemporary philosophers who
could make little sense of a merely antiquarian Vico.
On the other hand, Fiorentino realized that his syncretizing view of
Vico’s thought would also annoy the Italian nationalists who needed
their hero to be a complete original – as Descartes, the founding hero
of French philosophy, had claimed to be. For almost a century after Vico
died, in 1744, only a few innovators like Hamann, Herder, and Jacobi
had paid much attention to the great Neapolitan, whose masterpiece
found a German translator only in 1822, followed by the bestselling
French abridgement of 1827 by Jules Michelet. Meanwhile, Cuoco and
other Neapolitan progressives were making the case for Vico to their cor-
respondents in other parts of the peninsula. The result of the ensuing
Vico craze, according to Fiorentino, was uncritical adulation. He inter-
rupted the applause with analysis of links and isomorphisms between the
New Science and other ways of doing philosophy – not just philology.172
The medium for Fiorentino’s message was a series of epistolary essays
addressed in 1865 to the Marchesa Marianna Florenzi Waddington, who
67
was sixty-two when she published her own Essays on Psychology and Logic
in 1864. Born in 1802 to the noble Bacinetti family of Ravenna, she
first married an Italian, the Marquis Ettore Florenzi of Perugia, in 1819.
When her first husband died in 1833, she married a Protestant expatri-
ate, Evelino Waddington, in 1836. Meanwhile she had cultivated a long
friendship with Ludwig I of Bavaria, who abdicated in 1848. (The King
commissioned one of the several portraits of his companion that sur-
vive.) Although she befriended princes, the Marchesa was an untypical
aristocrat: like few Italian woman of her time, she studied science – at
the University of Perugia. She also organized salons and did risky work
as a political journalist and a translator of foreign texts that the authori-
ties disliked – a career that won her election (she was the first woman so
honoured) to the Philosophical Academy of Naples in 1865, five years
before her death in 1870.173
Her 1864 Essays open with schematic introductions to logic and psy-
chology before proceeding to the special topic of the soul’s immortality.
She examines the soul in the framework of German philosophy, nam-
ing Kant and Schelling but looking for a Hegelian solution to a topic
that she thought not well handled by Hegel: the soul’s purpose and des-
tiny. She finds immortality to be not just compatible with Hegel’s system
but required by it. Importing Hegel into Italian philosophical culture
for this purpose was benign: what harm could come of finding support
from abroad for a key tenet of Roman Catholic faith – the immortality
of the soul – whose career in philosophical theology had been long and
troubled?174
The Marchesa’s private thoughts in the years just before she corre-
sponded with Fiorentino were more threatening to conventional piety.
She read his book on Bruno’s pantheism, and in a draft essay on that
notorious doctrine, she not only endorses it but also attributes it to St
Paul – the unholy nightmare of Spinozism revived in the previous cen-
tury by Jacobi’s quarrel with Mendelssohn about Lessing. She explicitly
denies the dogma of creation ex nihilo and identifies her impersonal God
with the material universe, citing Bruno, an executed heretic, as her
authority. Along the way, however, she makes use of Spinoza’s arguments
before rejecting the version of divinity that she found in Schelling – an
undeveloped deity that remains unaware of itself until it is fully realized
in human reason. Although she mentions Gioberti only once, it is clear
that she has read him as well as his great rival, Rosmini, who accused one
another of the pantheism that she embraces.175
Although Schelling had published a book called Bruno oder über das
68
göttliche und natürliche Prinzip der Dinge in 1802, he actually seems not to
have read Bruno’s majestic Italian dialogues. Nonetheless, it was proba-
bly the appeal of Schelling’s title to an Italian readership that persuaded
the Marchesa to translate it, and then to publish it in 1844 in the face of
official resistance. A few years later, Spaventa drafted (but did not pub-
lish) the first modern Italian monograph on Bruno, thinking of him as
the Italian Spinoza. To follow up his monograph on Bruno’s pantheism
– dedicated to the Marchesa – Fiorentino also planned a large study of
Giordano Bruno and His Times that he did not live to publish.176
In the year before her translation of Schelling’s Bruno appeared,
Florenzi Waddington had launched her career as a philosopher with a
collection of Various Thoughts that Mamiani encouraged her to publish.
At this time of her life, however, she was as much a political agent as a
philosopher. Despite her first husband’s official obligations to the papa-
cy, in a city where papal rule was still a threat, she had long shared the
anti-clerical instincts of the liberal circles in which she moved, always
distrusting the Pope’s assertion of temporal power. She was never a
republican, however, and thought Italy unready for democracy, but her
commitments to nationalism and constitutional monarchy were passion-
ate and openly declared, starting with the disturbances of 1830 in Italy
and the rest of Europe. When Pius IX turned his back on the liberals
after 1848, her private words were to ‘damn the butcher who usurps the
name of the Vicar of Christ on earth! Pius IX has given us the hearts of
tigers,’ while publicly concluding that ‘on the principles of reason the
Protestant religion … is more plausible, more acceptable.’177
After the disillusionments of 1848 and their sorry sequel for local
affairs in Perugia, the Marchesa found politics less attractive than philos-
ophy in the next decade. She had known Fiorentino before 1861, when
he dedicated his first book to her – and elicited her delight that this
Italian thinker knew some German. Her own international network in
philosophy was large and well established by this time. She had improved
her German on visits to King Ludwig in Munich, where Schelling was the
court philosopher. In 1860 she corresponded about Schelling and Bru-
no with Baron Karl Bunsen, who was her second husband’s (Evelino’s)
cousin and the Prussian ambassador to Rome, Bern, and London.
Evelino’s extended family was renowned in France as well. Charles Wad-
dington-Kastus (probably a cousin) taught philosophy in Paris and wrote
a study of Aristotle’s psychology that the Marchesa translated into Italian
in 1856. One of Charles’s cousins became prime minister of France in
1879, and another was a distinguished politician. Such family and politi-
69
cal connections opened doors to Victor Cousin, Etienne Vacherot, and

other French intellectuals.178
Thus, the woman to whom Fiorentino wrote his philosophical letters
of 1865 had long since made her name. Since she had helped shape and
guide the Romantic culture that brought German idealism into Italy, it
was natural for the Marchesa to ask Fiorentino about Vico’s place in that
circuit of ideas. Fiorentino’s chair at Bologna had come to him from
Spaventa – also an admirer of Florenzi Waddington – and Spaventa had
regarded Vico as the only creative Italian thinker of his age. Vico alone
had really searched for the metaphysics of mind that Kant and Hegel
would finally discover. But Fiorentino picked up the thread that ties Vico
to Kant only in his third letter to the Marchesa, after dealing with Plato
and Descartes in the first two.
Fiorentino admired Vico’s genius and lamented the obstacles that kept
him in obscurity, but he found these lesser facts insignificant in compari-
son to the larger rhythms of the spirit. Some of the New Science was latent
in the Republic, he explained, and when the hinges of history were ready
to turn, Vico was there to uncover what had been hidden. The politics
of the Republic mirror a psychology. Faculties of reason, courage, and
appetite correspond to aristocratic, martial, and democratic forms of
government. In Vico this Platonic analogy becomes ‘an ideal eternal law
[causing] … all forms of government [to] arise from one another in a
way explained not by chance external circumstances but by the internal
order of the faculties of the mind.’179
According to Fiorentino, Vico understood Plato’s psychology as
grounded in metaphysics – as showing the way, in other words, to a mod-
ern philosophy of mind. But Plato had failed to reach that goal because
he stopped at metaphysics, treating the human person as an abstract,
ideal vehicle of contemplative reason, whose object is the True. Ever
since the Fall, however, real, concrete humans have been far from ideal,
once a perverse will corrupted them. And yet the same will that drove
Adam and Eve out of paradise also equipped them to act in postlapsar-
ian history, to do and to make the things about which they could be
certain because only they themselves had done and made them. Hence,
while the true knowledge of metaphysics may elude sinful humans, even
sinners know what they have done, in a practical, historical sense: the
history that humans make is most of what they can be certain about.180
In effect, this first letter of Fiorentino’s to the Marchesa revises the
Table of Opposites used by the ancient Pythagoreans to classify every-
thing – one/many, limited/unlimited, odd/even, straight/crooked,
70
male/female, and so on – as somehow good or bad. Fiorentino’s new

lists are
metaphysics history
ideal real
abstract concrete
reason will
contemplation action
true certain
Such oppositions became motifs of later Italian philosophy, which was

particularly good at expanding the sinister side of the table, adding tran-
scendence, mysticism, obscurity, prejudice, and so on. Since the division
is fundamentally moral, however, the dichotomy was hard to sustain for
later idealists, who, like Fiorentino, also wanted to be realistic.
Vico himself was a dichotomy, ‘half-modern and half-antique,’ accord-
ing to Fiorentino, and even the modern half was antiquarian, in a sense,
because it was philological. Although Descartes claimed to have dumped
the baggage of Renaissance learning in order to construct a new method,
not many educated people had followed his example by Vico’s time. Lat-
in volumes by the ton, stiff with classical erudition, still fell heavy, if not
stillborn, from the presses. Vico, reacting to the same pedantry that Swift
ridiculed in The Battle of the Books, saw value but also disorder and aimless-
ness in this profusely bookish culture. So at first he decided to imitate
Descartes by looking for rules of method to bring order out of the chaos
– to look for certainty.181 At the same time, by applying philosophy (the
true) to history and philology (the certain), Vico seemingly annulled
the divorce that liberated Descartes from the clutter of the past. Accord-
ing to Fiorentino’s second letter, however, his real aim was ‘to enlarge
the Cartesian method without altering it,’ meaning that the ‘sovereign
mind’ that Descartes located in the doubting self was also Vico’s discov-
ery, but on a higher plane. By minutely examining the textual remains of
the earliest Latin, Vico discovered eternal ideas: he saw ‘truth converted
into what is made in a mind located above our minds.’ The only strictly
intellectual product of human making is mathematics, which is there-
fore the only certain human science. But Providence makes humans,
whose primitive language preserves traces of divinely made certainties,
especially the ‘ideal eternal law’ that regulates history itself.182
The trouble with Vico’s insight that primitive Latin is inherently
philosophical is that history makes it implausible: Romans came late to
71
philosophy, which they imported from Greece. In his third letter, Fioren-
tino explains how Vico’s struggle with this problem led him to revise his
earlier views and discover his New Science, after surviving his critics and
emerging from various blind allies. It was useless to shift the hunt for
primitive language to the Etruscans, for example, because no one could
(or can) read Etruscan. Intelligible and abundant evidence of Roman
law, however, was as old as Rome itself.183 The laws of the Twelve Tables
are crude, but law by its nature generalizes: since one general rule covers
many particular deeds, law is ‘the natural mediator between theory and
practice.’ But since the earliest Romans were not truly primitive, Vico
began to use his data – the findings of philology – to go ‘back even far-
ther, to the cave-dwellers … to the crude savage rites that inaugurated …
the first civilization.’ The primitive was so alluring to Vico because it
seemed to unveil the universal, the anthropological constants that ought
to constitute human nature, thus making his new enterprise the human
science which explains that nature.184
Vico’s philological quest for a new science was persistent and produc-
tive, in Fiorentino’s view, but not reflective. Unlike Kant, he ‘lacks the
awareness of his own path … [which] is why the foundation of his philos-
ophy constantly conflicts with his own teaching.’ Before writing the New
Science, Vico had restricted human intellectual certainty to mathematics
as the only science made by humans, but his masterwork expands the
scope of the made to the natural, moral, and aesthetic sciences. Kant
would also encounter contradictions that impeded his progress and
made him slumber dogmatically, but he attended to them philosophi-
cally as antinomies. His aim, like Vico’s, was to give knowledge a stable
foundation, but Vico had proceeded unreflectively. Hence, he only got
glimpses of the findings that Kant would derive from the well-meditated
arguments of his first Critique.185 ‘Kant completes Descartes by putting
Vico’s presentiment into effect,’ according to Fiorentino, whose own dil-
igence in the libraries had clarified Vico’s distinction between the cogito
as a sign of the subject’s existence, on the one hand, and as a cause of
that existence on the other. Certainty of S’s existence by way of S’s irre-
fragable conviction that S is thinking does not show that thinking makes
S (or anything else) exist. Hence, the Cartesian project was incomplete
when Vico took it up, not as a philosopher but as a philological prophet.
Kant completed this vatic work when, like Vico, ‘he went beyond Carte-
sian consciousness,’ and then, unlike Vico, ‘moved up to … transcenden-
tal consciousness.’186
Fiorentino’s conclusion is an Italian historian’s platform for idealist
72
philosophy: ‘Vico teaches how the human being makes history, Kant how
the mind makes knowledge, and in this they both reveal that thinking
is the supreme maker.’ This was in 1865. But in 1866 Villari brought
his powerful advocacy of positivism into the philosophical conversation,
and the effects of his prolusione were still strong a decade later when
Fiorentino addressed the issue in ‘Positivism and Idealism.’ Like much
Italian philosophy of the period, Fiorentino’s Pisa prolusione is self-con-
sciously – and in his case – brilliantly rhetorical. It is a stunning piece of
prose, setting a standard of eloquence that only Croce would surpass.
The occasion, of course, demanded oratory: Fiorentino’s task was a for-
mal address to the students of his new university, which he would help
make the most distinguished in the new Italy.187
Fiorentino warns that positivism in Italy has been like an earthquake
that makes a shaky building collapse all at once: the ruined edifice was
speculative philosophizing about ideas; facts are the new seismic force;
and Auguste Comte engineered the cataclysm. But Fiorentino looks at a
side of Comte that Villari had ignored by focusing on the famous theory
of stages. At first, Comte had treated quantification as the foundation
of all science, which he saw ascending from mathematics through pro-
gressively more complex sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology to
sociology, the implication being that the human science at the top of the
ladder will be reductive, tracking its data down through the same hier-
archy until it becomes as quantitative as physics. Because Comte later
reversed himself to rule that ‘higher forms cannot be explained by lower
forms,’ Fiorentino is friendlier to him than to the real villains of positiv-
ism: the British.188
Since, from Fiorentino’s perspective, the British philosophical tradi-
tion had long been suspicious of substances and causes and was now
spellbound by utility, it was the perfect seedbed for the positivism that
crossed the Channel from France. ‘If, as Macaulay said, the glory of mod-
ern philosophy lies in seeking the useful and shunning ideas, then, from
Bacon until now, no nation has done more to make this maxim effec-
tive.’ Reductionism in the early Comte was as nothing, however, com-
pared to the sceptical assassination of ideas attempted by John Stuart
Mill. In Mill’s logic, Fiorentino could find no deductions, causes, laws, or
definitions, only associations, sequences, conformities, and descriptions.
He regards Mill’s inductive method as just bookkeeping with data, the
‘impoverishment of reason.’189
Mill’s positivism ‘is the genius of his nation, so horrified by ideas, so
anxious to corner the facts.’ But the instinct feeds on ignorance of Kant’s
73
two-sided conception of facts. On the one hand, facts in a spatio-tempo-

ral nexus of causes are all that we experience. On the other hand, some-
thing in our thinking about facts is required for experience but does not
come from experience. Practice is the sphere in which this a priori is best
grasped, as moral freedom, but the antinomy about facts is theoretical, a
theory ignored or misunderstood by Mill, Spencer, and the other British
positivists.190 Spencer at least tried to resolve the contradiction between
moral freedom and natural necessity by treating human facts statistically.
If the object of human science is not the individual person but the aver-
age man, individual aberrations will disappear in the statistical aggre-
gate, making it possible to quantify (contrary to Comte’s understanding)
the moral sciences. But Mill was obdurate. For Mill, there simply is ‘no
reason that governs and unifies the forms that change through history,
while for Idealism nothing happens without reason.’ There is no real
history, only a sequence of accidents, and Mill is even prepared to put
mathematics under ‘the rule of chance,’ which would make for large
odds against a rational statistical science.191
Neglect of ideas in favour of facts is the core error of positivism, which
inverts the basic idealist mistake of overvaluing ideas and disregarding
facts. ‘Idealism puts too much trust in deductions based on the eternal
fabric of cognition. Positivism wavers and worries too much about tying
up loose threads.’ Fiorentino sees these positions as two faces of monism:
naturalist and idealist. ‘Positivism gives nature the upper hand, and man
does not figure in nature except as … a nameless atom.’ Idealists counter
that only the conscious human atom takes cognizance of natural facts,
discovers their laws, and thereby regulates nature scientifically. Comte’s
final verdict was ‘close to this distinctly modern view: that without the
human mind, nature is a closed book.’192 The question left unsettled
by the contest of monisms is whether a unified philosophy can use the
same method to comprehend the facts of nature and the thoughts of
minds. The key breakthrough, moving by induction from facts to laws,
was Galileo’s. Although his findings were only about natural facts, the
excitement of a discovery that covers the whole natural universe motivat-
ed Descartes and Kant to look for mental truths of the same depth and
scope. Despite what ‘Kant achieved in his immortal critique,’ the truths
that he found had little bearing on the certainties of history that ought
to be foundational for the moral sciences. It was Vico who ‘made the
inductive method of the experimental sciences available to the science
of the mind,’ though in a far less finished way than Galileo’s.193
74
The bar to further progress was the difference between natural induc-
tion and historical induction, as Fiorentino sees it. Because the facts of
nature are stable, he claims, ‘exactly identical as long as circumstances
are the same,’ they are always ready for the scientist to assemble, disas-
semble, and test. The historian’s mental facts, by contrast, are fleeting,
always changing in time and constantly altered by context, providing no
basis for reliable induction or controlled experiment. Life, the object
of the moral sciences, is a ‘fickle, gabbling Proteus that has no constant
face.’194 Émile Littré, France’s great positivist lexicographer, had pro-
posed treating historical data about the words of modern languages as a
matrix of natural facts in which the sequence of linguistic forms would
guide induction. What about the missing links? This was Fiorentino’s
question, which made him even more sceptical about studying primitive
languages, and, in general, about all ‘researches into origins,’ which are
just guesswork. Such inquiries have no real method because there is no
‘equivalent of natural facts’ that can take the place of concrete observa-
tions. The results are more poetic than scientific.195
By Mill’s standards of positivity, in fact, there is little positive evidence
of a kind that might lead to historical equivalents of the gas laws. ‘Unlike
the … gases that surround the body … the moral and intellectual envi-
ronment is not always given. It grows in the course of history … [as]
both producer and product of that history.’ Because historical facts are
mental, they are always mutable. In the end, they may be useless for sci-
ence. But even Mill, in all his positivist parsimony, regarded ‘intellectual
activity and the search for truth … [as] the chief cause that determines
social progress.’ If thinking means so much to society, can the moral sci-
ences do without a science of thinking?196
Fiorentino’s Kantian reply is that ‘Idealism can be empty and Positivism
can be blind if one is detached from the other … What lights up the fact
is the idea shining inside it, raising it from … mere accident to … lasting
reality.’ Over the centuries, many people had seen many lamps swinging
in many churches. The facts had always been there, long before Galileo
grasped the law of the pendulum. And to discover such laws, observing
and compiling facts are not enough. We used to choke on syllogisms;
now it is mindless catalogs of data that crush us. The philosopher’s duty
is to cure the disease and end the destruction that will continue unless
the two monisms reform themselves.197 Fiorentino promises his students
to promote reform by avoiding the ruinous extremes: ‘True Idealism
must not neglect the results of the positive sciences nor neglect history,
75
and true Positivism must remember that the most important of all facts is
human thinking.’ His own method will be historical rather than positive
– at least in the British sense – combining a deductive ‘internal history’
with an inductive ‘external history,’ respecting both ‘strict discipline of
argument’ and ‘careful inquiry into the facts.’198
76
14
Matter and Idea
(Labriola)
Antonio Labriola was born the son of a school teacher in 1843 in Cas-
sino, and in 1861 he went to Naples to study philosophy. Working with
Spaventa and other Hegelians, he began by criticizing Eduard Zeller’s
version of Kantian epistemology; then he studied Socrates, Spinoza, and
Feuerbach. Despite the long shadows cast in Naples by Spaventa and
De Sanctis, Labriola was never comfortable with Hegel. He aimed one
of his early efforts at Augusto Vera’s Hegelian Lectures on the Philosophy
of History, but this should be seen in the context of coolness between
Vera and Spaventa. Like his father, Labriola taught school before ris-
ing through the ranks of the university, winning his first appointment
at Rome in 1874, where he taught moral philosophy and education.
Although he travelled in Germany and read German philosophy, it was
probably his continuing interest in pedagogy that attracted him to one
of the great German authorities in that field, Johann Friedrich Herbart
(1776−1841). And Herbart’s moral psychology gave Labriola more rea-
sons to dislike Hegel.199
Herbart belonged to an earlier generation. He had succeeded to
Kant’s chair at Königsberg in 1809 and moved to Göttingen in 1833. His
Psychology as Science (1824−5) and General Metaphysics (1828−9) appeared
in Hegel’s lifetime but took a much different, psychological approach to
post-Kantian problems. Some of Herbart’s psychology is quantitative and
empirical, but much of it is metaphysical and leads to a theory of value.
His starting point for philosophy is reflection on empirical information –
including the misleading information that makes us see simple monadic
substances (of a Leibnizian kind) as subject to real change. Philosophy’s
initial task is to clarify such unreliable reflections by applying tools of
logic. But logical clarification reveals contradictions that can be resolved
only at the next stage by metaphysics, which makes thinkable what logic
clarifies. The real objects of metaphysical analysis belong to the extra-
mental world, but the problems of aesthetics, left unresolved by logic
and metaphysics, are values that stand outside reality and emerge from
our thinking.200
Herbart convinced Labriola that human activity must be studied
empirically and psychologically, not just sketched in grand Hegelian ges-
tures, but this conclusion left him perplexed about idealism’s larger role
in philosophy. He thought that the basis of morality had to be a kind
of interior freedom, and yet it could not be the interiority of a pure
transcendental subject. On the one hand, a theory of knowledge had to
encompass concrete psychological processes governed by scientific laws.
On the other hand, without guidance from ideal reason, psychological
processes could not produce knowledge. Neither epistemology nor eth-
ics could be reduced to psychology, and experience would always require
the corrective of metaphysics.
In 1887, when Labriola moved up a step in the university hierarchy,
he marked the occasion with a prolusione on ‘The Problems of the Phi-
losophy of History,’ which summarized his worries about idealism and
applied them to this key Hegelian topic. Responding to German hopes
for a human science (Geisteswissenschaft) whose rigour and results might
match those of natural science, Labriola doubted that history could be a
science of any kind. He was suspicious of Hegel’s proto-evolutionism and
thought that positivist Darwinism could never account for complexities
of value, meaning, and culture. In the end, history registers transforma-
tions of the human spirit that cannot be reduced to material change.
And yet it seemed both necessary and possible to study the human con-
dition genetically through a social psychology of the spirit. Applying the
model of developmental embryology, researchers should study homolo-
gies of myth, custom, and language in a search for informative gener-
alizations. A social psychology working along such lines would produce
something sounder than a Hegelian philosophy of history, but – in Her-
bartian terms – metaphysics must always be available as a corrective to
experience.201
Until the 1890s, the undogmatic Labriola had more questions than
answers. But for some years he had been talking with the radicals and
socialists who would give his politics a harder edge – with a mature phi-
losophy of historical materialism undergirding the politics. After his
formative experience in Naples in the early days of the unified nation,
Labriola’s sympathies had been with the Historical Right, drifting left-
78
Matter and Idea (Labriola)
ward only later and gradually. By the late 1880s, he was running for
office and publicly active, much engaged in the movement to raise a
statue of Giordano Bruno in Rome. Erected in 1889 on the spot where
the Church had burned Bruno in 1600, the Roman statue is a late stage
of Bruno’s iconography. The martyred philosopher had first entered
Risorgimento politics as a hero of Spaventa’s historiography and as an
icon of anti-clerical resistance – a rebuke to the treason of Pius IX that
Florenzi Waddington abhorred. Three decades after unification, howev-
er, a subversive Bruno was no longer pleasing to the Roman authorities,
so the new statue shows us a hooded prophet and a mystic seer. Mysti-
cism was nowhere on Labriola’s agenda, but his treatment of politics and
philosophy was always provisional, always correctible by experience – like
the plans for Bruno’s statue.202
In the same year that a somber Bruno took his place in the Campo
de’ Fiori, Labriola taught a course on the French Revolution that caused
riots in Rome and had to be suspended. By this time, just before the
foundation of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), he had also begun to cor-
respond with Friedrich Engels and other eminent communists, quizzing
them about the theory behind their practice. One of his correspondents
was the syndicalist Georges Sorel, whose new journal published Labrio-
la’s In Memory of the Communist Manifesto in 1895. Quickly republished by
Croce, this essay became a charter document of the intellectual left in
Italy.203
Engels and Marx had finally convinced Labriola that historical expla-
nation could be scientific, objective, and naturalist, where the funda-
mental theorem of naturalism is that material conditions of production
constrain all human activity. Nonetheless, human activity occurs not just
in a material landscape but also in an ‘artificial terrain,’ which, like all
artifice, is a human product. The scene of historical inquiry is this arti-
ficial environment that includes humanity itself as a human creation.
Human beings make themselves, both as distinctly human members of
society and also as individual agents. Philosophically sensitive material-
ism will help humans discover what must be done by humans, and that
obligation will be the content of a philosophy of praxis based on histori-
cal development in a material world.
In such a world, ideas by themselves are powerless; it is the human
environment that gives the conditions of possibility of moral thought
and action. Not as abstract rules but as regulative ideas, progress and
perfectibility are nonetheless accessible to the historical materialist. And
yet Labriola acknowledged the difficulty of bridging the theoretical gap
79
between the material and the ideal, and he recognized the positivist
account of this problem as a step forward in its time. His honest respect
for philosophical dispute isolated him to some extent from other radical
thinkers whose theorizing was more in the service of politics. Perhaps for
this reason, in his later years he avoided the grand problems of Marxist
metaphysics – the nuances of dialectical materialism, for example – and
applied himself more to political economy. After an illness of several
years that deprived him of his voice, he died in 1904.204
Labriola’s ‘History, Philosophy of History, Sociology and Historical
Materialism’ dates from his last years, a decade after Croce had studied
the same problems from a different perspective in his first major pub-
lication, ‘History Brought Under the General Concept of Art.’ Labrio-
la’s influence on Croce was strong, certainly one of the reasons for the
younger scholar’s growing interest in Marx during the 1890s, when he
and Gentile formed their famous partnership. Like both those thinkers,
Labriola wanted to improve the understanding of history. His essay of
1902−3 on the topic – actually notes for a course on the philosophy of
history – is clearer than Croce’s 1893 effort, perhaps because Croce’s
apprentice piece had cleared some of the ground.205
The word ‘history’ is ambiguous, he warns, because it refers both to
events (history1) and to accounts of events (history2).206 Historia, the
original Greek word, means ‘inquiries’ about past facts and thus belongs
to history2, but by etymology the German Geschichte, from geschehen or
‘happen,’ refers to past happenings themselves, or history1. Although
history1, the object of historical materialism as a philosophy of history, is
Labriola’s topic, he does not ignore the attendant problems of history2,
history as recorded, researched, and narrated. When people ask if his-
tory is a science, he notes, the question cannot be answered until one
knows which history they have in mind.
There is no autonomous science that produces history2. The required
skills and techniques come from other special sciences, mainly philol-
ogy, and obviously not from history1. Asking whether history1 is science
or art involves a category mistake, like asking that same question about
metabolism rather than about physiology as the study of metabolism.
History1 might be the object of such a special science, but according to
Labriola it is not: it belongs not to a special science but to a division of
philosophy, the philosophy of history. That part of philosophy under-
stands history1 as ‘an objective sum of events,’ neither random nor provi-
dentially planned but moved automatically by an internal development
that drives and is also constituted by human activity, which includes all
80
the arts and sciences as moments of that development. Accordingly, the

aesthetic criteria, economic principles, or sociological laws that the spe-
cial sciences discover – normally by way of history2 – are generalizations
about history1: indeed, they are ‘history itself in action.’ This conception
of objective history (history1) forces a change in the practice of narra-
tive history (history2), which must now see its fundamental problems as
philosophical, not literary or rhetorical.207
While thinking of history1 as objective, as just the events or facts them-
selves and the laws that govern them, we may also regard history2 as
subjective, as some subject’s narrative of events or account of the facts
or inquiry into them. Subjective historical narration is an ancient art
that arose secondarily from moral, political, educational, and aesthetic
needs. Much more recently, the equally subjective domain of historical
research became scientific, more or less, and thus capable of criticizing
older versions of history2. This change was important, but not as basic as
another modern achievement, the new conception of history1 as objec-
tive. This deeper change mirrors transformations in the conception of
humanity itself, whereby past human facts are viewed no longer as just
past but sometimes as primordial, not always individual but often collec-
tive, not merely political but also social.
Competent research into this re-conceived past certainly requires
technical skills – different techniques, in fact, for different parts of the
past. The effort needed to acquire such skills forces historians to special-
ize; not a few specialists become pedants; and pedantry crushes the art of
narrative. The imagination needed to produce narrative at its best with-
ers away. The depleted historical imagination needs refreshing, but a
refreshed imagination alone will still be incapable of understanding the
history1 represented by history2. All such representations are shaped by
‘conceptions and preconceptions’ of human nature. Reflection on the
notion of history1 as objective exposes this fact and shows that in history2
absolute impartiality is an illusion.208
All seeing, whether of present objects or past events, is perspectival:
we can look at things only from a point of view. To correct our historical
vision, therefore, we need not just specialized techniques and critical
methods to find and certify the facts, but also philosophy to understand
them as historical events, ‘to acquire an adequate idea of the principles
that direct events.’ Deciding whether the principle in play is physical
or metaphysical, natural or cultural, mechanical or providential, indi-
vidual or collective is not within the means of paleography, epigraphy,
or codicology. If the medieval specialist (Labriola is thinking unkindly
81
of Villari) wants to write history, he needs to learn philosophy – and

from philosophers.209 Events, however well confirmed, have no mean-
ing unless they are understood by philosophy, from which we learn
that ‘progress … is history’s directive principle … the standard meas-
ure for classifying historical facts,’ leading to evaluative distinctions like
‘primitive or advanced, declining or static.’ The philosophical notion of
progress adds value to facts assembled as history2, and only the prospect
of evaluation justifies the huge labour of collecting and confirming facts.
By providing a way to understand history1, philosophy enables historians
to produce history2 in a principled way.210
The content of history1, according to Labriola, is ‘differences, oppo-
sitions and sequences of social forms,’ which would seem to be what
sociology studies. In the broadest sense, where the object of study is ‘eve-
rything that can be an object of our thinking when society exists,’ Labriola
agrees. Although investigations of these topics started with Aristotle, the
new sociology is still immature because it misunderstands itself, claiming
a global territory that ‘would occupy the whole field of the philosophy of
history.’ While disclaiming interest in disciplinary boundaries, Labriola
proceeds to defend the turf that he regards as philosophy’s property.211
The principles that shape history1 will not be found on the surface of
events but within the deeper social structures of past societies, classified
as large or small, stable or unstable, fixed or nomadic, agricultural or
commercial, and so on, by a series of oppositions that eventually define
classes ‘by the economic situation and by the functions that they fulfill …
In this social analysis, we begin to see what the history really is.’ But such
oppositions, if they remain what they are for ‘schematic sociology,’ are
abstract, never really corresponding to the concrete particulars of the
past. In practice, by the time the facts are accessible to the techniques of
history2, they are already too complex to be understood by sociology.212
Nonetheless, history2 is about history1, and the content of history1 is
essentially social. Only by understanding social contexts and motives can
we evaluate wars, innovations, class conflicts, and other past events. Soci-
ology, as a morphology of social types, is therefore useful to historians,
but it is not their project just because it is abstract. Abstraction strips
away much of what drives concrete historical development, which from
a sociological perspective is always overdetermined. Although the het-
erogeneous content of history1 is primarily social, it is also constituted
by tokens, not by the types that sociology studies. In the first instance,
the token contents of history1 must be grasped empirically to answer
such questions as why a particular revolution was the French Revolution
82
of 1789. Since schematic sociology cannot answer such questions about

history1, according to Labriola, neither the philosophy of history nor
a philosophically informed history2 can be reduced to or absorbed by
sociology.
Therefore, the study of the social that adds value to facts will not
examine ‘generic social forms … but … the complexity of these forms’
as concretely Athenian or Roman, republican or imperial, and so on.
‘The concept of … historical values, the values that refer to the … idea of
progress, appears only in relation to these concrete and complex forms.’
The progress in question is not the same as evolution, which is either too
broad, like the coming-to-be studied by metaphysics, or too narrow, like
biological evolution or the evolution of a language. Concrete marks of
historical progress are the elimination of slavery, the banning of com-
merce in wives, the guarantee of equality before the law, and so on. As
philosophy comes to understand progress, faith in progress emerges dia-
lectically as yet another mark of progress.213
What does it mean for sociology’s objects to be abstract while the con-
tents of history1 are concrete? Does concreteness (as distinct from par-
ticularity) have anything do with matter, with the physical stuff of the
world? Although Labriola does not face these questions directly, he sees
the debate about reducing the philosophy of history to sociology as lead-
ing ‘us naturally to examine … historical materialism,’ where the real
issue, he says, is whether or not the most basic conditions of human life
are material.214
The materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach and the Hegelian Left offered
no explanation of history, which is why Marx and Engels, making a new
break with Hegelian idealism, called their distinctive doctrine ‘histori-
cal materialism.’ Labriola explains the importance of their position, and
the name they gave it, by comparing history2 to psychology, which in its
schematic form reduces all psychic phenomena, however complex, to
sense data – ultimately, to biology – the problem being that many such
phenomena are too complex for that reduction and require a social psy-
chology. Just as biological materialism is too reductive for an effective
psychology, so a merely physicalist materialism will be inadequate for
historical understanding. Hence, ‘the task of historical materialism has
been to find the material conditions of the historical social world. This
task is parallel to – not derived from – what the pure positivists have
called sociology.’215
Social phenomena, which qua social are irreducible, occur when peo-
ple live and work together on any scale, from clan to empire. The bio-
83
psychological states of the individuals who make up such groups do not

explain their social behaviour, whose study needs a social psychology like
the one developed by Herbart’s followers. The psychology of individuals
ends up in abstractions because its forms lack social content – the ‘social
fact [that] … becomes the real basis and subject of history.’216 But what is
it for a fact to be ‘social’? The term acquired its meaning over the course
of the nineteenth century through the work of many disciplines, ‘law,
economics, mythology, linguistics and so on,’ until at last scholars began
to talk about the sociology that Labriola regards more as an attitude
than a science. Even if it were a complete science, a sociology of types
could never replace philosophy or philosophically informed history2,
and yet even an immature sociology changes how we think about the
facts of history1 as social. Historical materialism, which is ‘history [his-
tory1] recounted in materialist terms,’ can therefore understand facts as
social without being abstractly sociological.217
Labriola insists that his advocacy of historical materialism is not meant
to prove that he is Marx’s rightful heir or to promote any political cause.
If socialist politics were to languish for centuries, historical materialism
would be no less valuable as a key to philosophical understanding. Labri-
ola’s goal is ‘no abstract sociology, then, and no worrying about practical
projects “when socialism comes,”’ but real, authentic philosophy of his-
tory … history recounted in an understandable way.’218
The philosopher, or the philosophically informed historian, who
possesses this understanding may be expected to have the ‘social con-
sciousness’ that sociologists talk about. They often take the bearer of
that consciousness to be a we, whose constitution will obviously vary from
group to group – scarcely a stable platform for science. Without the I,
in fact, there is no we, since consciousness resides only in the individual.
But that does not make the we just the sum of every I in its relevant
group. The real we is both relational and material rather than mental: ‘its
content lies in the bonds that connect individuals, bonds that are prima-
rily material – bonds of shared blood, shared food, shared housing and
economic cooperation.’ Between this we and the I, moreover, there is no
ontological gap because the I is not a self-positing, transcendent spirit.
The I and the we, both apperceptive, constitute their self-consciousness
in the same material conditions of possibility.219
Although most individual consciousness is ‘nothing but a residue of
custom and tradition,’ the progress of civilization that enlarges the realm
of the I eventually drives it inward, where it discovers the we in the collec-
tive origins of the I. ‘The human race emerged from the horde that was
a continuation of the animal horde … [where] the we was everything’:
84
for Labriola it is ‘a settled empirical certainty’ that this was the primitive
human condition, from which individual consciousness emerged only
recently. He finds this illuminating, but not a reason to follow certain
positivists in distilling metaphysical constructs – ‘the social organism, the
collective spirit and so on’ – from sociology. A simpler view is that people
are born into nature as social, not individual, with socially determined
faculties of emotion, language, practical action, and so on. From this
social ground the I eventually emerges, an I that can overrate its capabili-
ties. Likewise overreaching were ‘all those scientists – idiots, more or less
– who used to deduce language, law, justice and the state from choice,
inventiveness and individual will.’220
Nonetheless, individuality is a momentous gain for human devel-
opment that history will not discard because the progress of history
empowers the individual. In fact, if a communist society were to arrive
– ‘meaning only … that the means and instruments of production could
no longer be private property but would belong to the collective through
the exercise of labor needed for the production of material goods’ –
more individuals, out of the many whom the bosses now enslave, would
be free. This is not a utopian fantasy about a primitive golden age,
Labriola insists, since it is grounded in the historical materialism which
understands that ‘every society depends on the material conditions of its
existence.’221
Those conditions – ‘the basic framework of society [that] depends on
relations … among those who produce material goods directly by their
labor’ – have varied throughout history, but the variation is rhythmic, not
random, constituting the order and direction of history1. The first prin-
ciple of the historical materialism that knows where history is headed is
that humanity’s ‘various schemes of organization,’ especially the political
kind, are ‘always in keeping with the corresponding state of the eco-
nomic framework.’ The second principle is a more tenuous correspond-
ence of myth, religion, morality, and other such forms ‘to a particular
social condition.’ A third key point is ‘that the social framework … is a
hierarchy … [of] families and classes in various relations of dependency
and superiority,’ which explains why society is inherently unstable as the
site of class struggle and the locus of the revolutions that move human-
ity forward. In its simplest and barest form, the historical materialism
that applies these principles to history1 will suffice to account for world-
historical events in their broad outlines, including their happening at
particular times and places. But it will take a technically proficient and
artfully constructed history2, a work of skill and imagination, to repre-
sent such events in competent and compelling narratives.222
85
15
No Speculative Movement
(Barzellotti)
Before Labriola discovered communism, and long before he offered his

final account of historical materialism, a new journal called Mind had
been founded in Britain. The first issue of 1876 included articles by Her-
bert Spencer on psychology, by John Venn on logic, and by Mark Pattison
on philosophy at Oxford – the medley of science and philosophy that
characterized the journal in its first decades. In 1878 Mind published a
long piece on ‘Philosophy in Italy’ by Giacomo Barzellotti (1844−1917),
who had studied in Florence with Augusto Conti, a liberalizing Giober-
tian, before travelling in Germany and then teaching at Pavia, Naples,
and Rome. Positivism is the latest phase of Italian philosophy described
by Barzellotti, who has nothing to say about Marxism. His tale begins
after the Enlightenment, when ‘Italy had no speculative movement of
its own’ and was ‘cut off from the current of Modern Philosophy.’ Thirty
pages later, when the story had reached his own day, Barzellotti con-
cludes that ‘there is as yet in Italy no true and proper speculative move-
ment.’ This interim report to the anglophone world on modern Italian
philosophy ends with a declaration of failure.223
Although Barzellotti’s brief history is comprehensive, building on Lui-
gi Ferri’s Essay on the History of Philosophy in Italy in the Nineteenth Century
(1869), the principal players in it are Galluppi, Rosmini, and Gioberti.
He recognizes that all three were talented thinkers, while lamenting
their submission to Catholic dogma, an especially deep deference for
Rosmini and Gioberti. He also explains the role of these two priests in
the debacle of 1848−9. On the one hand, they gave the politics of the
emerging Italian nation its intellectual foundation; on the other, the
Catholic and supernaturalist character of that foundation made it hate-
ful to those who inaugurated the new nation in 1860 in a climate of anti-
No Speculative Movement (Barzellotti)
clericalism. Even Gioberti repudiated his own Neo-Guelf program, but

in posthumous works that had no immediate effect.224
After mid-century, as sceptics (Sante Ferrari and Ausonio Franchi),
Platonists (Mamiani and Ferri), Hegelians (Spaventa and Vera), Her-
bartians (Francesco Bonatelli), and Neo-Kantians (Barzellotti himself)
turned decisively against their three great predecessors, Barzellotti saw
some hope in the new ideas descending from Germany, but too many
Italians ‘erred in despising the German philosophy, while … the Kan-
tians and Hegelians erred in wishing to make the Italians think wholly in
the manner of Germans.’ When Mamiani founded a new philosophical
academy in Genoa, Spaventa commented that ‘the academicians … had
nothing more in common than their assembly-hall.’225 One very vocal
sceptic was the eloquent Franchi, who aimed at
the utter demolition of … the philosophy of the Italian schools, … which he

identifies … with the scholasticism and theology of the Church of Rome …
He goes too far … [and] fails to take sufficient account of the … modern
philosophy … [in] Galluppi, Gioberti and Rosmini, and, above all, their his-
torical value as paving the way for the national revolution and arousing us
from our secular slumber…. To condemn them … it is enough for Franchi
that they should substantially agree with the Catholic creed … [His is] the
truest expression of the negative reaction that followed the attempt made
by Rosmini and Gioberti to reconcile Catholicism with philosophy.
Since he was a sceptic, Franchi founded no school, as Barzellotti

explains, so that ‘the only speculative doctrine … which has formed a
school among us is Hegelianism … taught by Augusto Vera and Ber-
trando Spaventa … Vera … [being] the true and leading representative
of the school.’ Barzellotti awarded the palm to Vera because of the inter-
national fame of his French translations of Hegel. (Also written in French
was the history of contemporary Italian philosophy by Ferri that Barzel-
lotti used.) ‘Among contemporary philosophers,’ he writes, ‘Vera is one
of those who have cut themselves most adrift from the idea of national-
ity.’226 On the other hand, Vera was notorious as the Italian enforcer of
Hegelian orthodoxy, the dogma that Barzellotti has in mind when he
describes idealism’s failure in his country:
‘The evil … was that, whereas for the Germans Absolute Idealism was the
last stage of one of the … most liberal speculative movements on record, for
us, on the other hand, it was only an importation, accepted … for no other
87
reason than that it represented a faith opposed to that which had hitherto
been preached to them … Bertrando Spaventa saw this more clearly than
any of the other Hegelians.’
Barzellotti thought Spaventa correct in his historical reconstruction of

the channels of mutual influence between Italy and the rest of Europe,
treating ‘Bruno as the precursor of Spinoza … Campanella as the pre-
cursor of Descartes [and] Vico [as] an indication from afar of the Ideal-
ism of Kant.’ The Kantian Barzellotti also thought Spaventa right to see
Galluppi and Rosmini as Kantian and Gioberti as Hegelian. Nonetheless,
‘as a philosopher, Spaventa has no doctrines peculiar to himself.’227
Having found no other philosophy in the peninsula that was signifi-
cant, original, and congenial to Italians, Barzellotti concludes that ‘in
Italy as elsewhere the advance in historical and critical studies is bound
up with … the positive philosophy’ as presented by Villari, Gabelli, and
Ardigò. But the advance of positivism on the peninsula was stalled. Ital-
ian followers of the movement remained stuck in the outmoded views of
Comte, which they could not distinguish from the newer work of Mill,
Spencer, and other British thinkers because they knew so little about
British philosophy. Having already appealed to his Protestant readers
in England by denouncing papism, Barzellotti leads up to his conclu-
sion – that the failure of idealism in Italy is the failure of his new nation’s
philosophy – with applause for ‘the new and fruitful direction … in Eng-
land,’ while also assuring his anglophone audience that in Italy ‘Mill,
Spencer and Bain are the names in highest repute amongst our most
cultured classes.’228
‘Looked at from any point whatsoever,’ he writes, ‘the doctrines of
Galluppi, Rosmini and Gioberti have been the only product of specu-
lation which Italy of itself has yielded during this century, and [that]
only … as they were the expression of a great moral and political crisis.’
After 1848 their enterprise collapsed, and what followed was intellectual
discord, tempered only when the ‘great idealistic movement in its final
outcome cross[ed] the Alps.’ But then it was the Italians who failed ideal-
ism, according to Barzellotti:
Introduced among us, it found our minds, by long habituation to theologi-

cal dogmatism, little, if at all, trained to severe criticism and rigorous analy-
sis, and disposed to make philosophy a question rather of nationality than
of science. Between the ‘ideal intuition’ of Rosmini and Gioberti and the
‘idea’ of Hegel there was no … possibility of a serious and fruitful discus-
88
No Speculative Movement (Barzellotti)
sion [with] the one … exclusively Italian … [and] the other … foreign….
Attempts … to naturalize the philosophy of Hegel among us have been
attended, as yet at least, with no general or lasting results … either because
our minds were already exhausted, surfeited or distracted, or because we
altogether lacked that spirit of application and discipline which has contrib-
uted so much to the progress of science in Germany.229
As the nineteenth century entered its last quarter, anyone who read this
bleak assessment of the state of philosophy in Italy would not have pre-
dicted that the twentieth century would begin with a titanic display of
application, discipline, and genius from Benedetto Croce and Giovanni
Gentile, who naturalized idealism so thoroughly in Italy that it towered
over its rivals there for fifty years and more.
89
16
A Revelation
(Croce I)
Croce was born in 1866 to an upper-class family of Pescasseroli, in the

middle of the peninsula and halfway between Rome and Naples. An ado-
lescent crisis of faith turned him to history, drama, and poetry, to De
Sanctis, Silvio Pellico, and Giosuè Carducci. While still a liceo student,
he also attended university lectures given in Naples by his father’s cous-
in, Bertrando Spaventa, thus disobeying his mother, who enforced the
family’s dislike of both Spaventa brothers. Physical catastrophe struck in
1883 when an earthquake killed Croce’s immediate family and forced
him to move to Rome, where he lived with cousin Silvio and studied
with him.230 Rome for Croce was a nightmare of doubt, depression, and
suicidal impulses until he enrolled in the university and heard Labriola
lecturing on Herbart’s moral philosophy, in which the young intellectual
found a new compass. ‘I did philosophy when I was driven by the need to
reduce my suffering,’ he wrote more than thirty years later, ‘and to give
some direction to my moral and mental life.’ But Croce’s attraction to
Labriola was as much historical as philosophical in this period when he
was ‘entirely committed to research and scholarship.’ Perhaps Labriola’s
historical materialism would make sense of the mass of information that
the young scholar had been acquiring.231
In 1886, Croce moved back to Naples. Then he travelled for five years
through Europe while working methodically on the cultural and politi-
cal history of that city, making its story part of the annals of the new
Italy. Deep immersion in the records of local Neapolitan history made
him distrust the positivism revived by Villari in the celebrated essays of
1891 that asked Is History a Science? Although Croce needed history to
make politics intelligible, he could find nothing foundational, nothing
responsive to scepticism or relativism, in the labour of assembling data.
A Revelation (Croce I)
It was this practical disappointment that sent him back to Labriola and
Herbart, and then on to Vico, Windelband, Simmel, Dilthey, and other
philosophers of history and historical method. The same research intro-
duced him to the many Germans who had written or were still writing
about aesthetics – always a provocation to positivists.232
The product of Croce’s enormous diet of books was what seemed at
the time to be a philosophical detour from a career in history. ‘Then,
after much hesitation and a series of provisional solutions,’ he tells us,
‘in February or March of 1893, having thought it over intensely for a
whole day, in the evening I drafted an essay that I titled “History Brought
Under the General Concept of Art.” It was like a revelation of myself to
me.’ He delivered his revelation to the Accademia Pontaniana in Naples
on 3 March 1893.233
91
17
History under Art
(Croce II)
Croce begins by dividing all cultural production into two domains: sci-
ence and art. If the two are mutually exclusive, and if history is not one
of them, it must be the other. But the question framed by this distinc-
tion– ‘Is history science or art?’ – is vague and has led to weak answers,
the commonest being that ‘history is science and art all at once.’ Only
the recent German thinkers who have philosophized about history have
replied in a rigorous way, maintaining that real history is strictly scientific
and must always exclude art. Science seeks knowledge, art seeks pleas-
ure, and the truly scientific historian will never confuse the two quests.234
The notions in play are really three, however – art, science, and his-
tory – and Croce suspects that the experts on history think too narrowly
about art, too broadly about science. Their double error makes them
devalue the more popular view, that ‘history shares the nature of art.’
After all, more than many other disciplines, history is tied to art – espe-
cially to literary art. Meditating on his own experience of reading and
writing history, the young mandarin will side with the common folk to
refute the German professors. He will also refute Villari – by snubbing
him. Although the form of Croce’s question best known to Italians of the
day – Is History a Science? – was the title of Villari’s recent lectures, Croce
takes this formulation to have missed the point by failing to ask about
art. He names Villari only in two footnotes, dismissing him as obtuse
and irrelevant.235 A different error confounds other critics who discuss
art but suppose that it aims at pleasure, when its real goal is ‘producing
the Beautiful.’ Sizing up that lofty goal requires knowing what the word
‘beautiful’ means. ‘Heaven save me,’ Croce wails, ‘from getting into the
endless and subtle disquisitions … of aesthetic science,’ and then he
plunges into those very disputes on four fronts, against the sensualist who
History Under Art (Croce II)
Theory Practice
Beautiful True Good Useful
Aesthetics Logic Ethics Economics
reduces beauty to pleasure; the rationalist who mistakes it for the True
and the Good; the formalist who detects it in formal relations of pleasure;
and the idealist who sees it as the Idea manifesting itself sensibly.236
Croce is confident that Kant has already put his first two opponents
out of action. He simply decrees that sensualism is French or English
pseudo-philosophy, but in passing he makes a substantive, prophetic,
and yet muffled point against rationalism: that the Beautiful cannot be
the same as the True and the Good because among all three items, ‘the
highest idealities of the human spirit,’ the relations that obtain are of
distinction, not identity. Although a footnote tells us that this ‘triad has
become a bit ridiculous,’ a cheap target for ‘windy philosophers,’ it was
good enough to hold Croce’s attention for more than half a century,
which was long enough for the trio to evolve into a quartet.237 This is how
he described his conception in 1948, four years before he died:
‘Over the centuries, and as if by consensus of the nations, the highest val-
ues, the forms or categories of reality and the Spirit, were gathered into the
triad of the True, the Good and the Beautiful, which to me seemed integral
with a fourth term, the Useful or the Economic or the Vital or whatever else
it should be called.’238
Ultimately, among Croce’s four forms of the Spirit, two will be theoreti-
cal and two will be practical, each with its own science.
Just as ethics and economics will be his practical sciences of the Good
and the Useful, so will logic and aesthetics be his theoretical sciences of
the True and the Beautiful. But in 1893, when Croce had yet to make
his name by reducing history to art and thereby confuting the positivists,
these large systematic thoughts were still to come.239
Aesthetics was the first of the four sciences to which Croce would give
93
full expression, and it was aesthetics that would make him famous, first
in his Aesthetic as a Science of Expression and General Linguistics of 1902,
preceded by the ‘Fundamental Theses of an Aesthetics’ of 1900, a sketch
prepared for the same hometown academy that published his ‘History
Brought Under the Concept of Art.’ Despite its protests against aesthetic
theorizing, that early essay on history and art put Croce on the path
to his mature work as a philosopher, a path that led through art and
aesthetics. Naturally, he wanted to clear the ground and eliminate com-
petitors, the easiest marks being the sensualists and rationalists, leaving
more time for the formalists and idealists.240
Croce identifies formalism with followers of Herbart who tried to
extend his moral psychology into a full-blooded aesthetics, and no doubt
it was Croce’s teacher Labriola who had taught him to respect Herbart.
Croce saw the aesthetics of Herbart’s students as a mere anomaly, how-
ever, contrived and unproductive. Herbart’s rigour and his insights into
the ‘simplest aesthetic facts’ had given him a plausible basis for formal-
ism: although the primitive elements of music − for example, individual
tones – have no aesthetic value in themselves, such values emerge in
their relations to other tones, relations that can be formalized. But when
left to his disciples, according to Croce, Herbart’s starting points turned
into blind alleys.241
After the demise of sensualism, rationalism, and formalism, Hegelian
idealism ruled the day in aesthetics, and Croce took his bearings on
aesthetic idealism from the German Aesthetics of Eduard von Hartmann
(1842−1906), best known for his Philosophy of the Unconscious, a post-
Kantian and Hegelian response to Schopenhauer’s pessimism: although
a blind dynamism drives the world and makes it wretched, Hartmann
allowed that beauty, unlike pleasure, may be a remedy. Noting that ide-
alism ‘locates the Beautiful in the expression of some thing, called the
‘sensible manifestation of the ideal’ in Hegelian terminology,’ Croce
insisted that this cannot be just the psychological experience of expression
and must be the expression of a content – of a meaning. Formalism is vacu-
ous because forms without content are empty, and idealism would also
be vacuous if – per impossibile – the idea were detached from its content.
Objects of aesthetic judgment are beautiful as tokens of a type – manifes-
tations of an idea or members of a kind – though it is always the token
that is beautiful.242
Judging an object to be ugly or beautiful assigns it to a category, so
that the Iago who is repulsive as a moral agent can also be seductive as a
dramatic character. But the ideas that Shakespeare made manifest in his
94
alluring Iagos and Calibans, according to Croce, are not natural kinds,
whose members would be natural individuals with particular contents.
‘The ideal … – the content that we want to see represented – is sim-
ply reality in general … [giving rise to] the distinction which, though
not at all abstruse, is not easy to express,’ though at this point Croce
does not try to express any distinction at all. Instead, having introduced
the notion of representation in the framework of aesthetic idealism, he
makes a crucial point about history: if art is ‘a representation of reality …
most of the reasons … [for] denying that history is a product of art disap-
pear.’243 Having located the link between history and art in representa-
tion, Croce still needs to answer the critics who would weaken that bond
by confining it to the trivial task of writing good prose, which is possible
for prose of any kind, not just the historical. History is no more an art
than any other scientific study expressed in artful words. Written well or
written badly, history is a science, the historians insist, forcing Croce to
ask what a science is.244
Science is not just data or information. Science generalizes data to
form concepts. But if history is a science, what are its distinctively his-
torical concepts? Croce excludes the concept of development because
it belongs to the philosophy of history, not to history. He then turns to
Schopenhauer’s famous distinction between coordination and subordi-
nation, echoed by Burckhardt and others. Science, whose proper object
is the type rather than the token, subordinates individuals under con-
cepts. History, whose proper object is the token, coordinates individuals
in narratives without subordinating them, which shows that history is not
science.245 Croce preferred the psychological variant of Schopenhauer’s
point proposed by Moritz Lazarus (1824−1903), who had also learned
from Herbart. Science wants its general laws to cover all the facts, valu-
ing each fact only insofar as it instantiates a law. Hence, science abstracts
general concepts from particular facts, while history condenses facts into
concrete representations, searching the facts not for laws but for coher-
ent ensembles (narratives, for example) of particulars. History wants to
tell the whole story, but that story is nothing general. ‘I agree entirely
with these observations,’ Croce declares; ‘history has only one aim: to
narrate the facts … History narrates.’246
To accept the arguments of Schopenhauer and Lazarus and still call
history a science, but a science unlike other sciences, a descriptive science,
is an evasion, Croce charges, noting that the best novels are full of such
descriptive science. But he does not want to surrender to Schopenhau-
er’s pessimism or end with other counsels of despair or folly: such as that
95
the history that cannot be science is therefore useless.247 Is poetry useless

because it is not science? Surely not. Croce also takes hope from what
he calls a ‘philosophy of history,’ hastening then to distinguish it from
the enterprise – ‘that alleged rhythm of ideas’ – that had made Hegel
famous before he became infamous. The original version of Croce’s
essay is clearer on what the hoped-for philosophy isn’t than on what it
is. Later expansions give only a little help: it is a study ‘of problems sug-
gested by the critical examination of history and historical writing, such
as those related to the cognitive development of the historical fact, to the
real elements of history and to the meaning and value of the course of
history.’ In any case, even if such an undertaking could become science,
history cannot.248
‘Now if history is not a science … what is it?’ Having put this question
to himself, Croce tries to answer by naming the only two operations of
which he deems the human mind capable: scientific understanding of
what a thing is and artistic imagining of how it appears. The same item
can be an object of both operations: the playwright’s Macbeth, for exam-
ple, stands before an audience, but the criminologist’s Macbeth stands
before a court. The scientist explains the murderer’s crimes by bringing
them under the abstract concepts of her science; the playwright repre-
sents the same crimes in his concrete art.249 Understood psychologically,
representation is the double process of condensation (less distilled from
more) and substitution (one standing for many), a process well known
to historians: think only of Gibbon and his very long story of decline and
fall. Think also of a David painting a Marat or of a Rodin turning the
Burghers of Calais into bronze, evidences of history’s kinship to more
arts than the literary ones. Although these modes of expression – prose,
painting, sculpture – are not distinctive to it, history has a distinctive
content, though discovering it is not a task for aesthetics.250
Since science is better known than history or art, perhaps we should
look to science first for the sort of thing that a content might be. The
content of science is everything that exists, brought under concepts. As
for art that includes history, the failures of sensualism, rationalism, and
formalism tell us not to look for its content in pleasure or in truth and
goodness or in form. What remains is idealism and the idea, as studied in
Hegel’s aesthetics, where content is said to be prior to any aesthetic proc-
ess and also ‘not irrelevant.’ But surely content is, in some sense, irrel-
evant to the aesthetic process since the artist can apply her procedures
to many contents. Croce therefore asks, ‘What is it to which it [content]
is not irrelevant?’251
96
After this crescendo of questioning, the answer falls flat. We learn

(from yet another German professor) that ‘aesthetic content is what is of
interest … the whole world of human interest,’ so that the wider the inter-
est, the greater the aesthetic value of the content, revealing the sense – a
very broad sense – in which content is not irrelevant to aesthetic value.
Indeed, content can be graded aesthetically on a scale descending from
the whole human race through classes, nations, and religions (no men-
tion of genders or ethnicities) down to individuals. Hence, ‘the content
of art is reality in general,’ but differing interests in various sectors of
reality will vary by time, place, perspective, and circumstance, which may
rescue Croce from the bathos of his conclusion. Despite the ultimate
generality – analogous to but distinct from the universality of scientific
concepts – of its content, art as actually expressed is tragedy or comedy,
landscape or portrait, temple or forum, which are names not of forms,
according to Croce, but of different contents.252
After Croce shows how various works of art – including works of his-
tory – are distinguished by various contents responding to various inter-
ests, we can see at last how ‘the product of history is distinguished from
other products of art,’ and, as an unspoken corollary, how works of his-
tory are members of that same family of artistic productions. What is of
distinctly historical interest is not the possible content of poems, paint-
ings, novels, or plays, but the real or actual content of the past. In the way
that the actual belongs to the possible – as the part of the possible that
gets realized – so does history belong to art. But the boundary between
the actual and the merely possible also separates the content of history
from the contents of other arts.253
Croce can now propose a definition of history: ‘the type of artistic pro-
duction that takes what has really happened as the object of its represen-
tation.’ This definition establishes the historian’s obligation to exclude
the merely imaginary, which for the historian is a species of the false that
all art must abjure. Just as every good artist carefully observes the world
in order to produce honest art, so the historian undertakes her labours
of research, criticism, and understanding for a cognate reason. The writ-
ten record of her labours, often self-addressed or addressed only to other
historians, is immense, unlike the much smaller mass of finished narra-
tives. The historian’s research is not history, Croce maintains, ostensibly
for the same reasons why the artist’s notebook is not art. The only real
history is narrative, and fully finished narratives are very few.254 Like the
ideal of all art, this ideal of history is hard to achieve – very hard, in fact,
seeing that non-historical art is less vulnerable to accidents of survival
97
and other external circumstances. Facing their special obstacles, histori-

ans are right to condemn the misuse of non-historical art in history – the
substitution of the possible for the real – but there are no grounds for
supposing that history practised as art must sacrifice rigor or accuracy.
‘The corporation of historians’ has nothing to fear, according to Croce,
from his project of ‘bringing history under the general concept of art.’255
98
18
What Is Distinct?
(Croce III)
Nonetheless, if Croce really means to bring history under art, and if

aesthetics is the philosophy of art, then historians might well ask how
Croce expects distinctive philosophizing about their craft to be possible.
A full answer can come only from the higher-order inquiry that Croce
called the Philosophy of the Spirit, the first of whose four parts would
appear in the Aesthetics of 1902. The whole colossal project is barely vis-
ible in the earlier essay, where Croce mentions ‘the highest idealities of
the human spirit’ or forms of the Spirit. After finishing the Aesthetics,
Croce moved on to the Logic that he needed to clarify the character and
relations of those forms, the logic that explicates the Concept as the
Spirit’s activity. Croce’s logic, in other words, like Hegel’s logic, is more
metaphysical than what anglophone philosophers now call ‘logic.’ And
Croce found that he needed such a logic by thinking about history as a
type of art.256
In Logic as a Science of the Pure Concept (1908), the second part of the
Philosophy of the Spirit, Croce examines the Spirit’s two most general
forms: the theoretical and the practical. He divides the theoretical form
into intuition and concept, a division parallel to individual and universal.
But this is where dividing stops: the forms of intuition and concept are
each indivisible into further forms. The form of intuition, based as it is
on the concept of individuality, divides into no further types or concepts,
but rather into tokens or particulars. The form of concept, based on
the concept of the universal, also divides into no further concepts, but
into the various token objects thought by way of concepts.257 Croce then
describes a problem that any theory of concepts – what he calls ‘logic’
– must face: the problem of the manifold or multiplicity of concepts.
‘Why will there not be as many concepts as representations,’ he asks, ‘an
infinity of them?’ To see why this is a problem, we must understand the

difference between the concepts and representations on which he insists.258
Consider a particular tiger. We can represent it with any number of
representations: a photograph, a charcoal sketch, an image recalled
from memory, and so on. Each such representation is itself a particular.
Now consider the class of all tigers. On a standard empiricist account,
we can use any particular representation to represent the tiger class. The
empiricist thereby avoids universals and reduces concepts to particular
representations that are used to refer universally, an account that also
explains the sharing of concepts. That you use one representation for
all tigers while I use another causes no trouble; what we share is the use
to which each of us puts our different representations. The empiricist
lets a multiplicity of particular representations stand in for a small set of
shared concepts denoting universals.
But a problem arises. Particular representations are both too inde-
terminate and too determinate to do the job. The sketch, for example,
omits many features that an individual tiger must have to qualify as a
member of its class: being warm-blooded, viviparous, and so on. And yet
the same sketch shows a definite number of stripes, a number that will
not help us put a tiger in its class. The sketch is also at best uninforma-
tive and at worst misleading about the colours of normal members of the
tiger class. In short, particular representations fail at what the empiricist
account asks of them because their particularity ill suits them to that
task: only concepts will do. Concepts, unlike particular representations,
speak to features that particular representations cannot capture – essen-
tial properties and relations of synonymy, for example – and they are
silent on idiosyncratic features that particular representations cannot
exclude.259
It is partly the simplicity of concepts that equips them to do what rep-
resentations, which are always complex, cannot do. The simplest con-
cepts are atomic; they are not themselves complexes of concepts. And
complex concepts are composed either of atomic concepts; of complex
concepts themselves composed of atomic concepts; or of both. A theory
that admits both the atomic and the complex kinds can account for the
number, variety, and novelty of concepts by reference to a small number
of atomic concepts under rules of combination. Croce’s objection applies
to conceptual atomists, those who regard all concepts as atomic and deny
that any are complex. The atomist needs enough atomic concepts to
cover the number, variety, and novelty of all our experiences – ad infini-
tum. Croce therefore asks, ‘Who could ever say that the concepts dis-
100
What Is Distinct? (Croce III)
covered and listed were all the concepts? If there are ten of them, why
could there not be twenty, a hundred, or a hundred thousand, if we took
a closer look?’260
Another response to the manifold of experience is the type of atom-
ism (or monism) that simply denies any multiplicity of concepts and
deploys just one – a single, simple, unified concept. But this solution
has its own fatal flaw, according to Croce. Regarding reality as organic
and unified, he agrees that what we think about reality will be prey to
scepticism unless it too has an organic unity. But if this unity is absolute
simplicity, he argues, ‘the unity obtained thereby is an empty unity.’ In
fact, the very notion of unity is incompatible with absolute simplicity:
unity is just the unification of distinct elements, something not simple
but composite.261
Unity cannot not be absolutely simple, then, because it needs what
Croce calls distinti – ‘distincts.’ This technical term, for which there is
no good English word, is at the heart of Croce’s logic, where it will be
defined (see below) by contrast with the term oppositi − ‘opposites.’262 Just
as an organism depends metaphysically on the physical and functional
operations of the organs that compose it, so too any real and organic
unity will depend metaphysically on the parts that articulate (compose)
it. The concept by which we can think about a unified reality is also a uni-
ty, and as such is itself articulated by distinctions on which the concept
depends metaphysically in order to be the concept that it is. Because
Croce recognizes that his notion of distinction and his use of ‘distincts’ is
non-standard, he warns us not to take his words in the standard way. His
point is not that the components of a unity, were there nothing unifying
them, would be logically or metaphysically distinct – in the usual sense
of ‘distinct.’ What Croce has in mind is a unity exhausted by logical and
metaphysical entailments among its components, which, while they are
‘distincts’ in his sense of the word, are not distinct from one another, or from
the unity that they constitute, in the standard sense of ‘distinct.’263
Distincts (like opposites) are plural in number, but that does not
mean that we can classify them as numerically finite or infinite. When we
speak of a numerical series as finite or infinite, according to Croce, we
do not have in mind that its members stand to one another as distincts.
In particular, they are not related by the mutual entailments that unify
distincts. Concepts that are distincts constitute a unity or a whole just
because they are not distinct in the standard way. To regard concepts
both as distincts and as numerically finite or infinite would be a category-
mistake about relations. Relations among distinct concepts belong to a
101
category of relation not well characterized by number. Speaking of such

concepts, Croce explains that ‘their arrangement is necessary because
they imply one another reciprocally, meaning that we definitely do not
apply the determination of finite number to them because number is
entirely incapable of expressing such a relation.’264
Croce’s theory is a concept holism.265 Distinct concepts are individuated,
in part, by the positions that they occupy in a logical space – positions
relative to positions occupied by other distinct concepts that, jointly with
them, entail the unity composed of all distinct concepts. Whether a dis-
tinct concept is singular, universal, or particular depends on the level of
analysis of the relations that it enters into. As the sole occupant of the
place it occupies in logical space, a distinct concept is regarded as a uni-
versal concept. As having a determinate relation with some one other
concept, it is regarded as particular. And as exhausted by its position in
logical space – such that nothing over and above that position makes it
the concept that it is – it is regarded as singular. Universality, particular-
ity, and singularity thus arise at different levels of analysis rather than as
differences among distinct concepts themselves.266
These three levels of analysis give Croce’s logic its account of definition.
To define a concept completely is to make it explicit at all three levels
of analysis: we must analyse a distinct concept in terms of (i) its unique
relation to the whole unity of distinct concepts (universality); (ii) its indi-
vidual relations to other distinct concepts (particularity); and (iii) the
position in logical space that exhausts it (singularity). A complete defini-
tion of a concept, one that analyses the concept at all three levels, would
give a full account of the nature of the concept.267
From the claim that distinct concepts are universal, particular, and
singular all at once, Croce derives his key distinction between universal
and abstract concepts. Abstract concepts, he claims, are not pure logical
concepts; they are a species of what he calls pseudo-concepts – artifacts of
treating distinct concepts in a way inconsistent with conceptual holism,
as though they were individuated by something other than their posi-
tions and relations in logical space. Tha ‘something other’ might be an
internal structure, or a method of verification, or necessary and suffi-
cient conditions, and so on.268
Nonetheless, Croce recognizes that viewing concepts in terms of such
features can be useful, so long as we do not confuse that utility with genu-
ine logical analysis. We can treat concepts as identical, for example, by
ignoring their holistic environment and seeing them as individuated by
their extensions. On such a treatment, triangle and trilateral will be
102
the same concept. So too, by ignoring the holism of distinct concepts, we

can speak of concepts as simple and complex, primitive and derivative,
abstract and empirical, and so on – useful fictions, perhaps. Although a
non-holistic treatment of concepts is not real logical analysis, it might
produce a useful taxonomy, for example, by placing concepts in a clas-
sification for heuristic purposes. Abstract concepts make up such classifi-
cations: taxonomically, we can regard the concepts of scalene, isosceles,
and equilateral triangles as three species of the genus triangle, taken
abstractly. But such a taxonomy can only ever describe, for heuristic pur-
poses; it cannot analyse concepts logically or fully explain their nature.269
As already mentioned, the complement of distincts in Croce’s logic
is opposites, which can never be identified with or reduced to distincts.
Recall, for example, that two forms of the Spirit are the theoretical and
the practical, whose concepts are indeed distinct, in Croce’s sense.270
The Spirit depends metaphysically on each and on both together for
its organic unity. But the concepts of the theoretical and practical are
not opposites. The opposite of practical activity is practical inactivity, not
theoretical activity.
If we were deceived by pseudo-concepts, we might be tempted to
regard opposites or contraries of concepts as genuine concepts that
form a unity of their own, mirroring the unity of distinct concepts. On
such a view, beauty, truth, and utility would be distinct concepts
in a unity organically dependent upon them, while ugliness, falsity,
and uselessness would be opposite or contrary but also distinct con-
cepts in a mirroring unity dependent upon them, in just the same way
that the mirrored unity depends upon beauty, truth, and utility.271
But treating opposites as distincts forming their own mirroring unities
is heuristically fruitless at the level of pseudo-logic and incorrect at the
level of genuine logic. At the level of pseudo-logic, to use Croce’s exam-
ple, no useful taxonomy would deploy the opposites living and dead to
divide the genus dog into two species, living dogs and dead dogs, or (so
Croce thinks) the opposites moral and immoral to divide the genus moral
person into two species, moral and immoral persons. Even at the level of
pseudo-concepts, opposites are not usefully treated as real items requir-
ing inclusion in a classificatory system.272
For the purpose of genuine logical analysis, however, beauty, truth,
and utility are authentically distinct concepts individuated by their
positions and relations in the organic unity of logical space. But ugli-
ness, falsity, and uselessness do not belong to this or any other unity:
they are not real. Indeed, because they are not real, ugliness, falsity,
103
and uselessness cannot be members of this unity. For example, if we

specify individuation conditions for beauty and truth, we find that two
such conditions are that beauty negates or rules out ugliness and that
good likewise negates evil. Strictly (logically) speaking, there are no
evil deeds or false thoughts. When we speak in this looser way, we use
abstract pseudo-concepts. If you act and your act is not good, it does not
follow that you have done evil; there is no distinct concept, evil, that
characterizes your deed logically; rather, your act was useful, or differ-
ently characterizable by a real, distinct concept like utility. In other
words, the deed that we loosely call ‘evil’ is characterized logically by
distinct concepts that are part of the same unity in which good also plays
an irreducible logical role.273 ‘The person who commits an evil action,’
Croce explains, ‘if he really is doing something, surely does not commit
an evil action but performs an act useful to him. The person who thinks
a false thought, if he is accomplishing anything real, does not think the
false thought – indeed does not think at all – but rather goes on living
and looking after his own convenience, or generally some benefit that
he cares about at that instant. Thus we see that opposites, when taken as
distinct moments, are no longer opposed, but now distinct.’274
Croce’s doctrine that the opposites of distinct concepts are not them-
selves distinct concepts will play a crucial role in his criticism of Hegelian
logic, which he regards as violating this rule. Hegel’s dialectic is com-
mitted, he argues, to opposition-in-unity – a single unity including distinct
concepts which are also opposites. Croce regards this as a straightfor-
ward logical contradiction. He claims, for example, that beauty negates
–rules out – ugliness. Now recall that what makes a distinct concept dis-
tinct is its location and its relations in a logical space unified by beauty
along with all other distinct concepts, like truth and utility. In that
case, a unity that includes the concept beauty cannot include any con-
cept which, like ugliness, is ruled out by beauty.
Nonetheless, and in Croce’s view, there is a sense in which opposites
of distinct concepts are themselves distinct concepts, in addition to the
sense, just described, in which they are not. If the opposite of good is
evil, then that abstract pseudo-concept, evil, is not a distinct concept.
But if, with Croce, we regard useful – or another concept within the
unity where good necessarily occupies its logical place – as the opposite
of good, then the opposite of good is a distinct concept.
Recall that complete logical analysis of a concept requires making it
explicit at all three levels of analysis: (i) the position in logical space that
exhausts it conceptually; (ii) its unique relation to the whole unity of dis-
104
tinct concepts; and (iii) its individual relations to other distinct concepts.
Thinking is just making concepts explicit in this way. But for purely heu-
ristic purposes, says Croce, we can capture the notion of thinking by
appealing to a law that he calls the ‘principle of identity and contradiction,’
which is that ‘A is A (unity) and A is not B (distinction).’275 Since Croce
wants this law (Lc) to capture his theory of unity in distinction, we should
read its central connective (‘and’) not as a conjunction but as a logi-
cal conditional. ‘A is not B’ is a necessary condition of ‘A is A’ in that
A’s identity with A requires A and B to be distinct in Croce’s sense of
‘distinct.’ But Croce warns that his law is just heuristic; it does not really
govern thinking. At best, it helps us find a description of thinking.
Croce contrasts his own law of identity and contradiction (Lc), which
is fine as far as it goes, with a different law (Ld) that expresses the doc-
trine of opposition in unity that he rejects. One might think that Croce’s
law (Lc), ‘A is A entails that A is not B,’ is equivalent to Lo, ‘A is A alone
and definitely not not-A, its opposite, as well.’ Yet, Croce insists, it is not
just that the two laws are not equivalent: Lo is actually ‘a perversion of
the principle of identity and contradiction.’276 Resisting that perver-
sion, some thinkers – Croce is thinking of Hegel – have proposed their
own dialectical principle (Ld): ‘A is at the same time not-A.’ While Croce
agrees that Lo must be resisted, resistance by way of Ld, by the dialectical
claim that everything is contradicted in itself, only obscures the theory
of unity in distinction and nullifies the key doctrine that opposites of dis-
tinct concepts are not themselves distinct. Because the unity of distincts
is holistic, the infinity of relations among distincts is a closed system of
mutual logical and metaphysical entailments. By contrast, if we adopt Ld,
‘the eternal law of opposition,’ we are committed to Hegel’s ‘bad infin-
ity,’ an open infinite series: ‘it would be necessary for the thinking that
negates the intuition to be negated in turn, and for the negation to be
negated again and so on to infinity.’277
Finally, although the dialectical principle (Ld) is more destructive of
Croce’s aims than the principle of identity and contradiction (Lc), he
regards even the latter as a mere device for expressing an activity – think-
ing – whose nature just cannot be adequately expressed by principles.
Thinking is not governed by rules or laws; it does not represent truths or
facts; it is not representation. Rather, thinking is making truths explicit by
conceiving of them in their singularity, universality, and particularity.278
105
19
What Is Living?
(Croce IV)
While taking his Logic through several drafts, Croce was also doing the
work that led to his most memorable statement about philosophy, What
Is Living and What Is Dead in Hegel’s Philosophy? Published in 1907 (the
preface is dated March 1906), it was the first of many books by Croce
to be produced by Giovanni Laterza, head of the new, and soon to be
distinguished, publishing house that still bears his name. Laterza had
just taken over the new journal, La Critica, that Croce launched with
Giovanni Gentile in 1903. The initial plan for this enormously produc-
tive partnership was for Croce to handle the history of modern Italian
literature, leaving the philosophy of that era to Gentile.279
Croce’s early friendship with Gentile was shaped in part by the deep
interest in Marxism that they shared, starting in the mid-1890s when
Gentile was doing research not only on Rosmini, Gioberti, and other
Italian philosophers but also on historical materialism, a topic much
studied by Labriola. In 1895 Croce had published Labriola’s In Memory
of the Communist Manifesto at his own expense, while more and more of
his reading was about economics and Marx. Another journal on which
he collaborated during these years was Devenir social, also begun in 1895
by Georges Sorel, the French syndicalist. Although Croce, as a relative
of Spaventa, had a Hegelian in his family tree, this new curiosity about
Marx made Hegel even more important. In fact, Croce’s early encounter
with Hegel soon turned into an immense project of translation, working
with Gentile to put Hegel’s Encyclopedia into Italian.280
It was Hegel’s metaphysical logic, however, rather than his aesthetics,
ethics, or politics that most interested Croce at the turn of the century.
His 1907 critique of Hegel grew out of his own Outlines of Logic, first
presented to the Accademia Pontaniana in 1904 and published the next
What Is Living? (Croce IV)
year. Since the finished Logic as Science of the Pure Concept was to become
the second part of the Philosophy as Science of the Spirit – the three other
parts being the Aesthetics, the Philosophy of Practice, and the Theory and His-
tory of Historiography – Croce’s work on the Hegel essay of 1907 came at a
crucial moment in his long intellectual voyage.281 After he had finished
his huge job of translating, Croce described an irresistible consequence
of the experience, his ‘desire to put into writing the critical-philosophi-
cal introduction to Hegel’s work that has taken shape in my mind – my
views on the merits and demerits of Hegel’s philosophy.’ He hoped that
‘the translation of the Encyclopedia, along with these critical inquiries of
mine, might help reawaken in Italy the study of a philosophical giant like
Hegel.’ But the giant was not just asleep: according to Croce, only part
of Hegel’s philosophy was alive; another part he pronounced dead.282
The living part of Hegel’s philosophy, as Croce saw it, sprang from
a great insight: that philosophy must have a method all its own, apart
from the methods of the other disciplines – art, science, history, and eth-
ics – to which it contributes a distinctively philosophical understanding.
Hegel’s insight was that philosophy uses a special form of thought: the
concept.283 Accordingly, the language that Croce himself uses to describe
the thinking that is distinctively philosophical is peculiarly Hegelian and
technical. In normal anglophone usage, a concept is what a term, espe-
cially a predicate, refers to; it is what we understand by such a term. Hav-
ing a concept enables us to do certain things, like making judgments, or
picking out what a term applies to. Kant, who was an architect of this view
of concepts, had described them as universals and as representations of
what several objects have in common.
One sign of the distance between those notions and Hegel’s is that he
does not put any clear boundary between concepts, on the one hand,
and the ‘I’ and objects on the other. Moreover, Hegel sometimes speaks
of the Concept as if it were an immanent God, suggesting that everything
is just the realization of a divine concept of all that there is and can be.
But Hegel’s concepts are neither the objects that come under concepts
nor the ideas that unite concepts with objects. Hegelian concepts con-
stitute objects; they do not represent objects; nor do they indicate some-
thing that some objects have in common. They may be, but need not
be universal. Croce, a severe critic of Hegel as well as a disciple, comes
closest to him in treating concepts as systematically interdependent, in
an extravagant version of what Sellars called a ‘conceptual framework’
and Davidson called a ‘conceptual scheme.’284 According to Croce, it is
distinctive of philosophical thinking to proceed by concepts rather than by
107
intuitions, feelings, or other modifications of the mind passively received

and independent of rational activity. This is how philosophy differs from
direct perception, revelation, and mysticism.285
Philosophy’s concepts are universal, Croce tells us, in that they grasp
their objects by way of what is essential to them rather than by way of
representations, marks, symbols, or other features that imply distinctions
of greater and lesser generality – distinctions like those that separate an
isosceles triangle from just any trilateral, for example. The universal char-
acter of its concept sets philosophy apart from the empirical and natural
sciences that deal with the general rather than the universal, with taxono-
my rather than understanding. Finally, although philosophical concepts
are universal, they are not abstract but concrete. Like Hegel, Croce makes
two points by insisting that concepts are concrete: first, concepts cannot
abstract from the essences of the particulars that they grasp; second, they
cannot abstract from the relations of mutual entailment that all concepts
have with one another. This last property of philosophical thinking also
distinguishes it from the mathematical and other purely formal systems
that idealize away from reality and require axioms that prevent such sys-
tems from being organic and unitary.286
Philosophical concepts are distinct from one another in Croce’s tech-
nical sense of ‘distinct’: they depend metaphysically and logically on
the different concepts with which they form a unity. To illustrate this
dependence, Croce discusses imagination and understanding: imagin-
ing is the basis of understanding, and in order to play that role, imagin-
ing must be distinct from understanding. Yet because it is essential to
imagination that it is the basis of understanding, imagination could not
be what it is except in relation to understanding. The totality of such dis-
tinct concepts forms what Croce calls the philosophical concept, which
is a concrete unity because of what makes it possible: the mutual rela-
tions among distinct concepts that cannot be abstracted-from without
undermining the unity and the essence of the distinct concepts that are
mutually related.287
But some concepts are opposed rather than distinct. Unlike distinct
concepts, they exclude one another. Croce lists the following pairs as
opposites rather than distincts: true/false, good/evil, beautiful/
ugly, valued/unvalued, positive/negative, joy/sorrow, activity/
passivity, life/death, and being/nothing. Unlike distinctions, these
oppositions are problematic, seeming to preclude the concrete, univer-
sal and organic unity that Croce posits. True/false, good/evil, being/
nothing, and the others cannot form an organic unity because true,
108
good, being, and so on rule out – or negate – false, evil, nothing, and
so on.288 The metaphor of logical space, and recalling that the concept
is something logical, may help: a distinct concept like true just is its
location in such a space of entailments unified by all the other distinct
concepts, like good and being. What makes a concept the concept that
it is are the entailments entered into with all the other distinct concepts
that form a unity with it. Logical space is a map of all the entailments in
such a unity. But a unity that includes true cannot include any concept
negated by true. Instead of distinct concepts embedded in an organic
unity, such oppositions of negation generate dualisms: as Croce puts it,
‘two universals everywhere, one confronting the other, one threaten-
ing the other.’ Opposites are a problem because, wrongly handled, they
will undermine a unified, coherent, and systematic understanding of
reality.289
According to Croce, familiar philosophical mistakes arise as proposals
for solving the problem of opposites. Proposals of one type – Croce lists
sensism, empiricism, materialism, and mechanism – deny the existence
of one side of each opposed pair. In contemporary terms, eliminative
materialism would be such an approach. A different possibility is to let
both members of a grand ontological pair exist in complete contrast to
one another. There have been many such dualisms, like the Cartesian
version famously described by Gilbert Ryle as reifying the mental con-
trastively as just like the physical – lawlike, causally efficacious, structured,
and so on – in all ways except for being physical.290 Croce views all such
strategies as unstable. While declaring the mental to be mythical, for
example, materialism actually reintroduces the mental part of dualism
by insisting upon the distinction between the illusory and the real. By
declaring the mental and the physical to be two incomplete yet incom-
patible presentations or explanations of a single reality, dualism likewise
reintroduces monism.291
Hegel’s solution to the problem of opposites is the dialectic, in which
unity and opposition are not mutually exclusive and each is retained.
In the dialectic, as interpreted by Croce, opposites stay opposed to one
another, and yet opposites taken together are not opposed to the unity
that depends upon them for its coming-to-be. Resolved by the dialectic,
the problem of opposites no longer threatens the philosophical concept.
The concrete and universal unity of the philosophical concept is safe
because the dialectic comprehends reality both as united and as divided,
all at once, and because the concept depends upon the persistence of
oppositions for its unity.292
109
But in Croce’s account of Hegel’s dialectic, each term of an opposition

is abstract (not concrete, in the Hegelian sense) when taken in isolation.
It is by analogy with the statics of the lever, Croce explains that Hegel calls
these opposed terms ‘moments,’ as when rising and falling around a ful-
crum merely seem to be opposed because they are abstracted from the
lever’s whole motion. In isolation, two abstract moments rule each other
out; the second negates the first. But a third moment preserves each of
the first two if, in relation to it, they are no longer isolated and abstract.
Their opposition is thereby resolved or overcome or superseded or sub-
lated (aufgehoben, superato). The third moment negates negation by an
absolute negating, which is preservative and productive: the two opposed
moments are sublated in the third and conserved in its dynamic unity.
Absolute negation is absolute affirmation.293 The dialectic is first and
foremost an activity, a thinking rather than a thought, in no way a passive
receptivity or a static solution. The understanding first posits opposition
and treats opposites as abstract. Reason then resolves the opposition by
preserving it as internal to the unity that overcomes it. And the opposi-
tion, far from being opposed to that unity, makes it possible.
To choose one troublesome case, if we treat truth/falsity abstract-
ly, we may conclude that everything is equally true; but this will violate
the very essence of truth, which requires a background of error. Reason
recognizes that neither truth nor falsity exists abstractly in isolation;
each depends on the other for its possibility – each depends especially
on its opposition to the other. This recognition that truth needs a back-
ground of error and that error needs a background of truth preserves
both truth and falsity; also their opposition to one another as truth/
falsity; as well as their status as conditions of the possibility of one anoth-
er. Thus, while truth and falsity stay opposed to one another, neither is
opposed to their interdependence and mutuality: each is a condition of
the possibility of that interdependence.294
Croce considers a number of familiar objections to Hegel’s dialectic.
The first is that the dialectic requires opposites to be identical because
they form a synthetic unity. But if they really are identical, they cannot be
opposites. Croce’s answer is that opposites are identical, in a sense, when
taken abstractly and in isolation. I can hold that everything is equally
true by assimilating the false to the true, for example, and claiming that
what is false is somehow ‘true for me.’ But when I think it philosophi-
cally – concretely, that is – the opposition of the first two moments is
preserved by the reason that recognizes their mutual interdependence.
A related objection charges Hegel with violating the principle of identity
110
and contradiction (or the rule of non-contradiction), with making such

claims as that everything both is, and is not, what it is. Croce’s response is
the same: reason triumphs by preserving each of the opposed moments
in its integrity and by recognizing the necessary role that each plays in
making the other possible.295
Croce’s view, then, is that the dialectic is what is living in Hegel’s phi-
losophy. The dialectic is a revolutionary solution to a perennial philo-
sophical problem – the problem of opposites.296 But Croce takes himself
to have solved an equally important problem that Hegel mishandled by
applying the dialectical method to it: the problem of distincts.297 As we
shall see, this bungled job is what Croce diagnoses as dead in the phi-
losophy of Hegel.
However, Hegel had also diagnosed a third set of problems – those
arising from the separation of appearance and essence – as ‘pseudo-
problems.’ Which of the separated items is real? Materialism saves the
appearances, but only by positing things as bearers of appearances. Super-
naturalism preserves the essential, but not without acknowledging that
essence appears to finite minds as appearance. Dividing appearance from
essence gives rise to more divisions: external and internal, accidental and
substantial, finite and infinite, many and one, sensible and suprasensible,
matter and spirit. According to Croce, the problems that emerge from
these divisions are not properly philosophical. They can be treated nei-
ther by the dialectical method nor by his own theory of distincts. They
are pseudo-problems because the separated terms are figments of abstrac-
tion, neither opposites nor distincts.298
True opposites are opposed not as essence and appearance but as being
and not-being. The question ‘Which is real?’ simply does not arise for
them: the false, evil, ugly, irrational, and dead are as real as the true, good,
beautiful, rational, and living when considered from the dialectical point
of view. Nothing in either series is related to the other terms as species or
genera of the real. Instead, the false, evil, ugly, irrational, and dead are
the reality of not-being that makes real being possible.299 Although they
are real, the opposites are not facts; in particular, they are not facts about
being. As Croce points out, an irrational thought is not a thought at all;
there are no thoughts about which ‘they are irrational’ is a fact. An ugly
work of art is no work of art at all, and it is not as though, for some work of
art, one fact about it is ‘that it is ugly.’ From the dialectical point of view,
the reality of not-being – of the illogical, stupid, ugly, shameful, and so
on – is the absence of fact. By contrast, the fact, or real being, ‘is always
rational and ideal, always truth, always wisdom and moral goodness.’300
111
20
What Is Dead?
(Croce V)
Croce thinks that Hegel was right to locate the synthesis of opposites in
the philosophical concept but wrong not to see that the concept also
requires the unity of distincts. The concept is more than the synthesis
of opposites; it is also those mutually interdependent domains which,
just because they are distinct, cannot oppose one another. Logic, ethics,
aesthetics, and history, for example, are distinct domains whose relations
cannot be captured empirically by classification or dialectically by oppo-
sition. It makes no sense to think of them as fitting together into a single
classificatory scheme like that of family, genus, and species. Nor does it
make sense to treat any of them as the opposite of another, logically or
metaphysically: logic is not the opposite of ethics; aesthetics is not the
opposite of history.301
Croce diagnoses Hegel’s confusion about distincts as what anglophone
philosophers since Ryle have called a ‘category mistake.’ To think of a
piece of art as evil, an intellectual achievement as useful, or a properly
functioning object as beautiful is like thinking of the university as an
additional building on campus, team-spirit as an another player on the
team, or the Average Tax Payer as a fellow-citizen. But it is also a category
mistake to think of a work of art as the opposite of evil, an intellectual
achievement as the opposite of useful, or a broken machine as the oppo-
site of beautiful. Because knowledge, morality, beauty, and utility belong
to distinct domains – ‘categories’ in Ryle’s language – judging any of
them by criteria appropriate to another is a mistake in logic.302
The generalizing method of the natural sciences, which classify indi-
viduals into species and other types and sub-types, creates distortion if it
is used to universalize, which is the philosophical task of the concept. In
the case of opposites, Croce concedes, Hegel’s dialectic eliminates the
What Is Dead? (Croce V)
distortions produced by misdirected classifying. But the dialectic cannot

deal with the problem of distincts. Like opposites, distincts make up a
unitary system that cannot be captured by any classification. But unlike
opposites, distincts are not amenable to synthesis and so are not candi-
dates for dialectical treatment. To replace Hegel’s dialectic in the case
of distincts, Croce substitutes his theory of levels, which he derived from
Hegel’s criticisms of Schelling’s philosophy of nature.303
Two concepts, a and b, are distinct in Croce’s theory when a can be
posited without b, but b cannot be posited without a; b therefore occupies
a ‘higher level’ than a. The relationship between a and b is asymmetrical:
a is a necessary condition of b, while b is merely sufficient for a. Presum-
ably, b is higher than a, not in any normative sense but in the sense that
a is a ground of b and that b requires a. Croce’s examples of art and
philosophy illustrate these relations. Art (a) and philosophy (b) are not
to be classified as species of a single mental genus, like cognition, nor
treated dialectically as opposites (Į against ȕ) that negate one anoth-
er. Philosophy is at a higher level than art, because, while art need not
include philosophy yet does not exclude it, philosophy requires art and
thus must include it. That philosophy is expressed artistically is neces-
sary, Croce claims, because (i) there is no unexpressed philosophy, and
(ii) all expression, by ‘words, images, metaphors, figures of speech and
symbols’ or other means, is artistic. The asymmetry between philosophy
and art as distincts entails that philosophy, being higher than art, incor-
porates or involves the art that is its necessary ground.304
Croce moves his analysis along by highlighting the differences between
Hegel’s dialectical synthesis of opposites (ȕ negated by Į) and his own
theory of levels (b at a higher level than a).
First, taken in isolation and outside the synthesis, the two mutually
negating moments of the dialectic are abstract. Isolated opposites, until
they are resolved and preserved, are merely abstract and not full-blood-
ed concepts, which would also be true of distincts were they subject to
dialectical treatment. In the theory of levels, however, the two moments
are concrete; the second moment, b, would be abstract without a, but
both a and b, just by being distinct – that is, in being thought as distinct
from one another – are concrete, fully-fledged concepts that are never
without one another.
Second, in the synthesis of opposites, both Į and ȕ are preserved, but
not as distinct. In the theory of levels, however, b preserves a by incorpo-
rating it in such a way that a is no longer independent of b, even though
they remain distinct – as, in Croce’s example, when the Spirit passes
113
from art to philosophy, it does so by preserving art as the form in which

philosophy expresses itself.
Finally, in the theory of levels, the passage from a to b or from b to a
(when, inversely, a will be higher than b and will incorporate b) is not the
result of contradiction, as it is in the dialectic. Neither a nor b contains
internal contradictions, nor does either conflict with the other. When
the Spirit passes from art to philosophy, or from philosophy to art, it
is not because art or philosophy are opposed qua art or qua philoso-
phy. Rather, if the Spirit is not content with artistic contemplation, it is
because it has already passed into philosophy; and if the Spirit is not con-
tent with philosophical inquiry, it is because it has already passed into
aesthetics.305
In dealing with such problems, Hegel compounded his errors, in
Croce’s view. He not only failed to recognize the special nature of dis-
tincts and to formulate a theory of levels that could do for them what
the dialectic could not do; he also – and this was Hegel’s original sin
– treated distincts as if they were opposites in order to apply the dialectic to
them.306 The implausible triadic machinery that covers this mistake is an
easy mark for Croce’s lampooning:
Thus, there is natural soul (thesis), sensitive soul (antithesis) and real soul
(synthesis) in his anthropology; theoretical spirit (thesis), practical spirit
(antithesis) and free spirit (synthesis) in his psychology, and also intuition
(thesis), representation (antithesis) and ethics (synthesis); or likewise, in
this last area, family (thesis), civil society (antithesis) and state (synthe-
sis); in the sphere of absolute Spirit, art (thesis), religion (antithesis) and
philosophy (synthesis) … And so on … This is the first case of that abuse
of the triadic form in Hegel’s system that has so greatly offended and still
offends … For who will ever be persuaded that religion is the non-being of
art and that art and religion are two abstractions that possess truth only in
philosophy, the synthesis of both?307
Applying the dialectic to distincts has two other unfortunate results,

beyond the multiplication of triads.
First, abstract moments of the philosophical concept – genuine oppo-
sites – come to be treated as distincts ought to be treated, as if they were
related by levels. Just because they are abstract, however, the moments mis-
handled in this way are pseudo-concepts, which Croce calls ‘philosophi-
cal mistakes.’ Such mistakes were made when the Eleatics made Being
into the Absolute, whereas for the Buddhists Nothing was the Absolute.
114
Each philosophical sect in turn isolated its own abstract moment and
then committed the besetting philosophical sin of that moment. Like-
wise, by perversely turning opposed concepts into distincts, the Hegelian
dialectic treats abstract pseudo-concepts – philosophical mistakes – as if
they were concrete concepts in a unity of distinct, yet interdependent
and therefore genuine philosophical concepts.308
Second, distincts come to be treated as opposites ought to be treated,
as abstractions that when taken in isolation are engines of philosophical
error. Applying the dialectic to distincts mistreats autonomous domains
– such as aesthetics, history, and ethics – as abstract, partial, and provi-
sional in relation to the philosophical concept. Accordingly, Hegel treats
them as imperfect forms of philosophy – in effect, as philosophical mis-
takes. One case, according to Croce, is Hegel’s view of art as a failed
attempt to grasp the Absolute: art’s purchase on that sublime item seems
sordid and incomplete because its apprehension is merely and necessar-
ily sensible; once philosophy has grasped the Absolute in the purity of its
thinking, art as a distinct domain is reduced to a philosophical mistake,
making philosophy the true art.309
History’s fate is similar by Hegel’s account – as Croce understands
Hegel. Philosophical thinking produces historical knowledge, when, for
example, we better understand Dante’s having written the Divine Comedy
(a fact of history) by deploying the (philosophical) concepts of poetry
and artistic creation. Conversely, historical knowing produces philosoph-
ical thought when, for example, we move from historical accounts of the
past to the theorizing that makes those accounts intelligible. Although
both these transactions occur all the time and do no harm, Hegel’s mis-
conceived philosophy of history subordinates history to philosophy and
thereby violates the autonomy of both history and philosophy as distinct
domains. History becomes just another philosophical mistake, a mere
pseudo-philosophy that annihilates history.310
The authentically distinct domains of science and mathematics go
the same ruinous way in Hegel’s system, becoming no more than flawed
attempts at philosophy. Hegel’s philosophy of nature is as unjust to phi-
losophy and to nature as his philosophy of history is unfair to history. By
viewing the empirical sciences in the warped mirror of his logic, Croce
writes, ‘Hegel completely rejected them and absorbed them into phi-
losophy, which thus took on all their rights and all their duties.’311
As each distinct domain is absorbed into the misbegotten philosophy
that treats it dialectically, the erroneous scope of that philosophy grows
ever wider. Having misappropriated the sciences, philosophy acquires
115
the false burden of discovering and explaining all natural phenomena,

‘stars, physical forces, chemical structures, physiological elements and
unknown species of animals and plants.’ Having invaded history’s terri-
tory, philosophy also extends its regime to individual facts. And just as
Hegel was forced to treat distincts as opposed moments needing synthe-
sis, so too was he obliged to treat empirical phenomena and particular
facts as if they too were philosophical concepts. According to Croce, ‘this
is the second great abuse of his dialectical discovery that Hegel committed’
– and another opportunity for ridicule.312
‘Hegelian dialectic has been caricatured many times,’ writes Croce.
‘But no caricature could equal what the author himself did unconsciously
when he tried to think of Africa, Asia and Europe or the hand, nose and ear
or family patrimony, paternal power and testament in the same rhythm of
thought that he used for being, nothing and becoming.’313
This long Hegelian train of error, from misunderstanding opposites as

distincts and treating distincts as opposites to mistreating phenomena
and facts as philosophical concepts, is what Croce, in an early use of the
term, calls panlogicism: ‘the substitution of philosophical thought for all
other processes of the Spirit, which must all take on logical (philosophi-
cal) form and vanish.’ By segregating opposites from distincts and sepa-
rating the methods appropriate to each – the dialectic and the theory of
levels – Croce aims to stop what he accused Hegel of starting, the engulf-
ing of everything by a metaphysical logic and the surrender of all reality
to a cold intellectualism.314
In the last chapter of his essay, describing his task as the resurrection
of Hegel’s spirit from the corpse that it had become, Croce summarizes
his results:
to preserve the living part of the philosophy, meaning the new concept of
the concept, the concrete universal, along with the dialectic of opposites
and the theory of levels of reality;
to reject, on the basis of that new concept and its development, all panlogi-
cism and any speculative construction of the individual and empirical, of
history and nature;
to recognize the autonomy of the various forms of the Spirit, even in their
necessary connection and unity;
and finally, to reduce all philosophy to a pure philosophy of the Spirit (or a
metaphysical logic, if one preferred to give it that name).315
116
The ‘pure philosophy of the Spirit’ that Croce sought would have left
natural science beyond the reach of philosophical discourse. Insofar
as idealism was a corrective for positivism, this antagonism to natural
science spoke to the last moments of the old century, when an enfee-
bled positivism had invited the proto-Fascist activism, pragmatism, and
irrationalism of young iconoclasts like Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe
Prezzolini. At first Croce himself saw their cultural journalism in the
fashionable pages of La Voce and Leonardo as a Florentine accessory to his
own aims in La Critica, whose accent was southern and Neapolitan. But
the real prophets of the dawning century would be Planck and Einstein,
not Peirce or Bergson, and Croce was all but deaf to those voices of a new
and powerful world view.316
Led by Ernst Cassirer, the neo-Kantian heirs of transcendental ideal-
ism kept themselves at the centre of debate about the new science until
Hitler shut down the discussion in the 1930s. Italian idealism, as Croce
and Gentile expressed it, let most of those conversations pass by. Of the
two, the professorial Gentile was the less fastidious on this point. He did
not share Croce’s aesthetic disdain for the unlovely speech of scientists.
More important, his own new philosophy was to be an immanent ideal-
ism which, more or less like Spinoza with his Deus sive Natura, aimed to
naturalize the divine while divinizing nature.317
117
21
Materialism
(Gentile I)
Croce’s superb essay on Hegel is his clearest public statement of the phil-
osophical issue that did most to put him at odds with Giovanni Gentile:
his theory of distinction and opposition. Much more than philosophy,
of course, was involved in their famous controversy, which took decades
to ripen and grew out of a relationship of patronage, partnership, and
friendship. Croce, the older of the two, had made his name as a public
intellectual while Gentile was still just another university student, and
Croce was one of the first to spot Gentile’s stunning talent.318
Gentile was born in 1875 – nine years after Croce – in Castelvetrano,
in a middle- class Sicilian family. He started school in 1881 and would
later describe his early education as positivist in spirit. He won admission
in 1893 to the Scuola Normale and went north to Pisa, where he studied
Italian literature with Alessandro d’Ancona, history with Amedeo Crivel-
luci, and philosophy with Donato Jaja. He was closest to Jaja, his per-
sonal link to Fiorentino, Spaventa, and, ultimately, Hegel. But erudition
was as prominent in his education as philosophy, and many ideologies
were also on offer: positivism, pragmatism, secularism, anticlericalism,
socialism, liberalism, and, above all, the nationalism of a new nation.
The thesis that he started in 1894 – a study of Rosmini and Gioberti – is
a chapter in the longer story that would become the grand narrative of
modern Italian philosophy. Another of his lifelong interests, education
and pedagogy, is visible in his earliest publications at Pisa, which awarded
him its degree in 1897.319
At that time, Villari was still teaching in Florence at the Institute for
Advanced Studies, where Gentile went next to prepare his thesis for
publication and extend his education. He taught a course on historical
materialism and studied with Felice Tocco, an eminent Neo-Kantian, a
Materialism (Gentile I)
student of Spaventa, and the editor of the Latin Bruno. Gentile finished
his thesis with Tocco in 1898: this account of Italian philosophy, From
Genovesi to Galluppi, provides the background to his study of Rosmini and
Gioberti. With his formal education complete, he returned to Sicily, but
not before meeting the person who would take Jaja’s place at the cen-
tre of his intellectual life: Benedetto Croce. The two young intellectuals
began to correspond in 1896 and met a year later in Naples to discuss
their mutual interest in history, art, and Labriola’s Marxism.320
Gentile’s political instincts in his student years were, roughly speaking,
the ideals of the Historical Right (Destra storica) – the generation that
came to power in 1860 – blended with a cultural populism, and such atti-
tudes were unfriendly to socialism and Marxism. Croce too was a critic
of socialist theory by the time he met Gentile: both doubted (though in
different ways) Labriola’s claim that historical materialism is a coherent
philosophy. Gentile joined the public debate on this topic in 1898 with
a ‘Critique of Historical Materialism,’ which had also been his secondary
thesis at the Normale.321
Labriola, Gentile, and Croce were all anti-positivist, but the concep-
tion of history that the younger thinkers shared was broader and deeper
than Labriola’s committed Marxism. Gentile charged that Marx misun-
derstood Hegel: Marx accused Hegel of detaching ideas from reality,
when, in fact, Hegel had insisted on the strongest possible union of the
ideal with the real. Gentile also disagreed with Croce, who regarded
socialism as a practical possibility even though its theoretical basis was
flawed – even though it was no historical necessity in the Hegelian sense.
In that case, Gentile objected, the socialism that is not necessary is also
not possible. In 1899 he combined his essay on historical materialism
with a companion piece on ‘The Philosophy of Praxis,’ publishing them
together as The Philosophy of Marx and dedicating the book to Croce.322
Gentile’s account of praxis starts with the writings of 1845 in which
Marx and Engels sketched their critique of the Hegelian Left, especially
Ludwig Feuerbach’s account of religion. In this framework, Gentile asks
whether Marx’s materialism qualifies as a genuine philosophy. While
acknowledging Labriola’s authority on such questions, he wants to get
back to Marx himself as the author of the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ and
thus as the critic of a ‘degenerate Hegelianism of the Left.’ He sees Feuer-
bach as having denied the harmony that Hegel had posited between phi-
losophy and religion, as finding them opposed in the way that thought
is opposed to feeling or imagination. Philosophy seeks to understand;
religion aims to satisfy needs, and those needs are essentially physical
119
and bodily. It is because the essence of the human is corporeal, in fact,

that the body’s needs give rise to religion. The history of human agency,
then, will be the story of embodied individuals acting in society – an eco-
nomic history grounded in historical materialism.323
Having summarized Feuerbach’s argument, Gentile then translates the
eleven theses that Marx wrote in 1845 to refute Feuerbach and sketch
his own notion of praxis. In the end, says Marx, even though Feuerbach
is a materialist, he is still stuck in the abstract theorizing that prevented
Hegel and other idealists from achieving any correct sense of praxis. As a
result, neither Hegel nor Feuerbach could get full value from their most
important achievement, which was to put human activity at the centre
of philosophy, since they could only conceive of that activity abstractly,
never objectively. Their perspective therefore remained bourgeois, not
comprehensively human, and they failed to interpret the world properly,
much less change it.324
Although praxis was the keystone of Marx’s critique of idealism, Gen-
tile recalls that the notion itself was an old idealist invention, long famil-
iar from the Socrates who required his students to make their knowledge
out of themselves. In his ‘implacable criticism of Descartes,’ Vico took
this venerable theme farther: all distinctively human knowledge is knowl-
edge made by humans. Hence,
‘if what can be known is one’s own work … the natural world must be
entrusted to the knowledge possessed by God, who is its only maker. But
the historical world, a product of human activity, is the object of which
humans can gain knowledge because they have made it.’ For Vico, however,
this human activity is an activity of the human mind.
History for Vico is about artifacts of human minds, whereas for Marx it is
about the needs of embodied humans in society. Marx wants to replace
Vico’s mental praxis with a material praxis.325
Labriola confirms Vico’s insight: ‘we understand well only what we
ourselves are capable of producing – by thinking, working, trying and
trying again, always in virtue of powers that are our own in the social
context.’ But Gentile observes that ‘this making or re-making is not
always … material … more often … it is simply making … by thinking,’
as reflected, for example, in Friedrich Froebel’s pedagogy of learning by
doing, which is idealist rather than materialist. Froebel was inspired by
Fichte’s effort ‘to derive all our science from the primitive making of the
I,’ but Marx’s goal was to keep praxis embedded in bodily agency and
120
then ‘to move this principle over from abstract idealism into concrete
materialism.’326
Marx also objected to the subject/object relation as understood in
the empiricist philosophies of his day, wherein the object of sensation or
intuition is not made but given. If, per impossibile, subject and object were
uncorrelated, if the subject did not make the object, the two would be
isolated, abstract, and dead. But in fact – according to Marx as explicated
by Gentile – not only is the object made by the subject but also without
the object there is no subject, and the subject itself makes itself by mak-
ing the object.
‘The moments of the subject’s progressive formation correspond to vari-

ous moments in the progressive formation of the object … The root, the
enduring cause of this development lies in the activity, in the making of the
subject that shapes itself by shaping the object.’
Here, in one of Gentile’s earliest works, we find other roots as well, those
of his later philosophy of actual idealism, with its intense – not to say
obsessive – focus on thinking as unmediated activity.327
As Gentile speaks on Marx’s behalf, what he means by the false
‘abstract position of materialism’ is a kind of empiricism, the illusion of
a mental tabula rasa passively written on by its objects. Although he finds
such a relation between a pure subject and pure objects unintelligible,
he allows that the desire for objective knowledge – for knowledge unsul-
lied by anything subjective – suggests that the empiricist delusion is not
altogether unhealthy. But Marx’s response was to derive a contrary and
far healthier subjectivity from his concept of praxis. His reality is not
a remote array of windowless objects that somehow pass through the
shutters of the mind: ‘reality is a subjective product of mankind, but a
product of sensory activity … not of thinking, as Hegel and other ideal-
ists believed.’328
Nonetheless, it was Hegel’s virtue to have understood our knowledge
of reality as ‘a continuous producing, a making that never stops, a prax-
is that originates,’ leaving it to Marx to ‘transfer this principle … from
an abstract, idealist notion of the Spirit to real, concrete, sensory human
activity.’ Although Feuerbach’s analysis of religion in The Essence of Christi-
anity had inspired Marx, what the great revolutionary found in that book
was inconsistency: religious praxis turns up only in the ‘filthy Jewish forms’
of Christianity, while theory and theology – the materially grounded ideol-
ogy of Christian faith, in Marx’s view – remain entirely idealized.329
121
Labriola sympathized with Feuerbach’s failure: it is hard to find any-

thing material in the otherworldly impulses of religion, though Labri-
ola (from his Western perspective) believed that familiarity made the
motives of Christian religion easier to grasp than those of religion in
general. It takes no great insight to see the massive cathedrals that domi-
nate Europe’s cities as expressing material needs, though only Marx
understood religious theorizing as a response to those same needs:
When the making is united with the knowing, the objects that belong to
knowing are also the objects of making, and vice-versa, so that finally there
is just a single class of objects related to praxis (which is making and know-
ing together) and produced just by it. And if materialism is good enough
to explain objects that are made, it must also be good enough to explain
objects that are known … Instead, Feuerbach explains his doctrinal con-
structions by the abstract activity of the Spirit – for him, the real human
activity – and so he leaps back into the idealism that he wished so firmly to
deny.330
As Gentile sees it, ‘inconsistency is Feuerbach’s leading error.’ His goal

was a materialist philosophy; materialism needs to be monist; but Feuer-
bach’s analysis of religion is dualist, positing an idealist theory inco-
herently related to a material praxis. By contrast, ‘we may define the
philosophy of praxis sketched by Marx … as a materialist monism that
differs from any system like it in its concept of praxis applied to mat-
ter.’331 Gentile renders this verdict at the start of the ninth and last sec-
tion of his long essay on praxis, after testing that notion against norms
of realism and dialectical coherence, tracing it through the work of Ger-
man, French, and Italian critics and evaluating it both as theory and as
practical politics.
Since Marx’s praxis is a materialist monism, Gentile will try to clarify it
by asking what matter means to Marx. Rejecting the traditional view that
matter is inert and fixed, Marx thinks of it as active and always in proc-
ess, though it is human agency that gives matter its activity. Equipped
with this new concept, Marx wants to reform Hegel’s system, in which
the Spirit makes the Idea – an ideal reality. His reform is a substitution
or inversion: embodied humans (not Spirit) make things that they need
(not the Idea), a sensory and material reality. And then, taking the step
that Feuerbach did not take, Marx accounts for the theoretical items in
Hegel’s system as ideologies, distillates of the same praxis that produces
economic goods.332
122
Marx’s root mistake, according to Gentile, is an incomplete phenom-

enology that stops short with sensible consciousness, which is really only
a first level. When we see colour, for example, it is our sensory activity
that produces our sensory reality as, among other things, coloured, while
our agency – like Plato’s Demiurge – still needs something to work on.
Whatever this raw material for our sensory production may be (Gentile
mentions vibrations in the ether), it is nothing like the sensations that
we produce. What more to say? From the point of view of psychology,
maybe nothing: the brute fact of physical data, primitives simply given to
the senses, may suffice. And for the thoroughgoing materialist, no deity
needs to pluck a cosmic string to set the ether vibrating: matter just does
what it does.333 This materialist account of sensation may work for psy-
chology but not for philosophy, Gentile insists, which needs an a priori
answer – one not derived a posteriori from the sensing that needs to be
explained – and the answer also needs to be more persuasive than the
God of the spiritualists. At this point, Gentile turns to Kant, to ‘synthetic
a priori judgments,’ which, unlike the blind data of sensation, equip us
with universal concepts, the reasons and laws immanent in matter and
govern nature. Without such concepts, our effort to understand matter
is futile because it is trapped in matter, the very thing that Marx needs
to explain if his materialism is to be a philosophy worthy of the name.334
Because it is a philosophy; the idealism advocated by Gentile wants to
achieve what Marx could not achieve: an a priori philosophical account
of praxis. The only alternative would be a materialism more rigorous
than Marx’s, but any such thing will be a metaphysics and hence just a
defective idealism, and Marx’s criticisms of other types of materialism
will be undermined in the same way as long as the Ideal is excluded.
Consider his views on individuals and society, for example: if human
individuals are irreducibly social – never just atomic persons apart from
society – then social mutuality is essential to the human person. But that
essential mutuality – as distinct from one person’s experience of anoth-
er – is not accessible a posteriori: it is ‘nowhere to be touched, seen or
heard.’ Once again, Marx needs the a priori that he rejects.335
Marx could not leave the human person in isolation, because for him
agency is the heart of the human. An agent needs something to act on,
or, at a minimum, something to do or to think, apart from just being
there. In Gentile’s words:
‘Praxis means a relation between subject and object – thus neither the indi-
vidual subject nor the individual object as such and simpliciter, but the one
123
as necessarily related to the other, and vice versa: thus, to put it another way,
the identity of opposites. Not teachers on one side … and on the other side
those who are taught, but teachers who are taught and, as teachers, those
who are taught.’336
The essential mutuality of praxis also required Marx to reject what Gen-
tile calls ‘naturalism,’ including any of the purely biological accounts of
mankind that proliferated in the century of Darwin. The human animal
is unlike the others in a number of ways – in being by nature political,
for example, and thus developing along paths outside the borders of bio-
logical evolution. Like Darwin’s theory of biological life, however, Marx’s
theory of human praxis needs to be dynamic – a materialist theory of
change. In the human domain, where such things as politics are on the
table, a materialist theory of change will be a historical materialism. ‘But
here,’ Gentile claims,
‘we have a materialism which, if it is to be historical, is forced to deny its

own basis – that there is no other reality beyond the sensible – in order to
construct its theory. It thus rejects the essential features of every materialist
position, of the atomist conception of society, for example, and naturalism
itself. In short, this is a materialism that to be historical can no longer be
materialism. A deep, internal and incurable contradiction afflicts it.’337
Gentile’s view is that a consistent materialism can never account for the
dynamic character of reality, especially as manifest in human history,
because the matter of materialism can only be static: ‘matter as such is
always self-identical: it never changes.’338
The most persuasive materialism is the historical kind that Marx pro-
moted, decreeing that ‘history is the only true mistress of all us humans
and that we are as history lives us.’ But in the end all materialism – and
any allied account of praxis – is defective, according to Gentile, and any
attempt to solve its problems will end in ‘a more or less Platonic dualism,
not a materialist monism.’ At this early stage of his career, before he had
developed a more robust notion of immanence – one that might sustain
a naturalist monism that is not physicalist – Gentile still looked back to
Plato for the answer that Marx could not find, the answer to the most
persistent question about matter:
‘What is the source of the energy that makes it come to be incessantly? One
might say there is a force immanent in it, but this force that transforms mat-
124
ter step by step in a dialectical and determinate development is a rational

force, and reason is the Spirit.’339
Marx ought to have found this answer, Gentile charged, in
‘Hegel’s stunning critique of the abstract intellect. Yes to matter, then, but
matter along with praxis (the subjective object). Yes to matter, but matter
in continuous becoming … Yes to materialism, but historical materialism.
Except that the irony of logic answered the best intentions of his realism
with a gross contradiction as the result.’
So Marx failed the test that opens Gentile’s essay. At best, his is a flawed
philosophy, ‘an eclecticism with contradictory ingredients.’340
125
22
Idealism
(Gentile II)
As Gentile laboured to reject one system, Marxism, while making it clear

that he valued Marx’s account of praxis, he was also at work on another
system – actualism or actual idealism – that would move him closer to
Hegel, Fichte, and Kant and away from Marx, that relentlessly ungrate-
ful child of idealism. After the publication of Rosmini e Gioberti in 1898,
Gentile’s work on the metaphysics and epistemology of earlier and later
Italian thinkers educated him about their targets and sources: Condillac
and the French sensists; Thomas Reid and the Scots Enlightenment; and,
above all, Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy in Germany. Spaventa
had already located Kant in his ‘circulation of European thought,’ there-
by linking him with Italian philosophy. It was while studying Marx and
thinking about praxis that Gentile started his large project of editing and
interpreting Spaventa.341
The young and ambitious Gentile was then teaching in a Sicilian liceo
while dealing with the frustrations – and the dishonesty – that many have
experienced in the Italian educational bureaucracy. This experience was
especially bitter for him because no small part of his early success was
as a theorist and critic of education – in his Teaching Philosophy in High
Schools of 1900, for example. By the end of 1902, however, he had found
a job as a docent in the University of Naples, teaching a course on the
‘Rebirth of Idealism.’ Gentile’s inaugural lecture for the course can be
read in several ways: as an oratorical self-advertisement; as a statement
of long-range philosophical goals; and as a prospectus for La Critica, the
journal that he and Croce launched together in January of 1903. Cul-
tural polemic in the high Italian style was the journal’s purpose, Croce
focusing on modern Italian literature, Gentile on Italian philosophy, and
in the journal’s first phase its two creators were fellow-soldiers assaulting
positivism under the banner of idealism.342
Idealism (Gentile II)
Like other examples of its genre, Gentile’s prolusione on idealism is

programmatic and polemical. He opens piously, however, with compli-
ments for Spaventa, ‘the founder of true academic philosophy in con-
temporary Italy,’ and for Jaja, ‘my valiant Pisan teacher.’343 Throughout
the speech, allusions to Bruno, Campanella, Dante, Galileo, Pompon-
azzi, and Vico confirm that Gentile means to grow his philosophy in the
old soil of the new Italian nation. Although the title of the address tells
us that its topic is rebirth, the author declares that idealism is alive and
well, not superseded by any of its opponents. An idealist will understand
best, he implies, that antagonism to idealism is necessary to its develop-
ment. And on a broader front, in the story of philosophy as a whole, we
should expect no stability. In that context, the conflicts that have shaped
idealism had to be as they were, since ‘it was inevitable that the Spirit
again began to be alienated from itself and to turn toward the nature
that stands eternally before it.’344
The opposition to idealism has been manifest in various materialisms
– those of Marx and Darwin most prominently – but these systems get
things upside down, not ‘raising nature to the Spirit but … bringing the
Spirit down to nature.’ Gentile also names historical positivism (mean-
ing Villari and others) and philosophical positivism (meaning Ardigò
and others) as enemies of idealism that ‘reduce history to an intricate
puppet-show, directed not by the Providence that Vico taught to us …
but by the ineluctable influence of … physical nature.’ In the end, what
the positivists have to show is just a confused collection of phenomena,
and, if the empirical sciences persist in ignoring philosophy, all that they
will manage to do is to compile and organize their data.345
Unaware that mere experimentalism is empty, sociology and other
studies of mankind have been anxious ‘to take a seat at the banquet of
the sciences,’ thus starving themselves on a diet of hollow particulars.
Even the artists who write manifestos about naturalism, realism, and ver-
ism are complicit in the positivist confusion of natural appearances with
spiritual reality. Most shameful of all, philosophy itself, in its Neo-Kan-
tian avatar, has become the ‘deferential – indeed, obsequious – devout
and passive admirer of the experimental sciences.’346
This was the situation, Gentile reports, until ‘a few years ago, when a
bizarre and peevish spirit came forth to shout at science’s failure.’ This
Zarathustra was Ferdinand Brunetière, a conservative Catholic and a
critic of naturalism who had great influence as the editor of the Revue
des deux mondes; his Renaissance de l’idéalisme, from which Gentile took
his title, had appeared in 1896. When Brunetière claimed that science
could never keep its promises or replace religion, the promoters of sci-
127
ence were scandalized, but resistance was futile. Others took up the cry,
complaining that materialism is naïve, that naturalism gives no account
of mind, that experimentalism has few uses, and that positivism erodes
morality. In response, philosophers in England and America have begun
‘a sort of neo-Hegelianism.’347 ‘What people are looking for and what
they want,’ Gentile explains,
‘is unity, the animating idea of nature and history. They are looking for
the fullness of life and knowledge … They want to put God back into the
deserted and desolate temple … Eyes turn naturally to the past, to times
when the present torment was not felt, and … [to claims] that fundamental
problems of thinking are neutral for reason, turning away from it toward
what is called “feeling” or the “inspiration of feeling” – which is then sup-
posed to be religion’s theoretical content. But this is a critical moment that
contains the seed of its own destruction.’348
Although blind faith, irrationalism, and mysticism are predictable

responses to naturalism, they are also worse than useless. In the ensuing
confusion, a resurgent idealism will do best on its own, taking its own
path of resistance to materialist naturalism and forswearing alliance not
only with the irrationalists but also with the Neo-Kantians:
‘Our idealism never denies the rights of the Spirit asserted by Neo-Kantian-
ism and by … mysticism, though when they offer an agnostic justification of
those rights, our idealism rejects this as irrational. It also departs from natu-
ralism by asserting the reality of ideas. But it differs from Neo-Kantianism
and mysticism by aiming to clarify the intrinsic and unbreakable connec-
tion between ideas and nature…. Since both nature and Spirit derive from
the real, nature gains the same intelligibility and transparency that belongs
to the Spirit.’349
Gentile expresses confidence in his quest for ideas because ‘mistrust of

the ideas that Plato called divine is an anachronism in today’s philosophy.’
He decrees that ‘ideal reality is beyond any possible dispute because phi-
losophizing entails asserting just such a reality.’ Idealism is built into the
project of philosophy as an a priori science. While the special sciences
may use concepts as kinds, categories, laws, and principles for their vari-
ous purposes, philosophy’s domain is the concept itself as both real and
ideal. Losing sight of this objective is easy, however, because the human
mind is naturally inclined to take the sensible as its norm – hence the
illusions of naturalism.350 In Gentile’s view, then,
128
Idealism (Gentile II)
‘the real question … is not the legitimacy of idealism, which is assumed by

philosophy … The real problem is to understand idealism. A person who
shrinks from idealism when he wants to philosophize makes himself look
crazy, like someone who wanted to walk without moving … We can say we
are theorizing without ideas, but we are not theorizing at all … We need
to understand idealism, and understanding idealism means understanding
the value of ideas. Here we encounter the supreme difficulty: that ideas
appear as directly contrary to nature and irreconcilable with it.’
Those who wish to escape the trap of materialist naturalism need a way
out, but
‘either [this is] idealist monism, which solves the problem by denying its
existence, or else dualism, which acknowledges the problem but declares
itself powerless to solve it. In neither case is there any real understanding of
idealism … Real idealism is missing in both cases,’
and a real idealism is now Gentile’s goal.351

But how to proceed? Since the idea grows out of sense, to negate the natu-
ral is to sever the roots of the idea, which is why Kant had to refute Plato’s
innatism and show that without sensory intuition concepts are empty, there-
by establishing ‘the necessary connection between idea and sense’ that both
idealist philosophers and empirical psychologists now assume.352 Unlike
Kant, however, Gentile wants to dispense altogether with the transcendent,
at least in any traditional sense, and also to accept a non-physical determin-
ism, but again of no ordinary kind. ‘This is the problem,’ he declares,
‘to reconcile transcendence with immanence, mechanical determinism

with teleology, idea with sense, and once again to find the unity of the con-
traries. Only on this condition can we … save Abel without causing the
death of his brother and turning him into Cain.’353
It will not be enough for the young idealists whom Gentile wants to edu-
cate simply to pledge allegiance to the Ideal; they must also
‘account for the value of the ideas that they use to understand reality …
such idealists establish the point where contraries coincide, and the unity
thereby established is not … of nature alone nor … of the Spirit alone but
the complete unity of the duality of nature and the Spirit. Spinoza’s sub-
stance … is the expression of this basic problem of philosophy. But it is the
expression, not the solution.’354
129
The problem as Spinoza left it is exceedingly difficult, he admits, but

simply declaring it unsolvable is the very refusal to account for ideas that
philosophy must repudiate: in effect, that refusal makes scepticism into
a dogma and turns its back on philosophy. The alternatives are stark:
‘either understand the unity of the Spirit and nature or give up phi-
losophy.’ And it was that unforgiving task on which Gentile laboured for
decades, ‘looking for the Spirit deep in Nature’s belly.’355
130
23
Actualism
(Gentile III)
After several years of teaching liceo and university students in Naples,

though never on a secure basis, Gentile moved back to Sicily in 1906
as professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Palermo,
where he stayed until 1914, participating in highly charged debates on
pedagogy, public education, and religious education. Because Palermo
was not a happy place for him, however, he tried for the history of phi-
losophy chair at Naples when it came open in 1908, only to be blocked
again by patrons of a competitor. Croce responded in 1909 with an open
letter on ‘The Gentile Case and Dishonesty in Italian University Life.’
Gentile’s fifth child, born in the previous summer, was given the name
Benedetto.356
During these years, two of Croce’s projects were a book on Vico and
another on aesthetics, which appeared in 1910 and 1911. His public
engagement with his Neapolitan predecessor was another step in the Ital-
ian rehabilitation of Italy’s greatest Enlightenment thinker. The Croce of
this period was already a pezzo grosso, a presence large enough on the cul-
tural scene that by himself he could enlarge or diminish a reputation as
considerable as Vico’s – not to speak of a career like Gentile’s, still in its
early stages. And Vico’s contribution to Croce’s aesthetics, pushing him
towards intuition and the concrete, away from the abstract and rational-
ity, also worked to separate him from Gentile. The most original part of
Gentile’s thought, his actual idealism, is also its most formidably abstract
part – and the heart of his philosophy.357
Gentile’s growing distance from Croce, both physical and intellectual,
allowed Gentile to work out his ideas without the mixed blessing of an
extremely persuasive collaborator. To this period we can trace the ever
sharper tensions between the two great thinkers that would end their
friendship within a decade. But the immediate result of Gentile’s iso-

lation was the first full statement of a philosophy that is distinctly his,
‘The Act of Thinking as Pure Act,’ first delivered as a conference paper
in 1911 to the Philosophical Library of Palermo, of which he was the
founding director.358
Like all of Gentile’s writing about actualism, the ‘Act of Thinking’ is
intense and abstract – though not in the technical sense of that word as
he used it. It is also quite short – both an advantage and a disadvantage
in comparison to the much longer, and more mature, books on actual-
ism: A General Theory of the Spirit as Pure Act (1916) and A System of Logic
as a Theory of Knowledge (1917−23).359 In later years, after he had become
a celebrity, both as an intellectual and as a senior official of the Fascist
regime, he wrote a number of summaries of his philosophy, which, given
his access to Mussolini, inevitably came to be seen as philosophical justifi-
cations of Fascism. One of those later pieces, ‘The Foundations of Actual
Idealism,’ was first published in 1931 in a German volume, Der aktuale
Idealismus, and then in Italian in the Nuova Antologia of the same year.360
The much earlier ‘Act of Thinking’ begins, characteristically, with a
strong assertion:
‘There is no philosophical or scientific inquiry, there is no thinking of any

kind unless the thinking has faith in itself or in its own value, unless there is
spontaneous and unyielding conviction of thinking the truth.’
We are told that when a subject thinks some thought, P, she is indefeasi-
bly convinced that P is true. To put it another way, no subject can think a
thought of whose truth she is not entirely convinced:
S thinks P → S is indefeasibly convinced that P is true.
The subject’s conviction of the truth of P is epistemically basic: it is not

inherited from her convictions about anything else that she may think.
It is an internal feature of thinking itself. Gentile’s label for this built-in
feature of thinking is ‘faith in truth.’ Even the sceptic has this faith, he
claims, since the sceptic takes her thought that she ought to suspend
judgment as unshakably true.361
But is it not possible for a subject to entertain a thought of whose truth
she is not convinced? That possibility applies to abstract rather than con-
crete thinking, according to Gentile, who wants to restrict genuine think-
ing to the concrete kind. Two examples of abstract thinking distinguish
132
Actualism (Gentile III)
it as inauthentic. First, if I entertain some thought of whose truth you

– but not I – are convinced, then, strictly speaking, I will not be think-
ing my thought. Your thought will be the object of my thinking, but not
anything that I am actually thinking. Second, if I merely recall one of my
own previous thoughts, that thought too will be the object of my think-
ing, not my thinking as such. In both cases, the thought that becomes
the object of my thinking – as distinct from my own actual thinking – is
an abstract thought.362
Abstract thoughts, according to Gentile, have abstract objectivity
as opposed to concrete objectivity. If, instead of just thinking, I make
a thought the object of my thinking, that thought will have objectivity
of an abstract kind: some objectivity, after all, is what we should expect
any object of thought to have. But if I actually think, rather than taking
some thought of yours or a past thought of mine as my abstract object,
my thinking will have concrete objectivity. In the latter, concrete case,
thinking entails affirming – my having an unshakeable conviction that
what I am thinking is true. The only way I can think another’s thought,
or one of my own past thoughts, concretely rather than abstractly is, as
Gentile writes, ‘by meaning it, or by discerning or recognizing its value
and, in other, perhaps provisional, terms, by agreeing to it and making
it [mine]’: by somehow thinking it, that is to say, rather than thinking
about it.363
According to Gentile, when I do not just think about a thought but
actually think it – whether it is someone else’s thought or a past thought
of my own – I negate the thought in its abstract objectivity by affirming
it in concrete objectivity. And because the abstract thought that I started
with is negated, the concrete thinking that negates it is a new act: it is nei-
ther a thought collected from someone else nor a thought recollected
from myself. Such thinking is my thinking, not someone else’s, and it is
wholly actual in that it is present as my own. Thinking that is not my own
or no longer my own is not actual thinking. By contrast, claims Gentile,
concrete thinking is absolutely actual, and the philosophy that Gentile
derived from this notion is often called ‘absolute actualism.’364
Again, negating a thought in its abstract objectivity by making it one’s
own concrete and absolutely actual thinking entails affirming it in its
concrete objectivity. This tells us why the material conditional,
S thinks P → S is indefeasibly convinced that P is true,
holds for the actual concrete thought that is one’s own. As Gentile puts
133
it, ‘what we think actually, if we think it, we think as truth.’ Error, on the
other hand, has no rights: error is what I cannot think; it may be what I
once thought, or what someone else thought or thinks, but I simply can-
not think it.365
In Gentile’s system, error just is abstract thought, always opposed to
actual concrete thinking. Though I may make a thought that I regard as
erroneous the object of my thinking, I cannot actually think it. In order to
think the thought rather than just think about it, I must negate its abstract
objectivity, and to do that I must affirm the thought, which requires that
I regard the thought as unshakably true – in no way an error. Finally, if
errors are thoughts that I can no longer think, or just cannot think, then
truths are thoughts that I must think, thoughts that I cannot not think.
Just as thinking that P is a sufficient condition for thinking that P is true,
thinking that P is true is also necessary for thinking that P. When I make
a thought my own concrete and absolutely actual thinking, I both affirm
it in its concrete objectivity and negate it in its abstract objectivity. And
when I become aware that a thought is mistaken, I can no longer think
it: as my own thinking it is negated. Once an error is negated in this way,
my own thinking is again affirmed as my own, actual and concrete. Gen-
tile calls this process the ‘dialectic … thinking as activity that posits itself
by negating itself,’ and he argues that it should replace the principles of
identity, non-contradiction, and sufficient reason.366
When I become aware of an error, I do so by thinking about some
thought that is no longer my own; I am thinking about the mistaken
thought, not thinking it. But when I negate that thought, I affirm my
own thinking. Hence, the applicable principle of thought is dialectical,
A = ¬A,
because, in Gentile’s view, ‘every act of thinking is a negation of an act of

thinking, a present in which the past dies, and thus a unity of these two
moments.’ Thinking is freeing oneself from error by knowing a truth.367
Here is a problem: common sense tells us that our beliefs may be erro-
neous – that believing that P is compatible with P’s being false. So how
can Gentile hold that I cannot, on his view, think an error? Gentile is not
committed to the position that I cannot be mistaken, only to a weaker
claim: that if I regard P as false, then, even though I may entertain the
proposition P, I may not think P. In other words, Gentile draws a distinc-
tion between entertaining a proposition – making P an object of thought
– and believing it, which happens only if one assents to it. This weaker
134
position is uncontroversial. Common sense and philosophy both recog-

nize a distinction between thinking about a proposition and believing it.
In fact, in order to recognize that I do not believe P, I must entertain P.
Gentile’s claim that I cannot think an error is not that I cannot be mis-
taken, only that, if I regard P as false, I cannot, at the same time, assent
to P – unless I am irrational.
Gentile’s advocacy of this uncontroversial commitment is obscured by
his highly tensed and indexed presentation.368 Here is a simple descrip-
tion of events involving some person S who recognizes that her belief
that P is false, and so disclaims P:
S first believes that P, which is equivalent to believing that P is true;

upon believing Q, S now believes that P is false, which is equivalent to believ-
ing that P is not true (though not to not believing that P).
Here is how Gentile might describe the same events, where the ‘thinks-
true’ relation captures believing some proposition, and the ‘thinks-
about’ relation captures merely entertaining it:
S thinks-true P at t1;
S thinks-true Q at t2;
S’s thinking-true Q at t2 is equivalent to its not being the case that S thinks-
true P at t2, though S may think-about P at t2.
Notice that neither account concerns the truth of P; rather, each is

concerned just to make it clear that a subject S cannot both (explicitly)
believe that P and also (explicitly) disclaim P as her belief and as a belief
to the effect that P is true.
With this clarification of the possibility of error, recall that Gentile
contrasts his dialectical principle,
A = ¬A,
with those of identity and contradiction,
A=A
and
A ∨ ¬A,
135
which are abstractions that cannot be rules of thought. Such false princi-
ples abstract away from the unity of the actual, depicting the world as con-
sisting of particulars that oppose one another and rule one another out,
thus giving birth to life’s conflicts – ‘between man and nature, life and
death, idea and reality, pleasure and pain, science and mystery, good and
evil and so on.’ If these principles are applied to thinking itself, philoso-
phers may be tempted to regard the associated oppositions as conceptual
or metaphysical, which may produce such results as Kant’s antinomies.369
Since the ‘logic of identity,’ to use Gentile’s phrase, requires opposites
to exclude one another, we must choose either being or non-being and
must therefore profess either dualism or monism, both of them leading
to unsolvable antinomies. The logic of dialectic, by contrast, tells us that
‘truth is not of the being that is but of the being that annuls itself and, by
annulling itself, really is’: the dialectical principle expresses the activity
of actual thinking as thought that posits itself by negating itself. Hence,
when we see how affirming thought as concrete negates it as abstract,
we understand how the dialectical affirmation of any opposite, which, in
the logic of identity, excludes a corresponding opposite, is, dialectically,
just the negation of that other opposite, and vice versa. Accordingly, to
affirm happiness, goodness, and understanding in actual concrete think-
ing is to negate pain, evil, and error.370
Such negations are made possible by transforming the thinking of
pain, evil, error, and so on into thoughts – thoughts that are no longer
one’s own, thoughts which, qua thoughts, are not thinking and thus are
not real. In Gentile’s system, knowing a truth is getting rid of an error;
doing actual good is moving beyond evil; and pleasure is leaving pain
behind. Once pain, evil, and error have become mere thoughts, they
are no longer one’s own thinking and have ceased to be real. They are
the dead past that we can no longer think because the past is not actual,
because it is not
where being is not already but comes to be … where to know is to learn

and, even if we already know, to learn anew; where the good is not what has
been done and already exists but what has not been done… where joy is not
what we have but what blossoms from its contrary… where, in a word, the
Spirit burns eternal, flashing and gleaming in the blaze as it consumes all
the heavy slag, dead and inert … Wisdom is ignorance there, good is evil,
joy is pain, conquest is toil, peace is war, and the Spirit is nature that makes
itself spirit.371
136
This nonsense is too bombastic to be as frightening as ‘the three slogans

on the white face of the Ministry of Truth:
War Is Peace
Freedom Is Slavery
Ignorance Is Strength.’
But its author surely had some responsibility for what others in Fascist
Italy may have extracted from his rhapsodies on actualism.372
Absolutely actual concrete thinking just is thinking and must neces-
sarily be thinking – a necessity, Gentile argues, that also makes actual
thinking universal. He is careful to distinguish this universal character of
thinking from the universals that are mere elements of abstract thought,
and, as such, are not actual. Obviously, actual thinking affirms itself as
universal not by thinking about particulars, even particular thoughts, but
by thinking thoughts simpliciter. And the subject that actually thinks can-
not be the empirical I, the I formed abstractly as against the not-I, against
the other things and other subjects that must be thought about just in
order to conceive of an empirical I. That I negates itself in opposition to
the not-I that Gentile calls Nature. By contrast, the absolute I, the One I
or the Spirit, negates itself as thinking about either the empirical self or
the manifold instances of the not-I against which the empirical I negates
itself. Because the absolute I is not the empirical I – indeed, because it
negates itself as thinking about the empirical I – true idealism as Gentile
conceives it cannot be charged with solipsism: it is only the empirical I –
the one that is not actual because it is abstract – that is abstractable from
others and thus conceivable as a singular I.
The empirical I is also part of Gentile’s Nature, the abstract reality that
is thinking in abstract rather than concrete objectivity. This Nature is
thought, but under principles of individuation that destroy the unity of
actual concrete thinking. Because Nature is what is governed by the prin-
ciples of identity and contradiction, these cannot be rules of thinking,
which Nature negates. Being governed by such principles makes Nature
manifold and not a unity, and since Nature is subject to causal laws, we
think about the natural manifold deterministically, as a mechanism.
Actual concrete thinking, on the other hand, is free. The only possible
limit on thinking is Nature itself, but since Nature is a mere abstraction,
its natural determinism is just an accident of an abstraction. By contrast,
thinking itself is necessary and necessarily free – never bound by the
137
determinations introduced into Nature by abstraction from actual think-

ing towards a manifold of particular thoughts.373
Gentile’s distinction between thinking, or the absolute I, and Nature,
or the empirical I, echoes Kant’s distinction in the Third Antinomy
between the intelligible and empirical characters. Kant recognizes that
from the standpoint of empirical psychology, human action is explained
exhaustively in causal terms. Actions thus explained belong to the empir-
ical character, located in space and time and subject to nature’s causal
determinism: ‘If we could explore all appearances of his power of choice
down to the bottom,’ says Kant, ‘there would not be a single human
action that we could not with certainty predict and cognize as necessary
from its preceding conditions.’ From the standpoint of transcendental
psychology, however, human action is explained by reasons, not causes.
Such actions are attributed to the intelligible character, not located in
space or time, and they exhibit a negative freedom of spontaneity – free-
dom from the determinations of natural causality.374
The spontaneity of the intelligible character mirrors the spontaneity of
the understanding; just as representations formed by the understanding
are underdetermined by what is presented in mere receptivity, so too are
the effects of the intelligible character underdetermined by the series
of events preceding these effects. Gentile clearly draws upon the Kan-
tian conception of the activity of the understanding and reason as crea-
tive and spontaneous. He also draws upon the equally Kantian contrast
between the active, creative force of reasons and the passive sequence of
events determined in space and time according to natural causality. Gen-
tile’s actual thinking is a pure act not located in space or time. In particu-
lar, thinking does not happen as events happen in Nature – in keeping
with the abstraction that treats thinking as a manifold of thoughts, as
empirical particulars temporally sequenced. Rather, the act of thinking
is eternal in that it is not in time – in that no instants of time precede or
follow thinking. While we may treat thinking abstractly (and mistakenly)
as a temporal sequence of thoughts, actual thinking is eternally in the
present. To illustrate the difference between thoughts and actual con-
crete thinking, Gentile uses an analogy: temporal thought is like reading
a series of facts in a book; actual thinking is like understanding the book
as a whole.375
Gentile maintains that his distinction between Nature and thinking
resolves Kant’s antinomies. Nature is finite and complex because abstrac-
tion treats it as a manifold of particulars. The principles that govern
Nature’s manifold relations – including the principles of causality and
138
non-contradiction – are deterministic and individuating, but the deter-

minism and individuation are themselves accidental features introduced
by abstraction. The distinction between Nature and thinking is the dis-
tinction between facts and the pure act of thinking. All activity belongs
to the Spirit, and the Spirit’s eternal act just is thinking. The will itself,
whose activity is merely practical, is part of the world of facts. In order for
the will to determine Nature, some thinking must precede Nature; but
once that that thinking precedes Nature, then what determines Nature
is not thinking but what has already been thought. The empirical I may
entertain that thought by thinking about it, but the absolute I thinks
only by actual thinking – only by negating the abstract objectivity of the
thought that it affirms. Such thinking is a pure, unified, and eternal act,
distinct from the practical activity whereby the will determines Nature.
From the standpoint of Nature, activity is the mere behaviour of
individuals in space and time, and those behaviours are mere events
determined by the causal-mechanical laws that rule all natural events.
From the standpoint of Nature, free action is not just impossible, it is
unintelligible:
‘Man is not free insofar as he is treated and pictured as part of nature, a

being who occupies a certain space for a certain time, who was born and will
die, limited in every direction … Insofar as he moves in this structure … he
comes to suspect that his own freedom is just an illusion, that he can really
do nothing to master the world nor even understand it.’376
Far from promoting the pessimism thus suggested by the standpoint of

Nature, Gentile holds that the despair itself leads the Spirit once again to
the actual thinking that is its freedom. Because the standpoint of Nature
enforces the dismal verdict that freedom is impossible, the I is forced to
think this judgment actually, and not just think about it: in doing so, the I
treats its own thinking as having the authority than can only be had by a
being whose thinking is actually free – a being with liberty.
According to Gentile, the Spirit’s eternal act of thinking has an object,
but its object is not a thought: the eternal act of Spirit takes the Spirit
itself as its object. In other words, the pure eternal act of the absolute I
is, in contemporary terms, intentional or representational: it is an act in
virtue of which the absolute I is conscious of something. It is also reflex-
ive: that of which the absolute I is conscious in the act of thinking is the
absolute I. Thinking thus consists in the absolute I’s consciousness of
itself. But this self-consciousness is active rather than passive: the act of
139
self-consciousness is a self-creation – an autoctisi, in Gentile’s terminolo-

gy. By making a thought its own, by affirming it as concrete and negating
it as abstract, the absolute I asserts its own thinking as its own, and thus it
asserts itself by making its thinking actual. The negated thoughts are no
longer its own, which explains why the absolute I endures: its enduring
is tied to its actual thinking rather than to particular thoughts, which,
when not affirmed as concrete and actual by the I, are not its own.377
Individuality itself is as much a part of Nature as the principles that
govern the events into which individuals enter; just as practical activity
must be distinguished from purely actual activity, and just as the empiri-
cal I must be distinguished from the absolute I, so too, says Gentile, must
empirical humanity be distinguished from what (in later versions) he
calls ‘deep humanity.’ Deep humanity is that in us by which we recognize
that our individuality is a mere abstraction and not actual – that by which
we are able to recognize ourselves in and through the world, and in and
through others, by an act of self-consciousness.378
Just as we must distinguish empirical humanity from deep human-
ity, so must we also distinguish empirical Nature from ‘real primordial
nature … before it becomes what we schematize in space and time.’
This real primordial nature is grounded in our bodies. It is in a body
that we first make self-consciousness itself an object of self-conscious
thought. Exteroceptive, interoceptive, and proprioceptive bodily sensa-
tions are the immediate and direct objects of the sensing by which I form
a mediated, indirect, and irreducibly first-person sensory consciousness
of properties of external things as distal, sensed parts of a larger body
of which I am the centre. Just as, in thinking, the Spirit is actual in an
eternal present, so also, in experiencing, is it actual in an omnipresent
centre: ‘my body … is a centre with infinite circumference. It is a living
component of a living organism, which is present and active and comes
to have sensation in each of its components.’ My understanding primor-
dial nature is my becoming ever more conscious of myself by becoming
sensitive, in conscious thought, of myself as the centre of a whole, sens-
ing, self-conscious bodily universe.379
Because the I makes itself actual by thinking itself, Gentile calls his phi-
losophy ‘actualism,’ and he achieves it by a ‘method of absolute imma-
nence’ that recognizes the ‘irreducible subjectivity of reality.’ Individuals
are creatures of Nature – abstract, non-actual, transcendent products of
abstraction. By contrast, the absolute I – the Spirit or Being – is a pure,
experiential, and creative act of thinking in which the object and subject
of experience are ‘indissolubly conjoined.’ Only this immanent act of
140
thinking is real and actual. If Nature is intelligible at all, it is intelligible

only derivatively from the concrete self-understanding that is the act of
the absolute I, from which Nature is abstracted. For this reason, Gen-
tile regards the Aristotelian act (energeia), the Platonic Idea, and other
metaphysically transcendent notions as capturing only the abstract logos
rather than the concrete logos that the Spirit actually is. As actual think-
ing, the I cannot be identified, analysed, or understood otherwise than
in terms of its self-understanding. ‘The I is not a soul-substance. It is
not a thing, not the noblest of things. It is everything because it is not
nothing.’380
Finally, Gentile uses the dialectic of thinking to draw conclusions
about history and philosophy. In historical and philosophical thinking
he discerns two unified moments: the actuality of thinking; and the
reflexive consciousness of thinking. The reflexive moment overcomes
the actual moment, however, because the Spirit (or Being or thinking) is
actual only insofar as it is conscious of the Spirit (or Being or thinking).
True history, then, is present history – a history that makes itself present
by reflecting on itself. But this present history is philosophy, and so phi-
losophy overcomes history. The past as past, on the other hand, is to be
understood merely as ‘empirical determinations of history shattered in
space and time.’ Gentile identifies actual history as consciousness itself:
real history reflects present problems, concerns, and interests by repre-
senting the past. Actual history is of present intellectual life because it is
actual – thinking rather than a record of thoughts. Unlike the dead past,
actual history – the history that is present – is progressive, because, as
thinking, it is self-creating and thus is always coming to be. The progress
made in the actual and historical present is ‘an ever more acute and
careful consciousness of self.’381
141
24
Manifestos
(Croce and Gentile)
In 1914 the idealist Gentile succeeded the idealist Jaja at the Faculty of
Letters in Pisa. Gentile was still doing the work that produced his major
statements on actualism, and four years later he was called to a chair in
Rome when Barzellotti died. There he made two crucial decisions: first,
to start his own journal as the official organ of actualism – and competi-
tion for Critica – the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana; second, to accept
appointment as the Director of Public Education for the Commune of
Rome. During this period he wrote extensively on the most contentious
issue in Italian politics: the recent war and its effects on Italy. Unsurpris-
ingly, he and Croce often disagreed about the war, as by then they disa-
greed about many things.382
Croce himself had long been involved in politics and government,
sometimes in the same debates on education that helped make Gen-
tile famous, though increasingly not on Gentile’s side. Croce’s political
experience, and his great distinction as a voice of high culture, led to his
appointment as Minister of Public Instruction in 1920 in the last Giolitti
government. He made proposals for national educational reform, only
to resign in 1921 when Giolitti lost his majority.383 Shortly afterward,
when Mussolini came to power in 1922, Gentile had remarkable success
in the same office that Croce vacated. He was Minister of Public Instruc-
tion under Mussolini for nearly two years, and the result was the famous
‘Gentile Reform’ whose effects are still felt in Italy today. Although he
held this post only for a short time, other top appointments followed:
the national Senate, the Fascist Grand Council, the presidency of the
Fascist Institute of Culture, commissions on constitutional reform, the
academic directorship of the Enciclopedia Italiana, the directorship of the
Scuola Normale, and so on. Until the early 30s, Gentile was intensely
Manifestos (Croce and Gentile)
and effectively involved in party and governmental affairs, and even later
he never stopped overseeing cultural projects. As late as 1943, the year
before his assassination, he accepted the presidency of the Italian Acad-
emy when Mussolini offered it.384
Croce’s fortunes during the same period were very different. At first
he thought of the Fascists as disorganized, ineffective, but well-meaning
patriots. While declining any appointment by the regime and declaring
himself a liberal, he defended Gentile’s educational reform. Even after
a notorious political murder in 1924, he voted for Mussolini in the Sen-
ate. His full public breach with the Fascists – and with Gentile – came in
1925, as author of the ‘Reply by Italian Authors, Professors and Journal-
ists,’ written in response to the ‘Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals’
published on 21 April of that year – the birthday of the city of Rome,
capital of Mussolini’s new Empire.385
Gentile’s ‘Manifesto’ was the product of a Conference for Fascist
Culture held in Bologna a few weeks earlier to show that the Party was
not just a club for ignorant criminals: a few hundred pliable intellectu-
als, journalists, and artists were assembled in Bologna to acclaim this
thesis. Then Gentile produced the keynote document, which gathered
signatures from figures as respected as Filippo Marinetti, Luigi Piran-
dello, and Gioacchino Volpe. Giovanni Amendola, the liberal editor of Il
Mondo, persuaded Croce to write a counter-manifesto, signed by Rodolfo
Mondolfo, Luigi Einaudi, Guido De Ruggiero, and other leading intel-
lectuals, which appeared on the following May Day.386
Gentile was bitter about Croce’s response for years, but the conse-
quences for Croce were very much harsher, starting with vicious attacks
in the Fascist press, intrusive police surveillance, exclusion from official
academic organizations, and suppression of his writings. In 1926, when
Croce’s house in Naples was vandalized at night, the international outcry
was loud. Amendola, whose idea it was to put out a counter-manifesto,
died as a victim of Fascist brutality in the same year; what saved Croce’s
life may have been his international fame and the worldwide support
that came with it. Despite the danger, he continued to fight the regime
in the pages of Critica, while also producing his most celebrated works of
history and thus making the case for liberalism.387
Croce’s ‘Reply’ of 1925 is also a defense of liberalism; it assails the Fas-
cist violence that Gentile’s ‘Manifesto’ glorifies. Hegelians, as Bertrand
Russell remarked, ‘love a synthesis,’ so it is no surprise that Gentile starts
by giving himself a contradiction to resolve: as a ‘movement of the Italian
spirit,’ Fascism is both novel and ancient, we are told, although the rest
143
of the document sticks mainly to current affairs. Since the Fascist Party
was a young organization with a brief but troubled record to defend,
Gentile had no choice but to focus on the present.388
Undoubtedly, the greatest cataclysm of the recent past was the First
World War, and Gentile explains Fascism as a response to mistakes made
by other parties and politicians in assessing the war’s consequences.
Because the catastrophe of the war and its aftermath was essentially
moral, not material, Italy’s leaders were wrong to see it from ‘a petty
individualist and utilitarian point of view,’ behaving as if there were some
‘tally of sacrifices’ by which to calculate the compensation due to each
single person. Corrupt and selfish individualism of this kind falsely pits
the citizen against the state.389 As a moral movement, Fascism makes
no such concessions to individualism. It has been ‘a gymnasium of self-
denial, as it campaigned for the sacrifice of the individual to an idea.’
Indeed, Fascism is a religion, and, in Gentile’s view, the religious charac-
ter of the new party explains the intransigence of its struggle against the
old liberal state, its main opponent. Unlike the heroic ideology of the
Risorgimento, the liberalism of the most recent Italian government is
agnostic, acquiescent, mechanical, and merely external. Such liberalism
is no match for a Fascism which, in the tradition of Mazzini’s Young Italy,
is a ‘party of the young’ representing ‘the faith of all Italians.’ This faith
ripened in the trenches and in a deep rethinking of the sacrifice offered

on the battlefields … a faith of energy and violence, disinclined to respect
anything that opposed the life and greatness of the fatherland. Thus arose
the movement of squadrons – young people, resolute, armed, wearing the
black shirt and organized militarily, opposing the law in order to set up a
new law.390
At first, people were amazed by the new party; then they came to admire
it; finally their acclaim was unanimous. And popular support now grows
stronger and stronger, Gentile declares, because moral, social, and finan-
cial order have been restored. The lawbreaking has stopped because Fas-
cism has given the state the discipline needed to make the laws that the
people really need. This work goes on in a ‘perfect public order’ which
is the envy of foreign nations. Meanwhile, for all Italians the fatherland
of the Fascist is
… a school for the subordination of the particular and inferior to the uni-
versal and immortal. It is respect for law and discipline. It is liberty … won
144
Manifestos (Croce and Gentile)
through law, liberty established by renouncing all petty willfulness and

wasteful, irrational ambition. It is an austere conception of life and a reli-
gious gravity.391
Despite the false charges against it, however, Fascism is not reactionary,
certainly no enemy of the workers, and not even of genuine liberals. Its
real opponent is the old political machinery whose lies about democracy
and universal suffrage sold the people out to professional office-seek-
ers. Far from giving up on constitutional government, Fascism makes it
stronger. Then why the complaints about eliminating civil liberties, espe-
cially freedom of the press? There is really no question of principle here,
says the ‘Manifesto.’ One need only examine the hard facts that forced
the state to silence the seditious literature that disrupted public order,
thus depriving citizens of the ‘guarantee of a law that truly expresses
their real, organic, concrete will.’392
The duplicity of false liberals shows that word ‘liberty’ itself is ‘entirely
elastic.’ Since most ordinary Italians know this, they simply ignore the
opposition groups: the ‘Manifesto’ transmutes this political quietism
into a paradoxical endorsement of an activist politics intent on ‘driving
forward.’ As their old silent majority withers away, the democrats, radi-
cals, and Masons will go the way of all political flesh, macerated in the
jaws of the dialectic. Since they have no real ideal of their own with which
to oppose Fascism, only a lower ideal, history’s unforgiving law will liqui-
date them. Were there any principled opposition to Fascism, a genuine
opponent armed with it would be an antithesis to the party’s thesis, and
in a higher synthesis both would be overcome. As things stand in 1925,
however, ‘when one of two principles is lower and the other higher …
the first must necessarily succumb,’ and Fascism will triumph alone until
the cunning of history produces a real opposite for it.
Although Gentile’s ‘Manifesto’ lacks the clockwork rationalism of his
philosophical writing, the theory at the core of the special pleading is
dialectical and hence philosophical, obviously not meant for the ordi-
nary citizens whom the document writes off as passive. Gentile’s elitist
message was for Italian intellectuals who lived in a world of books, ideas,
and culture, but there is really not much in it to appeal to them, and a
good deal to put them off: sentimentalism, religiosity, romantic violence,
and not a little dishonesty. Even in 1925, and especially among intellec-
tuals, the nearly unanimous support for Fascism claimed by Gentile was
less than that, as he certainly understood. He also knew that the thug-
gery had not stopped and that public order was far from perfect. But did
145
he realize how frightening his rigid idealism must be to the individuals in

his audience, to intellectuals who could read his ‘Manifesto’ only one at
a time? ‘The point,’ Gentile concluded, ‘is no longer to count and weigh
each single person but to look … to the idea.’393
Croce, who had matured as an idealist in Gentile’s company, did not
yet object to that chilling abstraction. The main grievance of his counter-
manifesto is that the Fascists, with Gentile as their spokesman, have set
themselves up as a religion. And most of Croce’s case against that fakery
is just eloquent name-calling, though in a good cause – a barrage of
hard words that would leave pebbles in Gentile’s shoes for many years:
‘half-baked schoolwork … ill-spun arguments … facile and fevered rhet-
oric … manipulations of history … wordy … bizarre and incoherent …
demagoguery.’394
Like Gentile, Croce starts on a familiar note by insisting on a distinc-
tion: although politics is a right and a duty for intellectuals, their only
distinctive calling, as intellectuals, is ‘research and criticism.’ If, as Gen-
tile’s program would require, they breach the boundaries between their
proper work and other fields of human action, the result will be contami-
nation, and the infection will be fatal if they themselves become agents
of the violence and oppression which it is their duty to criticize. What
the Fascists have given Italy is chaos, which, in an outrageous violation of
the principle of distinction, Gentile calls a religion. But ‘this chaotic and
incomprehensible religion,’ Croce argues, can never replace the older
faith that inspired the Risorgimento, the faith that still stirs liberals to
extend the founding ideals of the Italian nation to more and more peo-
ple in a vigorous civil society.395
146
25
Common Sense and Good Sense
(Gramsci I)
In 1926, the year when Amendola died of his injuries and Croce’s house
was attacked, the Fascists arrested another prominent member of the
Italian legislature, Antonio Gramsci, who had been general secretary of
the Italian Communist Party (PCI) since 1924. By the time Gramsci was
‘conditionally’ released in 1934, his health was so bad that he could not
leave the hospital, where he died in 1937 at the age of 46. He was born
in Sardinia in 1891 in a middle-class family, but he had to go to work in
his teens because his father got into political trouble and ended up in
prison. After school in Sardinia and early contacts through his brother
with the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), he won a scholarship to the Uni-
versity of Torino in 1911, where he studied philosophy and linguistics
but did not finish a degree. Instead, he became a professional journal-
ist, writing for the socialist press, supporting the Russian Revolution of
1917, rising through the ranks of the PSI hierarchy in Torino and even-
tually splitting with the Socialists to help form the PCI.
When Mussolini came to power in 1922, Gramsci was in Moscow,
where he made contacts with the Soviet leadership and also met his wife,
Giulia Schucht. Giulia moved to Rome after her husband’s arrest there,
but he never saw her again after she returned to Russia in the same year.
He grew very close to her sister Tania, however, who followed Gramsci
around Italy as he was taken by his jailers from city to city, facing a sen-
tence of more than twenty years. The only concession was that he was
allowed to read, though not at first to take notes. Eventually he wrote
abundantly, the main product being the Prison Notebooks, which in the
Italian edition fill nearly 2,400 pages. After Gramsci died, Tania had the
twenty-nine notebooks sent to Moscow. Once they were published in
Italy after the Second World War, in six installments between 1948 and
1951, their influence on Italian politics and culture was immense.396
Gramsci’s ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ comes from the eleventh note-

book compiled in 1932−3. It is a series of notes, part of a huge corpus of
unfinished texts that Gramsci had no chance to put into final form. Its
purpose is clear, however: to teach intellectuals on the left how to talk to
uneducated people about moral reasons for making political choices. If
we describe it with words from Gramsci’s own lexicon, the ‘Introduction’
is about achieving the unity of theory and practice, which, in his view,
had always eluded professional philosophers as well as the workers.397
All philosophies, by the nature of the enterprise, will aim at a monop-
oly of truth: Gramsci extends that aim to his own philosophy of praxis,
with the proviso that its method of finding the truth must be critical
and self-critical. Criticism reveals that traditional speculative thought is
a phase of philosophy, not its essence; that the philosophy of praxis is
as close as humans can get to the truth; and that the origins of that phi-
losophy are Hegelian. By ‘philosophy’ Gramsci means a coherent and
formally expressed framework of thought, not just an attitude or a vague
world view. And philosophy is ‘good sense,’ not just ‘common sense.’ In
fact, Gramsci’s prime directive for philosophical progress is that it must
begin with a critique of common sense – meaning not basic wisdom or
ordinary prudence but the understanding, more or less defective, that
any group of people has in common. Good sense will be the product of
a philosophical critique of common sense.398
Gramsci offers several typologies of philosophy. His main distinction
is between the philosophy of praxis, which is the philosophy that can
accomplish a critique of common sense, and all others, which cannot.
Another difference is between everyman’s spontaneous philosophizing
and the expensive, delicate ships of reason assembled by the experts. But
the division of philosophy that is most productive for his ‘Introduction’
has three parts: receptive, regulative, and creative. Receptive philosophy
is entirely passive and simply takes the world as given. Regulative philoso-
phy is much the same, except that it permits thought to become active
and thus changes the world to some extent. It is only in creative philoso-
phy, however, that thinking really makes the world. And solipsism is the
great risk of absolute creativity. Until the age of ‘classical German phi-
losophy,’ all the traditional systems were receptive or regulative. Creative
thought arrived only with Kant and Hegel, and it is Hegel whom Gramsci
names as the ancestor of his philosophy of praxis, which he means to be
not only creative but also an improvement on other such systems since
Marx’s time.399
Gramsci defines his system both positively and negatively. On the neg-
148
Common Sense and Good Sense (Gramsci I)
ative side his main opponents are Gentile, Croce, and Nikolai Bukharin.
In the new Soviet Union of 1921, Bukharin had published The Theory
of Historical Materialism: A People’s Manual of Sociology. Gramsci charged
that this guidebook for revolutionaries, despite its impeccable commu-
nist pedigree, gave the masses bad guidance. As he was criticizing the
Manual, Josef Stalin was on his way to power in the international com-
munist movement, so it is no surprise that Gramsci’s inclination to speak
truth to power, even on the left, later got him into trouble with his jailed
comrades: his offense was to reject their prophecy that Fascism was about
to fall in 1930 and usher in the revolutionary millennium. In and out of
jail, his disagreements with Croce and Gentile were less personal, and
also more predictable.400
Gentile and Labriola, who had both written about praxis, were disap-
pointments to Gramsci, especially as followers of Spaventa, who had not
been guilty of the ‘vulgar evolutionism’ of the two later thinkers – their
extraction of an ontogeny of culture from its phylogeny: since all of us
have ancestors who were slaves, the story goes, slavery is a stage through
which all peoples must pass. Gramsci detects political interests behind
such theorizing. A concession that had to be made in order to secure
Gentile’s educational policy, for instance, was the teaching of religion in
state primary schools. Accordingly, Gentile’s declaration that religion is
good for the people is less than high-minded, just another cynical excuse
to keep them away from real education. In broader terms, ‘the histori-
cism of Labriola and Gentile is … the historicism of lawyers who say that
the knout is not a knout when the knout is “historical’’’ – when arbitrary
violence is justified on the grounds of custom and tradition.401
Taken as a whole, Gramsci’s view of Labriola is less harsh than these
words suggest: his own ideas about praxis owed a great deal to Labriola
as a reader of Marx and Engels. But Gramsci is never impressed by Gen-
tile’s austere abstractions, where ‘wit and polished phrases substitute for
thinking’ and ambiguous language is a cover for ‘ideological opportun-
ism.’ He even prefers the shopworn syllogisms of the neo-scholastics to
‘the banal sophisms of … actual idealism,’ a system that he describes
as ‘completely contrary to common sense,’ despite Gentile’s claims to
speak straightforwardly to the man on the street. Understanding Gen-
tile’s enormous power as commissar of Fascist culture, Gramsci holds
him responsible for ‘an environment of louche culture in which all cats
are grey, religion embraces atheism, [and] immanence flirts with tran-
scendence … If Gentile’s words meant what they say … actual idealism
would have become ‘the manservant of theology.’’402
149
Gramsci diagnoses Gentile’s errors as naïve extrapolations from Croce,

for whom he has more respect, although Croce’s treatment of common
sense is no more satisfactory to him than Gentile’s. Croce’s account of
knowing as doing, taken from Vico, seems promising as an approach to
praxis, but it is just a tautology since he identifies all doing with knowing.
Gramsci is particularly struck by an exclamatory passage of the ‘Philoso-
phy of Hegel,’ where Croce describes Engels as a character in the ‘sad
story of the dialectical method among Hegel’s students’ who had ‘liqui-
dated philosophy by reducing it to the positive sciences, salvaging only
its “doctrine of thought and some of its laws, formal logic (!) and the
dialectic.”’ Croce’s surprise is hypocritical, says Gramsci, because his own
theory of opposition and distinction is just another abstract formalism.403
Although Croce’s brand of idealism may be an advance on scholastic
logic, Gramsci asks whether it is not just a technique – not a philosophy
at all, just a propaedeutic to philosophy. In the latter case, ‘the technique
of thinking … will surely not create great philosophers, but it will pro-
vide criteria of judgment and verification and will correct deformities in
the way that common sense thinks.’ There was something to be said for
Croce’s distinctions, in other words, as ways to detect the ‘deformities’
imposed on common sense by positivism, determinism, crude histori-
cism, and abstract formalism.404
Having read Russell’s Problems of Philosophy in Italian translation,
Gramsci associates that famous book with the last of these mistakes: the
attempt to levitate thinking out of its historical matrix. Reading Gramsci
on Russell, one senses ships passing in the night, and if Russell could
have read Gramsci during this period, the encounter would probably
have been no different. The general case of Russell’s error is what Gram-
sci calls ‘philosophical esperantism,’ a primitive instinct that ends up
concocting artificial languages: like primitives, we moderns still regard
ourselves as ‘the humans,’ thinking of all others as ‘babblers’ or barbar-
ians because everything about them, even their speech, is deranged; the
absurd esperantist remedy is to devise an über-language that will permit
everyone else to parse one’s own enlightened sentences.405
Contrary instincts and contrary mistakes impair Bukharin’s Manual,
which Gramsci read in French and whose author he had met in Russia.
Bukharin goes wrong by enshrining common sense as a special preserve
of working people, whom he sees as having no truck at all with high-
falutin intellectuals. To sell the people short in this way only ties them
to their superstitions, says Gramsci, and the so-called ‘sociology’ that
Bukharin offers them is neither historical nor dialectical nor reflectively
150
Common Sense and Good Sense (Gramsci I)
philosophical, just a crude materialism unconscious of its own metaphys-

ics. When Bukharin claims that a society is more than the sum of its parts,
for example, he is thinking about the way that a hundred cows make a
herd, ignoring the deeper collective relation that arises in a workforce or
a whole society. By thus missing Hegel’s point about quantity and quality,
the People’s Manual ends up hypostasizing matter as quantity, just as the
idealists hypostasize quality as the Spirit and the actualists do the same
with the State – another case of history repeating itself as farce, accord-
ing to Gramsci.406
The way out of all such blind alleys starts with a critique of common
sense, which must be conceived more carefully than it was by Gentile
or Croce. The ingredients for criticism are to be found not only in a
reformed Marxist doctrine but also in a careful study of language, where
the elements of common sense are made manifest. Such a study will be
concrete and historical, however, not a reduction of language to logical
form – an Esperanto for the clerisy. As criticism progresses, its pedagogic
method will be constant repetition of the critical thinking that can raise
the uneducated to higher intellectual levels and thereby spread a sound
philosophy of praxis to the masses.407
In faith and religion the people already have access to uncritical popu-
lar philosophizing, and the systematic philosophies of intellectuals also
influence them indirectly as instruments of control by the ruling class.
The task of criticism is to see these raw materials for what they are and
convert them into a philosophy of praxis. Common sense, where the
change must start, is not yet the good sense that will come out of this
transformation: it is chaotic, fragmented, primitive, superstitious, anach-
ronistic, and conservative. Because it is mistaken and confused, common
sense submits itself uncritically to the experts who serve the rulers. Per-
haps its worst confusion – evident in the People’s Manual – is to insist that
theory is always accessory to practice, which precludes an effective unity
of theory and practice.408
The makings of that unity are already there in common sense. But
because popular common sense is passive, the people accept theories
invented by priests and intellectuals to keep them subordinate, though
such theories never make a coherent whole even when some of them are
correct. Critical consciousness of this predicament becomes possible for
workers only when they form a ‘national-popular’ grouping no longer
limited to narrower ‘economic-corporate’ interests. That step towards
a richer culture gives the people access to the critical, consensual, and
‘hegemonic’ class-consciousness that turns common sense into good
151
sense, puts the proletariat in a position of leadership, and unifies theory

with practice in a genuine philosophy of praxis.409
Without that unity, Gramsci argues, the philosophy of praxis will
always be incomplete, and an effective dialectic of theory and practice
can develop only in parallel and productive relations between the masses
and the intellectuals. Leadership must come from the industrial working
class, but the workers can lead through an effective hegemony only if
they actually assimilate – through mutual understanding and criticism
– the culture of those whom they lead: the peasants and the intellectu-
als. Hence, the role of intellectuals is a major topic of the ‘Introduc-
tion,’ where Gramsci’s reflections on the issue are obviously as much
autobiographical as analytic.410 Traditional intellectuals, aloof from the
human world and abstracted in their thinking, must be replaced by ful-
ly integrated intellectuals who work at practical politics. Nonetheless,
Gramsci’s views about intellectuals – given the hard facts of unregener-
ate capitalism – seem oddly elitist at moments, despite his aggressively
democratic politics: uneducated people need to be educated and organ-
ized by intellectuals who are specialist experts made socially effective and
legitimated by political parties. There is even a role for a ‘great man’
whom Carlyle would have recognized:
Working to stimulate intellectual élites of a new kind that emerge directly

from the masses … is what really changes the ideological panorama of an
era, [but] … these élites cannot be constructed and developed unless inside
them there arises a hierarchy of authority and intellectual competence that
can culminate in a great individual philosopher … capable … of reliving the
needs of the mass ideological community [and] … of understanding that
it cannot have the agility of movement possessed by an individual mind.411
If Gramsci dreamed that he might be a great person of that kind, his

dreams were not mistakes.
152
26
The Religion of Liberty
(Croce VI)
Croce began to study the past professionally around the time when
Gramsci was born, starting at home with research on theatre in Naples.
Eventually he made monumental contributions in many genres of his-
torical writing, mainly literary, cultural, and political history, as well as
autobiography. He also theorized about history in works on aesthetics,
historiography, and what must be called – despite Croce’s reservations
and for want of a better term – philosophy of history. The quarter-cen-
tury after the First World War, when Fascism triumphed and declined in
Italy, was the time of his greatest achievement in history and its theory,
which was where he found his voice as Italy’s liberal conscience. These
are the words of an eyewitness, Federico Chabod, speaking of the con-
tinued publication of La Critica after its editor had publicly defied the
regime in the late twenties: ‘the cultural form (meaning a journal of
philosophy, history, and literature) will mask the political content, and
in that way Croce becomes the living banner of the ideals of liberty and
antifascism. The rest is silence.’412
Croce’s most memorable reflections on the past are recorded in
Theory and History of Historiography (1915−17)

Contribution to the Critique of Myself (1918)
History of Italian Historiography (1921)
History of the Kingdom of Naples (1925)
History of Italy from 1871 to 1915 (1928)
History of the Age of the Baroque in Italy (1929)
New Essays on Italian Literature in the Seventeenth Century (1931)
History as Thought and Action (1938)
and, most famously, in the great
History of Europe from 1815 to 1915 (1932).413
Croce dedicated this History to Thomas Mann, the author by that time
of Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain, and also of an
allegorical novella, Mario and the Magician, which attacks Fascism. Before
Mann left Germany in 1933, he had received Croce’s dedication – lines
taken from Dante in the passage where he and Vergil are chased by
demons on their way down to the pit of the hypocrites:
Your thoughts still entered into mine,

ours who act and look alike:
a single choice I’ve made with both our minds.414
Croce had long since made his choice to resist Mussolini while preserv-
ing a position of cultural leadership in Italy. The History of Europe, espe-
cially its opening and closing chapters, is a profession of the liberal faith
for which he risked everything.
The History of Italy that preceded it by four years was even more auda-
cious, from an Italian perspective, because it confronted Mussolini on
the native ground of recent politics. In 1927, the year before Croce’s
book appeared, Gioacchino Volpe, an eminent historian who had signed
the Fascist Manifesto of 1925, published Italy on the Road, a nationalist
celebration of Italian power and progress. Although it was not Croce’s
intent to reply to Volpe, what the Italian public witnessed was a debate
in print between Liberalism and Fascism: Volpe’s book sold 10,000 cop-
ies in several printings, but Croce’s sold four times as many, frustrating
the regime’s efforts at a boycott. While Croce was working on his History
of Europe in 1931, Volpe prefaced a new edition of Italy on the Road with
hostile remarks about him. By the time Croce’s new book was ready early
in 1932, Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany was bringing Fascism onto
the international stage.415
The History of Europe begins after the collapse of another failed empire,
Napoleon’s, when some Europeans who still honoured the ideals of the
Revolution that created the Emperor also remembered its promise of
liberty, though others feared that promise and tried to stifle it. Oppo-
nents of reaction responded with lists of demands: equality before the
law and the rule of law; a written, public constitution; representative gov-
ernment; freedom of speech and association; self-determination; and,
154
The Religion of Liberty (Croce VI)
on a broad front, modernization and rationalization. Different parts

of this sweeping program came to the fore in various places at various
times, but the ideal of liberty was a common property of liberals, and it
was nothing new. ‘Liberty, equality and fraternity’ had been a noble bat-
tle cry of the Revolution until the screams of the Terror and the boots of
Napoleon’s armies drowned out those liberating words. Still, after 1815
and in the face of repression, many still championed the cause of liberty.
Liberals planted their hopes in new concepts of mankind’s place in
history and the universe and in new notions of reality itself. That the
world was the lower creation of a higher God seemed less and less plau-
sible, as science narrowed the ancient divide between matter below and
mind on high. If mind was immanent in the world and not transcendent,
why posit an opposition between reason and history? Indeed, given a
new dialectical idea of history, reason itself could be discovered in his-
tory. ‘History no longer seemed to be deprived of spirituality and given
over to blind forces … but showed itself to be the Spirit’s work and actu-
alization. And since the Spirit is liberty, history is liberty at work.’ The
philosophical master of those insights was Hegel, who, though some of
his views were quite illiberal, defined ‘the Spirit through liberty and lib-
erty through the Spirit.’ According to Croce, there was a theoretical and
a practical side to Hegel’s idealist historicism: ‘the conception of history
as a history of liberty had its necessary and practical complement in lib-
erty itself as a moral ideal.’ Armed with such thoughts, Hegel and his
followers made idealism the philosophical basis of liberal politics and
morality.416
The cultural changes born of liberalism were profound, as Croce
explained:
The grandeur of the modern concept was precisely in its having trans-
formed the meaning of life from the idyllic … or elegiac to the dramatic,
from hedonism … and pessimism to activity and creativity, and this turned
liberty itself into a … continual battle in which a final and defining victory
is impossible.417
Once spirituality was embodied and the body spiritualized, the only ulti-
mate meaning lay in the ever-expanding freedom at which all life aims.
Despite widespread and bitter resistance, liberals kept working towards
that goal, which had to keep changing. In political terms, this meant that
governmental and institutional gains made by liberalism could never
be permanent. ‘Liberal institutions, in the final course of their history,
155
would die as the conditions of their existence went under,’ according to

Croce,
and they would need to be modified or else completely discarded and

replaced. But that is the fate of all human things, which live and die, trans-
forming themselves and acquiring new life or else turning mechanical and
needing to be thrown out. In any event, the agent of those modifications,
adaptations and extinctions will always have been liberty itself.418
Although Croce admired Hegel as the philosopher of this process, in the

end he thought of liberty as a religion, defining religion as having two
components, a ‘concept of reality’ and ‘an ethics that conforms to this
concept.’ The conceptual component that he took from Hegel was ‘his-
torical and dialectical,’ derived mainly from the Phenomenology and the
Philosophy of History. The ethical component, human freedom or liberty,
was what Croce himself discovered as a student of history. The result was
what he called the ‘religion of liberty,’ which is the title of the first chap-
ter of his History of Europe.419
The second chapter describes the four rival faiths that opposed the
religion of liberty: Catholicism, absolutism, democracy, and commu-
nism. The democracy that Croce thought antagonistic to liberalism in
its early days was the Jacobinism that lost its conscience in the Reign of
Terror. Like communism, however, democracy was not yet as much a
threat to liberty as the tyranny of popes and princes. In any case, ‘once
the liberal order was established, each of the ideals – Catholic, absolutist,
democratic, and communist – would have the freedom to speak and pro-
duce propaganda, prohibited only from destroying the liberal order.’420
Were the romantics liberals? When Croce described romanticism not
as opposed to liberalism but as a basis for it, what he had in mind was
the theoretical romanticism that he attributed to Hegel and other think-
ers. Their rejection of academic intellectualism and abstract scientism,
along with their zeal for poetry, emotion, imagination, spontaneity, and
concrete organic life were all romantic instincts on the side of the liberal
ideal. But romanticism as a practice rather than a theory was another
matter – and troublesome. Croce held practical romanticism responsible
for racism, nationalism, aestheticism, sentimentalism, and the cult of evil
and disease as mal du siècle – none of this at all liberal in his view.421
Having described the resistance to the new liberal ideal, Croce tells
the story of its development in three phases. Faith in liberty first gained
credit as absolute monarchy disintegrated in the years leading up to
156
The Religion of Liberty (Croce VI)
1830; then it added strength in a succession of struggles culminating in

the crisis of 1870; and a genuine Age of Liberalism finally emerged after
1870, only to face the much greater cataclysm of 1914. The Europe that
survived the war demanded new forms of government, new states, and
new boundaries, all on the shaky foundations of a depleted culture.422
But the discontinuities between the post-war and pre-war eras were more
apparent than real, as Croce explains in the ‘Epilogue’ to the History of
Europe.
The ‘spiritual conflicts’ that compelled liberty to thrive in the nine-
teenth century persisted in the twentieth, he observes, although nation-
alism, imperialism, and dictatorship had grown cruder and had acquired
new instruments of violence. The ‘disordered movements and … showy,
barren projects’ of intemperate activists gave openings to the new dicta-
tors. The new communism was just as clumsy as the old, now more frag-
mented than ever, and still wedded to the ‘cockeyed, shop-worn sophisms
of … historical materialism.’ An irrationalist and mystical Catholicism
was another refuge for ‘muddled and misbegotten buccaneers of the
Spirit.’423
Those were the facts as Croce saw them in the early thirties, when
Mussolini was at the peak of his power in Italy and Hitler was on the rise
on Germany. Since those were the facts, they had to have a role in the
progress of the Spirit. But what role? Having reflected deeply on the
past, Croce had no illusions about a prophetic ‘history of the future.’
Instead, as a basis for action, he looked to a ‘history of the past recapitu-
lated in the present.’ In that framework, moving towards a future that we
cannot know through a present in which we must act – a present formed
by its past – Croce chose liberty over its familiar enemies.
He could find no evidence for the dogmas of transcendence promul-
gated by the Catholic Church, whose constant habit was to institutional-
ize its fear of criticism. (As if to confirm the diagnosis, the Church that
had become official in Italy with the Lateran Accords of 1929 quickly put
Croce’s new book on the Index). In Russian communism he saw just one
autocracy replacing another, not abolishing the state but aggrandizing it
and destroying culture in the process. The new ‘materialist mysticism’ of
the revolutionaries gave them
the courage to tread underfoot …. religion, thought and poetry, everything

that we revere as sacred, everything that we love as noble … With words,
acts of violence and repressive methods, they have arbitrarily denied but
have not solved … the basic problem of human community, which is that
157
of liberty, the only condition in which human society flourishes and bears
fruit, the only reason for humans to live on earth.
Even though the October Revolution was a necessity of history, its ideo-
logical residue was a pseudo-communism that could only degenerate
and was therefore doomed to fail when exported.424
‘Those who get drunk on action for the sake of action’ worried Croce
more than the communists – a predictable view for an Italian victim of
Italian Fascism. The reflexive violence of thugs like the squadristi was ‘a
fever, and not an ideal,’ and the same verdict applies, by implication, to
the sublimated violence of actualist philosophy. If the worst were full of
passionate intensity in Mussolini’s Italy, those of them who read books
could find cover in a philosophy that put spontaneous, self-constituting
action at the core of reality.425 Croce understands the virtues of the activ-
ist and the revolutionary, who, in the ideal case, ‘always faces up to the
future.’ But he also acknowledges the strength of Catholicism, admiring
the constancy which, in its decadent state, becomes rigidity and reaction.
‘Liberty is the only ideal,’ he concludes,
that has the solidity that Catholicism once had and the flexibility that it
could not have; it is the only ideal that … stands up to criticism and …
constitutes the point where equilibrium always reasserts itself amid society’s
continuing oscillations … Hence, when we hear people asking whether lib-
erty can achieve what they call the future, we must answer that it has some-
thing better – it has eternity.426
Although liberty is secure only sub specie aeternitatis, Croce nonetheless

speculates on its contingent future in a post-nationalist Europe. He imag-
ines a Europe liberated from her constituent nation-states and moving
on from the political battles of the nineteenth century to long-delayed
debates about society and economics. Since Croce’s roots grew deep in
his native Italian soil, these hopes for a transnational order make an
odd ending for his most important book. But he is a writer who often
surprises his readers.427
158
27
Philosophy in Prison
(Gramsci II)
By 1931, when some of Croce’s History was already in print, Gramsci

had been in custody for five years and his health, always precarious, had
collapsed. But he had constant support from Tania Schucht, his sister-in-
law, and help from others, including Piero Sraffa, a friend and a Cam-
bridge economist. Early in 1932, Sraffa convinced Tania to ask Gramsci
to write about Croce’s History: Sraffa’s purpose was to improve Gramsci’s
health by stimulating his thinking. Gramsci first replied to Tania with
two preliminary questions: from what interests of Croce’s did his History
emerge; and how could his international celebrity be explained?428
For the motives behind the book, Gramsci looked to Croce’s writings
during and after the First World War, his polemics against the ‘French
and Masonic propaganda’ that treated the great conflict as a crusade to
save civilization. Although short-term political gains might be made by
such appeals to popular passions, Croce thought it wrong to universalize
‘religious fanaticism’ and thus impede the cooperation that would be
needed when peace returned. ‘Croce always sees the moment of war in
the moment of peace and the moment of peace in that of war,’ Gramsci
explained, ‘always doing his best to prevent the destruction of … com-
promise.’ The practical consequence of his refusal to cooperate with the
demagogues was that after the war Italian and German intellectuals were
able to communicate again, which in Gramsci’s opinion was a great boon
to Italy and also helped Croce’s political career – though it did not stop
the hatred that caused the war.429
Gramsci’s judgments about Croce are acute and forceful when he
takes up his second question about the older man’s fame, his ‘élite world
audience’ and his sense of himself as an intellectual leader: he is ‘the
greatest writer of Italian … since Manzoni … in the domain of learned
prose.’ The simple and powerful language of his brief essays on pressing
public issues is never pedantic, which makes his ideas accessible to an
enormous audience – as Galileo’s had been. Like Goethe’s style as well,
Croce’s matches his personality in its
serenity, order and unshakable confidence. As so many people lose their

heads, wavering among apocalyptic feelings of intellectual panic, Croce,
with his steadfast certainty that evil cannot prevail metaphysically and that
history is rationality, becomes a point of reference for acquiring inner
strength.
As a result, Croce’s views circulate without his name attached to them:

they are ‘absorbed as good sense and common sense’ into the general
stock of ideas. Uneducated people who know nothing about Croce thus
become his followers.430
Despite his admiration for Croce’s writing and his character, Gramsci
finds a flaw in his thinking: revisionism. By this he means Croce’s sup-
port for such attacks on orthodox Marxism and Hegelian philosophy
as those by Eduard Bernstein and Georges Sorel just before the turn of
the century. Croce still identifies himself with this early position, says
Gramsci, who links it with Croce’s current views on the ‘theory of his-
tory as ethical-political’ and with the History of Europe as the expression
of that theory.431 When Croce claims a ‘liquidating effect’ for his theory,
his point (according to Gramsci) is that it simply eliminates the philoso-
phy of praxis. Gramsci denied this, of course, while locating the core
of Croce’s position in ‘the moment of hegemony, consensus and cultural
direction [as distinct from] … the moment of force, compulsion and
intervention by the legislature and the state or the police.’ This is the
essence of Croce’s concept of liberty. Far from being the antithesis of the
philosophy of praxis, this liberalism runs on a parallel course. Liberal
antagonism to state tyranny is the same historical-political hegemony
that recent (and defective) philosophies of praxis have expressed by
rejecting ‘mechanist and fatalist conceptions of economism’ but carry-
ing their criticism no farther.432
If Croce’s history of liberalism were genuinely ethical-political, it
would, like any such account, be compatible with ‘historical materialism
inasmuch as it is the history of the hegemonic moment, while specula-
tive history, like all speculative philosophy, is excluded.’ The trouble is
that Croce’s history is nothing more than speculative: ‘it fully sustains
transcendence and theology while using historicist language’ and fails to
160
Philosophy in Prison (Gramsci II)
achieve the liquidation at which it aims. Unlike David Ricardo on wages

and markets, for example, Croce never comes to grips with concrete eco-
nomics, a failure that prevents him from developing a realist (anti-ideal-
ist) notion of immanence. In the end, he mistakes speculative liberty for
ideological liberty, when it is only the latter that achieves the practical,
moral unity required for effective hegemony.433
Gramsci calls Croce a ‘“priest” of the modern historicist religion,’
explaining that he
lives the thesis and the antithesis of the historical process and insists on
“practical reasons” in the one and in the other because he sees the future in
the present … Priests are the custodians of tomorrow. At bottom, there’s a
good dose of moral cynicism in this ethical-political notion. It’s the current
form of Machiavellianism.434
Those are harsh words, and yet Gramsci never underestimates Croce:
he objects, in fact, to Tania’s remark that Croce has become isolated in
Mussolini’s Italy. On the contrary, Croce has given Gramsci reason to
hope that in the Fascist Fatherland a new ‘transformism’ is at work. What
Gramsci has in mind is not Giolitti’s dreary cycle of fatuous compromises
but a much older practice, going back to the decades of Restoration and
Revolution, when
a small leadership group managed … to absorb into its circle all the political
personnel produced by originally subversive mass movements … Indeed,
even after 1876, the process continues … Absorbing them is difficult and
burdensome, but … Croce’s energy seems to be the most powerful machine
for ‘conforming’ the new forces to the vital interests … of the group domi-
nant today.435
Summing up Croce’s career, Gramsci locates the pivotal moment in

1912 and in his break from Gentile – after Gentile had begun to declare
his philosophical independence. After that time, Croce made his views
clearer but did not change them in any deep way, which means that ‘the
so-called “religion of liberty” is not a discovery of the present years.’
Although Croce’s liberal religion is anti-mystical or even anti-religious –
a secular faith in civilization itself as the vehicle of its own rationality – it
is nonetheless a response to traditional religion, a result of the decision
he had made long before to leave the Catholic Church. Nonetheless,
‘for Croce … every philosophy, insofar as it becomes a … morality, is
161
religion … The origins of this doctrine are already there in Hegel and
Vico … the common heritage of all Italian idealist philosophy.’ Gram-
sci’s verdict, then, is that idealism made this amazingly effective thinker
less effective than he might have been.436
162
28
Still a Strange History
(Bobbio II)
Croce lived to the age of 86. By the time he died in 1952, the Fascist
regime had been gone for nearly a decade, Italy was still recovering from
another calamitous war, and Gramsci’s works had been published. Gen-
tile was assassinated in 1944, and Mussolini met the same fate in 1945.
Three years after Croce’s death, Norberto Bobbio wrote his article on the
cultural politics of idealism, more than half a century after Gentile had
declared idealism reborn. The ‘strange history of European thought,’
the autobiography of Italian idealism during that half-century, had been
a self-deception, according to Bobbio.437 What was the real story? If one’s
perspective is the canonical history of Western philosophy in the anglo-
phone world, the real story was also a strange one.
Between 1687, when Newton published his Principia, and 1781, when
Kant brought out his first Critique, great changes in Western philosophy
mirrored the larger cultural transformations of the European Enlight-
enment. The pre-eminent heroes of the philosophical Enlightenment
– Locke, Leibniz, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant – were British,
French, and German. The only Italian of the period who ranks with them
is Vico, but even in Italy Vico found few readers until Jules Michelet
translated the New Science into French in 1827. In Vico’s Italy and later
in the eighteenth century, there had been no philosophical Enlighten-
ment to equal events north of the Alps. Among native Italians, the most
eminent Enlightenment philosopher after Vico was Antonio Genovesi.
But when Galluppi, Rosmini, and Gioberti looked back from their own
century for philosophical motivation, they found little in Genovesi or
other Italians: the thinkers who most provoked or inspired them were
Locke, Reid, Condillac, and Kant.
Not until the very end of the nineteenth century could Gentile begin
to construct a distinctly Italian history of modern philosophy for his new

nation. The philosophers described in this book needed that much time
to ingest and digest the Enlightenment – and its Romantic sequel – that
came to them from beyond the peninsula. But this book has barely men-
tioned the Italian philosopher who, at the level of common sense (as
Gramsci used that term), had most influence on modern Italian thought:
Saint Thomas Aquinas.
When Gramsci wrote that ‘formal scholastic logic can be useful for
criticizing the banal sophisms of actual idealism,’ he was thinking of
learned Jesuits defending the Church’s cultural interests against Fascism
in the pages of a papally authorized periodical, Catholic Civilization.438
But the reach of scholastic philosophy was far greater than the ten or
twenty thousand readers of that magazine for Catholic literati. Every day
of every week, in schools, churches, private homes, and public places, in
prayers and sermons, when babies were baptized, when confessions were
heard, when priests visited the poor and the sick and the dying, in those
ubiquitous and unceasing moments, the Church’s ministrations to its
Italian faithful were laden with theories about birth, marriage, death, sex,
sin, redemption, law, justice, wealth, property, poverty, government, war,
peace, heaven, hell, and the meaning of life, and those theories were
informed by a philosophy – the scholastic philosophy that culminated in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and, in Italy, flourished again
in the nineteenth century.
Thomas Aquinas, a leading scholastic in his own time, became the
Church’s most authoritative thinker only after the Council of Trent
and the rise of the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth century. The next
large step in the apotheosis of Thomism was the work of Pope Leo XIII
(1878−1903), who died in the year when Croce and Gentile launched
their journal, La Critica. Aeterni Patris, Leo’s encyclical of 1879, com-
manded teachers ‘to implant the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas in the
minds of students, and set forth clearly his solidity and excellence over
others. Let the universities … illustrate and defend this doctrine, and
use it for the refutation of prevailing errors.’ Insofar as Leo’s orders were
followed, the Roman Catholicism that became Italy’s official religion in
1929 would bring with it an official philosophy.439
The Croce who denounced the Lateran Pacts of 1929, and the Gentile
who tried to outmanoeuvre their neo-scholastic backers, were religious
people: religiosity was a trait that the two philosophers shared.440 Gen-
tile, whose educational reform of 1923 required religion to be taught in
elementary schools, presented his actualist philosophy as a bulwark to
164
Still a Strange History (Bobbio II)
the Catholic faith. Croce described his liberalism as a kind of religion

– and thereby fit to replace Catholicism. But neither Croce nor Gentile
could embrace traditional religion consistently. Both were sons of a new
Italian nation whose most implacable opponent, since before its founda-
tion, had been the Church of Rome – Italy’s ancient enemy just because
it was the Church of Rome. The Eternal City, once the capital of pagan
Caesars and then the citadel of popes, was the most contested site in
Italy’s struggle for national identity. As long as the popes of Rome were
Italy’s adversaries, secularism and anticlericalism would go hand in hand
with Italian nationalism – and so with Italian philosophy in this era of
nation-building.441
In the struggle for the loyalties of Italian intellectuals, the popes repeat-
edly gave hostages to fortune. Gregory XVI, a friend of Rosmini and the
last monk to become a pope, inaugurated his reign with the encyclical
Mirari Vos (1832), assuring the faithful that ‘the Church has always taken
action to destroy the plague of bad books.’442 Gregory was also the pope
who looked beyond the transient advantages of material progress to its
perils, the demonic dangers that lurked in railway cars, for example: the
newly invented railroads were paths to hell, surely. Gregory’s successor,
Pius IX, flirted with the cause of Italian independence before 1848 but
then betrayed it: in the memory of patriots like Croce and Gentile, his
was the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit of Italian identity. Pio
Nono went on compounding the offense throughout his long reign. In
1864 he hurled eight of the eighty anathemas in his Syllabus of Errors
at modern philosophy. As late as 1907, when Pius X needed to label
an anti-scholastic heresy about ecclesiastical authority and theological
dogma, ‘Modernism’ was his choice – as if modernity itself were a crime
at the dawn of a new century.443
The updated catalogue of errors that condemned Modernism in 1907
declared progress to be illusory in the sphere of dogma: what might
seem progressive for the faith actually corrupts it. ‘Scientific progress’
therefore gives the Church no reason to alter its teachings on such fun-
damentals as the creation of the world.444 Decades after Darwin’s Origin
of Species, nonetheless, what gave the Church cause to worry was the posi-
tivism of Comte and Spencer, which in Italy had become the positivism
of Villari and Ardigò. A likely ally for religion against positivism was the
essentially conservative idealism promoted by Croce and Gentile at the
turn of the century: the two critics took the Church’s side, in fact, in the
heat of the modernist controversy. But the dogmatic intransigence of
the popes, aggravated by their reactionary and anti-nationalist politics,
165
made that alliance unsustainable. The new idealism would be religious,

in some sense, but it could not be Roman Catholic or even Christian.445
Thus, although Catholic common sense was grounded in a philosoph-
ical system, Thomist neo-scholasticism, which had the respect of critics
as harsh as Gramsci, Catholic dominance of Italian culture could never
become an effective hegemony – again using Gramsci’s term. The popes,
incapable of self-criticism, could never actually appropriate the culture
of those whom they needed to lead: lay intellectuals like Croce and Gen-
tile, for example, whom Gramsci described as priests of a philosophical
religion. Thomas Aquinas was a great philosopher, but his modern eccle-
siastical patrons were not disposed to use his (or any other) philosophy
critically and so make it a lasting force in Italian culture.
Thomas, called the Angelic Doctor, was first and foremost a theolo-
gian, whose philosophy was resolutely supernaturalist. It was Thomas, for
example, who supplied the Church with a philosophical theory – ‘tran-
substantiation’ – to demystify its most implausible sacramental miracle:
the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ,
every time a priest says a mass. Thomas had to explain how ordinary
physical objects change in this extraordinary way – supernaturally, vio-
lating the laws of nature. But the metaphysics behind his explanation
is Aristotelian, grounded in a rational account of natural change. The
story is long, but the point can be briefly put: on the way to constructing
a philosophical theology, Thomas’s supernaturalism starts with, and sus-
tains, respect for nature. Likewise, the new Italian idealism, especially as
Gentile expressed it, was a naturalist idealism (an immanent, as opposed
to a transcendental idealism) that never abandoned religion on the way
to formulating a philosophy of the Spirit. For most professional philoso-
phers and public intellectuals in Italy, it was idealism – not scholasticism
– that prevailed. But in both cases, and indeed in all cases of modern
Italian philosophy, there was nothing more distinctive about the con-
text in which the philosophy emerged than Italy’s abiding and agonized
immersion in religion.446
Galluppi’s Philosophy of Experience, Rosmini’s Mother Idea, and
Gioberti’s Ideal Formula inaugurated philosophical modernity in Italy
with pious nativist intentions, by repudiating the British and French
empiricism that Italians called ‘sensism’ and deplored as heathen and
foreign. Although the debate was professedly and plainly philosophi-
cal, its motivations were also explicitly religious, especially as Rosmini
and Gioberti expressed them. A century later, when Croce and Gentile
took charge of the conversation, its structure was similar. Positivism had
166
replaced sensism as the enemy. Post-Kantian idealism rather than Catho-

lic dogma was the faith that had to be defended. And the very same ide-
alism was to be the Spirit’s strongest shield against an alien materialism
When the debate started, Italy was a province of Napoleon’s Empire,
but it was an independent Italian nation that appointed Croce and Gen-
tile to ministries and sent Gramsci to die in prison. The constant struggle
that won national unity and independence was a school of experience
for Italian philosophers. As the nineteenth century neared its end, the
young Croce was not unusual in having living relatives who had seen the
failed turmoil of 1848, not to speak of happier days in 1861 and 1870,
nor of the earlier generation of Spaventa and De Sanctis. Like the age-
old habit of Catholic belief, the recency and immediacy of nation-making
politics defined the culture in which modern Italian philosophy evolved.
In the anglophone world, no analogy applies to the British case, though
a question about North America comes to mind: what might have fol-
lowed for philosophy had thinkers like William James and Charles Peirce
had direct experience not just of the Civil War that unified their nation
but also of the American Revolution that created it?
By 1837, when Emerson gave his address on ‘The American Schol-
ar’ to declare the intellectual independence of the United States, the
country’s political sovereignty had been secure for nearly three decades.
Despite the revolution and the ocean that separated Emerson’s nation
from England, the two were still united by a common language, with
its many cultural appendages. In fact, the cultural coherence that every
anglophone American could take for granted was Emerson’s problem:
how to own the language of Shakespeare without being owned by it?
Alessandro Manzoni faced a different problem in 1822, when the first
installment of The Betrothed appeared. Despite the enormous influence
of Dante’s archaic Tuscan on a well-educated minority, there was still no
national Italian language for a growing middle class. It took this popular
historical novel to bring modern Italian into being and make it a public
good – just as Verdi’s operas of the 1840s would admit ordinary Italians
to the temples of art and high culture.447
In these circumstances, it is easier to understand the intense – per-
haps obsessive – hope of Italian philosophers that their discipline
might become another vehicle of national identity. After Gioberti and
Mamiani, this impulse was pervasive in Italian philosophy, with various
consequences for better or worse. Among the former was the effort to
recover the Italian past for present philosophical uses. Sometimes the
attempt was crude and a strain on credulity: a concocted race of ancient
167
Pelasgians as a seminary of ancient wisdom, for example. Sometimes

history sold out to politics, as when that mercurial genius, Giordano
Bruno, turned up in monumental Roman statuary as a mystic brood-
ing in corroded bronze. In this and other cases, the present engulfed
the past in order to transform it: the post-medieval period customarily
called the Resurgence (Risorgimento) was reborn as the Rebirth (Rinas-
cita, Rinascimento, Rinascenza) when ‘Risorgimento’ found more urgent use
as a modern political battle cry.448 But sometimes the results of cultural
archeology were productive and enduring: the modern Italian reception
of Vico was such a case.
Not many great books (Moby Dick, perhaps) begin as ineptly as Vico’s
New Science: interminably, with dozens of pages explicating an ugly fron-
tispiece that only Rube Goldberg’s mother could have loved.449 Vico’s
aim was to show his whole system to the reader all at once, but pity the
poor reader! A kinder author would have put less Piranesi and more Pal-
ladio in the architecture of the book, and yet Vico was merciless in his
pursuit of layered complexity. Nonetheless, tracking through this laby-
rinth of baroque prose, mapped in a syntax that was strange to most Ital-
ians, Mamiani, Gioberti, Spaventa, Villari, Fiorentino, and others tracked
down the epistemic insights that made it credible to talk about Vico and
Kant in the same breath. Since some of Vico’s champions – Spaventa and
Villari, for example – opposed each other’s philosophies, perhaps their
admiration for Vico was not purely philosophical. Had Vico not been
an Italian, would all these Italian philosophers have been as anxious to
promote him? It seems unlikely, in which case our understanding of this
eccentric genius would be diminished.
Nationalism and patriotism, attended by colonialism, imperialism,
and racism, were mighty forces in nineteenth-century Italy, as they were
all over the world, and in Italy the effects of nationalism on philosophy
were everywhere: from the Italian ‘primacy’ asserted by Gioberti to a
rediscovery of Vico that non-Italians could also applaud.450 In the decade
before Croce finished his stirring History of Europe, that herald of trans-
national liberalism had published histories of Italian historiography; the
kingdom of Naples; Italy from 1871 to 1915; the baroque in Italy; and
Italian literature in the seventeenth century. Although no Italian human-
ist of the twentieth century had influence more global than Croce’s, his
experience of the world was surely Italocentric. From a very different but
still Italian point of view, Gramsci admired Croce’s ‘steadfast certainty,’
his ‘clarity, order and unshakable confidence’ – as who would not, think-
ing of Croce’s courage in the face of tyranny? But we also have Bobbio’s
168
assessment of the same trait hardened into a reflex: ‘Anything written

outside of Italy was most often treated as … nonsense and foolishness …
Anything new in the air, and ten pages of summary condemnation in La
Critica would make the air fit to breathe again.’451 Firmness of character
and decisive judgment on one day became rigidity and arrogance on the
next. Those diseases are deadly in philosophy. Inasmuch as nationalism
bred them in modern Italy, nationalism was destructive for philosophy.
Mussolini’s Fascism was a caricature of nationalism, as it was also a cari-
cature of activism, patriotism, populism, and other attitudes that might
in themselves have been cultural goods. Gentile, one of the best minds
of his era in Italy, let his philosophy be used to frame this bizarre Fascist
cartoon of a political ideal. Sometimes the transaction was explicit, as
when ‘good is evil, joy is pain, victory is labor, peace is war,’ and the
Spirit flames in service to the State.452 But mainly the devil’s bargain was
implicit, and perhaps more effective because it was indirect. Gentile pro-
duced reams of the most abstract philosophy ever put on paper. Usually
his claims about actuality have no cultural locus at all. The actual might
just as well act on the moons of Jupiter as in the streets of Rome, assum-
ing that the outer planets come within the reach of thinking and history.
But this torrent of abstraction flowed from the pen of Giovanni Gen-
tile, whose power throughout the ventennio was all too concrete. Because
Gentile the philosopher was Gentile the cultural impresario, he had the
kind of power dreamt of by Plato in Karl Popper’s nightmares.453
The thoroughly abstracted Gentile would have been familiar – in terms
of style and method – to other philosophers on the continent, in Britain
and in North America after 1870. But a different Gentile, the one who
filled two-dozen volumes with historical writing of a very high standard,
looked less like his philosophical contemporaries. Among anglophone
philosophers a notable exception was R.G. Collingwood, an accom-
plished historian who liked Italian idealism well enough to put Croce’s
autobiography into English.454 Bertrand Russell might seem to be anoth-
er eminent exception. He wrote an immensely successful book (still in
print in several different editions) called a History of Western Philosophy,
but it is less a history than a collage – brilliantly written and decorated
with philosophical aperçus – of Russell’s prejudices about the past.455 For
the most part, during the professional lifetimes of Croce, Gentile, and
Russell, anglophone philosophy became more and more ahistorical, and
at times aggressively so.
During the same period, philosophers in Britain and North America
gradually ceased to care about the Hegelian or neo-Kantian end-game
169
of what Kant had started in 1781. Quite the reverse in Italy. Although
Croce, Gentile, and their acolytes quarrelled about what was alive and
what was dead in Hegel, each remained committed to a form or a version
or a derivative of Hegelian idealism – rival philosophies of the Spirit.
Both also wrote a great deal of history, while thinking deeply about its
making and its meaning, and this kept the Italian intellectual environ-
ment hospitable to Hegelian historicism, which found the English-speak-
ing world less and less welcoming.
The two foremost Italian philosophers of pre-war Italy were prolific
historians, and all their nineteenth-century predecessors had helped
write the new history of Italian philosophy that evolved in this period.
The whole post-Kantian enterprise in Italy was strikingly different from
its anglophone counterpart, especially after 1870, just in its deep regard
for the past. A related difference was Italian philosophy’s greater cul-
tural breadth, of which Croce was the prime exemplar – a thinker who
spoke with grace and authority about as many issues outside the bound-
aries of philosophy as within them. And Croce was no isolated excep-
tion: think of De Sanctis on literature, Labriola on economics; think of
Gioberti, Spaventa, and Gramsci as journalists, and Villari or Fiorentino
as historians.
Because they were expected to write professionally for large and mixed
audiences, some of these philosophers became brilliant writers: Croce
comes first again, and then Spaventa, Villari, and Fiorentino. Literary
achievement of their kind has been less common among anglophone
philosophers: few have written as well as Mill, James, or Santayana. Yet
it must be said that graceful writing and grandiloquent speaking some-
times occluded philosophy in the texts that modern Italy produced: cul-
tural imperatives and institutional habits sometimes put rhetoric ahead
of its ancient rival. Cicero was an Italian, after all, and so was Girolamo
Savonarola. Thunderous speechmaking and passionate sermonizing lay
deep in the strata of Italian cultural memory. The philosophical prolu-
sione – Fiorentino’s Pisa inaugural of 1876 is a splendid example – was
a residue of those venerable effusions of learned language, and in the
anglophone world there has been nothing quite like it.456
Near the start of Fiorentino’s speech come some lines that suggest a
conclusion:
Every era is made of an aggregate of traditions, principles and doctrines

with which it stays content until it occurs to someone to suspect that they
are unstable. Until that moment, there is no hint of suspicion, which for
170
most people is not an issue. But then – as with a building whose walls tum-
ble down all at once, and no stone is left upon a stone – not one principle
or doctrine in this whole mental world any longer has any value or author-
ity at all. It must be completely rebuilt, completely redone from the start,
and reconstruction begins with a preconceived dislike for anything from
the past.
In order to dislike the past enough to bother rejecting it, one should
first learn something about it: this is a minimal motivation for explor-
ing an unfamiliar region of philosophy’s history. A better reason lies in
the ‘aggregate of traditions, principles, and doctrines’ that Fiorentino
mentions.457 For us, these will be our own cultural property. If we inspect
this real estate again, but look at it now in a fresh way, set against the
alien landscape that Fiorentino has in mind, perhaps we too can pro-
voke the instability that philosophy thrives on. Strangers in the strange
land of modern Italian philosophy, we anglosassoni will notice its distinc-
tive externalities: the Catholic spirituality that suffused it; the national-
ist exultation that inspired it; the historicism that gave it direction; the
cultural breadth that enriched it; and the political isolation that shack-
led it. More important, we will notice and honour its core philosophi-
cal achievements in the work of the remarkable thinkers described in
this book, among many others in an embattled age that would not cease
from mental fight.
171
Notes to Part I
1 Bellamy (2004).
2 Bobbio’s autobiography, with a chronology by the editor of the English edi-
tion, has been translated: Bobbio (2002); for the complexities of Bobbio’s
politics during the Fascist period and afterward, see also Zolo (2008).
3 Bellamy (2004).
4 For an earlier statement of the same theme, see Spaventa (1972a), I, 331:
‘Italy abounds in genius for theorizing; what is missing is agreement of
theory with experience’; see section 10 of this Introduction.
5 Bobbio (1955).
6 Below, section 7.
7 Bobbio (1955).
8 Bobbio (1955); Garin (1966b), II, 532−40; (1996): 105−7.
9 Below, section 19.
10 Garin (1966b), II, 3859; De Felice (1985): 11−61; Turi (1995): 202−7;
Santucci (1996); Rossi (2002), (2009); Bassi (2005); and below, sections 11
and 20.
11 Parts of this section, and of sections 3−9, are based on Copenhaver and
Copenhaver (2006).
12 Gentile’s extensive writings about the history of philosophy fill 25 volumes
out of 59 in his collected works. His vast historical project started with a
thesis, Rosmini e Gioberti, in Gentile (1899a). The other historical works by
Gentile which are most relevant here are Gentile (1917), (1930), (1957),
(2001), and (2003).
13 For Galluppi, Rosmini, Gioberti, and Mamiani, see below, sections 3 to
9; for accounts in English of the history of Italy in the period covered by
this book, see Beales and Biagini (1981), Clark (1996), Duggan (1994),
Hearder (1983); and for a recent Italian survey of the Risorgimento, its
origins, and its aftermath, see Banti (2004); also Turi (1998): 925.
14 Below, section 10 on Spaventa.

15 Rosmini (1830) is the text followed here for historical reasons rather than
Rosmini (1934), the Edizione nazionale, which is based on the fifth revised
edition of 1851−2. Rosmini was introduced to the anglophone world by
Lockhart (1856), which contains a short preface on Rosmini’s philosophy
by the author, who was also responsible for the first English translation,
Rosmini (1883), based on the fifth edition; the second English translation,
Rosmini (2001), follows a posthumous Italian text of 1875−6.
16 Rosmini (1830), I, 8.111, 113, 333; (1881): 313−23, 393−401; for other
Italian editions of the Schizzo sulla filosofia moderna, see Rosmini (1913) and
(1950), and for an earlier English translation, Rosmini (1882). Condillac
and his followers are sensisti in Rosmini’s terminology; their doctrine is il
sistema della sensazione or sensismo.
17 Rosmini (1830), I, 8; Garin (1966a), III, 1112−15.
18 Rosmini (1830), I, 64−7; Condillac (1746), and for an English version,
Condillac (2001).
19 Rosmini (1830), I, 8−11.
20 Rosmini (1830), I, xii−xiii; Cousin (1829), I, 120−7; Reid (1836), I, cxxv−
cxxvii; Jouffroy’s introduction to Dugald Stewart was translated into Italian
in 1841, ten years after Galluppi translated Cousin’s Fragments because of
his ‘deep knowledge of Reid’s philosophy and German philosophy, which
have important connections with one another’: Jouffroy (1841); Galluppi
(1831): v−vi, xi, xviii, 113−59, 183−92; Garin (1966a), III, 1117.
21 Rosmini (1830), I, 330−1; Reid’s importance for Rosmini and Galluppi was
recognized by Sciacca (1935), which is still very useful, especially pp. 83−6,
94−9, 209−37.
22 Rosmini (1840): 3, but this attack on Gioia had been written in 1824 and
published in Rosmini (1827−8); Garin (1966a), III, 1037−63, 1105−6;
Restaino (1999), I, 125−30, 135−6.
23 Kant (1796) is Born’s Latin translation; Kant (1820−2) is the defective Ital-
ian version of Vincenzo Mantovani; Kant (1835) is Tissot’s French: before
the vernacular versions in French and Italian were published, important
expositions by Villers (1801), Kinker (1801), De Gérando (1802), and
Destutt de Tracy (1992) were available in French; Soave (1803) is an early
account in Italian: see also Garin (1966a), III, 1070−1, 1078-80; Leetham
(1957); Prini (1999): 155−61; De Giorgi (2003).
24 Lo Cane (2001); Amerio (1965).
25 Galluppi (1935); Garin (1966a), III, 1073−7, 1080−2; Genovesi (1962);
Zambelli (1972); Tortora (1989).
26 Galluppi (1819−32); (1846a), II, 221−4; (1846b); Ottonello (1997).
174
Notes to Part I
27 Galluppi (1843): 225−70; (1965): xxxi−xxxii, 114−27; Rosmini (1830), I,

31−2, 54−6; Gentile (1930), II, 33.
28 Rosmini (1830), I, 31−2, 54−6, 147−9; III, 380−6, 723−5; cf. I, 260−1; II,
242−3; III, 50−1, 373−7, 438−40, 476−7, 725−6, 744−7, 754−7, 760−3,
824−5; Gentile (1930), II, 51; (1899a): 82−3.
29 Galluppi (1831); Cousin (1826); Rosmini (1968): 617; Lo Cane (2001):
xviii; Garin (1966a), III, 1073−4.
30 Galluppi (1846a), I, 5; II, 196, 221: see our Translations, II.1.
31 Galluppi (1846a), I, 279; Locke (1975): 105, 115 (2.1.4, 19).
32 Galluppi (1846a), I, 280−1.
33 Galluppi (1846a), I, 282.
34 Galluppi (1846a), I, 282−4.
35 Galluppi (1846a), I, 285−7.
36 Galluppi (1846a), I, 419−20.
37 Galluppi (1846a), II, 220−2.
38 Galluppi (1846a), I, 420−2.
39 Galluppi (1846a), I, 422−7.
40 Galluppi (1846a), I, 427−8.
41 Galluppi (1846a), I, 428−9.
42 Galluppi (1846a), II, 225.
43 Galluppi (1846a), II, 226.
44 Galluppi (1846a), II, 227−30.
45 For the approach to Kant taken here, see Kitcher (1999).
46 Jacobi (1787): 209−30: in the Preface to the 1815 edition of the same
work, Jacobi said of Kant’s Ding an sich, that ‘Without that assumption, I was
unable to get into his system, but with it I could not remain in it.’
47 Galluppi (1846a), II, 210−11.
48 Galluppi (1846a), II, 223−4.
49 Galluppi (1846a), II, 196; Garin (1966a), III, 1082−9.
50 Kitcher (1999): 416−17.
51 Kant, KrV, A89-90/B122.
52 Galluppi (1846a), II, 197−8.
53 Galluppi (1846a), II, 198.
54 Galluppi (1846a), II, 196−7, 219−21.
55 Kant (1796); Rosmini (1881): 316; see also n23 above.
56 For the biographical information that follows, see Garin (1966a), III,
1103−12; Leetham (1957); Prini (1999): 155−61; De Giorgi (2003).
57 Rosmini (2001), the latest English version of the New Essay, is just one part
of the large project undertaken by his followers; Cleary (1992) is a brief
introduction to Rosmini from this perspective.
175
58 Above, section 3, n23.

59 Rosmini (1996).
60 Garin (1966a), III, 1106−12, 1137−41.
61 Rosmini (1830), II, 332−9.
62 Rosmini (1830), II, 329−30; Gentile (1899a): 69; Sciacca (1935): 229−31.
63 Rosmini (1881); see II.2 of our Translations; and Prini (1999): 57−67,
131−54. The final form of Rosmini’s metaphysics and philosophy of mind
appears in the eight volumes of the posthumous Teosofia, published in
1938−41 in the Edizione nazionale supervised by Enrico Castelli; a new
Edizione critica was begun by Sciacca in 1979.
64 Rosmini (1881): 393.
65 Rosmini (1830), I, 162−3; (1881): 313−23.
66 Rosmini (1881): 393.
67 Rosmini (1881): 393−4; Garin (1966a), III, 1123−5.
68 Rosmini (1830), I, 124−6; (1881): 394.
69 Rosmini (1830), III, 751−3.
70 Rosmini (1881): 394; Garin (1966a), III, 1112−15.
71 Rosmini (1881): 394−5.
73 Rosmini (1881): 396−7.
74 Rosmini (1881): 397−8.
75 Rosmini (1881): 398.
76 Rosmini (1881): 398−9.
77 Rosmini (1881): 400.
78 Rosmini (1881): 315.
80 Rosmini (1881): 400−1.
81 Rosmini (1881): 313.
82 Rosmini (1881): 315−16.
83 Rosmini (1830), I, 170; Sciacca (1935): 83−5.
84 Rosmini (1830), III, 720, 742−3, 750−3, 775, where Reid is cited.
85 Rosmini (1830), III, 76−82, 749−50.
86 Rosmini (1830), I, 144−50, is an explication of Galluppi’s critique of De
Gérando’s account of Reid’s theory of judgment; unsurprisingly the argu-
ment that precedes Rosmini’s summary of his own views on simple appre-
hension, intuition, and judgment is, as Rosmini himself says, a labyrinth.
87 Rosmini (1830), I, 141−52, 164−70; Rosmini objects to other aspects of
Reid’s theory as well – nominalism, for example (ibid., pp. 269−72). Since
his own system revolves around ideas as universals, Rosmini opposes Dugald
Stewart’s nominalism and blames it on Reid. Because Reid rejects ideas,
176
Notes to Part I
Rosmini claims, he thereby rejects universal ideas, and the result is nomi-
nalism; see also Sciacca (1935): 83−6, 95−6, 230−1, 236.
88 Rosmini (1830), II, 253−4.
89 Rosmini (1881): 316, 319−21; Garin (1966a), III, 1115−19.
90 For the biographical information that follows, see Garin (1966a), III,
1149−54, 1176−8; Giusso (1948); Intini (2002); Palhoriès (1929); Rumi
(1999); Stefanini (1947).
91 For an analysis of the Theory of the Supernatural, see Garin (1966a), III,
1159−62.
92 Gioberti (1843) is the first edition of the Primato; (1938−9) is the Edizione
nazionale; see II.3 of our Translations; also Garin (1966a), III, 1152−4;
Casini (1998): 272−93; Bagnoli (2007): 176−208; Irace (2003).
93 Gioberti (1938−9): 37−44.
94 Gioberti (1938−9): 42−5; Garin (1966a), III, 1162−3.
95 Gioberti (1938−9): 44−5.
96 Gioberti (1846−7); (1841−3); Curci (1845); Garin (1966a), III, 1153−4;
Intini (2002): 7−14.
97 Gioberti (1938−9): 44, 49; (1840): 9, 28, 58, 61.
98 Gioberti (1840): 9−143; see II.4 of our Translations; also Garin (1966a),
III, 1162−76.
99 Gioberti (1840): 14−23.
100 Gioberti (1840): 16−20.
101 Gioberti (1840): 19.
102 Gioberti (1840): 34−5, 38−9.
103 Gioberti (1840): 39−40.
104 Gioberti (1840): 40−2.
105 Gioberti (1840): 41−2, 64.
106 Gioberti (1840): 42−5; Garin (1966a), III, 1168−9.
107 Gioberti (1840): 48−54.
108 Gioberti (1840): 56−7.
109 Gioberti (1840): 52−3, 57−60; Garin (1966a), III, 1169.
110 Gioberti (1840): 60−3.
111 Gentile (1917): 87−109: Pincherle (1973); the first edition of the Renewal
is Mamiani (1834), but the edition cited here is Mamiani (1836); see II.5
of our Translations.
112 Hearder (1983): 104−8.
113 Cuoco (1804−6); Casini (1998): 238−62.
114 Mamiani (1836): 11−12; Malusa (1977): 46−9.
115 Dante, Purgatorio, 18.55; Gioberti (1938−9): 42−5; Mamiani (1836): 320;
Rosmini (1836); above, section 7.
177
116 Gentile (1917): 109−37; Garin (1966a), III, 1197−9; Hearder (1983):
113−19.
117 Mamiani (1836): 5, 7, 14, 18−21, 28, 37, 42, 47, 53, 56−7, 159−60; section
3 of this Introduction.
118 Gentile (2001): 14−21; (2003), I, 222−9; Garin (1966a), III, 1091−3; Ras-
chini (2001): 82−92.
119 Spaventa (1972a), III, 19−20; Gentile (2003), I, 187−269; Garin (1966a),
III, 1225−6; (1966b), I, 14−19; Raschini (2001): 84−6.
120 Gentile (2001): 9−19.
121 Gentile (2001): 19−28, with Palmieri’s speech on pp. 20−1; Garin (1966a),
III, 1229−30.
122 Gentile (2001): 29−100, with the passage from ‘Jesuit Saturdays’ on p. 58;
‘Introduction’ by Rascaglia and Savorelli in Spaventa (2000): 9−54; Malusa
(1977): 50−4; Grilli (1941).
123 Spaventa (1972a), I, 293−5; see II.6 of our Translations; also Gentile
(2001): 100−7; Savorelli, ‘Introduction,’ in Spaventa (2003): v−xxxviii;
Malusa (1977): 73−80; Garin (1966a), III, 1233−8.
124 Gentile (2001): 108−16, with the passage quoted on p. 108; Savorelli,
‘Introduction,’ in Spaventa (2003): xxiii−iv, 7−8.
125 Gentile (2001): 116−44.
126 Gentile (2001): 145−74.
127 Spaventa (1972a), I, 295−332.
128 Villari (1859−61); (1877−82); (1888); (1892), I, 1−230; Martirano, ‘Intro-
duction’ in Villari (1999a): 11−32; Martirano and Cacciatore, ‘Introduc-
tion’ in Villari (1999b): 25−33; Gentile (1957): 53−61; Garin (1966a), III,
1246−7; Malusa (1977): 461−7; Buckle (1857); Breisach (1994): 268−75.
129 Villari (1868); see II.7 of our translations; also Malusa (1977): 461−2;
Martirano and Cacciatore, ‘Introduction’ in Villari (1999b): 25−33.
130 Garin (1966a), III, 1273−6.
131 Gentile (1957); Martirano, ‘Introduction’ in Villari (1999a): 11−32;
Poggi (1999): 144−8, 185−205; Santucci (1996): 7−8, 29−39; Cacciatore
(1997); for Ardigò and the other positivists mentioned here, see also Garin
(1966a), III, 1244−59, 1265−73; (1966b), I, 1−14.
132 Villari (1999a); below, section 17 on Croce.
133 Garin (1980): 12; Martirano, ‘Introduction’ in Villari (1999a): 17−18; also
p. 148.
134 Villari (1868): 2−5, 18−21, 27−9.
135 Villari (1868): 3−5.
136 Villari (1868): 4−6.
137 Villari (1868): 6−7.
178
Notes to Part I
138 Villari (1868): 1−3, 6−8; see below, section 13 on Vico.

139 Villari (1868): 7−11.
140 Villari (1868): 8−11.
141 Villari (1868): 10−15.
142 Villari (1868): 14−18.
143 Villari (1868): 18−19.
144 Villari (1868): 18−21.
145 Villari (1868): 20−2.
146 Villari (1868): 28−30.
147 Villari (1868): 22−4.
148 Villari (1868): 23-6.
149 Villari (1868): 27−9, 31−3.
150 De Sanctis (2002); Jachia (1996): 5−45.
151 De Sanctis (1990): 91−120; Jachia (1996): 45−155.
152 De Sanctis (1952), III, 335−7; (1990): 150, 226; Jachia (1996): 141−5,
155−8; Garin (1966a), III, 1240−1, 1264.
153 De Sanctis (1990): 121−4; Kirchmann (1875); see II.8 of our Translations.
154 De Sanctis (1990): 124−5.
155 De Sanctis (1990): 125−6.
156 De Sanctis (1990): 127−9,
157 De Sanctis (1990): 129−30.
158 De Sanctis (1990): 130−2.
159 De Sanctis (1990): 131−3.
160 De Sanctis (1990): 132−4.
161 De Sanctis (1990): 134.
162 De Sanctis (1990): 135−7.
163 De Sanctis (1990): 139−41, 146; see II.9 of our Translations.
164 De Sanctis (1990): 141−2.
165 De Sanctis (1990): 143−4.
166 De Sanctis (1990): 144−5.
167 De Sanctis (1990): 145−6.
168 Fiorentino (1861), (1868), (1872−4); Gentile (2003), I, 3−45; Malusa
(1977: 97−107; Garin, ‘Preface,’ in Fiorentino (1994): 7−14; Garin
(1966a), III, 1216−17.
169 Fiorentino (1994), with the introductory ‘Essay’ by Fabiana Cacciapuoti,
pp. 15−19; Scazzola (2002): 229−34; Burckhardt (1876) is the Italian
translation by Domenico Valbusa of Burckhardt (1989).
170 Fiorentino (1935); see II.13 in our Translations.
171 Fiorentino (1876); see II.12 in our Translations.
172 Fiorentino (1876): 161−2; Vico (1827); (1975): 61−80; Berlin (2000).
179
173 Aruta Stampacchia (1990); Cacciaglia and Capaccioni (2000);

Degl’Innocenti Venturini (1980), (1981); Degli Oddi (2001); Gentile
(2003), II, 36−49; Antonio Pieretti and Carlo Vinti, ‘Introduzione,’ in
Florenzi Waddington (2000): vii−lix; Garin (1966a), III, 1216−17, 1225,
1239−43.
174 Florenzi Waddington (1864a).
175 Florenzi Waddington (1978): 23−35, 99−112: the editor (pp. 24, 32, n4)
says that Mamiani had persuaded the Marchesa to renounce her earlier
support for pantheism; Degl’Innocenti Venturini (1980): 326−7. See II.10-
11 of our Translations.
176 Claudio Cesa, ‘Introduzione,’ in Florenzi Waddington (1978): 10−14; Ras-
caglia and Savorelli, ‘Introduzione,’ in Spaventa (2000): 17; above, section
10 on Spaventa.
177 Florenzi Waddington (1843); Degli Oddi (2001): 52−3, 82−5.
178 Florenzi Waddington (1978): 25−35; Degl’Innocenti Venturini (1980):
311−29; Degli Oddi (2001): 23−107; Garin, ‘Preface,’ in Fiorentino
(1994): 7−8.
179 Fiorentino (1876): 164−6.
180 Fiorentino (1876): 166−8.
181 Fiorentino (1876): 167−73.
182 Fiorentino (1876: 173−5.
183 Fiorentino (1876): 177−9.
184 Fiorentino (1876): 178−80.
185 Fiorentino (1876): 180−2.
186 Fiorentino (1876): 182−3.
187 Fiorentino (1876): 183−4; (1935): 9; above, section 11 on Villari.
188 Fiorentino (1935): 9−10.
189 Fiorentino (1935): 10−11.
190 Fiorentino (1935): 11−13.
191 Fiorentino (1935): 13−15.
192 Fiorentino (1935): 15−16.
193 Fiorentino (1935): 16−17.
194 Fiorentino (1935): 17−18.
195 Fiorentino (1935): 18.
196 Fiorentino (1935): 18−20.
197 Fiorentino (1935): 20−1.
198 Fiorentino (1935): 21−3.
199 Badaloni and Muscetta (1990): 3−14; Poggi (1981): 3−28; Jacobitti
(1975); Agazzi (1962): 104−9: see also the brief chronologies prepared by
Sbarberi in Labriola (1976): cv−cix, and Poggi (1981): 99−100.
180
Notes to Part I
200 Herbart (1825); (1828−9); Pettoello (1988).

201 Labriola (1887); Poggi (1981): 64−8.
202 On Bruno’s statue, see Berggren (2002); Rowland (2008): 3−7.
203 Labriola (1902), (1949); Badaloni and Muscetta (1990): 3−14; Poggi
(1981): 99−100.
204 Poggi (1981): 64−100.
205 Labriola (1976a); see II.14 in our Translations; also Garin (1966b), I,
195−210; Agazzi (1962): 95−125; and below, section 17 of this Introduc-
tion, on Croce.
206 Labriola (1976a): 794−5: the notation (history1, history2) is ours, not
Labriola’s.
207 Labriola (1976a): 795−6.
208 Labriola (1976a): 797−8.
209 Labriola (1976a): 798−800.
210 Labriola (1976a): 800−1.
211 Labriola (1976a): 801−2.
212 Labriola (1976a): 803−4.
213 Labriola (1976a): 804−7.
214 Labriola (1976a): 807−8.
215 Labriola (1976a): 808−9.
216 Labriola (1976a): 809−11.
217 Labriola (1976a): 811−12.
218 Labriola (1976a): 812−13.
219 Labriola (1976a): 813−14.
220 Labriola (1976a): 814−16.
221 Labriola (1976a): 816−17.
222 Labriola (1976a): 817−19.
223 Staley (2009); Pattison (1876); Spencer (1876); Venn (1876); Barzellotti
(1878): 505, 537; Gentile (1917): 333−53, dismisses Barzellotti as a Neo-
Kantian manqué whose views amounted to ‘aestheticism or aestheticizing
mysticism.’
224 Barzellotti (1878): 506−18, 526; Ferri (1869); on Ferri, who collabo-
rated with Mamiani and founded the Rivista italiana di filosofia, see Garin
(1966a), III, 1199−1200.
225 Barzellotti (1878): 518−29.
226 Barzellotti (1878): 529−31.
227 Barzellotti (1878): 531−4; Garin (1966a), III, 1126−9; Raschini (2001):
85−9.
228 Barzellotti (1878): 534−6.
229 Barzellotti (1878): 537−8.
181
230 This section and the next two are derived from Copenhaver and Copen-
haver (2008). Croce (2000a) is an autobiography, circulated privately after
1918 and translated into English by R.G. Collingwood in the year after it
was published commercially: Croce (1927). For biographical and histori-
cal accounts, see Bonetti (2000); Galasso (2002); Cingari (2003); Garin
(1966a), III, 1282−7.
231 Croce (2000a): 26−7; above, section 14, on Labriola and Herbart.
232 Above, section 11, on Villari; Garin (1966a), III, 1290−1; (1966b), I,
179−95; Cingari (2003), I, 19−31.
233 Croce (2000a): 15−32; the original version of the essay is Croce (1893),
followed here and in II.15 of our Translations; the final revision appears
in Croce (1951a). See also Garin (1966a), III, 1288−90, 1297−8; Galasso
(2002): 114−26; Bonetti (2000): 3−7, 145−6; Cingari (2003): 15−37.
234 Croce (1893): 1−2; Bernheim (1889); Droysen (1977); Ullmann (1885).
235 Croce (1893): 2−4, 18; Cingari (2003), I, 15−24.
236 Croce (1893): 4−5.
237 Croce (1893): 5−6; below, section 18, on Croce’s notion of distinction.
238 Croce (2005). 24.
239 Garin (1966a), III, 1311−16; Galasso (2002): 150−7.
240 Croce (1900), (1902), (1956), (1992); Garin (1966b), I, 222−44.
241 Croce (1893): 6−7; Zimmermann (1858), (1862−4); Nahlowsky (1863).
242 Croce (1893): 7−8; Hartmann (1878), (1886).
243 Croce (1893): 9−10.
244 Croce (1893): 11.
245 Croce (1893): 11−12; Schopenhauer (1859), II, 500−1 (3.38); Burckhardt
(1979): 32.
246 Croce (1893): 12−13; Lazarus (1865).
247 Croce (1893): 13−15, criticizing the scientism and pessimism in Buckle
(1857), Delfico (1814), Wundt (1888), and Gumplovicz (1883), while sid-
ing with Simmel (1892).
248 Croce (1893):15; cf. (1951a): 21−2.
249 Croce (1893): 16.
250 Croce (1893): 17−21, citing Lazarus (1865) on condensation and substitu-
tion and then criticizing Droysen (1977), Schopenhauer (1859), and
Lecky (1865).
251 Croce (1893): 21−3.
252 Croce (1893): 23−4; Köstlin (1869): 53−62 (1.2.2).
253 Croce (1893): 24−5.
254 Croce (1893): 26−7.
255 Croce (1893): 27−9.
182
Notes to Part I
256 Above, section 17.

257 Croce (1920): 46−7; see II.16 in our Translations; (1996) is the new
Edizione nazionale; (1917b) is an English translation of the original edition
of 1908.
258 Croce (1920): 48.
259 The example of the tiger is adapted from Dennett (1969). The problem
arises most clearly in the case of images, but, as Dennett notes, it arises
equally well for cases in which the representation has propositional form.
For example, both the classical theory of concepts and the prototype and
exemplar theories of concepts face this problem. For an overview of theo-
ries of concepts, see Laurence and Margolis (1999).
260 Croce (1920): 48.
261 Croce (1920): 48−9.
262 Below, in this section, on distincts and opposites; see also Garin (1966a),
III, 1287−90, on Croce’s compulsion to analyse by negating.
263 Croce (1920): 48−9.
264 Croce (1920): 49.
265 For contemporary versions of concept holism, see Quine (1951) and
Davidson (1984), and for a discussion and criticism, Fodor and Lepore
(1992).
266 Croce (1920): 50−2.
267 Croce (1920): 52−3.
268 Croce (1920): 51−3.
269 Croce (1920): 54−7.
271 Croce (1920): 58.
272 Croce (1920): 59.
273 Croce (1920): 59−60.
274 Croce (1920): 59−60.
275 Croce (1920): 62−3.
276 Croce (1920): 63.
277 Croce (1920): 63−6.
278 Croce (1920): 67.
279 Croce (1907) is the original version, cited here, and used for II.17 in our
Translations; Croce (2006) is in the new Edizione nazionale, which is
very valuable for its notes on sources; see also the recent text by Giuseppe
Gembillo in Croce (1995): 27−128, which reflects the many stylistic and
some substantive changes that Croce made in later editions. See also Garin
(1962): 155−73; Bonetti (2001): 147−8; Rizi (2003): 22−3, 174−5, 196−9;
Cesa (2006): 447, 455−6, 467.
183
280 Hegel (1907); Bonetti (2001): 3−14, 146−7; Galasso (2002): 127−40; Turi
(1995): 54−68.
281 Croce (1905); (1907): 105, 131, 149; (1909a); (1909b); (1917a); above,
section 17.
282 Croce (1907): v−vi.
283 Croce (1907): 1−5.
284 Davidson (2001); Sellars (1965): 172−3.
285 Croce (1907): 5−6.
286 Croce (1907): 6−8.
287 Croce (1907): 9; above, section 18.
288 Croce (1907): 9−11; Raschini (2001): 107−9.
289 Croce (1907): 10−11; on ‘logical space,’ see especially Wittgenstein
(1974), 1.13, 3.4, 42; Sellars (1997): 57−68.
290 Croce (1907): 11−12; Ryle (2000a); also Broad (1925); Rorty (1965);
Lycan and Pappas (1972); Churchland (1981).
291 Croce (1907): 13−18.
292 Croce (1907): 18−20.
293 Croce (1907): 20−1.
294 Croce (1907): 21−4.
295 Croce (1907): 24−30.
296 Croce (1907): 30−1.
298 Croce (1907): 32−5, 51−4.
299 Croce (1907): 54−6.
300 Croce (1907): 56−8.
301 Croce (1907): 81−4; Pardo (1972): 73−84.
302 Ryle (2000b): 16−17.
303 Croce (1907): 81−4; see also the notes in chapter 4 of our translation of
Croce’s ‘Philosophy of Hegel.’
304 Croce (1907): 85−8.
305 Croce (1907): 88−93; Sasso (1994−2000), I, 35−47.
306 Croce (1907): 93−4.
307 Croce (1907): 94−6.
308 Croce (1907): 97−114.
309 Croce (1907): 115−27.
310 Croce (1907): 129−43.
311 Croce (1907): 145−64.
312 Croce (1907): 164−70.
313 Croce (1907): 184.
314 Croce (1907): 185−7.
184
Notes to Part I
315 Croce (1907): 196.

316 Garin (1966a), III, 1297−1307, 1312−13, 1316−18; (1966b), I, 21−44,
86−90, 137−49, 157−66, II, 292−310; (1977): 40−2, 66−8; De Felice
(1985): 62−127; Cingari (2003), I, 9−15, 145−83.
317 Garin (1966b), I, 175−9; (1997b): 19−26; Friedman (2000).
318 The standard biography is Turi (1995), but the intense debate among Ital-
ians on Gentile is still producing a fast-growing literature: among general
accounts of Gentile’s life and thought; see, for example, Negri (1975);
Brianese (1996); Gregor (2001); Lo Schiavo (2001); Coli (2004); Moss
(2004); Romano (2004); for more specialized accounts of the philosophy
and other issues, see Alderisio (1959); Pardo (1972); Del Noce (1990);
Negri (1992); Sasso (1998); Sasso (1994−2000), II; Raschini (2001).
319 Garin (1966a), III, 1318−21; Turi (1995): 7−50; Lo Schiavo (2001):
163−4; Sasso (1994−2000), IV, 489−90; Scazzola (2002): 1−46.
320 Garin (1966b), I, 211−21; Turi (1995): 50−8; Lo Schiavo (2001): 163−4;
Scazzola (2002): 47−81; Cingari (2003), I, 37−58.
321 Turi (1995): 58−65; Lo Schiavo (2001): 13−20; Garin (1966a), III,
1276−9.
322 Gentile (1899b), the version followed here and in II.18 of our Transla-
tions, is the first edition; Gentile (1991): 95−224, is based on the 1937
text, the last one revised by Gentile, see also Turi (1995): 58−68; (1998):
924; Coli (2004): 75−89; Brianese (1996): 42−52; Del Noce (1990):
53−81; Agazzi (1962): 234−43, 268−84; and Garin, ‘Nota introduttiva,’ in
Gentile (1991): 85−93.
323 Gentile (1899b): 51−8.
324 Gentile (1899b): 58−62.
325 Gentile (1899b): 62−3.
326 Gentile (1899b): 64−6, citing Labriola (1898): 43.
327 Gentile (1899b): 66−7; below, section 23, on actualism.
328 Gentile (1899b): 67−8.
329 Gentile (1899b): 68−9.
330 Gentile (1899b): 69−71, citing Labriola (1898): 123−5.
331 Gentile (1899b): 71, 147.
332 Gentile (1899b): 147−8.
333 Gentile (1899b): 148−9.
334 Gentile (1899b): 149−51.
335 Gentile, (1899b): 150−1.
336 Gentile (1899b): 151.
337 Gentile (1899b): 151−3.
338 Gentile (1899b): 153.
185
339 Gentile (1899b): 153−5.

340 Gentile (1899b): 155−7.
341 Turi (1995): 68−81; above, section 10.
342 Gentile (1903a) is the first edition, used here and in II.19 of our Transla-
tions; Gentile (1991): 247−65, follows the version in Gentile (1921), the
last one with changes by the author; see also Alderisio (1959): 34−43;
Garin (1966b), I, 171−4, 179; Turi (1995): 81−121; Sasso (1994−2000),
IV, 494−6.
343 Gentile (1903a): 5−6.
344 Gentile (1903a): 6−9, 13−14, 16−17, 19.
345 Gentile (1903a): 8−9.
346 Gentile (1903a): 9−11.
347 Gentile (1903a): 10−12; Brunetière (1896); Garin (1966a), III, 1298−9;
Turi (1995): 113−14.
348 Gentile (1903a): 12−14.
349 Gentile (1903a): 14−15.
350 Gentile (1903a): 15−16.
351 Gentile (1903a): 17−19.
352 Gentile (1903a): 18−19.
353 Gentile (1903a): 19−20.
354 Gentile (1903a): 19−20.
355 Gentile (1903a): 20−3.
356 Croce (1909c); Turi (1995): 148−212.
357 Croce (1910), (1911a); De Gennaro (1963).
358 Gentile (1913): 245−58, the version used here and in II.20 of our Transla-
tions, appeared two years after this paper was first delivered: see also Garin
(1966a), III, 1321−5; (1966b), I, 44−53; Sasso (1994−2000), IV, 496−502;
Galasso (2002): 169−82.
359 Gentile (1913); (1916); (1922−3); (1998); Garin (1966a), III, 1320−22;
Brianese (1996): 65−70, 87−100, 109−35; Raschini (2001): 96−104;
Moss (2004): 43−56. Holmes (1937) provides an unusual perspective on
Gentile’s actualism: it was written by a Harvard philosophy student who
heard Gentile lecturing in Rome, while also studying with C.I. Lewis and
E.A. Burtt; Moss (2004) has a similar genesis since its American author
studied in Rome with Ugo Spirito and Guido Caligero, who were students
of Gentile.
360 Gentile (1931a) is the version used here and in II.21 of our Translations;
(1931b); Garin, ‘Nota introduttiva,’ in Gentile (1991): 685−7; Moss
(2004): 57−78.
361 Gentile (1913): 245.
186
Notes to Part I
362 Gentile (1913): 245−6.

363 Gentile (1913): 246.
364 Gentile (1913): 246−7.
365 Gentile (1913): 247−8.
366 Gentile (1913): 249−50, 255−7.
367 Gentile (1913): 248−50.
368 For the temporal character of one of the key terms involved, attuale, see
the second note to our translation of Gentile’s ‘Act of Thinking.’
369 Gentile (1913): 254−5; (1931a): 305−6.
370 Gentile (1913): 249; (1931a): 304−6.
371 Gentile (1931a): 306.
372 Orwell (1983): 23; Garin (1966b), II, 362−81; Brianese (1996): 30−1; Del
Noce (1990): 189; cf. Sasso (1998): 7−8; Turi (1998).
373 Gentile (1913): 247−52.
374 Kant, KrV, A550/B578.
375 Gentile (1913): 251−5; see also Sasso (1996−2000), II, 453−87.
376 Gentile (1931a): 302−3.
377 Gentile (1913): 255−7: the ctisi in autoctisi is ‘creation’ (ktisis) in Greek.
378 Gentile (1913): 251−2; (1931a): 303−4.
379 Gentile (1931a): 306−7.
380 Gentile (1931a): 301, 304.
381 Gentile (1913): 257−8; (1931a): 308−9.
382 Garin (1966a), III, 1129−30; (1966b), I, 256−73; Turi (1995): 212−87; Lo
Schiavo (2001): 164−5; above, section 15.
383 Bonetti (2001): 149−50; Rizi (2003): 35−41.
384 Turi (1995): 304−526; (1998): 929−30; Sasso (1994−2000), IV, 511−29;
Lo Schiavo (2001): 165−7; Belardelli (2005): 3−48.
385 Bonetti (2001): 150−1; Galasso (2002): 305−29, 346−59; Rizi (2003):
41−89: both manifestos are reproduced in Papa (1974): 187−94, 212−14.
386 Turi (1995): 345−59; Lo Schiavo (2001): 119−26.
387 Rizi (2003): 89−122, 208−12; Bonetti (2001): 150−1; Garin (1966b), II,
405−9.
388 Papa (1974): 387; Russell (1905): 485; Turi (1998): 930.
389 Papa (1974): 387.
390 Papa (1974): 187−9.
391 Papa (1974): 189−90.
392 Papa (1974): 191−3.
393 Papa (1974): 190−1; Turi (1998): 928.
394 Papa (1974): 212−13.
395 Papa (1974): 212−14.
187
396 For the biography and chronology, see Fiori (2008); Romano (1965);
Garin (1997a): 3−40; Jones (2006): 14−26; Gramsci (1975), I, xliii−lxviii;
(1985): 1−15; (1996a), I, xxix−xli; (1996b): 1−28; (2000): 17−25.
397 Gramsci (1975), II, 1363−1509.
398 Gramsci (1975), II, 1375−8.
399 Gramsci (1975), II, 1375−6, 1383−94, 1485−90.
400 Gramsci (1975), I, lxiv−lxv, II, 1396−7; (1996a): xxxvi−vii; (2000): 22;
Bukharin (1925).
401 Gramsci (1975), II, 1366−8; Garin (1966a), III, 1286−7.
402 Gramsci (1975), II, 1370−1, 1399−1401.
403 Gramsci (1975), II, 1398−9, 1462−6; see chapter 11 of Croce’s ‘Philoso-
phy of Hegel,’ and on Gramsci and Croce in an earlier period, see Garin
(1996): 343−60; also (1997a): 41−4, 59−61.
404 Gramsci (1975), II, 1462−6.
405 Gramsci (1975), II, 1418−20, 1466−7; Russell (1922): 113−14.
406 Gramsci (1975), II, 1446−7; Bukharin (1927).
407 Gramsci (1975), II, 1375−8, 1380−1, 1465−7.
408 Gramsci (1975), II, 1378−94.
409 Gramsci (1975), II, 1384−6, 1396−8, 1481−2.
410 Gramsci (1975), II, 1375−8, 1380−97; Garin (1996): 289−342; Belardelli
(2005): 174−91.
411 Gramsci (1975), II, 1392.
412 Chabod (2002): 81−2, 105−7.
413 Croce, (1917a), (1918), (1921), (1925), (1928), (1929), (1931), (1932),
(1938); Croce (1991), followed here, is Galasso’s edition of Croce (1932);
Garin (1966a), III, 1335−7; (1966b), I, 252−6, II, 275−87; Galasso (2002):
183−249, 371−89; Bonetti (2001): 73−101; Rizi (2003): 196−204.
414 Croce (1991): 9, and the ‘Nota del curatore’ by Galasso, pp. 453−7; Dante,
Inferno, 23.28−30.
415 Croce (1928); Volpe (1991); Sasso (1979); De Felice (1985): 205−8; Rizi
(2003): 146−54; Cingari (2003), II, 357−64; Di Rienzo (2004): 112−53;
Belardelli (2005): 97−140.
416 Croce (1991): 11−20.
417 Croce (1991): 20.
418 Croce (1991): 20−5.
419 Croce (1991): 25−30: the notion of a religion of liberty itself is Hegelian
(Religion der Freiheit); see Hegel (1986), 17.203−4, where the full achieve-
ment of truth and freedom comes with the arrival of the ‘consummate’ or
‘absolute’ Christian religion – which, of course, is not what Croce has in
mind. See chapter 9 of Croce’s ‘Philosophy of Hegel.’
188
Notes to Part I
420 Croce (1991): 31−56.

421 Croce (1991): 57−75; Cingari (2003), II, 364−8.
422 Croce (1991): 77−424.
423 Croce (1991): 425−8.
424 Croce (1991): 428−33, and the ‘Nota del curatore’ by Galasso (2002):
460−1; Verucci (2006): 140−201.
425 Croce (1991): 431; Cingari (2003), II, 364−8.
426 Croce (1991): 433−4.
427 Croce (1991): 434−8.
428 Gramsci (1996a), I, xxxii−xli, II, 563−5, with Santucci’s notes, as through-
out this section.
429 Gramsci to Tania Schucht, 18 April 1932, in Gramsci (1996a), II, 563−5.
430 Gramsci to Tania Schucht, 18, 25 April 1932, in Gramsci (1996a), II,
564−8.
431 Gramsci to Tania Schucht, 18 April 1932, in Gramsci (1996a), II, 564−5.
432 Gramsci to Tania Schucht, 2 May 1932, in Gramsci (1996a), II, 568−72.
433 Gramsci to Tania Schucht, 9, 30 May 1932, in Gramsci (1996a), II, 572−5,
581−3.
434 Gramsci to Tania Schucht, 23 May 1932, in Gramsci (1996a), II, 577−8.
435 Gramsci to Tania Schucht, 6 June 1932, in Gramsci (1996a), II, 584−7.
436 Gramsci to Tania Schucht, 6 June 1932, in Gramsci (1996a), II, 584−5.
437 Bobbio (1955), and in section 1 above.
438 Gramsci, ‘Introduction to Philosophy,’ section 6.
439 Lora and Simionati (1994−8), III, 88−90; for neo-scholastic philosophers
in the Italy of Leo’s day, see Garin (1966a), III, 1218−22.
440 Garin (1966a), III, 1311, 1319, 1330−7; Del Noce (1990): 164−89; Turi
(1995): 393−407; Raschini (2001): 104; Rizi (2003): 155−79; E. Gentile
(2005): 7−25, 101−4, 128−9.
441 For the historical roots of the struggle for an autonomous lay culture in
Italy, see Ciliberto (2008), especially the introductory essay, pp. 5−79.
442 Lora and Simionati (1994-8), II, 42−4.
443 Lora and Simionati (1994-8), II, 500−45; IV, 190−246; Garin (1966b), I,
62−80.
444 Lora and Simionati (1994-8), IV, 248−56.
445 Gentile, ‘La Filosofia scolastica in Italia e i suoi problemi,’ in Gentile
(1963): 3−36; Garin (1966b), II, 493−9; Turi (1995): 394; Verucci (2006):
1−10.
446 Garin (2000): 38−45, 53−61.
447 Emerson (1983): 53−71; Manzoni (2003); Duggan (1994): 27−30.
448 Casini (1998): 197−297; Berggren (2002); Rowland (2008): 3−7.
189
449 The reproduction in Vico (1975): 2−26 is one of the clearer ones in stand-
ard editions.
450 Sections 7 and 13 above.
451 Gramsci, ‘Letters,’ #302; Bobbio (1955).
452 Gentile, ‘Actual Idealism,’ section 4.
453 Popper (2006); Belardelli (2005): 3−48; E. Gentile (2005): 101−4.
454 Copenhaver and Copenhaver (2008).
455 Russell (2004).
457 Fiorentino, ‘Positivism.’
190
PART II
Translations
1
Baron Pasquale Galluppi of Tropea
Elements of Philosophy1
To the Young, Lovers of True Wisdom
Young People,
In the last century, remarkable changes have occurred in philosophy;

new elements must therefore replace the old. Despite the wonderful
books that keep appearing to shed their light on the world of philosophy,
to me it appears that we still have no good elements. To create them, one
must follow the whole history of philosophy in an analytic spirit, paying
special attention to the period of the current philosophical revolution,
looking deeply at the causes that made it happen, and then reading and
analysing all the classic works of the various philosophical schools which
between Descartes and our own time have been established in educated
Europe. Only such study can put the author in a position to write good
elements. I can assure you that I have diligently pursued this most labori-
ous task, which justifies, I believe, my presenting to the public the Elements
of Philosophy. They include: 1. Pure Logic, the logic of ideas; 2. Psychology;
3. Ideology; 4. Mixed Logic, the logic of facts; 5. Philosophy of Natural Obliga-
tions; 6. Philosophy of Religion, or natural theology.
The Pure Logic, though small in size, is meant to educate thinkers. I
have tried to see that each of the seven chapters that make it up contains,
in combination with the others, some major point closely connected to
the differences among particular opinions evident today in the field of
philosophy. In the first chapter, I define philosophy in the sense that
people now commonly take this term. In the second, I establish the dis-
tinction between pure cognitions and empirical cognitions.2 Because
Destutt-Tracy did not attend to this important distinction, he accepted
Part II: Translations
empiricism, and the transcendental philosophy that dominates Germany

today is based on an abuse of the distinction.3 The third chapter exam-
ines the very famous question of synthetic a priori judgments, the source
of the revolution that Kant produced in philosophy. The fourth chapter
solves one of the major problems of modern logic, which is how specu-
lative reasoning is instructive even though it depends on identity.4 The
fifth chapter defends the rules of the syllogism from some objections of
modern critics. The sixth establishes the distinction between the order
of deduction of our ideas and that of deducing our cognitions.5 The sev-
enth and last chapter specifies the laws of the two methods, analytic and
synthetic, which are not very widely understood.
The other parts of the elementary course, to be published without
delay, are written in the same spirit.
The fifth edition is notably improved. At the end of each part of these
elements is a summary dialogue, as in the third and fourth editions, in
which I have followed the synthetic method for the topics treated, as a
companion to the analytic method of the body of the work. In this way, I
hope that you will be well instructed. Good luck!
Summary of the PSYCHOLOGY by Question and Answer
Q What is psychology?
A Psychology is the science of the soul. Psyche means soul in Greek.
Q Can we know the soul, and how can we know it?
A Certainly we can know the soul since it shows itself to us.
Q Please explain this to me more clearly.
A The soul is the subject of all our sensations, of all our affections, and
of whatever thoughts we may have. But each of these modifications
of ours is constantly accompanied by a sensation of it. The soul not
only thinks and has modifications, then, but also becomes aware of
whatever particular thoughts and particular modifications there may
be. This awareness of what goes on in the soul is called consciousness
or inner sense – internal sense.
Q From what you say, it seems that the soul has a sensation of what
goes on in it, but not of itself.
A No. The soul also has a sensation of itself since it senses its modifica-
tions as its modifications, as things inhering in it, which amounts to
saying that it senses itself modified.
Q But does the soul distinguish itself from its modifications, regarding
itself as the subject of these modifications?
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Galluppi, Elements
A The soul distinguishes itself from its modifications. But it does not
make this distinction in the first moments of its consciousness of
itself, only later on.
Q Since the various modifications of which the soul has consciousness
must have a cause, can you tell me what sort of cause this is?
A There are two kinds of modifications in us: some are actions; oth-
ers are passions. Accordingly, willing, judging, and reasoning are
actions. Passions are sensations of pain following a blow or of pleas-
ure following a different movement – eating tasty food, for example.
The efficient principle of actions is the soul itself; for passions the
action of an object outside the soul is necessary. The soul’s suscepti-
bility to being affected in such a way is also necessary.
Q What are faculties of the soul?
A Faculties of the soul are potencies that the soul has either to pro-
duce certain actions or to accept certain modifications. The first are
active potencies of the soul. The second are passive potencies.
Q Might these faculties be something other than the soul itself?
A The faculties of the soul are the soul itself considered in relation to
its various modifications.
Q What sorts of faculties does the soul have?
A The primary faculties of mind are those that give it the objects of
its thoughts, since the objects of our thoughts are an indispensable
condition of thinking and since these objects must be given to the
mind and are not created by it,
Q What are these faculties that give the mind the objects of its thoughts?
A They are sensibility and consciousness. The first gives the mind
external objects; the second gives it its own I and the modifications
that occur in the I. We cannot get back beyond this fact. The I that
senses objects outside it is the first object shown to the mind.
Q How can objects outside the mind be shown or made present to the
mind itself?
A By acting – by modifying the mind, in other words, which is to say by
producing various sensations in it.
Q Sensations are internal modifications of the mind, then?
A Exactly.
Q From this it seems one can infer that our sensations cannot reveal to
us anything external.
A Such an inference would be false. Since our sensations, in acting
to modify our soul, must at the same time be perceptions of some
external thing, they reveal an external world to us.
195
Q Is there any similarity between our sensations and the qualities of

bodies?
A There is none. In our bodies we perceive only movements, and none
of our sensations is a movement. This response is developed in the
second chapter of the Psychology.6
Q In a good philosophy, what do our sensations authorize us to admit
outside ourselves?
A Various aggregates of substances, which, by constantly varying their
mode of being, produce various sensations in our mind.
Q Besides sensibility and consciousness, what other faculties must one
recognize in the mind?
A One must recognize two active faculties with which the mind works
on the objects given to it by sensibility and consciousness.
Q What are these faculties?
A They are the faculty of analysis and the faculty of synthesis.7 With
the first, the mind divides and distinguishes the objects that sensibil-
ity and consciousness together make present to the mind. With the
second, the mind unites the objects by recognizing their relations.
Q Give me a clear explanation of the different functions of analysis
and synthesis.
A Analysis can be divided into two kinds, which can be called attention
and abstraction. From among the many sensible objects that operate
on the senses at any moment and are really separate in nature, the
mind uses attention to separate one of them and make the percep-
tion of it clearer than that of the others. By using attention, the
mind also separates a sensible object from others with which it is
naturally united but from which it can be separated naturally, thus
making the perception of this object clearer than that of the other
objects united with that object.
Q Please give me examples of these two actions.
A At the moment when a person and a tree are present to my senses,
I can attend to the person whom I see and make the perception of
this person clearer than that of the tree, so that the perception of
the person to whom I attend becomes nearly exclusive. In the same
way, while seeing a person, I can attend to his head and thus make
my perception of the head clearer than that of other parts of the
body.
Q What is abstraction?
A Abstraction is an act of the mind by which it treats as separate from
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Galluppi, Elements
other things what cannot have existence apart from these things.
In this way, modes are treated as separate from the subject, and the
subject as separate from the modes that determine it, without which
determinations the subject cannot exist. Physicists treat motion as
separate from the body; moralists treat virtues and vices as separate
from the mind of which they are modes; the universal idea of man,
tree, body, and so on separates from these objects the determinations
without which they cannot exist. The first type of abstraction is called
modal abstraction; the second can be called abstraction of the subject.
Q Explain the different kinds of synthesis.
A Three kinds of synthesis can be distinguished: real synthesis, ideal
synthesis, and imaginative synthesis. The first is what unifies any real
objects whose unity is real; accordingly, this is the kind that deter-
mines the real relations of things. The second is what unites things
ideally when they are not really united; accordingly, it determines
the logical relations of things. The third is what forms imaginary
objects by uniting several things in thought.
Q Give me examples of these three kinds of synthesis.
A All judgments in which a real subject affirms in itself a real mode of
itself are examples of real synthesis. ‘The ivory ball that I hold in my
hand is heavy’: given the weight combined with the ivory ball that I
hold in my hand, this is a judgment that contains a real synthesis. If
news of my friend’s death makes me sad, I will be right to say ‘I am
saddened by news of my friend’s death.’ This judgment unites the
real mode of sadness with the I as real subject, and it achieves this
unity in reality because the sadness mentioned is a mode that really
inheres in the I. ‘God is the cause of the existence of the universe’
expresses the synthesis of effect with cause, and this synthesis is real.
‘Tizio is equal in height to Sempronio’: this proposition expresses
an ideal synthesis because the relation of equality in height between
Tizio and Sempronio is not a real relation at all but a logical rela-
tion. ‘Two triangles erected on equal bases between the same paral-
lel lines are equal to each other’ is also a proposition that expresses
an ideal synthesis. The first can be called objective ideal synthesis and
the second subjective ideal synthesis because the terms of the logical
relation are real in the first proposition but ideal in the second. It
is correct, therefore, to divide ideal synthesis into objective ideal
synthesis and subjective ideal synthesis.
The idea of a building to be built is the product of an imaginative
197
synthesis. The idea of a winged horse is also the product of an imagi-

native synthesis. The first can be called practical imaginative synthesis
since the object produced by thinking can be made real outside of
thinking.8 The second can be called poetic imaginative synthesis since
the object of the idea always remains imaginary and cannot acquire
any reality outside of thought. Synthesis is of three kinds, then: real,
ideal, and imaginative. Each divides in two: the real into (a) synthe-
sis of the mode with the subject in which it inheres, and (b) synthe-
sis of the effect with the cause. The ideal divides into objective ideal
synthesis and subjective ideal synthesis, the imaginative into practi-
cal imaginative and poetic imaginative synthesis.
Q Why are the operations of analysis and synthesis called voluntary
operations?
A Because they depend on the will, which is moved by desire and
directs them.
Q From what has been said up to now, it seems that all the faculties of
the soul reduce to the following: sensibility, consciousness, analysis,
synthesis, desire, and will.
A The establishment of our cognitions also requires another faculty, one
that preserves the cognitions we have acquired. Without this faculty, a
person could live a very long life and be no different, as far as knowl-
edge is concerned, than in the first instant of his intellectual life.
Q Give me an idea of this faculty.
A Usually this faculty is called memory, but we call it imagination. As
soon as an object is manifest to the mind – by means of our exter-
nal senses or by means of consciousness – and we have given it our
attention, the mind has the faculty of perceiving the object again, of
reproducing the perception of it, when the object is absent. To this
faculty we give the name imagination.
Q Is imagination the same faculty commonly called memory?
A All memory is imagination, but not all imagination is memory.
Q Explain this clearly, please.
A Memory contains two things: the reproduction of a past perception;
and the recognition of having had such a perception. But some past
perceptions can be reproduced without the recognition of having
had them.
Q How is this intellectual fact explained?
A Constant experience teaches us that, if one of the perceptions of
objects to which one attends together is reproduced in any way,
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Galluppi, Elements
the other is reproduced by means of imagination. This amounts to

saying that all of a past perception comes back by means of imagi-
nation when part of it comes back either by means of the senses or
by means of imagination. This law is called the law of association of
ideas. When imagination reproduces a perception by reproducing it
according to this law, the perception reproduced by the imagination
is located in two or more series of perceptions, in which case recog-
nition takes place and imagination becomes memory.
A Please use an example to explain this to me.
Q Suppose I have seen a preacher speaking in a church. If I then see
this same preacher at someone’s house, partial perception of him
will awaken a total perception – perception of the church along with
the preacher, in other words. Thus, the perception of the preacher
that I am talking about occurs duplicated in my mind, one part
belonging to the total perception of the church, the other part to
the total perception of the house. My mind has the sensation of
these two complex perceptions, into each of which, and as a part
of it, comes perception of the same person, and this is precisely the
sensation that constitutes recognition. When I see this person, if the
sight of him awakens no idea in me, even though I may have seen
him thousands of times, I would not notice that he had been in my
presence at some other time.
On the other hand, it sometimes happens that imagination awak-
ens various ideas without the sensation of having had them. In this
way, a thought that I recall having read in a book can be awakened
in my mind without the sensation of having read it. This happens
when the idea reproduced is awakened alone, not together with
associated ideas that accompanied the idea of the thought. Some-
thing I have read in a book is associated with idea A, for example.
When idea A is recalled, the idea of the thought in question is awak-
ened, but it can be awakened in two ways. It can be awakened either
together with the idea of the book or by itself. In the first case, the
idea of the thought that I am talking about occurs duplicated: one
version is simultaneous with present ideas; the other makes up part
of the complex idea of the book, and recognition takes place there-
by. The idea of the thought is not duplicated in the second case, and
so it is not recognized.
Q It seems to me that the fact we are discussing can also be expressed
and explained by looking at it from a different point of view.
199
A That is true. But the substance of this other explanation comes

down to the one that we have already given. We have the sensation
of the present I and of the ideas presently in it. We can also imag-
ine the past I with all the ideas that would have occurred in it, and
in that past state as we imagine it. Thus, we will have recognition
of those ideas that take part both in the complex sensation of the
present I and in the complex phantasm of the I in the past state as
we imagine it.
Q Is recollection distinct from memory, in the strict sense?
A When the recognition found in phantasms of the imagination is
direct, this function of the imagination is memory. When the re-
cognition is indirect, this function of the imagination is recollec-
tion.
Q Please give an example to explain it to me.
A I have seen Tizio in church, sitting somewhere with other people. I
see Tizio again, but I do not recognize him. He says to me, ‘Remem-
ber, you saw me in church.’ Then the idea of the church is awak-
ened, united to those of the people who were with Tizio. And the
idea is duplicated because it is united both with the sensation of the
current I and with phantasms of the I affected by past modifications.
I direct my attention to the ideas of the people who were with Tizio,
and these awaken the idea of Tizio, thereby duplicated and recog-
nized. Recognition of Tizio is therefore an effect produced not by
simple reproduction of the idea of Tizio, but by reproduction of the
ideas of the people who were in his company. This indirect recogni-
tion constitutes recollection or remembrance.
Q So then, the faculties of the soul are sensibility, consciousness, analy-
sis, synthesis, imagination, desire, and will. Together these faculties
constitute what is called the nature of the soul. What constitutes habit,
which philosophers regard as a second nature?
A Nature gives us the faculties. Frequent exercise of these faculties
gives us aptitudes for exercising them. Habits are these aptitudes.
Q They say that frequent exercise perfects our intellectual faculties.
What does this perfecting consist of?
A It consists of the aptitudes that I have mentioned.
Q Can habit give us faculties that we have not received from nature?
A Habit cannot give any faculty, only aptitudes, and these assume the
faculties.
End of the PSYCHOLOGY
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Summary of the IDEOLOGY by Question and Answer
Q What is an idea?
A The idea is the result of thinking about objects present to the mind
from sensibility and consciousness.
Q Is there no difference between the first operation of the intellect,
called simple apprehension or perception, and the idea in the proper
sense?
A The idea can be regarded as the terminus of the act called perception
or simple apprehension, or else as an internal modification of the soul
deriving from the act of perceiving.
Q What is ideology?
A Ideology is the science of the origin of our ideas, and thus of their
nature.
Q Ideology deals with what sorts of ideas?
A With ideas essential to human understanding.
Q Please explain this more clearly.
A There are ideas essential to human understanding and some that
are not, and thus they can be called accidental to understanding. The
first are found universally in all people, which cannot be said of the
second. No person can be without the idea of his own body and of
something outside it, whatever it may be, nor of his own thinking I.
But a person can do without the idea of a crocodile or an elephant,
and, if he is born blind, even of the starry sky.9 The ideas essential to
human understanding are those that thinking, which is the use of
the faculties of analysis and synthesis, develops naturally out of the I
that senses something outside the I.
Q Since the idea of one’s own body is an idea essential to human
understanding, tell me how people distinguish their own bodies
from external bodies.
A Our own body is the one in which we seem to sense and to be, in
which movements can be produced directly just by our willing them.
It is also the one that is present without interruption.
Q What is the soul, which seems to rule its own body?
A The soul is what has sensations and thoughts of some kind.
Q From that it seems we must regard the soul as something distinct
from sensations and from thoughts of any kind. This conclusion
seems to follow from the idea of the soul that we have formed for
ourselves. Is that right?
A It is right and indisputable.
201
Q But this thing that constitutes the soul and is usually also called the
substance of the soul or essence of the soul – what might that be?
A We have no determinate or particular notion of it, but we under-
stand that it is a subsistent thing, and to a subsistent thing we give
the name substance, as we give the names quality, accident, mode, modi-
fication, and so on to something that inheres in substance.
Q We have a general notion of substance, then?
A Certainly. If we had no notion of substance, we would have none of
quality, which is the correlate of substance. The distinction between
substantive and adjectival names, which is found in all languages,
shows that all people have the idea of substance and of quality.
Q But where do we get the idea of substance and its correlate of
quality?
A From experience, or rather from analysis of sensations or percep-
tions of the I or of something outside it. It is an objective notion
with respect to both origin and meaning.
Q The human soul is a substance, but since a body also appears to us
as a substance, might the human soul be a body?
A It is not possible that the human soul is a body. When one analyses
the consciousness of the thinking I, it is plainly seen that the human
soul, the I, shows its itself to be rigorously one in all functions of
thinking – to be absolutely simple and indivisible, in other words.
Q What did we call this absolute simplicity of the thinking I?
A We called it the metaphysical unity of the I.10
Q Give me a clearer picture of this metaphysical unity of the thinking
subject.
A In reasoning the thinking subject deduces a judgment from other
judgments. But this deductive act belongs necessarily to a simple
and indivisible subject because there is no dividing the deduction.
The deduction belongs to and inheres in the same subject to which
each element of the conclusion and each element of the premises
belong.11 Thus in reasoning there is no plurality of subjects, but
rather absolute identity and unity of the same subject.
Q Are there different kinds of unity?
A Two kinds can be distinguished: metaphysical unity and synthetic
unity. This second kind can be divided into the synthetic unity of
thought and physical unity. Metaphysical unity is absolute. Synthetic
unity is conditional (Ideology, sections 15−16, 20−24).12
Q We have already recognized (1) the substantiality of the soul; (2) its
metaphysical unity, also called spirituality; and (3) its various modi-
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fications or modes of being. Now from this it seems not only that the
soul is a substance, but also that it is an efficient cause of any modifi-
cations that it has – even though Hume denies the existence of the
notion of efficient cause. What should one think of this theory of
Hume’s?
A Hume’s theory of causality is false. Consciousness attests that the
soul is the principle or efficient cause of its own willing. In all lan-
guages, there are expressions that point to causality, such as dunque,
percio, in conseguenza, perchè, and so on in Italian.13
Q It seems that the notions of action and passion, which are linked to
that of causality, are also notions essential to human understanding.
A So they are. The distinction between active and passive verbs, found
in all languages, derives precisely from these notions.
Q From what you have said about substance and cause, it seems that
the relation between quality and substance and that between effect
and cause are both objective relations and therefore real.
A What you say is true. There are two real relations between items that
exist: one is of the modification or quality to the subject; the other is
of the effect to the cause. A modification has two real relations with
the substance: one is of the modification to the subject; the other is
of the effect to the cause. The cause of the modification can be the
subject itself of the modification or a different subject.
Q These two truths – (1) there can be no quality without a substance
in which the quality inheres; (2) there can be no effect without a
cause – are they contingent truths or, rather, necessary?
A They are necessary truths and therefore identical.
Q Please help me understand this clearly.
A Quality is an existence that inheres. A quality without substance,
therefore, would be at the same time an inhering and a non-inher-
ing existence. Moreover, quality is a mode of being, and without the
being a mode of being would be both a mode of being and not a
mode of being. Thus, it is an identical and necessary truth that there
can be no quality without a substance.
Q Demonstrate with the same clarity that there can be no effect with-
out a cause that makes it exist.
A The effect is what comes to be. Everything that exists either exists
independently of any assumption, or it may depend on some
assumption. In the first case, it exists absolutely, does not come to
be, and hence is not an effect, which is contrary to the hypothesis.
In the second case, the existence that is assumed and on which the
203
effect depends is an efficient cause. Thus, the proposition that there

is no effect without a cause is a truth demonstrated by means of the
principle of contradiction.
Q Help me understand more clearly that what comes to be does not
exist absolutely.
A What comes to be must be preceded by something, either being or
empty duration, since what is not preceded by anything does not
come to be but is itself the first being, before which there is nothing.
What is preceded by something exists only on the assumption of the
thing that precedes it. Therefore, it does not exist absolutely.
Q But in the case where a being was preceded only by empty duration,
would it not exist without an efficient cause?
A A being that comes to be cannot have a relation of dependence
with empty duration because the empty duration that supposedly
precedes it no longer exists when it comes to be. Its relation of
dependence would then be a non-dependent dependence, which is
a contradiction.
Q The two real relations that we have discussed, are they the only ones
that the mind conceives among things?
A Besides the real relations, the mind posits among its ideas – and also
among various things – various logical relations that exist only in it
and have no real archetype outside it. The terms of these logical
relations are real, and their basis, which is the positive nature of the
terms, is also real. But the relations are only in thought, and com-
pletely subjective.
Q What kinds of logical relations are there?
A There are relations of identity and difference, from which those of
equality, inequality, and so on derive.
Q What do we call the operation of the mind that perceives these logi-
cal relations?
A It is called ideal synthesis, which is divided into objective ideal synthesis
and subjective ideal synthesis.
Q The distinction between the two kinds of relation, the real and the
logical, is it important in philosophy?
A This distinction is of the highest importance. It teaches us how to
solve a leading problem of philosophy, which is what is objective in
cognitions, and what is subjective. It makes us distinguish two kinds
of experience: primitive experience, which is composed only of
objective elements; and comparative experience, which is composed
of objective and subjective elements together.
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Q Might the perception of logical relations be regarded as a mistake

and a mental illusion on our part?
A By no means. The perception of logical relations is a truth that has
its objective basis in the real terms of the relations themselves and in
the nature of our mind. Since these relations are modes of thinking
about objects, these modes therefore derive from the nature of our
mind. A person born in America, for example, looks like another
born in Italy. The two people are independent; there is no real rela-
tion between them. The mind conceives and thinks about the first
along with the second, and the two people are together in the mind
of the one who thinks about them. But this bringing together of the
two people in the same mind, and their existence in a single act of
the understanding, is and can only be ideal. It is nothing more than
the mode in which the mind thinks about each of these two people,
each of whom is isolated from and independent of the other. The
mind makes them a unity and joins one to the other. This is clear to
anyone who understands how to withdraw into the solitude of the
understanding. From this one sees that logical relations, in the final
analysis, are an effect existing in our mind, an effect that derives
from real causes.
Q You said that real relations among things come down to two: the
relation of quality to subject; and that of effect to cause. But is there
not also the relation of time, perhaps, which is different from that
of causality? By way of example: one person is fifty years old, while
another is ten, and there is no other relation of kinship between
these people. Might one not claim that there is an anteriority of
time between the first and the second, meaning that the first existed
at a time preceding the time in which the second existed?
A Even though many philosophers accept a relation of time distinct
from the relation of causality, still, if one reasons precisely and with-
out deluding oneself with fantasy, this theory is false.
Q Please give me a clear explanation of these views about time, and
show me which is true.
A Some philosophers think that there is a duration distinct from
things that endure, and that this duration is composed of an infinite
number of tiny durations that succeed one another. Imagine that
all things are annihilated, they say, and you cannot conceive of the
annihilation of time, the duration in which things exist. This proves
that duration exists independently of all things and that it is a neces-
sary condition of their existence.
205
A What should one think of this opinion?

Q It is absurd.
A Prove its absurdity for me, please.
A Here are some absurd notions that this theory contains. First, each
of the tiny durations that make up infinite duration is contingent
and conditional. Each comes to be and passes away again into noth-
ing. But an infinite series of conditionals cannot constitute the Abso-
lute. Infinite duration regarded as an absolute cannot be composed
of these tiny durations, then, so it cannot exist. Second, if things are
existent in this duration, duration is the subject in which all things
inhere. Consequently, it is the only subject, and all beings are only
modifications of it. But this unique substance is something that
cannot be. Past duration is nothing, and future duration is nothing,
but two zeros do not add up to any real and subsistent thing, such as
substance. (See also Ideology, section 51.)14
Q But if duration distinct from things that exist is impossible, how do
we form the idea of this duration for ourselves?
A Experience shows us the existence of generative acts, or rather
their effects, and for this reason causality is real in nature. Cause is
regarded as by nature anterior to effect. The mind has a concept
of the measure of effects or products, and the idea of this measure
constitutes for us the continuing phenomenon of time.
Q So there is nothing objective about time?
A The objective aspect of time is causality, or, to express it in different
terms, production or generation. Time is nothing more than the
measure of generative acts.
Q But since the measure is an idea of the mind and nothing outside
the mind, it follows from the proposed view of time that time is
nothing outside the mind.
A Measure is nothing outside the mind, but things measured are real
even outside the mind; likewise, the measure of generative acts
is only in the mind, but measurable generative acts are real and
objective.
Q Just as the idea of duration distinct from existing things – a dura-
tion in which all things seem to us to exist – cannot be separated
from the mind, likewise inseparable from the mind itself is the idea
of an immense space in which all things seem to exist. But we have
regarded duration distinct from existing things as merely imaginary.
Should we perhaps say the same of the immense space in which
everything seems to us to exist?
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A The idea of an immense void in which all things seem to exist is a

constant phenomenon for us and is the condition of other phenom-
ena, as it is of motion. But we have no legitimate reason to believe
in the existence of this void. When we establish the true nature of
the components of bodies, the non-existence of the void will be seen
clearly.
Q You said before that an infinite series of conditionals with no abso-
lute is impossible; please prove this proposition for me.
A A finite series of conditionals, by themselves, is a series of effects
without a cause and thus impossible. But with respect to causality,
an infinite series of conditionals by themselves does not differ from
a finite series. An infinite series of conditionals by themselves is
impossible, then.
Q Please explain this clearly.
A Let a finite series of conditionals by themselves be represented by
these five terms – A, B, C, D, E – such that E cannot exist unless D
exists, D cannot exist unless C exists, C cannot exist unless B exists
and B cannot exist unless A exists. Since the condition or cause of
A is not there, and since A is by hypothesis an effect, if by positing
the existence of the series you posit the existence of A, you posit an
effect without a cause, which we have shown to be impossible. But
the number of terms in the series of conditionals has no influence
at all on the nature of the series. In a five-term series of conditionals
by themselves, the cause of the first term is missing. In the same way,
the cause of the first term is missing in a ten-term series. Obviously,
the same must be said of a series of a thousand terms or of any other
number. Therefore, what is proved for a series of five terms is also
proved for all possible series, whatever the number of terms that
make it up.
Q It follows from what you have said that there must exist an abso-
lute Being – consequently, that God exists. Please give me a clear
account of the foundations of the proof of God’s existence.
A These are the foundations: (1) there is no effect without a cause;
(2) an infinite series of effects in which each term is an effect of the
one before it and the cause of the one after it is intrinsically impos-
sible; (3) if anything exists, the Absolute exists; (4) the I exists; (5)
the I is not the Absolute; (6) a conditional and contingent existence
has an intelligent cause for its cause.
Q You have already proved the first proposition, that there is no effect
without a cause. Can you prove it in a different way?
207
A An effect is something that comes to be. The idea of something that

comes to be is identical to the idea of something preceded by some-
thing else. The idea of something preceded is identical to the idea
of something produced.
Q But might a thing not be preceded by a duration devoid of things?
A We have shown that such a duration cannot exist. Therefore our
theory of time supplies a proof of the principle of causality.
Q Please review the other five propositions that support the crucial
proof of God’s existence.
A The second proposition, as we have shown, is a conclusion evident
from the principle of causality. The third is a conclusion evident
from the first two. The fourth is a primitive truth of fact. The fifth
proposition needs proof, which comes from the incompatibility of
the nature of the I, as shown to consciousness, with the nature of the
Absolute.
The Absolute is immutable. If change occurred in it, there
would be some effect in it of which it would be the cause. Before
the change, it would then be in some state, and this state would
be accidental to it and hence conditional, thus needing another
antecedent state which would also be conditional, thereby admitting
a series of conditionals without an Absolute, which we have shown
to be impossible. Therefore, in absolute being one must accept an
absolute state, which is the same as saying that the Absolute is immu-
table. The Absolute can lose nothing and gain nothing; it is all that
it can be. The Absolute is infinite, therefore. The I is not immutable;
the I is not infinite; therefore, the I is not the Absolute.
The sixth proposition can be proved in the following way. When
the I is posited, the Absolute is posited, but when the Absolute
is posited, the I is not posited since the I in this case would be
immutable, like the Absolute. Therefore, the I is not a necessary
consequence of the Absolute. It is, not because the Absolute is,
but because the Absolute makes it be. This causality, which is not a
consequence of the nature of the Absolute, is will. Therefore, the
Absolute is intelligent.
Q But God is regarded also as creator. What is the basis of this notion?
A The I is a substance. The I comes to be by action of the Absolute.
The action of the Absolute, therefore, makes substances exist. Such
an action is called creation. Therefore, God is the Creator.
End of the IDEOLOGY and of the First Volume
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Summary of the MIXED LOGIC by Question and Answer
Q What subject does mixed logic deal with?

A The aim of mixed logic is to explain the theory of reality, of certain-
ty, and of the limits of our knowledge, and thereby to determine the
legitimate grounds of our cognitions and the causes of our errors.15
Q Of what does the reality of our knowledge consist?
A Knowledge joined with the existence of the known object is real
knowledge.
Q Please prove to me that the human mind is capable of real cogni-
tions and possesses them.
A The reality of knowledge or the existence of various real cognitions
is a primitive truth and thus not provable.
Q What is the nature of this primitive truth?
A It is a primitive truth of fact or of internal experience.
Q Tell me what this primitive truth is.
A Expressed in general terms, it is this: ‘I am existent in the state of
thinking.’ This truth is posited by denying it, since, if you deny
that you are existent in the state of thinking, you yourself posit
that you deny it. But for you to posit that you deny your thinking I
is the same as positing yourself as thinking. If you say that you are
deceived, you still posit the same you that deceives you – that thinks,
in other words.
Q What do you mean by legitimate grounds of our judgments?
A What determines the mind to form some judgment is called a
ground of that judgment; this ground is legitimate when the judg-
ment grounded by it is true. If the judgment so grounded is false,
the ground is a cause of error.
Q How many legitimate grounds do we have for our judgments?
A There are three legitimate grounds of primitive truths of fact:
consciousness, external senses, and the authority of other persons.
But there is only one legitimate ground of primitive truths that are
rational or metaphysical: this is direct evidence – direct perception
of the relation of identity or of incompatibility among our ideas.
Q Might memory not be a legitimate ground of our cognitions?
A Memory is certainly a legitimate ground of our cognitions, since without
memory knowledge would be impossible. But memory is not an origi-
nating ground productive of cognitions that we do not already have. It is
a ground auxiliary to all other grounds, whatever they may be.
Q Can memory’s legitimacy as a ground be proved?
209
A Memory’s legitimacy as a ground can be proved only by assuming

the unprovable legitimacy of consciousness as a ground, since this is
what testifies to the existence of memory in us.
Q So it seems that consciousness can be regarded as a legitimate
ground of the legitimacy of all our other judgments?
A Exactly so. Consciousness must be seen in two ways, as a direct
legitimate ground of all those judgments regarding our I, and as an
ultimate and indirect ground of all our judgments, since the exist-
ence of all the other grounds is based on consciousness.
Q The testimony of other people as a ground is also based on the testi-
mony of consciousness?
A By analogy this ground is based on the testimony of our senses, and
the testimony of our senses, no less than the existence of memory
as an auxiliary ground, rests on the testimony of consciousness as its
ultimate basis.
Q What are the legitimate grounds, then, that give us primitive truths
of fact?
A They are consciousness, the testimony of the external senses, the
authority of other people, and memory as an auxiliary ground.
Q What are the legitimate grounds that give us rational or metaphysi-
cal primitive truths?
A There is only one: it is direct evidence – the clear and direct percep-
tion of the relation of identity or of incompatibility among our ideas.
Q Is there perhaps some general expression that covers all primitive
metaphysical truths?
A There is, and it is the famous principle of contradiction: ‘A thing
cannot both be and not be at the same time.’
Q What are the legitimate grounds of inferred truths?
A There is only one: it is deduction or reasoning.
Q But are there not two kinds of inferred truths: rational or metaphysi-
cal inferred truths; and truths from existence?
A Of course there are these two kinds of inferred truths, which is why
we have divided reasoning into pure and mixed. Beginning with
certain experiential existences, this last leads us to other existences,
which, even if they do not fall under experience, are nonetheless
capable of doing so, or else they are absolutely and exclusively
within the domain of reason.
Q You said that all legitimate grounds of our cognitions rest ultimately
on the authority of consciousness. I long to learn if the existence of
the material universe is also indirectly attested by consciousness.
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Galluppi, Elements
A My answer to the question you ask must be affirmative. Conscious-

ness assures us, beyond any doubt, of the existence of the percep-
tion of bodies. It shows us that this perception is referred by us to
bodies through a twofold relation: the general relation of some
thought to an object; and the special relation of causality. We regard
bodies not only as objects of our sensible perceptions but also as
causes of these perceptions. This identity of the object of percep-
tion, in the very thing that is the body, constitutes the reality of
empirical perception.
Q What stands out from our conversation is that the human mind is
capable of knowing various truths. It knows its own existence by the
consciousness that it has of itself; the existence of the bodies that
surround it by means of sensations; that of God by means of reason-
ing; and the existence of the many natural causes of visible effects
by means of the same reasoning. And yet some philosophers, usually
called sceptics, deny that the human mind can know anything. What
should one think of this scepticism, and what are the grounds that
the sceptics claim for doubting everything?
A The existence and reality of some human cognitions is a primitive
truth and not provable. From this follows the falsity of scepticism.
Scepticism wants proof of the existence and reality of any human
cognitions, but this proof is impossible because it would assume as
proven what must be proved. Therefore, the falsity of scepticism
cannot be proven rigorously, but must be recognized. Nonetheless,
once the existence of some true cognitions is admitted, it can be
proved that scepticism involves contradictions.
Q What are the philosophers called who teach that we can understand
some truths?
A They are called dogmatists.
Q Does sound philosophy not reject dogmatism?
A One must not confuse the dogmatic method with dogmatism. The
dogmatic method consists of judging when there are legitimate
grounds for judgment. But dogmatism consists of proclaiming judg-
ments without any legitimate ground.
Q But have philosophers not taught many errors, believing them to be
based on the grounds that they have stated? And are the sceptics not
right to conclude from such errors and from disagreement between
philosophical and popular opinions that the truth is entirely hidden
to the human mind?
A The sceptics reason badly. From some faulty judgments that people
211
make, they reach a universal conclusion that all human judgments

are false and that no person can know the truth. From the disagree-
ment of popular and learned opinion on some topics, they infer
universal disagreement in all human opinion. They therefore reach
a conclusion more universal than their premises.
Q But in the end, the existence of error in this world is beyond ques-
tion. What means do we have to distinguish error from truth?
A Error exists in this world because the human mind is limited. This
limitation brings with it the possibility of error, but not its necessity.
Logic gives us rules for recognizing the truth, and by explaining the
causes of our errors it shows us the way to avoid them.
Q But consciousness, external senses, memory, authority, evidence, rea-
soning – in the end, do they not deceive us, and often necessarily so?
A These grounds never deceive us necessarily. We always have ways to
avoid error. Thus, with regard to consciousness, one should note
that the elements of a judgment based on consciousness must all be
attentively observed, and that not everything which is in conscious-
ness comes to our attention. With regard to the senses, it suffices to
note that they cannot inform us about absolute properties of bod-
ies, only about relative properties, and that the apparent mode of
bodies must not be confused with the absolute mode. With regard
to evidence, one should take care not to confuse the mechanical
association of our ideas with the clear perception of their relation.
We have made analogous observations in the appropriate places in
dealing with the causes of our errors.16
End of the MIXED LOGIC
Explanation and Examination of the

Transcendental Philosophy
Immanuel Kant was born on 22 April 1724 at Königsberg in Prussia and

died on 22 February 1804. He is the author of a new philosophy called
transcendental philosophy and also the critical philosophy. Since this author
boasts that he has discovered a new method for philosophy, neither dog-
matic nor sceptical, called the critical method, you should not be strangers
in the land of this philosophy. Here I can give you only a brief account of
it by explaining its basic principles. My work titled Philosophical Essay on
the Critique of Consciousness, especially books three, four, and five, includes
a full treatment.17
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I call that philosophy transcendental which determines a priori the

subjective content of our cognitions. Subjective means what comes from
the mind, from the cognizing subject, and not at all from the object
cognized. The latter, the component of cognition that comes from the
object, is called objective.18
That there is something subjective in our cognitions was recognized
before the birth of the transcendental philosophy. If you look at an oar
immersed in water, it will seem to be broken, but the break in the oar is
not objective: the oar is not broken. This breaking of the oar is our mode
of seeing it, which is therefore subjective. If you happen to be in the
middle of two parallel lines of trees or columns, these lines will seem to
converge in the distance, and, at a great distance, to meet in a point. But
this convergence and this coming together are not at all in the object.
They are our ways of seeing, and thus they are subjective, not objective.
A square tower seen in the distance will seem round: this roundness is
subjective, our way of seeing the shape of this tower. No need for me to
multiply examples that you can multiply for yourselves. I only remind
you that in the second chapter of the Psychology I showed you that smells,
colours, cold, and heat are our ways of being, and the various modes by
which we perceive external objects are certainly not the modes in which
these objects exist.19
Not only are we aware from our sense-perceptions that our mode of
seeing objects does not correspond to objects themselves; this subjec-
tive element is also manifest in the products of thinking. Thus we have
seen that relations of equality, similarity, and so on are simply mental
viewpoints and certainly not physical and absolute properties of things.
We have likewise noted that the mind, by turning the possible into the
real, by making duration distinct from things in succession, has thereby
produced some illusions that can be called transcendent. All these ele-
ments that arise from our mental activity can be regarded as subjective
elements of our cognitions and of our errors.20
I have warned many times that logical relations must not be confused
with real relations.21
But the transcendental philosophy differs from theories that preceded
it by proclaiming itself a fully a priori science and seeking to determine
a priori – independently of any experience whatever – the subjective ele-
ments of our cognitions. It treats many objective elements as subjective,
and it treats them as inherent in our cognitive faculty, antecedently to
any datum of experience whatever.22 Moreover, it treats these subjective
elements as in themselves empty of reality and as lasting phenomena. It
213
seeks to make all objects arise from the synthetic combination of these
subjective elements together with objective elements. But Kant’s ‘objec-
tive’ is not the ‘objective’ of other philosophers; his is not real in itself,
but rather an appearance, a phenomenon. And humans can cognize
nothing outside of appearances.23
The transcendental philosophy therefore supposes (1) that some ele-
ments of our cognitions are in us a priori, independently of any experi-
ence whatsoever; (2) that the philosophy that tries to discover them must
be wholly established a priori. These elements of our cognitions, which
the mind possesses independently of experience, are called pure, mean-
ing primitive and somehow purified of any impression at all foreign to
us. Calling the complex of all these principles pure reason, the philosophy
that discovers them a priori also calls itself a critique of pure reason.24
But what means shall we use to help us uncover the pure elements of
our cognitions? By what sign shall we recognize them? The philosophy
that I am investigating declares the following basic principle: what is nec-
essary, invariable, and universal in our cognitions is subjective, pure, and
a priori; by contrast, the accidental, contingent, and variable will belong
to the object, will be an objective element.25
The first fact that strikes us from outside is extension; the second is
motion. In these perceptions we see what is necessary and universal,
and, in keeping with the principle declared above, we will succeed in
uncovering the pure elements of these perceptions. If I abstract from
all bodies, if I make every trace of them disappear, space still stays with
me – infinite, indeterminate, absolute space. If we abstract from space,
we annihilate all bodies and the possibility of any external perception.
If extension were a thing that experience makes us recognize in bodies,
we would be able to conclude only that all objects that we have perceived
until now by means of the external senses are extended and in space.
Nothing would assure us that we would not perceive some object outside
of us that was not extended. But to make such a judgment is beyond our
power. All objects that we can perceive by means of the external senses
must be extended and in space. Therefore, space is a representation that
rigorously carries with it the features of absolute necessity and universal-
ity; hence, it is a subjective element of our cognitions.
Motion represents body to us successively in various parts of space;
therefore, a succession of ideas must be produced in us in order for us to
be able to perceive motion. But is this succession objective or subjective?
Suppose all the things that follow one another in succession are anni-
hilated; the idea of duration or time remains with us, as we have seen.
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We cannot perceive anything unless it exists in time. Therefore, time is

a representation (perception, idea, notion) that rigorously carries with
it the features of necessity and absolute universality; hence, it is a subjec-
tive element of our cognitions.
But if the representation of space is in the mind antecedently to expe-
rience, a priori, how does it happen that space or extension seems to us
to be in objects? Kantians usually explain this with comparisons. Suppose
that a seal which you usually use to seal your letters has a certain figure
or image carved in it. As soon as you press the seal in the sealing wax,
the figure that was in the seal is also imprinted in the wax. Now sup-
pose that the seal were equipped with the ability to sense the impression
while making it: the seal would perceive in the wax the figure that we
are discussing, and this figure would seem objective to it. Yet the shape
in the wax comes from the seal, not from the wax – from the perceiving
subject, that is, not from the object perceived: it will really be subjective,
not objective. Likewise, if you look at objects through green eyeglasses,
the colours of the objects will seem darker. In this way, the green that was
the form of the glasses – of the means by which you see the objects – will
appear to you in the objects themselves. In the same way, space, which
is a form of our external sensibility, appears to be in external objects, as
a consequence of the sensation that we experience, but in reality space
is a subjective element of our sensible perceptions, a pure form of our
external sensibility.
Sensible perceptions, those that arise from our sensations, Kant calls
empirical intuitions or seeings; the subjective elements of these intuitions
he calls pure intuitions or seeings. Hence, according to Kant, every empiri-
cal intuition consists of two elements: matter and form. The matter is
sensation; the form is space. Sensation is the empirical part of empirical
intuition; space or extension is the pure or subjective part of it. With
regard to internal sense – perceptions of consciousness – the matter is
the internal modifications that seem to us to be affections; the form is
time. We perceive external objects one after another only because with
the internal sense we sense the perceptions referred to these objects one
after another.26
Time is the immediate form of internal sense, mediated by the exter-
nal senses. The succession that consciousness perceives in our internal
affections comes from consciousness itself. It is not in these affections at
all.
The result is that extension in external objects is our mode of seeing
them, not at all a real and objective quality. Objects are not extended,
215
just as they are not fragrant, sweet, bitter, and so on. Likewise, in things
taken by themselves there is no succession, which is a mode of sensing
our internal affections. At a certain moment a cannon fires a shot, then
fires another shot at another moment. We judge that one shot was fired
before, the other afterward, but the judgment arises from a subjective
element. In the things themselves there is neither before nor after.
If you object to Kant that it follows from this that inner sense deceives
us by making us see within us a succession of modifications that do not
exist, he answers that both internal sense and the external senses give us
only appearances; that just as space is apparent outside, so time is appar-
ent inside and thereby also apparent outside; that consequently internal
sense has no privilege over the external senses, and both proceed in the
same way. Kant calls his theory of sensibility the transcendental aesthetic.27
Kant’s school recognizes, as do we, a passive state and an active state
in the cognizing being, a passivity and an activity.28 The first consists of
external and internal sensibility, each of which sensibilities has its form a
priori, independently of experience. These forms are also called laws of
sensibility, its primitive conditions; they are space for external sensibility,
time for internal sensibility. The products of sensibility are called intui-
tions or seeings. But these intuitions are not yet the notions that are the
elements of judgment. For them to become so, the action of understand-
ing is needed to elevate intuitions into concepts. The products of passiv-
ity are intuitions; the products of activity are concepts.29
The activity of the understanding consists of analysis or synthesis. This
is the first question that presents itself, then: ‘Is analysis or synthesis the
first act of the cognizing being?’ To answer the question posed, let us
examine the state in which sensibility leaves us as we form our concepts.
Our sensations, which are the empirical part or the matter of our sen-
sible intuitions, are distinct and separate from one another. Thus, even
though sight and touch often excite different sensations at the same
time – as when one sees colours with the eyes, feels hardness or softness,
weight or heat with the hand, or sound with the ears – sensations are
nonetheless distinct from one another and not blended in the sensing
being.
Sensibility thus gives us distinct sensations but does not bind them
together. It also gives us two indeterminate subjective elements, an infi-
nite space and an infinite time. But what will bring these sensations
together and surround them in a determinate space and a determinate
time? What must produce this union is the activity of the mind. There-
fore, the first operation of the activity of understanding is to unify the
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various sensations that sensibility gives to it. Its first operation, then, is
synthesis. Sensations of yellow given by vision; of sound given by hearing;
of hardness, weight, and ductility given by touch − sensations isolated in
themselves − are taken by the activity of the mind and joined together
with the form of a determinate space and a determinate time into the
single representation that we call ‘gold.’ Therefore, the first operation of
the understanding is synthesis.
Suppose you object that the qualities corresponding to the sensations
united in the representation of gold are found united in the gold itself,
which is the object of your representation, and that this is because you
perform an analysis, revealing them one by one – no synthesis at all. The
philosophy that we are explaining will reply that things taken absolutely
by themselves and independently of our representations can never be
cognized by us, and that they are outside the sphere of activity of our
knowledge. Consequently, the objects of our cognitions are formed by
us, and these objects are our representations themselves. The data, the
elements with which we form these representations, are our sensations
– external impressions and internal impressions; therefore, sensible
objects are formed by the synthesis of these sensations. The sensible tree
or the sensible animal is nothing more than a batch of sensations joined
together by the activity of the understanding. According to the transcen-
dental philosophy, then, synthesis is the first operation of mental activity.
The concepts that are the elements of judgment are formed by it.
The transcendental philosophy must determine a priori the subjective
elements of our cognitions. The result of the transcendental aesthetic
was that space and time are subjective elements of the products of sensi-
bility. What will these subjective elements of the products of synthesis be?
We said that judgment is a product of synthesis. Hence, by discovering
a priori the subjective elements of our judgments, we will find the sub-
jective elements of the synthetic products, and hence of our concepts,
which are the first products of synthesis.
There are four forms needed for all our judgments, and they are quan-
tity, quality, relation, and modality. With regard to quantity, all our judg-
ments must be singular, particular, or universal: ‘the moon is opaque’;
‘some bodies are transparent’; ‘all bodies are heavy.’30
But in saying that the moon is opaque, we must regard various quali-
ties of the moon – the various sensations and representations by which
we are affected in representing the moon to ourselves – as constituting
just one whole. We regard this body called ‘moon’ as one. This concept
of unity is therefore necessary for the mind to be able to form a singular
217
judgment, since it must treat the subject of this judgment as one. This
concept of unity is therefore a subjective element of these singular judg-
ments. In the batch of sensations by which you are affected in regard to
the moon, you will not be able to find any sensation of which you can say,
‘this sensation is exactly the concept of unity.’ This necessary element of
all singular judgments is therefore a subjective element.
Likewise in this judgment, ‘some bodies are transparent,’ you will find
no sensation that corresponds to the word ‘some,’ the concept denoted
by this word being plurality. Such a concept is in us a priori, then, a sub-
jective element of particular judgments. In the judgment ‘all bodies are
heavy,’ there is no sensation corresponding to the word ‘all.’ The con-
cept denoted by this word, which is the concept of totality, is therefore in
us a priori and is a subjective element of all universal judgments. Hence,
the concepts of unity, plurality, and totality are pure concepts.31 They are
in the understanding independently of any experience. They are subjec-
tive elements of all judgments of quantity, and these judgments are not
possible without these concepts.
With regard to quality, all our judgments are either affirmative, nega-
tive, or infinite: ‘all bodies are heavy’; ‘the rock is not sensitive’; ‘the
soul is not-mortal.’32 Infinite judgments combine the two ways of judg-
ing, according to Kant, the affirmative and negative. This is because we
treat the object as being in a certain mode whereby it lacks some quality,
and we judge that it is in a mode different from that in which certain
others are; in the universe of objects this sets a limit, a divide, on one
side of which objects have such a quality, while on the other side they do
not have this quality. To say ‘the soul is not-mortal’ is a judgment whose
meaning equates to this other negation, ‘the soul is not mortal,’ because
the complex notion that corresponds to the first is the same as the one
that corresponds to the second; the one and the other both represent
the soul as not mortal. Nonetheless, the first sets up a class of mortal
things from which the soul is separate, but the second does not set up
this class. In the first it is affirmed that the soul is in a state different from
that in which many other things are, which is not said in the second. In
judgments viewed according to quality, then, the mind either affirms or
denies or limits.
According to Kant, the mind can neither affirm nor negate nor limit
unless it has antecedently in it the concepts of affirmation or reality, of
negation or privation, and of limitation.33 When the mind says ‘all bodies
are heavy,’ what corresponds to the word ‘are’ is the concept of reality.
The mind regards bodies as having the reality of weight. Therefore, the
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concept of reality is a subjective element of this cognition that ‘bodies

are heavy.’ Without it, the mind could not say ‘are,’ just as it could not say
‘is’ in this other judgment, that ‘gold is malleable.’ Likewise, without the
concept of negation or privation, it could not say ‘is not’ in the judgment
that ‘the rock is not sensitive.’ In that other judgment, that ‘the soul is
not-mortal,’ it could not say ‘not-‘ without the concept of limitation. The
proposition expresses various elements of the synthesis of judgment, but
what corresponds to the words ‘is,’ ‘is not,’ and ‘is not-‘ is nothing objec-
tive and not a sensation. Only certain concepts are involved, those of
reality, privation, and limitation. These concepts are therefore subjective
elements of judgments of quality. They are pure a priori concepts. With-
out them judgments would not be possible.
With regard to relation, our judgments are either categorical or con-
ditional or disjunctive.34 The first are those in which the predicate is
referred to the subject absolutely, without any condition, as in: ‘a body is
heavy.’ The second are those in which, when the truth of one thing is pos-
ited, it is asserted that another must also be true, as in: ‘if a body is heavy,
it falls when not supported.’ In these judgments, neither of the two predi-
cates is affirmed. What is affirmed is only a necessary connection between
the one and the other.35 Disjunctive judgments are those in which one
among a certain number of features is attributed to the subject but with-
out determining which one, as in ‘the soul is either mortal or immortal.’
When you say ‘a body is heavy,’ in this categorical judgment you treat
weight as a mode or accident of body and body as a substance to which
this accident belongs. Hence it is necessary, according to Kant, for the
understanding to have in itself the concepts of substance and accident.
Without this pure concept, categorical judgments would not be possible.
In conditional judgment, the mind has the concept of a necessary con-
nection between the condition and the conditioned.36 But the concept
of a necessary connection between two things, according to Kant, cannot
come from sensations. Therefore, it is in the understanding a priori. This
concept, which is the relation of causality or of cause and effect, is there-
fore a pure concept, a subjective element in the synthesis of conditional
judgments. In disjunctive judgments, the various predicates are treated
as parts of a whole, with a reciprocity between them. In fact, when one is
posited, the other is denied, and denying one posits the other. But this
concept of reciprocity or commerce is a subjective concept to which no
sensation corresponds.37
With regard to modality, judgments are either problematic or asser-
toric or necessary. In the following argument – ‘if a body is heavy, an
219
unsupported body necessarily falls; but the body is heavy; therefore, the
unsupported body necessarily falls’ – the first judgment is problematic
because the heavy body is still treated as something merely possible. The
second judgment – ‘the body is heavy’ – is simply assertoric or contin-
gent because weight is treated simply as real in the body, clearly not as
necessary. The third judgment – ‘the unsupported body necessarily falls’
– is necessary, or, as they usually say, apodictic, because falling is attributed
necessarily to the unsupported body.
The mode of regarding the suitability or unsuitability of the predi-
cate to the subject of the judgment is nothing more than a mere mental
outlook, a mere mode of our thought. Nothing objective corresponds
to it. The terms possible, actual, necessary, and contingent merely express
concepts to which nothing physical corresponds. Yet these concepts are
necessary to form judgments of modality. Therefore, they are in the
understanding a priori. They are subjective elements of our cognitions.38
The pure concepts of unity, plurality, and totality; reality, privation,
and limitation; substance-and-accident, cause-and-effect, and commerce;
possibility-and-impossibility, existence-and-non-existence, necessity-and-
contingency, Kant calls categories. And these twelve categories are the sub-
jective elements of all our judgments.39
We said that the signs for discovering what is subjective in our cogni-
tions are necessity and universality. Let us apply this principle to judg-
ment. I do not know what I will think tomorrow nor at all the later
moments of my life because I do not know what objects will be given
to me by my senses. But if I am ignorant of the objects of my thinking,
I am not ignorant of the how of my thinking. I cannot foresee the mate-
rial, which is given to me from outside, but I do foresee the form, which
resides in me a priori. Everything that I will think must necessarily be
clothed in the four forms of quantity, quality, relation, and modality.
For me it is absolutely necessary that I conceive what I think (1) as
one, many, or all; (2) as real, negative, or limited; (3) as substance or
accident, cause or effect, action or reaction; and finally (4) as possible or
impossible, existent or non-existent, necessary or contingent. No object
conceived by me can take any other form. These four forms, therefore,
are found universally and necessarily and in all our judgments. The
twelve categories that correspond to them, then, are subjective elements
of all our judgments. Every judgment, in order to be determined, must
belong necessarily to one of the three modes of the four forms. Thus, the
judgment that ‘all bodies are heavy’ is universal in quantity, affirmative
in quality, categorical in relation, and assertoric in modality.
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We have now discovered the subjective elements of the synthesis of

understanding. To learn how synthesis produces concepts composed
of subjective and objective elements, it is necessary to determine two
things: first, the centre of unity of the synthesis; second, the order of the
synthesis itself.40
Synthesis means unity, but unity assumes what is united and that to
which it is united.41 Without that to which it is united, synthesis is not
possible. But synthesis, according to Kant, consists in uniting represen-
tations. Representations are our only endowment; hence, a representa-
tion to which other representations are united is necessary. This first
representation, to which the others are united, is the centre of synthesis.
Without this centre of unity, synthesis would not be possible.
This first representation must be in us a priori because what is given
by sensibility is a manifold – a multitude of sensations and also indefinite
intuitions of a space and a time.42 But this first representation must be
unique, since, if it were a complex of representations, it would assume
unity in the act still to be produced. Since sensible objects are nothing
other than a complex of representations produced by the synthesis of
the understanding (according to the philosophy that we are explaining),
it follows that this first a priori representation, which is the basis of all
synthesis, must also be regarded as the basis of forming objects and as
the primitive source of all objectivity. This will become clearer as we go
on, and I ask you to pay attention to what follows.
In the Ideology I showed you that synthetic unity of thinking would not
be possible without the metaphysical unity of the I, and without synthetic
unity of thought no knowledge would be possible for mankind. The tran-
scendental philosophy accepts cognition of the synthetic unity of percep-
tion and of thought. It calls this consciousness empirical consciousness, or,
if you will, empirical unity of consciousness, which would be consciousness
of the idea of a man, a tree, and so on.43 Nonetheless, it does not make
the synthetic unity of thought arise from the metaphysical unity of the
I. Although in my philosophy this unity is real and independent of our
mode of perception, the transcendental philosophy, which forbids any
kind of relation with the absolute realities called noumena, can certainly
not accept this. But it still needs a unity to explain the synthetic unity of
thought that it does accept.
Truly, how can one explain this fact, that I am conscious of seeing a
person’s foot and head together, without assuming a simple centre of
unity in which the perceptions of the foot and the head are united? If
one person in a crowd feels hot, another cold, one happy, and another
221
sad, could there ever be a single feeling of heat and cold together with
happiness and sadness? Empirical unity of consciousness assumes syn-
thetic unity of thinking, but synthetic unity of thinking assumes a centre
of unity in which the various elements of thinking are united. This sim-
ple centre of unity I have found in the real I. Where does Kant put it? In
an a priori representation.
But how does he manage to determine this representation, which is
the basis of his synthesis? Since this representation is a priori, it must
necessarily be found in every synthesis. As soon as we have a representa-
tion, we can say ‘I think of this representation.’ Thus, when I have the
representation of a person’s foot, I can say ‘I have the representation of
a person’s foot,’ or rather, ‘I think of the person’s foot.’ The represen-
tation ‘I think’ is therefore necessary so that it can be united with any
other possible representation.44
Hence, this representation is found necessarily and universally in eve-
ry synthesis of the understanding, making it the centre of unity of all oth-
er representations. Accordingly, this representation is a priori. It is not
given to us but is the first act of the spontaneity of the understanding.45
It is independent of experience, since all representation, being my rep-
resentation, necessarily assumes the representation ‘I think.’ Kant calls
this representation the transcendental unity of consciousness, or rather the
transcendental unity of apperception. The synthesis of understanding starts
from the unity between each particular representation and the represen-
tation ‘I think.’
One must not confuse the transcendental unity of consciousness with
the category of unity: the second serves to produce the synthetic unity
of representations, but it cannot do this without the first. The cognizing
being unites each representation – of each part of a person, for example,
or of a tree, and so on – with the representation ‘I think,’ and applies the
category of unity to the entirety of these representations, thus constitut-
ing the synthetic unity of the representation of a person, a tree, and so
on.46 From this synthetic unity arises the empirical unity of conscious-
ness, or the single act of consciousness that embraces all the represen-
tations united in the synthetic unity that we are describing. By means
of the categories, therefore, the transcendental unity of consciousness
establishes the synthetic unity of our representations, from which arises
the empirical unity of consciousness of these same representations. It is
by dint of this consciousness that we can say, ‘I am conscious of the rep-
resentation of a person, a tree,’ and so on.
In the Ideology I also discussed the physical unity of bodily objects, say-
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ing that if it arises from the synthetic unity of thinking, it still assumes in
objects something that determines the synthetic unity of thinking and
supplies us a legitimate ground for qualifying it with the metaphysical
adjective ‘one.’47 The transcendental philosophy absolutely rejects this
view. It forbids any communication whatever with objects taken by them-
selves. For this reason, objects are products of the synthesis of the under-
standing, according to the canons of this philosophy. Hence, it must
believe synthetic unity of thought to be the same as physical unity. But
synthetic unity of thought depends, as we have said, on the transcenden-
tal unity of consciousness, which therefore is the origin and basis of the
formation of objects – an object being nothing more than the synthetic
unity of certain representations, according to the transcendental phi-
losophy. And for this reason the transcendental unity of consciousness is
also called objective unity.48
According to the transcendental philosophy, just what is a tree or an
animal? It is the entirety of certain representations embraced by con-
sciousness. But this entirety is formed by the synthesis of the under-
standing with the help of the categories, and this synthesis assumes the
representation ‘I think.’ This representation is therefore the basis and
source of all objects, and no object would be possible without it.
A difficulty will surely emerge as you think about this. The transcen-
dental philosophy, you will be entitled to say, allows some objective ele-
ments in our cognitions. Sensations, which are the material of empirical
intuitions, come to us from outside. How, then, can any connection with
objects taken by themselves be banned? At present I am only explaining
to you the basic principles of the transcendental philosophy. But this
philosophy has two canons: that sensation comes to us from objects; and
that we have no informative communication with objects taken by them-
selves, called noumena. I do not understand how these two canons agree
with one another – nor how they can be made to agree.
However that may be, the question that the transcendental philoso-
phy proposes to answer by examining the understanding is this: ‘How
does the understanding form objects of experience by the synthesis of
sensations?’49 And here, despite any difficulty you might encounter, I
ask you to note that the question is a general one and certainly involves
the object of internal sense, the I perceived by empirical consciousness
and called the empirical I to distinguish it from what is real in itself or the
noumenal I. This will be made clearer to you as we go on.
The results of our inquiries have been: (1) the first operation of the
mind is synthesis; (2) the centre of unity of the elements of synthesis is
223
the transcendental unity of consciousness; (3) this unity, aided by the

categories, constitutes the synthetic unity of representations and thus
all objects of experience. A question now arises: What order does this
synthesis preserve in uniting the elements of our cognitions? Since we
already know that to which synthesis unites the various representations
provided by sensibility, it is natural to ask what are the first representa-
tions that synthesis unites to the representation ‘I think.’ What order
does understanding preserve in combining various elements to form
objects of experience?
The philosophy that we are explaining states the following canon:
‘The categories must first be combined with the pure intuitions of space
and time; time in particular, as form of internal sense, serves as a means
and a bond between the categories and the material of sensible intui-
tions – sensations.’ A category applied to the pure form of sensibility
constitutes a schema – or a crude silhouette. Thus, the first products of
the synthesis of the understanding are the schemata.50
Let me clarify what I am saying to you. Pure space is in us independ-
ently of experience, but this space is indeterminate and represents to us
no determinate figure. Yet the objects of external experience represent
determinate spaces to us – not indeterminate extension, in other words,
but an ascent through figures. They present to us, for example, a cube, a
sphere, a cylinder, or some such figure. Any tree or animal whatever has
a determinate figure.51
To form objects of external experience, then, one must first form
the determinate space in which we bound all the qualities attributed to
them.52 Sensibility gives us only an indeterminate space as an a priori
form of our empirical intuitions. Determinate space is therefore a prod-
uct of the synthesis of the understanding, which acts on the indetermi-
nate space given to it a priori as a subjective element by sensibility. But
the categories enter into the products of the synthesis of the understand-
ing as subjective elements. The combination of the categories with space
therefore constitutes the schemata – or the figures of bodies.
But this needs more explanation. Suppose that a body accessible to
our senses had the figure of a cube. The first thing that synthesis would
have to do to form this body is to construct the figure of a cube in inde-
terminate space. The mind must construct this cube a priori in the same
way that geometers construct it.
The notion of number is more general than that of space or extension,
and from this it emerges that it is representative as much of continuous
as of discrete magnitude.53 Synthesis begins with the simple, and its first
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products are simpler than those that come after. But the more general
the ideas are, the simpler they are, as we said in the third chapter of the
Logic.54 Synthesis of the understanding must therefore form the concept
of number in general before that of a determinate space in general.
Let us see how this forming proceeds. Imagine a moment, an instant
in the pure seeing of time. To this instant, united with the representa-
tion ‘I think’ by the understanding, apply the category of unity, and you
will say ‘one.’ Imagine a second instant, joined like the first with the
representation ‘I think,’ and applying the same category of unity will
again cause you to say ‘one.’ Apply the category of plurality to the two
moments formed in this way, and you will say ‘two,’ and then ‘three,’
‘four,’ and so on in succession.55 In this way arise sensible concepts of the
various numbers. But note that the understanding, according to Kant,
must form the primitive concept of any number – which is to say the uni-
versal concept – before forming concepts of particular numbers. Such a
concept is formed by applying the categories of unity and plurality to the
series of moments, and thus arises the general notion of number, which
is adding one to one in succession.
Before thinking of two people, according to Kant, one must first think
of two, and before thinking of two, one must think of number in general
– one must form the universal concept of number, in other words. This
concept is called the schema of the categories of quantity, and it arises
from the application of the categories of quantity to the pure intuition of
time. Time is therefore the means by which the categories are joined to
the other elements of our cognitions, and in synthesis the first products
of the understanding are the schemata – that is, the combination of sub-
jective elements of the understanding, either thinking combined with
subjective elements of sensibility, or these elements combined directly
with the element of time in the first instance.
Once the understanding thinks of two, it makes the universal concept
of number more determinate and stable. In the philosophy that we are
explaining, this is called forming an image, so that two, three, and so on
are images of number, as when you put five points • • • • • on a piece
of paper and get the image of the number five.56 The image is to the
schema what species is to genus. But just as the five points printed on
paper are a species in relation to five, they are an individual in relation
to number in general, and in Kant’s philosophy they are called an object
when regarded as an individual. In this way the synthesis of the under-
standing forms schemata first, images next, and then objects. Thus,
when it needs to form the figure of a tree, synthesis first forms the genus
225
of this figure, next the species, and then it forms the object or individual
by uniting with this species something empirical – colours, for example
– that we discern in the tree.
But let us turn back and take another look at how the understanding
constructs the figure of sensible objects, referring to the example of the
cube that I mentioned. Geometers take lines to be formed from the flow
of a point, while surfaces come from the lateral movement of lines, and
solids come from moving surfaces up or down. On that assumption, a
point is conceived to flow and to produce a bounded line; if the line
is then conceived to flow laterally and to produce at its two extremes
two other lines equal to itself and perpendicular to it, we will have the
schema of a square. Assuming that this square rises along a line perpen-
dicular to it and equal to the generating line, you will have the schema
of the cube.
But let us see what elements enter into the construction of the cube
constructed a priori by the understanding. This construction posits a
manifold or rather a number, and the number arises from applying the
categories of quantity to time, as we said above. But the construction
occurs in pure space, the space assumed in all geometrical construc-
tions. Pure space is an element of this construction, then, and the cat-
egories are therefore also applied to pure space, but they are applied to
it because they are applied to time. Hence they are combined directly
with time and indirectly with space.57 Note here also that the mind, after
constructing the cube, treats its various elements as parts and the entire
cube as a whole. The category of totality therefore also enters into this
synthesis of the understanding.
Now here are the elements of this synthetic product: (1) the pure form
of time and that of space; (2) the categories of unity, plurality, and total-
ity. The centre of unity of the synthesis is the representation ‘I think,’ or
the transcendental unity of consciousness. The order of synthesis is the
application of the categories directly to time and indirectly to space.
Up to this point synthesis combines only subjective elements; its prod-
ucts are not yet objects of experience. It is necessary to add an objective
element to these a priori combinations, and this element is sensation.
Unite sensations with the cube that the mind has formed a priori, and
you will have a die, a cube of ice, or a cube of wood – which is to say an
object of experience. This, then, is how the synthesis of the understand-
ing forms all the objects of sensible nature, all the empirical and indi-
vidual concepts – concepts of a dog, for example, a horse, a cherry, the
sun, the moon, and so on. But this needs still more clarification.
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Previously I noted that the synthesis of judgment, in order to be com-

plete and determinate, requires the combining of categories that belong
to all four modes to which judgment can be reduced – the categories of
quantity, quality, relation, and modality. But according to our descrip-
tion, the categories must be combined directly with time. Thus, for an
object of experience to be formed, it is necessary for an individual empir-
ical concept to do its job before the needed application of the categories
of quantity, quality, relation, and modality to the pure intuition of time.
Let us return to the earlier example of what goes into the empirical
concept of a cube of marble, ice, wood, and so on. We have seen that
it is necessary, in the first stage of representing the figure of the cube,
to apply the categories of quantity to time in order to form the figure.
After the cube has been formed, we unite a batch of sensations – of col-
our, solidity, hardness, weight, smoothness, cold or heat, and so on – to
this representation. But every sensation has a degree.58 Look around a
landscape covered with green plants, and in each plant you will find a
different green – a green deeper in one, less deep in another. When you
pick things up in your hand, the sensation of weight will be stronger in
one than in another. The heat can also be more intense or less intense.
Every sensation has a degree, then, and has it necessarily. If every sen-
sation has a degree necessarily, then the degree is also a subjective ele-
ment of sensation. Nonetheless, it is not a simple subjective element,
so what are its components? Kant finds them in the category of reality
and in the pure form of time. The category of reality, applied to time,
constitutes the schema of this category – which is to say the degree of
the sensation. Assume time to be empty, and you will have the schema of
privation. Assume that the next instant is filled with a reality – of a cer-
tain heat, for example. Assume that this heat remains and that the next
instant is also filled with the same heat, and you will conceive the degree
of heat as starting from zero and going to two. The degree, then, is the
schema of the category of reality; in this way, objects are limited in the
empirical part of sensations.
We regard cold and solidity in the cube of ice as qualities or modes
of the ice; therefore, the category of substance also enters our synthesis
as a subjective element. But we regard the cold and solidity of the ice as
modes only because we think that these things cease to be while the sub-
stance of the ice remains. Indeed, if you bring ice near fire, it loses cold
and solidity and takes the form of fluid. Hence, we regard substance as a
subject that lasts through time while modes cease.59 Therefore, the cat-
egory of substance is also combined here with the pure intuition of time.
227
In the experience described above, you likewise regard fire as the

cause of fluidity in the ice, so the category of causality comes into this
experience as a subjective element. But this category also applies to time
because the fire is assumed to exist before the fluidity of the ice, and
in general – according to Kant – the cause is conceived as antecedent
in time to the effect. Finally, the cube of ice of which we are speaking
is regarded as existing at a given time; this comes about through the
synthesis of the category of existence, which is one of the categories of
modality with respect to time.60
Thus, to form an object of experience and thereby an individual empir-
ical concept, it is necessary first for the understanding to form schemata
of the various categories of quantity, quality, relation, and modality, and
subsequently to unite the matter or objective element of sensation with
these schemata.
If sensible nature is a product of the synthesis of the understanding,
then the laws of this synthesis are the laws of nature. Thus, according
to the philosophy that we are explaining, nature’s supreme legislation
resides in our understanding. If an architect constructs a building and
forms its design, the laws of this building – namely, its form as a whole,
in its parts, in the relations among these parts as in the blueprint – which
were the laws of the architect’s practical imaginative synthesis, then
become the objective laws of the building just by the fact that the design
is executed.61 The architect that creates sensible nature is our under-
standing. It constructs the schemata of the categories a priori, independ-
ently of experience. The laws of the schematism must therefore become
the laws of sensible nature, and these laws are in the understanding itself
a priori.
Thus, for example, the law that substance persists through all of
nature’s changes is the law of the schematism of the category of sub-
stance, and this law of nature is a priori in the understanding, which with
the synthesis of sensations makes the law objective. The same with anoth-
er law, that every natural event assumes a cause from which it derives
and which precedes it. This is the law of the schematism of the category
of causality that the understanding executes with the synthesis of sensa-
tions, thus constructing sensible nature.
Human knowing, says Kant, does not extend beyond experience.62 But
experience has two sources in relation to our faculties and is composed of
two types of elements. It arises from sensibility and from understanding,
from passivity and from activity. It is composed of two types of elements,
subjective elements and objective elements. The subjective elements do
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not have objective value except as forms of the objective and thus in
combination with them. In themselves they have no reality. Hence, Kan-
tian thought is defined as a transcendental idealism and an empirical realism
since it admits no reality a priori, only in experience. So space, time,
cause, substance, and so on have no reality when these things are consid-
ered a priori and in themselves. But they get a reality in experience or in
phenomena because they constitute the forms of experience.
Subjective elements found in our empirical concepts are of two types:
some are in objects inasmuch as objects are sensed; others are in them
inasmuch as they are thought. Thus, if you say ‘the sun is extended,’ the
word ‘extended’ expresses a subjective element of the sun inasmuch as
the sun is sensed; if you say ‘the sun is one,’ the word ‘one’ expresses a
subjective element of the sun inasmuch as the sun is thought. The first
elements are the pure intuitions of space and time; the second are the
categories.
The activity of the understanding consists of synthesis and analysis.
Analysis assumes the object that is to be taken apart, and this object
must be formed by synthesis. Synthesis therefore comes before analysis.
Furthermore, when analysis takes the object apart, no elements can be
found in it except those that synthesis has put there in forming it. There-
fore, when philosophers of Locke’s school take the idea of a body apart
and find there the idea of space or of extension, plurality, number, sub-
stantiality, and so on, if these philosophers decide on that account that
these notions come to us a posteriori and from experience, they draw a
false conclusion. All these elements are found in the complex idea of a
body, but one must first examine how the object taken apart is formed
or – which strictly amounts to the same thing – the representation of the
body that is analysed. Thus, synthesis forms objects, and analysis takes
them apart. And this analysis is necessary to form human knowledge and
comes about as a consequence of synthesis. With the alphabet of sen-
sation synthesis composes the great book of nature; analysis reads and
studies it; and there you have all of human knowledge.63
All objects of nature subject to experience are formed by the synthe-
sis of the understanding. This synthesis produces and can produce only
our representations – meaning phenomena, appearances. Beyond these
appearances our knowledge cannot reach. Thus, if there is some reality
beyond the phenomena that affect us and independent of them, it is
inaccessible to human knowledge.
The canons of transcendentalism are general. Having said that all
objects of experience are formed by the synthesis of the understanding,
229
one must not exclude the object of internal experience – the I of con-
sciousness. What might the I of consciousness be? It is a substance that
endures, and many internal sensations and affections come into it one
after another. But the notion of enduring substance is the schema of the
category of substance, combining two subjective elements – a category
and the pure intuition of time. Furthermore, sensations have a degree,
and this degree is also a synthetic product of subjective elements – time
and the category of quality. Like all natural objects, then, the I is a phe-
nomenon, an appearance, a representation and nothing more.
We have seen how reason succeeds in discovering the existence of
the Absolute, but we have also shown that this notion of the Absolute
is a product of the synthesis of reasoning, by no means a product of
the analysis of sensations.64 In this the transcendental philosophy agrees
with us. But there is disagreement on a point of the greatest importance,
which is that the transcendental philosophy removes from the notion
of the Absolute the reality that we grant to it. If the subjective elements
of our cognitions acquire objective value only in the synthesis by which
objects of experience are formed, how, according to the philosophy that
we are explaining, can objective value ever be given to the Absolute,
which does not enter into the synthesis of any sensible object? Elements
that enter into the formation of an object through synthesis can be taken
out through analysis. Try to analyse any sensible object at all, and you
will never get the Absolute as a result. According to the transcendental
philosophy, then, the Absolute remains a simple idea of reason, deprived
of any reality. Kant nonetheless admits God’s existence, but on other
grounds that I lack the space to describe.
I have explained to you the theory of the transcendental philosophy
on the origin of ideas; it is directly opposed to the theory that I have
adopted and have previously explained to you. In the latter theory no
notion is posited a priori in the understanding, independently of experi-
ence. The ideas of space, time, and the categories are derived a posteri-
ori from thinking about sensations. They all arise from the sensation of
the I that senses something outside the I. Thinking derives them all from
this primitive fact. We admit that the notion of the Absolute is a product
of the synthesis of reasoning, but we grant reality to this notion just as we
grant it to the perception of the I.
This reality rests on the following principles: (1) the data of experi-
ence give us some real cognitions, meaning cognitions that reveal to us
the existence of some thing real in itself – a noumenon, speaking Kant’s
language – as, for example, the sensation of one’s own being, of the I;
230
Galluppi, Elements
(2) the reasoning that leads us to the Absolute is composed of analytic

judgments. Hence, since the datum of experience that a variable being
exists is a real cognition, the reasoning that reveals to us the identity of
this judgment with another one, that the Absolute exists, also leads us
to a real cognition. The question is, which doctrine should be accepted,
the one presented to us by the transcendental philosophy, or the one
presented by the philosophy of experience.
What we call the philosophy of experience is the doctrine that (1) claims
that the data of experience reveal to us some existences that are real in
themselves and locate these data among our primitive cognitions; and
(2) regards the connection between existences – between cause and
effect, that is – and between modifications and the subject as real and
not subjective, and therefore admits in the mind that faculty of synthesis
that we called real synthesis in the Psychology.65
If our examination means that one must accept either the transcen-
dental philosophy or the philosophy of experience, I reduce the prob-
lem to this simple question: ‘Is the connection among perceptions that
constitute an empirical concept subjective or objective?’ If it is subjec-
tive, one must decide for the transcendental philosophy; if it is objective,
for the philosophy of experience.
To settle the question, I make use of the same feature used by the
transcendental philosophy to distinguish subjective from objective. This
is the feature previously mentioned: what comes from the subject is nec-
essary. If the connection among perceptions that constitute an empirical
concept is subjective, it must be necessary. As a matter of fact, Kant says
that experience is possible only through the representation of the neces-
sary conjunction of perceptions. He calls this principle the leading prin-
ciple of the analogies of experience.66 Thus, we have an easy way to discover
whether the connection among perceptions that constitute an empirical
object is subjective. But the analysis of each empirical concept makes us
see that there is no necessary connection among the various perceptions
that constitute an empirical object. The connection is not subjective,
then, but objective, and for want of a foundation the transcendental phi-
losophy is ruined beyond repair.
It is evident, and I have made this clear in the second chapter of the
Logic, that all empirical judgments are contingent, which amounts to say-
ing that the conjunction between perceptions of the subject and of the
predicate is not necessary.67 But if the conjunction among perceptions
that constitute an empirical concept were necessary, then, if this concept
were resolved into an empirical judgment, the judgment would be neces-
231
sary. Of what might the empirical concept of a peach be composed? Of

the concept of a certain figure, of a given colour, a given weight, a given
hardness, and so on. The union of all these perceptions constitutes the
empirical concept of the peach. But among all these perceptions there
is no necessary conjunction at all. What relation is there between the
shape of a peach and its colour, between this shape coloured with a given
colour and its taste? What is the connection between these perceptions
and that of a given weight or a given hardness?
In this complex of perceptions, analysis does not find the element
of necessary connection. If analysis does not find it there, synthesis has
not put it there, and if synthesis has not put it there, the conjunction
found is not at all subjective, but objective. Thus, it is not the mind that
forms it; it is a datum of experience. However little one follows the tran-
scendental philosophy as it forms schemata of objects, plainly it will be
recognized that it can never establish that necessary conjunction among
the various representations that constitute a schema which it would need
to reason out the consequences of its basic principle. If the schemata are
constructed a priori by the understanding, the synthesis that produces
them must be necessary because, according to transcendentalism, what
comes from the subject is necessary.
But this synthesis is entirely arbitrary, as Kant himself agrees. He actu-
ally says that every conjunction consists either of composition or of con-
nection; that composition is the synthesis of various things that do not
belong to one another necessarily, as two triangles that come from a
square divided in half by a diagonal do not belong together necessarily;
and that this type of conjunction is the synthesis of the homogenous in
all things that can be treated mathematically.68 But if the synthesis of
the schemata from which synthesis begins, which gives us the objects
of experience, is entirely arbitrary, where is that necessary conjunction
among perceptions that Kant requires for the possibility of experience?
How could this philosopher not have been aware of this palpable contra-
diction found in his philosophy?
Had he thought carefully about the origin of his transcendentalism,
the philosopher of Königsberg would have been aware of this contra-
diction. As he admits, it emerged from Hume’s thoughts about causal-
ity, as we have noted elsewhere. The English philosopher said: I find
no necessary connection among the occurrences of nature; therefore, I
have no notion of this connection.69 Kant accepted Hume’s principle but
drew different conclusions. Causality, he said, is not in the things that we
observe; therefore it is in the observer. It is not objective, but subjective.
But he did not look thoughtfully at the whole of his system.
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Galluppi, Elements
Consequently, he allowed the categories of the understanding to

acquire an objective value in experience; he allowed the subjective laws
of our understanding to become the laws of nature itself; he acknowl-
edged that if it is through synthesis that the categories enter as elements
into the formation of experience, they can be taken out through analy-
sis. But from all that he should have recognized the contradiction in his
system. Either causality can be had from the objects of sensible nature
through analysis, and Hume is wrong to deny it; or Hume is right, as
Kant says, and causality cannot be derived analytically from objects. But
if analysis cannot derive it, synthesis has not put it there, and transcen-
dentalism collapses. Kant says that the conjunction posited between the
motion of the striking body and that of the body struck does not come
from experience at all but is subjective. But if it is subjective, it must
be necessary. Yet the mind does not recognize this necessity there. This
conjunction is not subjective, then, but objective. I find this argument
unanswerable.
If the conjunction among the perceptions that make up an empiri-
cal concept is not at all subjective, it must be a datum of experience.
Analysis consequent on this concept is the first operation of the mind.
The great conflict between the transcendental philosophy and the phi-
losophy of experience can thus be reduced to its simplest form in the
following question: ‘is the first operation of the activity of the under-
standing synthesis or analysis?’ If it is synthesis, the conjunction among
the various perceptions that constitute an empirical object is necessary.
But it is not necessary. Therefore, the first operation of the activity of the
understanding is analysis. If the first operation of the understanding is
analysis, one must admit a real synthesis; for that reason, one must admit
that the connection among the existences that constitute a complete
object of experience is a datum of experience.
These observations justify our concluding that one must reject the
transcendental philosophy and accept the philosophy of experience.
NOTES
1 Galluppi (1846a), the version used here, is the fifth edition of the Elements,
whose first edition was finished in 1827: see the Introduction, section 3; the
text is erratic in typography and orthography, and our translation aims at
consistency rather than mirroring its variations.
2 Galluppi (1846a), I, 24: ‘Prior to experience, if snow became present to
your eyes for the first time, you could not have known whether it was hot or
233
cold. What happens with the following judgment is different: “of two quanti-
ties equal to a third, one is not greater than the other.” I deny that the
predicate belongs to the subject because I notice an absolute incompatibil-
ity between them. Judgments of the first kind are called empirical, experimen-
tal, physical, a posteriori, and contingent. The second are named pure, rational,
metaphysical, a priori, and necessary. The feature that distinguishes one from
the other is this: an affirmative judgment is contingent when denying the
predicate does not destroy the idea of the subject; a negative judgment is
contingent when affirming the predicate does not destroy the idea of the
subject; if it is destroyed, the judgment is necessary.’
3 Influenced by Locke and Condillac, Count Antoine Destutt de Tracy
(1754−1836) attracted followers who came to be called Idéologues from the
name that he gave to his radically empiricist psychology. Active in French
revolutionary politics and educational reform, he published his Eléments
d’idéologie between 1801 and 1815. For the Idéologues in Italy, see the Intro-
duction, sections 2 and 3.
4 Galluppi (1846a), I, 68−70, 132: ‘the principle of identity is “what is is” or
“what is not is what is not’’; The mind cannot know all the relations of its
ideas directly; it makes use of reasoning to compare two ideas with a third
and thus to extend the sphere of its cognitions. In this task, the mind does
not move beyond identity. Idea A as compared with idea B, and the idea of
the relation of A to B, are identical. The problem that we posed is already
solved. If someone asks how reasoning can be instructive without moving
beyond identity, this is our answer: because it discovers those relations of
our ideas that we cannot know directly, and knowing a relation that was not
known is surely progress on the road of knowledge.’
5 Galluppi (1846a): 105−7: ‘The idea of man is more universal than that of
Peter; the idea of animal is more universal than that of man; that of a thing
that has an organic body is more universal than the idea of animal; and the
idea of a mortal thing is more universal than the idea of a thing that has an
organic body … [But] the order of deduction of our ideas is not the same as
that of the deduction of our cognitions … Reasoning consists in deducing
one judgment from other judgments … [But] in pure reasoning one cannot
conclude from the particular to the universal, only from the latter to the
former. On the other hand … universal ideas are parts of particular ideas.
And the mind, starting with the latter, moves up from abstraction through
abstraction to the former, and thus it arrives at the most universal and the
simplest ideas. From all that, you may conclude that the order of deduction
of our ideas is different from the order of deduction of our cognitions, and
that the logical doctrine of Destutt-Tracy, which confuses these two orders
234
Galluppi, Elements
of deduction, is false … [If so,] you should be on your guard against the two
following false arguments: you should not say with other philosophers that
since all ideas come from experience, all cognitions derive from experience;
you should not say with certain others that because we have some cognitions
a priori, we also have some ideas a priori.’
6 Galluppi (1846a), I, 156−69.
7 For Galluppi on analysis and synthesis, see the Introduction, sections 3 and
4.
8 See n61 below.
9 Alluding perhaps to Kant, KpV, A289: ‘Two things fill the mind with ever
new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we
reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within
me.’
10 Galluppi (1846a), I, 312−13, 324−5: ‘Consciousness of the synthetic unity
of thinking includes … consciousness of the unity of the thinking subject …
which I call the metaphysical unity of the I…. Without the metaphysical
unity of the I, the synthetic unity of thinking would not be possible, and
without the synthetic unity of thinking, no knowledge would be possible for
mankind. Get this basic truth of ideology well planted in your intellect and
memory. To the one, simple thinking subject I give the name mind [spirito].
Thus we have explained the origin of the notion of mind … The metaphysi-
cal unity of the I … is an absolute unity … and synthetic unity assumes the
indefinable metaphysical unity of the I.’
11 The thinking or psychological subject, not the logical subject of a proposi-
tion.
12 Galluppi (1846a), I, 308−13, 319−29.
13 Therefore, for that reason, consequently, because.
14 Galluppi (1846a), I, 362−3.
15 Throughout this section, ‘ground’ corresponds to Galluppi’s motivo and
motivare; see below, n46, in Galluppi’s discussion of Kant.
16 Galluppi (1846a), II, 102−4.
17 The first parts of the Essay appeared in 1819, for which see Galluppi
(1819−32), but we have used Galluppi (1846b): for Kant, see especially III,
202−325; V, 45−376; see also Galluppi (1843): 208−70.
18 Kant’s texts are cited here, following the translation by Guyer and Wood
in Kant (1997), only to illuminate Galluppi’s terminology, not to indicate
passages that may have been his sources: KrV, A571−2: ‘Every thing …
stands under the principle of thoroughgoing determination [Bestimmung];
according to which, among all possible predicates of things, insofar as they
are compared with their opposites, one must apply to it’; A50: ‘Our cogni-
235
tion arises from two fundamental sources in the mind [Gemüts] …’; A484:
‘Your object is merely in your brain … hence all you have to worry about
is … avoiding the amphiboly that would make your idea into a putative
representation of something given empirically, and thus of an object to be
cognized [erkennenden Objeckts] in accordance with the laws of experience
[Erfahrungsgesetzen]’; A46: ‘raindrops … as appearances [Erscheinungen], are
already empirical objects [empirische Objekte]’; A239−40: ‘One need only take
as an example the concepts of mathematics … Although all these princi-
ples, and the representation of the object [Vorstellung des Gegenstandes] with
which this science occupies itself, are generated in the mind completely
a priori, they would still not signify anything at all if we could not always
exhibit their significance in appearances (empirical objects) [Erscheinungen
(empirischen Gegenständen)].’ Here, both conoscenza and conoscenze are taken
to stand for Erkenntnis (cognition), as distinct from Wissen (knowledge),
Wissenschaft (science), or Denken (thinking). Although spirito in philosophi-
cal Italian often corresponds to the German Geist, Galluppi is thinking of
Gemüt, meaning ‘mind,’ ‘soul,’ or ‘mental state,’ which Kant preferred in
the first Critique. Galluppi’s oggetto had to cover both Objekt and Gegenstand.
In general, the latter object of experience becomes the former object of
knowledge through the transcendental unity of apperception – a distinction
both elusive and important.
19 Galluppi (1846a), I, 280−1.
20 Galluppi (1846a), I, 423−8; Kant, KrV, B67-8: ‘… the form of intuition …
since it does not represent anything except insofar as something is posited
in the mind [Gemüte], can be nothing other than the way in which the mind
[Gemüt] is affected by its own activity [eigene Tätigkeit].’
21 Galluppi (1846a), I, 29−31, 424−5.
22 Kant, KrV, A832: ‘Since systematic unity is that which first makes ordinary
cognition [Erkenntnis] into science [Wissenschaft] … architectonic is the
doctrine of that which is scientific [Scientifischen] in our cognition [Erkennt-
nis] in general;’ B2: ‘We will understand by a priori cognitions … those that
occur absolutely independently of all experience [schlechterdings von aller
Erfahrung unabhängig];’ A267: ‘But if it is only sensible intuitions in which
we determine all objects merely as appearances, then the form of intuition
… precedes all matter (the sensations), thus space and time precede all
appearances [Erscheinungen] and all data of experience [datis der Erfahrung;
cf. Guyer and Wood, ‘data of appearances’], and instead first make the latter
possible.’
23 If Galluppi is implying that ‘appearance’ and ‘phenomenon’ are synony-
mous, he ignored Kant’s distinction; KrV, A19: ‘The undetermined object
236
Galluppi, Elements
[Gegenstand] of an empirical intuition is called appearance [Erscheinung]’; cf.

A248: ‘Appearances [Erscheinungen], to the extent that as objects [Gegen-
stände] they are thought in accordance with the unity of the categories, are
called phaenomena [Phaenomena].’
24 Kant, KrV, A11/B24: ‘Every cognition is called pure [rein] … that is not
mixed with anything foreign [Fremdartigen] to it.’
25 The distinction between subjective and objective on which Galluppi bases his
refutation of Kant is too simple to be faithful to the first Critique; KrV, B4
seems to support Galluppi: ‘Necessity and strict universality are therefore
secure indications of an a priori cognition, and also belong together insepa-
rably …’; but compare A156: ‘The possibility of experience [Die Möglichkeit
der Erfahrung] … gives all of our cognitions a priori objective (objektive)
reality,’ where much hangs on the difference between ‘experience’ and
‘possibility of experience.’
26 Kant, KrV, B147: ‘Things in space and time … are only given insofar as they
are perceptions (representation accompanied with sensation) [Wahrneh-
mungen (mit Empfindung begleitete Vorstellungen)], hence through empirical
representation. The pure concepts of the understanding … provide cogni-
tion only insofar as … a priori intuitions [Anschauungen a priori] … can be
applied to empirical intuitions [empirische Anschauungen]. Consequently,
the categories do not afford us cognition of things by means of intuition
[Anschauung] except through their possible application to empirical intui-
tion [empirische Anschauung], i.e., they serve only for the possibility of empir-
ical cognition. This, however, is called experience [Erfahrung]’; A20−2: ‘I
call that in the appearance [Erscheinung] which corresponds to sensation
[Empfindung] its matter [Materie], but that which allows the manifold of
appearance to be intuited [angeschauet] as ordered in certain relations I call
the form [Form] of appearance … There are two pure forms [Formen] of sen-
sible intuition as principles of a priori cognition [Erkenntnis], namely space
and time [Raum und Zeit].’ A494: ‘The sensible faculty of intuition is really
only a receptivity for being affected [affiziert] in a certain way with represen-
tations …’
27 Kant, KrV, A21: ‘I call a science of all principles of a priori sensibility [Sinnli-
chkeit] the transcendental aesthetic [transzendentale Ästhetik]’; ‘Transcenden-
tal Aesthetic’ is also the title of the first section (A20−49/B34−73) of the
Critique of Pure Reason following the ‘Introduction,’ where Kant deals with
space and time; he explains that his aesthetic is not ‘the critique of taste’ –
what we now call ‘aesthetics.’
28 Kant, KrV, A348: ‘Thus I, as thinking being [denkend Wesen] (Soul), am
substance’; B153−4: ‘That which determines the inner sense is the under-
237
standing … Under the designation of a transcendental synthesis of the

imagination, it therefore exercises that action [Handlung] on the passive
[passive] subject, whose faculty it is, about which we rightly say that the inner
sense is thereby affected [affiziert].’
29 Kant, KrV, A320: ‘A concept is either an empirical or a pure concept, and
the pure concept, insofar as it has its origin solely in the understanding …
is called notio. A concept made up of notions [Notionen], which goes beyond
the possibility of experience, is an idea or a concept of reason.’; A64: ‘The
Transcendental Analytic … is concerned with the following points: 1. That the
concepts [Begriffe] be pure and not empirical concepts. 2. That they belong
not to intuition and to sensibility, but rather to thinking and understanding
[Denken und Verstande].’
30 Kant, KrV, A70: ‘Quantity of Judgments Universal Particular [Besondere] Sin-
gular’; Verhältnis is the normal usage in the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ for a
relation among objects, as distinct from a subject/object relation, indicated
by Beziehung: Guyer and Wood (Kant, 1997): 156, 172, 206.
31 Kant, KrV, B113−14: ‘The transcendental philosophy of the ancients … con-
tains pure concepts of the understanding … expounded in the proposition
… quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum…. These supposedly transcendental
predicates of things are nothing other than logical requisites and criteria of
all cognition of things in general, and ground it in the categories of quan-
tity, namely … of unity, plurality, and totality [Einheit, Vielheit, und Allheit]
… Perfection [Vollkommenheit] … consists in this plurality [Vielheit] … being
traced back to the unity [Einheit] of the concept, and agreeing completely
[völlig] with this one and no other one, which one can call qualitative com-
pleteness (totality) [qualitative Vollständigkeit (Totalität)].’
32 Kant, KrV, A72−3, maintains that while ordinary logic needs only affirmative
and negative judgments in the category of quality, transcendental logic adds
infinite judgments, where the logical form of the proposition is affirmative
but the meaning of its predicate term is negative. Ordinary logic does not
need to distinguish between affirmative and negative qualities (mortal/
immortal) of the predicate since it recognizes qualities only of the whole
judgment or proposition (affirmative: X is mortal; negative: Y is not mortal).
Thus, the judgment that ‘die Seele ist nicht sterblich’ would be logically affirma-
tive if understood as asserting the soul’s membership in the class of immor-
tal (nichtsterbliche) beings, a class defined negatively by excluding mortals.
Kant says that the distinction belongs to cognition and may therefore be
relevant to a transcendental logic. Aristotle (PrAn 51b5-2b35) had recog-
nized the difference between not being mortal and being not-mortal.
33 Kant, KrV, B111: ‘Thus allness (totality) [Allheit (Totalität)] is nothing other
238
Galluppi, Elements
than a plurality considered as a unity, limitation [Einschränkung] is nothing

other than reality combined with negation, community [Gemeinschaft] is the
causality of a substance in the reciprocal determinations of others.’
34 Galluppi is following Kant’s tables of judgments and categories at the begin-
ning of the ‘Transcendental Logic,’ where the German is Relation instead of
Verhältnis or Beziehung; KrV, A70: ‘Relation Categorical Hypothetical Disjunc-
tive [Relation Kategorische Hypothetische Disjunktive].’
35 Kant, KrV, B5: ‘… in the proposition that every alteration must have a cause
… the very concept of a cause … obviously contains the concept of a neces-
sity of connection [Notwendigkeit der Verknüpfung] with an effect and a strict
universality of rule [Allgemeinheit der Regel] …’
36 Kant, KrV, A322: ‘… a pure concept of reason in general can be explained
through the concept of the unconditioned [Unbedingten], insofar as it con-
tains a ground of synthesis for what is conditioned [Bedingten].’
37 Kant, KrV, A144: ‘The schema of community (reciprocity) [Gemeinschaft
(Wechselwirkung)], or of the reciprocal causality of substances with regard
to their accidents, is the simultaneity of the determinations of the one with
those of the other’; A213: ‘The word “community” [Gemeinschaft] is ambigu-
ous … and can mean either communio or commercium. We use it here in
the latter sense, as a dynamical community [dynamische Gemeinschaft], with-
out which even the local [lokale] community (communio spatii) could never
be empirically cognized.’
38 Kant, KrV, A681−2, speaking of the systematic unity of reason: ‘one … posits
an idea only as a unique standpoint [Gesichtspunkte] from which alone one
can extend the unity that is so essential to reason and so salutary to the
understanding’; A415: ‘The concepts of the possible, actual, and neces-
sary [Möglichen, Wirklichen, und Notwendigen] lead to no series, except only
insofar as the contingent [Zufällige] in existence always has to be seen as
conditioned and refers … to a condition under which it is necessary to refer
this to a higher condition.’
39 Kant, KrV, A80: ‘Reality Negation Limitation [Realität Negation Limitation]’;
A80: ‘Possibility–Impossibility Existence–Non-Existence Necessity–Contin-
gency [Möglichkeit –Unmöglichkeit Dasein–Nichtsein Notwendigkeit–Zufällig-
keit].’
40 Kant, KrV, A201: ‘But if this synthesis is a synthesis of apprehension (of the
manifold of a given appearance), then the order [Ordnung] in the object
is determined, or, to speak more precisely, there is therein an order of the
successive synthesis [eine Ordnung der sukzessiven Synthesis] that determines
an object …’
41 Kant, KrV, B134: ‘The thought that these representations given in intui-
239
tion all together belong to me means, accordingly, the same as that I unite
[vereinige] them in a self-consciousness.’
42 Kant, KrV, B130: ‘The manifold of representations [Mannigfaltige der Vorstel-
lungen] can be given in an intuition that is merely sensible … Yet the combi-
nation [Verbindung] (conjunctio) of a manifold in general can never come to
us through the senses … All combination [Verbindung] … is an action of the
understanding, which we would designate with the general title synthesis
in order … to draw attention to the fact that … among all representations
[Vorstellungen] combination [Verbindung] is the only one that is not given
through objects but … only by the subject’
43 Kant, KrV, B140: ‘The empirical unity of consciousness [empirische Einheit des
Bewußtseins], through association of the representations, itself concerns an
appearance, and is entirely contingent … The original [ursprünglichen] unity
of consciousness … through the pure synthesis of the understanding …
grounds a priori the empirical synthesis. That unity alone is objectively
valid; the empirical unity of apperception … has merely subjective validity.’
44 Kant, KrV, B132: ‘The I think must be able to accompany all my representa-
tions.’
45 Kant, KrV, A51: ‘If we will call the receptivity of our mind to receive repre-
sentations … sensibility, then on the contrary the faculty for bringing forth
representations itself, or the spontaneity of cognition [die Spontaneität des
Erkenntnisses], is the understanding [Verstand].’
46 Kant, KrV, B112: ‘… in all disjunctive judgments the sphere (the multitude
of everything that is contained under it) is represented as a whole [Ganzes]
divided into parts … coordinated with one another, not subordinated, so
that they do not determine each other unilaterally, as in a series, but recip-
rocally, as in an aggregate [Aggregat] … Now a similar connection is thought
of in an entirety [Ganzen] of things, since one is not subordinated, as effect,
under another, as the cause of its existence, but is rather coordinated with
the other simultaneously and reciprocally [zugleich und wechselseitig] as cause
with regard to its determination.’
47 Kant, KrV, A699: ‘The greatest systematic and purposive unity, which your
reason demands as a regulative principle to ground [zum Grunde] all inves-
tigation of nature, was precisely what justified [berechtigte] you in making
the idea of a highest intelligence the ground [Grunde] as a schema of the
regulative principle; and however much purposiveness you encounter in the
world in accordance with that principle, so much confirmation do you have
for the rightness [Rechtmässigkeit] of your idea.’ Elsewhere (A85) Kant treats
deduction as a technical legal concept, confirming the sense of Rechtmäs-
240
Galluppi, Elements
sigkeit as ‘legitimacy’ or ‘lawfulness’; see above, the first part of the ‘Mixed
Logic,’ for ‘ground,’ motivo and motivare.
48 Kant, KrV, B141−2: ‘A judgment is nothing other than the way to bring
given cognitions to the objective unity [objektiven Einheit] of apperception.
That is the aim of the copula is in them: to distinguish the objective unity
[objektive Einheit] of given representations from the subjective.’
49 Kant, KrV, B161: ‘All synthesis, through which even perception [Wahrneh-
mung] itself becomes possible, stands under the categories, and since
experience [Erfahrung] is cognition through connected perceptions
[Wahrnehmungen], the categories are conditions of the possibility of experi-
ence [Erfahrung], and are thus also valid a priori of all objects of experience
[Gegenständen der Erfahrung].’
50 Kant, KrV, A140−1, B179−81: ‘Pure concepts a priori … must contain a
priori conditions of sensibility … that contain the general condition under
which alone the category can be applied to any object. We will call this for-
mal and pure condition of the sensibility, to which the use of the concept of
the understanding is restricted, the schema [Schema] of this concept of the
understanding, and we will call the procedure [Verfahren] of the understand-
ing with these schemata [Schematen] the schematism [Schematismus] of the
pure understanding … It is not images of objects but schemata that ground
[liegen … nicht Bilder der Gegenstände, sondern Schemata zum Grunde] our pure
sensible concepts … The concept [Begriff] of a dog signifies a rule [Regel]
in accordance with which my imagination [Einbildungskraft] can specify
the shape [die Gestalt verzeichnen kann] of a four-footed animal in general
…. This schematism [Schematismus] … is a hidden art in the depths of the
human soul … We can only say this much: the image [Bild] is a product
of the empirical faculty of productive imagination [produktiven Einbildung-
skraft], the schema [Schema] of sensible concepts (such as figures in space
[Figuren im Raume]) is a product and as it were a monogram [Monogramm]
of pure a priori imagination [Einbildungskraft].’ The ‘monogram’ to which
Kant compares a schema is not, of course, an initial sewn on a garment;
it is a bare figural outline, a ‘schematic’ image without colour or shading.
Galluppi, perhaps unsure what Kant had in mind, would certainly have
known the Greek etymology of ‘mono-gram’ – ‘one’ + ‘line’ or ‘letter’ – and
he probably used tipo (‘silhouette’ unfortunately inverts the image) not
abstractly, to mean ‘type’ or ‘model,’ but in some concrete sense.
51 Kant, KrV, A426: ‘We can intuit an indeterminate [unbestimmtes] quantum
as a whole [Ganzes], if it is enclosed within boundaries, without needing
to construct its totality [Totalität] through measurement, i.e., through the
241
successive [sukzessive] synthesis of its parts’; A220: ‘In the concept of a figure
(Figur) that is enclosed between two straight lines there is no contradiction’;
B154: ‘We cannot think of a line without drawing it in thought … and we
cannot even represent time without, in drawing a straight line (which is
to be the external figurative [figürliche] representation of time), attending
merely to the action of the synthesis of the manifold through which we suc-
cessively determine [sukzessiv bestimmen] the inner sense, and thereby attend-
ing to the succession [Sukzession] of this determination in inner sense’;
A308−9: ‘Whether the principle that the series [Reihe] of conditions (in the
synthesis of appearances …) reaches to the unconditioned, has objective
correctness or not … or whether it … is only a logical prescription in the
ascent [im Aufsteigen] to ever higher conditions to approach completeness
in them …’
52 Kant, KrV, A520−1: ‘The world has no first beginning in time and no outer-
most boundary [Grenze] in space. For in the opposite case … a perception
of boundedness [Begrenzung] through absolutely empty time or empty space
would have to be possible.’
53 Kant, KrV, B203: ‘The consciousness of the homogenous manifold … is
the concept of a magnitude [Größe] (Quanti) … The appearances are all
magnitudes [Größen], and indeed extensive magnitudes [extensive Größen] …
as intuitions in time and space’; A527: ‘The infinite division [of an appear-
ance in space] indicates only the appearance as quantum continuum, and is
inseparable from the filling of space [Raumes] … But as soon as something
is assumed as a quantum discretum, the multiplicity of units in it is deter-
mined; hence it is always equal to a number [Zahl].’
54 Galluppi (1846a), I, 48−9.
55 Kant, KrV, A201: ‘The principle of sufficient reason is the ground of pos-
sible experience, namely the objective cognition of appearances with regard
to their relation in the successive series [Reihenfolge] of time.’
56 Kant, KrV, A140−1: ‘Now this representation of a general procedure of the
imagination [Einbildungskraft] for providing a concept with its image [Bild]
is what I call the schema for this concept. In fact it is not images of objects
[Bilder der Gegenstände] but schemata that ground [liegen … zum Grunde] our
pure sensible concepts.’
57 Kant, KrV, A732−3: ‘A synthetic principle … can never be immediately
[unmittelbar] certain from mere concepts because I must always look around
for some third thing, namely the condition of time-determination in an
experience, and could never directly [direkt] cognize such a principle imme-
diately [unmittelbar] from concepts alone.’
58 Kant, KrV, B207: ‘In all appearances the real [das Reale], which is an object
242
Galluppi, Elements
of the sensation [Empfindung], has intensive magnitude, i.e., a degree [inten-

sive Größe, d.i. einen Grad]’; cf. A143.
59 Kant, KrV, A183−7: ‘… all change [Wechsel] in time can only be regarded as
a modus of the existence [Modus der Existenz] of that which lasts and persists
[bleibt und beharrt] … The philosopher expresses himself somewhat more
determinately in saying that in all alterations [Veränderungen] in the world
the substance remains [bleibt die Substanz] and only the accidents change
[Akzidenzen wechseln] … Many misinterpretations arise from this … [but]
it is still unavoidable for us to abstract out … that which can change in the
existence of a substance [was im Dasein einer Substanz wechseln kann] while
the substance remains [Substanz bleibt].’
60 Kant, KrV, A 145: ‘The schema of actuality [Wirklichkeit] is existence [Dasein]
at a determinate time.’
61 Compare Kant’s different distinction between types of imaginative synthesis,
KrV, A118: ‘Only the productive synthesis of the imagination [produktive
Synthesis der Einbildungskraft] can take place a priori; for the reproductive
[reproduktive] synthesis rests on conditions of experience’; see also nn8, 49
above.
62 Kant, KrV, A471: ‘… real speculative knowledge [eigentliche spekulative
Wissen] can encounter no object anywhere except that of experience
[Erfahrung].’
63 Galluppi would have remembered Galileo’s description of the universe as
‘this greatest book of all … [that] cannot be understood unless one first
learns to understand the language and read the characters (caratteri) in
which it is written’: Galileo (1964), I, 573, 631−2; cf. Kant, KrV, A314.
64 Galluppi (1846a), I, 427−9, applies ‘Absolute’ to God in the substantive
sense that Kant avoided; cf. KrV, A335−6: ‘reason [Vernunft] … in the cate-
gorical syllogism, must necessarily come to the concept of the absolute unity
[absoluten Einheit] of the thinking subject, [and] … hypothetical syllogisms
[lead to] the ideas of the absolutely unconditioned [Schlechthinunbedingten]
in a series of given conditions, and finally … the disjunctive syllogism neces-
sarily carries with it the highest rational concept of a being of all beings
[einem Wesen aller Wesen] … No objective deduction of these transcendental
ideas [Ideen] is really possible …’; also A324−7.
65 Galluppi (1846a), I, 282−3.
66 Kant, KrV, B218: ‘Analogies of Experience. Their principle is: Experience is
possible only through the representation of a necessary connection [notwen-
digen Verknüpfung] of perceptions;’ ‘Analogies of Experience’ is the title of a
section of the first Critique.
67 Galluppi (1846a), I, 24−7.
243
68 Kant, KrV, A162−5, B201−5: ‘All combination [Verbindung] (conjunctio) is

either composition [Zusammensetzung] (compositio) or connection [Verknüp-
fung] (nexus). The former is the synthesis of a manifold of what does not
necessarily [nicht notwendig] belong to each other … The second combina-
tion [Verbindung] (nexus) is the synthesis of that which is manifold insofar as
they necessarily [notwendig] belong to one another … All appearances con-
tain, as regards their form, an intuition in space and time, which grounds
[zum Grunde liegt] all of them a priori. They cannot be apprehended,
therefore … except through the synthesis of the manifold [Mannigfaltigen]
… i.e., through the composition of that which is homogenous [die Zusam-
mensetzung des Gleichartigen] and the consciousness of the synthetic unity of
this manifold [Mannigfaltigen] (of the homogeneus [Gleichartigen]) … That 7
+ 5 = 12 is not an analytic proposition … Although it is synthetic, however,
it is still only a singular proposition … It is only the synthesis of that which
is homogenous (of units) that is at issue here [hier bloß auf die Synthesis des
Gleichartigen (die Einheiten) gesehen wird]’; see nn98, 158 above.
69 Galluppi (1846a): I, 422; Lettere (1965): 208−24; Hume (2006): section 7,
‘Of the Idea of Necessary Connexion.’
244
2
Antonio Rosmini
A Sketch of Modern Philosophy1
[I. Recent Philosophical Systems]
1. Locke. Locke took it upon himself to solve the problem of the origin
of ideas. He said that all ideas come from sensation and from reflection.
By reflection he meant the operation of the faculty of the human mind
on sensations. Consequently, he denied that there are innate ideas in the
mind. By innate ideas are meant cognitions that a person has in himself
naturally.
2. Condillac. Locke’s philosophy was spread in France by Condillac, who

modified it.2 Condillac set aside Locke’s reflection and claimed that it is
nothing but sensation. In this way he boasted of having simplified phi-
losophy, reducing all human cognitions to sensation alone. As a result he
claimed that a human being has only one faculty, the faculty of sensing,
and that the faculties of memory, imagination, understanding, and rea-
son are nothing more than various modes of sensing.
This system was extremely destructive for morality and religion,
because, if humans had no faculty other than sensing, the result would
be that good and evil are just pleasant and painful sensations, which
would turn morality into procuring more of the pleasant sensations for
ourselves while avoiding the painful ones. In France this immoral system
was developed by Helvétius, and in England it was applied to public wel-
fare by Bentham, the leader of the utilitarians.3
3. Berkeley. Berkeley was a well-meaning Anglican bishop educated in the

school of Locke. While others deduced materialism from Locke’s sen-
sationalist system, he undertook to deduce spiritualism from it, which
he did as follows. He accepted that all human knowing is reduced to a

complex of sensations, taking this to be something already proved and
universally acknowledged in his time. He then made the observation
that sensations can exist only in a being capable of sensing, of which
they are modifications. Sensations therefore are not outside a person but
are found only within – inside the human soul. Hence, if a person knows
nothing other than sensations, the objects of his knowing are not outside
him but in his own soul as modifications of the mind. Therefore, the
whole external world exists only in appearance, being composed only
of sensations that manifest themselves in the soul as modifications of it.
This system, which denies what is bodily and external and permits only
spirits to exist, was called idealism. Berkeley applied his system to the
analysis of bodies: he lists all the bodily qualities and shows for each one
that it is nothing more than a sensation. Then he concludes that every-
thing we know about bodies reduces to a complex of sensations, and so
what we call qualities are in ourselves – not outside of us, as commonly
believed. In his famous Dialogues between Philonous and Hylas, when an
objection arises about the source of sensations, Berkeley answers that
they come from the direct action that God exercises on our minds.4
Using the example of dreams, he shows that bodily objects do not need
to be present in order for us to become convinced of their presence – in
order to have a sensation of them. In Berkeley’s system, then, human life
is just a continuing dream, and between life and dreaming there is this
difference only: that in life sensations from the various senses are linked
to one another in a stable and harmonious way, while in dreaming they
become unstable and unharmonious, so that visual sensations or images,
for example, do not correspond to those of touch.
4. Hume. Hume was also educated in Locke’s philosophy, accepting as a

certainty and without examination the principle that all human cogni-
tions reduce to sensation. But while Berkeley had derived idealism from
this principle, Hume derived scepticism, which is the system of those
who deny all certainty to human cognitions.
Hume’s reasoning was as follows: people base their arguments on the
principle of cause, he said, expressing it in this way – here is an effect,
so here is a cause. This principle is false and illusory, however, because a
sensation can never be a cause: wherever there is a cause, there must be
an active entity. Now, sensation is not something but the modification of
something, not active but passive; therefore, a sensation can never be a
cause. But humans know only sensations, and thus they never know any
246
Rosmini, A Sketch
cause. They know sensations before and after, but they reason falsely if
they believe that what comes before must be the cause of what comes
after, which is the fallacy of hoc post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Therefore, when-
ever people talk about things that they take to be causes of the sensible
world, they presume to do what they cannot do since it is impossible to
start from sensations and arrive at knowledge of any cause. This system
is plainly wicked because by denying causes or putting them in question
it also denies or puts in question the existence of the first cause, which
is God himself.
5. Reid. The Scotsman Reid was horrified by the frightful conclusions

that the two powerful minds of Berkeley and Hume had derived from
Locke’s system.5 These conclusions, which eliminated the external world
and the certainty of human cognitions, were derived with such logical
rigour that once the premises were granted they could no longer be
denied. On the other hand, the conclusions conflicted with everyone’s
common sense and destroyed morality and religion; they could not be
true, then. From this Reid determined that the fault must lie with the
premises, and that Locke’s system must not be blindly accepted but had
to be submitted anew to a thorough examination to find the hidden flaw.
Reid set to work on this task with all his powers of mind, and in the end
he believed he had found the error. He saw that the fact of human per-
ception does not stop with mere sensation. If it were true that humans
know only sensations, we could assert only those sensations. But experi-
ence says that we assert real things that are by no means sensations. We
do not believe that we know only modifications of our own minds; in
addition, we believe that we also know substances apart from ourselves
that have effects on us. Hence, it must be said not only that we have the
faculty of sensing but also that we possess another mysterious faculty,
which, on the occasion of sensations, drives and compels us to assert the
existence of something beyond these sensations.
But how can one explain a faculty that asserts what is not found in sen-
sation? If the object of this faculty is not given by the senses, where does it
reside? What presents it to the mind for perception? These are the ques-
tions that Reid asked, those that define the knotty problem of ideology.6
The Scottish philosopher answered them in this way. The point is not
to go beyond the fact. The fact tells us that the human mind perceives
substance and being, things that do not fall under the senses and are
altogether different from sensations. Yet the mind perceives them on the
occasion of sensations. The point, then, is to say that the human mind
247
has in its very nature an instinct that leads it this far. This instinct was
accepted as a primitive faculty for which no further explanation could
be given. Therefore, according to Reid, there is a natural suggestion (as
he puts it) that makes it necessary for a person who receives sensations
not to stop there but to move on by the act of thinking to the belief
that there are real beings, called bodies, which are causes of the same
sensations.
By means of this primitive faculty that asserts or perceives bodily sub-
stance itself, Reid thought that he had refuted Berkeley’s idealism and
secured the existence of bodies, as he also thought that he had refuted
Hume’s scepticism by relocating the criterion of certainty in the primi-
tive faculty of human nature. He also supposed that he had harmonized
philosophy with mankind’s common sense, from which the English phi-
losophers had strayed.
The merit of the Scottish school lies in having made the first attempts
to lead philosophy out of the sensist system of Locke and Condillac.
6. Kant. While it appeared that the Scottish school had finally established
solid foundations for philosophical knowledge, the sophist of Königs-
berg rose up to overturn them again and compound the damage. Taking
the father of Scottish philosophy at his word, Kant reasoned in roughly
this way:
You are right to say that our conviction of the existence of bodies does
not come from sensations but from an entirely different faculty with a
nature of its own, so that the very nature of the human mind obliges it
to assert that there are bodies whenever its sensory faculty receives sensa-
tions. Now if this is the case, the belief we have in the existence of bodies
is an effect of the nature of our minds. If our minds were differently con-
stituted, then, it would not be necessary for us to assert that bodies exist.
The truth of the existence of bodies is therefore subjective – relative to
the mind that states it and not at all objective. We are obliged to acknowl-
edge that there are bodies, in other words, because of how we are built
and because we cannot resist the impulse of our nature that leads us to
this conclusion. But this does nothing to show that bodies exist in them-
selves, that they have an objective existence independent of us.
Kant generalized this thought to all human cognitions, saying that,
since they are all acts and products of a mind that cannot reach beyond
itself, they could have no truth or certainty except the subjective kind,
and so the mind could never be assured that things are as they appear.
He observed that all beings act according to the laws of their own natures
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Rosmini, A Sketch
and that their products bear the stamp of those laws. Thus, if cognitions
are products of the human mind, they too must be shaped according
to the nature and laws of that mind. And if there were another mind
constructed differently than ours, he added, who knows whether it
would observe things entirely unlike those that appear to us? He used
the example of a mirror that produces an image according to the shape
of things as they are reflected in the mirror, so that a convex mirror, on
this example, makes all objects elongated, while a concave mirror makes
them shortened.
Thus, the human mind gives its own forms to the objects of its cog-
nitions; it does not get the forms from the objects themselves. So the
philosopher’s task is to discover what these forms are, to list them one
by one, and describe each one with its own determinations. For that
purpose, the only requirement is to consider all the objects of human
knowledge, moving the forms of these objects into the human mind and
thus removing the transcendental illusion that makes people believe that
forms are of the object when they are of the mind itself. Kant undertook
this labour in his work titled The Critique of Pure Reason, and he carried it
out in the following way.
He said that there are two forms [of sensibility]: one of external sense,
called space, the other of internal sense, called time; that there are four
forms of the understanding, which are quantity, quality, modality, and
relation; finally, that there are three forms of reason, which are absolute
matter, absolute whole, and absolute mind – matter, world, and God, in
other words.
Then he claimed to reconcile all the completely antagonistic systems
devised by philosophers. He divided them into two large classes, calling
them dogmatists and sceptics. The dogmatists were those who accepted the
truth and certainty of human cognitions; the sceptics were those who
denied all truth and certainty to human cognitions. He said that both
were right. The dogmatists were right because there is a truth and a cer-
tainty, but it is subjective or relative to the human subject. The sceptics
were right because there is no objective truth and certainty belonging to
objects taken in themselves, since no human can know anything as it is
in itself.
Kant called this system of his critical because it makes a critique of
other systems and of human reason itself. He called it transcendental phi-
losophy because it transcends the senses and experience and submits to
its critique everything that people think they know about the sensible
world outside.
249
But Kant’s is really a system that is:
i. sceptical, because the subjective truth and certainty that he accepts is

neither truth nor certainty, except by an abuse of language.
ii. idealistic, because, by accepting the existence of bodies only subjec-
tively as products of instinct and of forms innate in the human mind,
it accepts them only in appearance, denying them an existence of
their own. Moreover, his system is idealism transferred from the par-
ticular to the general – the idealism that Berkeley had applied only to
bodies and that Hume applied to all objects of human cognition, be
they corporeal or spiritual, concrete, or abstract.
iii. atheist, because, if human reason cannot be certain of the absolute
and objective truth of the objects presented to it, there is no longer
any possibility of knowing God’s existence with certainty, and God too
becomes a subjective appearance – as Kant himself openly admits in
making his critique of all the arguments offered by philosophers to
prove God’s existence, showing them all, so he thinks, to be useless
and without effect.
iv. pantheist, because in this system there remains nothing but the mind,
which, in virtue of its instincts and forms, produces and portrays all
things on its own; hence, there exists only one substance, the human
subject itself, which contains in itself the universe and even God, and
in this system God becomes a modification of man.
v. spiritualist and materialist at once, because what is called matter is in the
human object as one of its products and what is called spirit or mind
is also in the human object as something producing and modifying
itself, so that the human spirit comes to be mind and matter at the
same time.
7. Fichte. Fichte was a follower of Kant. By publishing the work titled The
Science of Knowledge, he believed he had given a scientific explanation of
Kant’s system.7 But in this exposition Kant refused to recognize his own
system, so then Fichte realized that he had invented a new one.
Here is the difference between the critical philosophy and transcendental
idealism, as Fichte’s system is still called. Kant certainly said that people
cannot know whether objects that appear to them are as they appear, but
he did not exclude the possibility that they are as they appear: they might
exist independently of the person, but the person cannot be sure of this.
Fichte denied this possibility altogether, maintaining that objects can be
nothing other than products of the person.
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Rosmini, A Sketch
This is Fichte’s argument: Objects of knowing are all products of the

act of knowing; but the act of knowing is a product of the human mind;
therefore, the objects are also products of the same mind. But these
objects are the world, God, and man. Thus, these three are nothing but
products that the mind represents to itself as objects of its knowledge.
Fichte then sets about explaining how the human mind produces all
other things from itself. He says that with the first utterance, with the first
creation, the I posits itself. Before a person says I, the person is not yet
under the form of the I. With the second utterance, which is a second
creation, the person posits the not-I. The not-I is for Fichte everything
that is not I, hence the external world, the divine and every object of
human thinking whatsoever. Now these two acts, by which the mind pos-
its the I and the not-I, are correlative, such that the one cannot happen
without the other. The I cannot utter itself without positing counter to
itself a thing other than itself, and by this counterpositing it negates itself
and thereby differentiates itself from everything else. It cannot utter the
not-I if it does not posit the I counter to the not-I and thereby apprehend
the not-I as different and distinct from itself.
Fichte thus establishes a first operation of the mind that he also calls
intuition, and this action has two correlates or terms that counterposit
and negate themselves reciprocally. With this first mysterious action he
intends to explain not only the origin of human cognition but also the
existence of all things.
Since the designation not-I covers everything that is not I, the not-I
includes God as well as the world. Fichte thereby reaches the absurd
conclusion not only that the world is man’s creation but also that God
himself is a creation of man. This system is called transcendental ideal-
ism because it applies Berkeley’s idealistic principle to all things without
exception, drawing all the conclusions that lead logically and inexorably
into the yawning abyss. Indeed, Fichte proclaims that there is no doubt
of the kind that survives in Kant’s critical philosophy about things pos-
sibly having an existence of their own. Thus he turned Kant’s critical
scepticism into dogmatic scepticism.
From this system of Fichte’s there soon emerged in Germany the two
systems of Schelling and Hegel: the first, the system of absolute identity;
the second, the system of the absolute Idea. Exposition of these systems
is omitted here because it seems unnecessary for understanding what we
have to describe, the topic of this essay.
8. Critique of the Foregoing Systems. The observation that Reid made about
251
the sensism of Locke, Condillac, Berkeley, and Hume was correct because
it rested on a more thorough examination of the phenomena of the
human mind. The fact is that if a person had only the sensory faculty, he
would sense but would not think. Thought goes beyond sensation because
we also think things that do not fall under the senses, as we think about
substance, cause, and spirits. Therefore, the objects of human thinking
are not merely sensations.
But what is more difficult to understand well – obvious though it is – is
that the way in which sensations are thought is different from the way in
which they are sensed. And in fact, the thought asserts the sensation in
itself, and therefore asserts it whether it is present, past, or future. I will
think of the pleasant smell of the rose that I sniffed yesterday, for exam-
ple; the sensation is no longer present, but the thought is present; there-
fore, the sensation and the thought of the sensation are not the same
thing. The same applies to a future sensation. I keep thinking about the
pleasant sensations that I will enjoy tomorrow while hunting or dining;
the sensations do not yet exist, yet the thought already exists. Therefore,
the essence of the thought is different from that of the sensation. That
being the case, I must conclude that even where the sensation as well as
the thought of the sensation are both present to me, the two still differ
from one another, and the one is independent of the other.
And how often does a person experience sensations without thinking
of them, especially if the sensations are not very lively or are habitual
and manifold, like those that a person has at every moment of exist-
ence? They pass unnoticed: the mind, especially if distracted and busy
at something else, pays them no attention. Hence, it is not at all hard to
grasp that there are some things that are purely sensory and others that
combine thought with sensation. The first are the lower animals and
the second are human beings. This suffices to explain why the funda-
mental principle of Locke and his school is entirely demolished. Locke
confused sensation with thought and claimed to be speaking of the latter
when everything that he said could apply only to the former.
Although Reid easily succeeded in refuting sensism, he then hit a brick
wall. While he recognized the need to establish a philosophy of thinking
and to offer a specific explanation of this phenomenon that could never
be explained by referring to the senses, he also clung to the choice of
declaring this phenomenon to be an instinct with its own special char-
acter, and that human nature is endowed with it. In this way, he recog-
nized only the subjective part of thought and forgot the objective part.
Accordingly, he did not succeed in understanding the true nature of
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Rosmini, A Sketch
thought itself. The reason is that thought occurs precisely where there is
an object present to the subject in such a way that the object is never con-
fused with that subject but remains distinct. And since thought depends
on this continuing and necessary distinctiveness, if the object could ever
be confused with the subject, the thinking would be altogether lost.
Kant availed himself of this error of Reid’s by calling into question
again not only the existence of bodies but indeed all objects of human
cognition, claiming (as mentioned above) that all these objects are just
products of the subject arising from an irresistible and natural human
instinct. From this came Fichte’s transcendental idealism, which is only
the logical development of Kant’s system.
Now to comprehend this huge error, this seedbed of other errors and
ultimately of German pantheism, we must reason as follows: I know that I
am not the objects of my thought. I know that the objects of my thought
are not me. I know that I am not the bread that I eat, for example, or the
sun that I see, or the person with whom I speak. This is obvious to me
because I am known to myself so that, were I not so known, I would not
be myself. Therefore, no thing can be me unless I know it to be me. But
I do not know that the bread, the sun, and the person with whom I talk
are myself, and so I know that they are not me.
Kant cannot reply that I am mistaken, that the other things could be
myself without my knowing it, precisely because, if I did know it, I would
no longer be myself, the reason being that the I includes conscious-
ness of itself. Without this consciousness of itself, the I would not be I
but would be something else. Therefore, the objects that stand before
thought are essentially distinct from the I. For the same reason, moreo-
ver, they cannot be modifications of the I because modifications of the I
exist as such in the consciousness that constitutes the very nature of the
I. Whatever the objects of thought may be, then – which remains to be
seen – it remains beyond doubt that they are neither the I nor a modifi-
cation of it.
Here the idealists raise this question: What is the bridge of communi-
cation between the I and its objects? Can the I go out of itself and reach
a thing outside it?
This is the reply to their question: Can your query, no matter how dif-
ficult it is, even if the problem were insoluble, destroy the assertion of
fact that we have already proved? Logic demands that when we have a
truth of fact, even if we do not know how to explain it, we still must not
abandon it. The only conclusion we would have to draw would be the
need to confess our own ignorance. But this is not our situation.
253
Indeed, on reflection we notice that the question arises from a mate-

rialist ontology that applies to the mind what belongs only to bodies.
One law of bodies is impenetrability, which requires that one body can-
not be in the same place as another. But who said that this law holds for
all beings, even those without bodies? Who said that it holds for spir-
its? Nothing prevents there being an opposite law for spirits; in fact, it
befits their different nature. And how can we make a judgment about
this nature? Surely not by reasoning from analogy with bodies, but by
observing and considering spirits in themselves.
Now by observing and considering what our own intelligent spirit is,
what it does, and what is done to it, precisely what we come to discover
is that it obeys a law different than the one mentioned for bodies, and
that, far from being described as impenetrable, its nature is such that
objects of thought can be in it without being confused with it, remaining
entirely different and distinct from it. (As people commonly use it, the
very word ‘object’ – obiectum – suggests this fact by its etymology since it
means something ‘set against.’) Since there is nothing absurd about sup-
posing this to be the case, it is correct to accept the result of observation.
So there is no need for a bridge of communication between things and
the mind because the former can be found directly in the latter, through
that mental mode called cognition.
Moreover, a similar reflection may emerge from the different perspec-
tive of the sensible order. In this order the soul is defined as the sensory
principle. Now from the start, the sensory principle has an end or term,
which is called sensed. The designation of object (a word to be reserved
for the intellectual order) does not properly belong to this sensed term.
Yet it is true that the sensed resides in the sentient principle and that it
cannot exist outside of it. At the same time, it is true that the sensed is
not the sentient. But under the designation of sensed all sensible things
are included.
Two consequences follow from this: first, that sensible things cannot
be confused in any way with the sentient principle, which completely
refutes Berkeley’s idealism; second, that Galluppi was not wrong to say
that sense directly asserts things themselves and perceives them directly
with no need for any bridge of communication. Kant’s system, then, and
Fichte’s are based on incomplete observation of nature, for the lack of
which those philosophers mixed together things entirely opposed to one
another – subject with object and origin with end. But if it were pos-
sible to mix them together, there would no longer be any thought nor
sensation.
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Rosmini, A Sketch
II. The Final System
From what has been said, it appears that the object known is something
entirely different from the knowing subject. The knowing subject is a
person; the object as such is impersonal. Nonetheless, there is a sense
in which one can say that the known object is a subject that knows, with-
out in the least confusing object with subject or mixing up their natures
– in fact, by keeping them distinct in such a way that the distinction
is one of the essential features of cognition. But there is no cognition
where there is not a distinction between subject and object. The ques-
tion, then, comes down to finding out where the object of knowledge
comes from. This is the question of the origin of ideas and of human
cognitions.
Human cognitions are divided into two groups, called cognitions
by intuition and cognitions by assertion. Cognitions by intuition are
those that have to do with the nature of things in themselves, things
in their possibility. Ideas are just those things considered in themselves
as possibly subsisting or not subsisting. Cognitions by way of assertion
or judgment are those that we acquire in asserting or judging that a
thing subsists or does not subsist. From this definition follow two con-
sequences:
i. That we cannot have this second type of cognition unless the first
precedes it because we cannot assert that a thing subsists or does
not subsist unless we already know the thing itself in its own possible
nature; for example, I cannot say that a tree subsists or a person sub-
sists unless I first know what a tree is or what a person is. But knowing
what something is amounts to the same thing as knowing it in its pos-
sibility, since I can know what a tree is and yet not know that this tree
also subsists.
ii. That the objects belong only to the first kind of cognition because
nothing happens in the second kind but asserting or denying the sub-
sistence of an object known in the first kind. Whence it follows that
this second way of cognizing does not supply a new object to the mind
but only declares the subsistence of the object that is already known.
The first way of cognizing is what presents possible objects to us, then,
and these are called ideas. The second way does not present new possi-
ble objects, new ideas, but shows us beliefs about known objects. Hence,
there are two terms of cognition, ideas and beliefs: with the first we know
255
the possible world, with the second we know the real world that subsists.
Thus there are two categories of things: possible things and subsistent
things – ideas and things, in other words.
We have seen that the objects of our cognitions are essentially distinct
from ourselves, that we are the subject who knows them. Whether these
objects are purely possible or likewise if they subsist, they are distinct
from us just the same and independent. This sheds new light for our
understanding of the nature of ideas since we are logically obliged to
conclude, on the one hand, that ideas are not nothing; on the other,
that they are not ourselves nor modifications of ourselves; and, finally,
that they have their own way of existing, entirely unlike that of real or
subsistent things.
This mode of existence of ideal objects, or rather of ideas, is such that
it does not fall under our bodily senses. This is why ideal objects entirely
escaped the notice of many philosophers, who went about philosophiz-
ing with a built-in prejudice that led them to suppose that anything that
did not fall under sense is nothing. But it is a fact that possible objects
do not fall under sense, and so there is no way to explain cognition of
them by referring only to bodily senses – a new and conclusive refutation
of sensism.
So, then, if ideas – ideal and possible objects, that is – are not supplied
by the senses, what is their origin?
It helps to state in advance an observation about the special features of
ideas. These are chiefly two: universality and necessity. An ideal or mere-
ly possible object, in fact, is always universal in the sense that by itself it
makes known the nature of all the unspecified individuals in which it is
realized. Take the idea of man, for example. The idea of man is, as we
have said, the ideal man. Realized human individuals can exist in what-
ever number one likes, and in all of them there is still the same human
nature: the nature is one, the individuals are many. Now what does the
idea of man, the ideal man, express and make known to me? The nature.
Hence, whoever possesses the idea of man, had he the power to create,
could produce as many men as he pleased by the idea alone. In the same
way, he would know them all by the idea alone.
In this way, a sculptor who had conceived the idea of a statue could
reproduce this idea in marble time after time without ever leaving the
idea exhausted. The ideal statue would be always one and the same,
keeping an exemplary type of this kind always before the mind. Material
copies would be many, all shaped and known by the same idea. This is
what is called the universality of ideas and what distinguishes them cat-
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Rosmini, A Sketch
egorically from real objects, which are always particular, and from sensa-
tions, which are also particular.
The feature of necessity is likewise obvious: ideas are possible objects,
and it is clear that what is possible cannot be other than possible, and is,
therefore, possible necessarily. The possible is what does not involve con-
tradiction: therefore, every object that does not involve contradiction is
possible of necessity. Now all finite and real beings are, in their reality,
only contingent and not necessary, as opposed to possible beings. This
is because we can think of any finite and real object either that it is, or,
equally, that it is not, while, for the possible object, we can never think
that it is not – that it is not possible, in other words. By way of example,
man in his possibility is necessary because nothing can make man not
possible; a real man, by contrast, is contingent because he can be and
can not be, can happen to be or happen not to be.
Universality and necessity, therefore, are the two primitive features of
ideas, but from them come two others, which are infinity and eternity.
Ideas have in themselves an infinity because they are universal. No real
and limited being is universal but is of itself determinate and incom-
municable to others. Therefore, ideas do not belong to the class of real
limited beings. Ideas are also eternal just because they are necessary, for
what is necessary always was necessary and always will be, and what always
was and always will be is eternal.
Having contemplated these lofty features of ideas, Saint Augustine,
followed by Saint Thomas and preceded by Plato, concluded that ideas
reside in God, as in their source and foundation. From this opinion Mal-
ebranche derived his system: that man, and every finite intelligence, sees
everything that he sees in God. And His Eminence Cardinal Gerdil ulti-
mately defended the system against theological charges brought against
it. We do not accept this system entirely, and here it would take too long
to develop a critique of it.8 But we recognize in it a basis for truth, and
the difference between Malebranche’s system and ours involves only
various particulars.
We take great care to distinguish ideas as they are in God from ideas
as they are seen by our intellect. Ideas are in God in a different way than
they shine on our minds. In God ideas have a mode of being that does
not differ from that of God himself, and this is the mode of the divine
Word. This Word is unique, without any real distinction in itself, and it is
God himself. But ideas do not shine on our minds in this way.
In our minds ideas are manifold, and by themselves they do not con-
stitute the human word because that word, or speech, expresses a judg-
257
ment, an assertion, an utterance that always terminates in reality, while

possibility is all that ideas make known. Thus, ideas are limited by the
human mind that receives them so that they can no longer be called
by the name of God or the divine Word because God is the absolute
being for whom subsistence is necessary, while ideas are only possibili-
ties intuited by the mind. And yet ideas retain some features of divinity,
such as those mentioned above, so that one may appropriately call them
adjuncts of divinity.
From these considerations it follows, generally speaking, that the ori-
gin of ideas is from God, who makes them shine on the human mind.
And they cannot come from man or from external things because finite
beings do not have such exalted features, and nothing gives what it
does not have. Next, however, one must start to investigate the origin of
human ideas in a more precise way, and, above all, explain their multi-
plicity and also show how they contribute to produce that class of cog-
nitions that we have called cognitions by belief. Let us see, then, if we can
classify the ideas and find out what order of subordination holds among
them. Through this inquiry we discover that there is only one idea that
is completely indeterminate and universal in every respect, and this is
the idea of being. All other ideas are more or less determinate and make
known what is possible in a more restricted sphere.
Now between the indeterminate idea of being and all other ideas this
relation holds, that the other ideas always contain the indeterminate
idea of being, to which various determinations are added. Take the idea
of stone, for example, or tree, animal, or human. What makes me know
the idea of stone? A being, but not just any being; rather, the one that
has the determinations of stone. What makes me know the idea of tree?
A being with the determination of tree added. What makes me know
the idea of animal? Also a being, but determined by animal features.
What makes me know the idea of human? Again a being, but with the
features and determinations that belong to the human. Being is found
in all the ideas, then, and every determination is no more than the same
idea of being clothed with certain determinations and limited by them.
All ideas, then, have the same basis; all have a common element, which
is ideal or possible being.
These determinations are more or less complete since either they
determine being fully or determine it only in one respect and leave it
indeterminate in another. I can form for myself the idea of a book of
a given size, for example, or of a given shape, printed in a particular
typeface, and, in short, furnished with all the accidents that occur in
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Rosmini, A Sketch
a given book. This is the determinate idea of a book, and yet this idea
is still general because it is a pure idea, not a real book. It is a type, an
exemplar that stands before my mind, from which an indefinite number,
a real number, of books – all alike – can be formed.
By contrast, I can also have the idea of a book which is indeterminate
in some respect, as happens when I think of a book with its essential ele-
ments but leave out accidents of size, shape, typeface, and so on. Now
ideas that are wholly determinate are called concrete ideas, while ideas
that are indeterminate in some respect are called abstract ideas. But if I
take away all its determinations, both accidental and essential, from the
idea of book, the book vanishes from my mind, and all I have left is the
idea of a wholly indeterminate being.
Ideas, therefore, are distributed in our minds in the form of a pyramid
that ends in a point. The first layer of this pyramid is formed by con-
crete ideas, wholly determinate, which just for that reason form a larger
number. The other layers are composed of ideas ever less determinate,
which decrease in number as more determinations are removed from
them. The point of the pyramid is the idea of being alone, indeterminate
in all respects.
Wishing to give a satisfactory explanation of the origin of ideas, then,
we need to account for two things; first, the origin of the indeterminate
idea; second, of its determinations. And in regard to determinations of
the idea of being (which is precisely the idea taken as indeterminate), we
find their origin easily by way of the following observation. Suppose that
a person has the idea of being – that he knows what being is, in other
words: it is immediately understood that he can turn sensation into an
idea. The reason is that when he experiences sensations, he can say to
himself, ‘Here is a being limited and determined by sensation.’ Seeing
a star, for example, he can say in his thoughts, ‘This is a being that gives
light,’ and so on.
Sensations, then, provide him the first determinations of being, so
that when he thinks about a luminous being that acts on his visual sense,
at that point he no longer thinks only about indeterminate being but
about a being with the determination of luminosity, of varying intensity,
of magnitude, of shape, and so on. All these qualities make the being
determinate, and all are provided by sense. But this does not mean that
such determinations of the idea are themselves sensations. We under-
stand this by distinguishing the various operations that the human mind
performs in this process.
In fact, when a person seeing a star says in his thoughts, ‘Here is a
259
being that gives light,’ he makes an assertion, a judgment, and we have

already distinguished cognitions of assertion from simple ideas. But we
have also said that this way of cognizing assumes those ideas, so that we
cannot assert the subsistence of an object of which we have no idea at
all. Thus, in the judgment by which we assert the star that is before our
eyes – which is called perception of the star – the idea is already contained.
Then it remains for us, by another operation of the mind, to isolate the
idea from other elements of perception.
Now this operation is called universalization, and it occurs in this way:
in perceiving the star, my thought is connected with the particular sen-
sible object; but it can disconnect from the object by putting aside any
thought of the star’s actual subsistence, preserving its image while treat-
ing it as a possible star, as a type and exemplar of all those other stars like
it, indefinite in number, that could be made real by the Creator’s power.
The possible star is just a pure determinate idea. This possible determi-
nation of the star is no longer sensation, which is real and not possible.
But sensation has presented me the occasion of discovering it nonethe-
less, and then the intelligent mind discovers it by treating as possible
what sensation presented as real. This the mind can certainly do, given
our assumption that it knows what possible being is. But the possible star
is universal; hence, we call this operation of the mind universalization.
By universalization fully determined ideas are formed; by abstraction
are formed those ideas that are determinate only in some respect and
remain indeterminate in another. Thus, if my thought, besides setting
aside the star’s subsistence, also sets aside magnitude, shape, intensity of
light, and other accidents of the star, what is left? Still left is the idea of
the star, but it is abstract and generic, and can apply equally to stars of
magnitude 1, 2, 3, and so on. This idea is determinate in part because
such an idea of the star cannot be confused with ideas of other things;
but in some part it also remains indeterminate because it applies no
more to one star than to another.
Assuming the idea of possible being in the human mind, then, it is not
difficult to discover its determinations, which clothe, limit, and trans-
form it into all the other ideas. Such determinations are occasioned and
materially provided by sensations which are then formed into ideas by
the two operations of the human mind that we have described – namely,
by universalization and abstraction. Then it remains to explain where
the idea of universal being comes from – the idea which alone is inde-
terminate. Once this idea has been given to the human mind, no fur-
ther problem arises in explaining all the other ideas, because, as we have
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Rosmini, A Sketch
seen, these are nothing but this same idea of being that the human mind
clothes with determinations on the occasion of sensations and as the
mind experiences various feelings.
To reach an explanation of such a problem it helps, first of all, to
notice the corollaries that derive from this account, which are:
i. The idea of being is universally prior to all others because other

ideas are only determinations of it, and determining something
assumes that there is already something to be determined.
ii. This idea cannot come from sensation or feelings − not only because
sensations are real, particular, and contingent, whereas this idea
offers the mind knowledge of being that is possible, universal, and
necessary in its possibility; but also because sensations and feelings
provide the mind nothing but determinations of the idea of being,
which they limit and restrict.
iii. Nor indeed can this idea come from operations of the human mind,
from universalization and abstraction, because these operations do
nothing more than add determinations to that idea and take away
what has been added on the occasion of sensations and feelings.
iv. These operations of the human understanding are possible only if
one assumes the idea of being, which is the medium, instrument,
and condition of the same understanding.
v. Thus, without the idea of being, the human mind would no longer
perform any rational operation and would remain devoid of the fac-
ulty of thinking and understanding, which is to say that it would
cease to be anything intelligent.
vi. If removing the idea of being from the soul keeps it devoid of intel-
ligence, and if granting it this idea makes the soul an intelligent
being, then it can be said that this idea constitutes the very light of
reason, and so we discover what the light of reason is that everyone
acknowledges and no one defines.
vii. And since philosophers usually say that form is that by which a thing
is what it is, we can correctly call the idea of being in general the
form of reason or intelligence.
viii. On the same basis, this idea deserves to be called the first idea, the
Mother Idea, the idea per se, and the light of understanding. It is the
first idea because it is prior to all others; it is the Mother Idea because
it brings forth all the others by uniting with sensations through the
operations of the mind; it is the idea per se because sensations are
not ideas, and the mind needs to add them as determinations to that
261
first idea in order to get determinate ideas from the idea; finally, it
is the light of understanding because it is knowable in itself, whereas
sensations are knowable by means of it as they become its determina-
tions and are known as such.
Careful consideration of all these items is enormously helpful for

solving the great problem of the origin of ideas and human cognition,
though in fact this problem has long since been solved just by the com-
mon sense that people possess. For common sense acknowledges in the
human mind a light of reason or understanding, and regards this light
as so natural and proper to humans that it differentiates them from
animals.
Now once we show that this light of reason is none other than the
same idea of being in general, it follows from the testimony of common
sense that this idea is natural to humans and belongs to their nature.
This is because it is an idea not formed or acquired but innate, planted
there by nature, made present to the human mind by the same Creator
who formed mankind. In fact, it is necessary for being to be known per
se, or else there is nothing to make it known; on the contrary, everything
else is made known by it, because, since every thing is a being, unless one
knows what being is, one knows nothing.
And so we have an answer to the great question of the origin of ideas.
This is because all specific and generic ideas are found to be the idea of
being itself, variously determined by means of sensations and the opera-
tions of the mind. And since it follows that this unique and primitive
idea cannot be the product of these operations, whose indispensable
condition the idea is, it must be that the idea is given to man by nature,
so that a person knows what being is without needing to learn about it,
while everything else is learned with the help of this primitive cognition.
We cannot reasonably ask for a definition of being since it is what is
known of itself and enters into the definition of all other things; one can
only describe it; its features can be analysed and nothing more.
The idea, as we have seen, contains the pure essence of the thing;
therefore, the idea of being contains and makes known the essence of
being. Essence is not affected by space; ideal being, then, is incorporeal.
But ideal being is the form of the intellectual soul, and the intellectual
soul subsists by simple intuition of it. Therefore, the intellectual soul
is also incorporeal, and hence spiritual, and hence incorruptible and
immortal. Essence is also unaffected by time because being in its essence
is always being and can never cease to be, since it would be contradic-
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Rosmini, A Sketch
tory if being ceased to be being. Therefore it is eternal. But in time it

was united with the soul. Therefore, there was being before there was a
human soul, and being is independent of the soul. But being is the light
of understanding, and the light of understanding is contingent on the
existence of that whose light it is. Therefore, a mind exists prior to the
soul, an eternal mind, and this is God; therefore, God exists.
The existence of God and the immortality of the soul are the two foun-
dations of morality. This is because God is the end at which the immortal
soul aims, and this is that comprehensive and summary duty to which
all others are reduced. Thus, abstract inquiry into the origin of ideas
becomes a great and serious matter of human destiny.
NOTES
1 Rosmini (1881), the text followed here, is the first edition and posthumous:
see the Introduction, section 2, n15; section 6, n61.
2 For Condillac in Italy, see the Introduction, section 2.
3 In 1758 Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715−71) published his controver-
sial physicalist psychology, De l’Esprit, which influenced Jeremy Bentham
(1748−1832) and the utilitarians.
4 Bishop George Berkeley (1685−1753) called his famous work Three Dia-
logues between Hylas and Philonous, but Rosmini has ‘Filylas’ for ‘Hylas’; see
Berkeley (1713).
5 For Reid in Italy, see the Introduction, sections 2 and 6.
6 For ideology, see the Introduction, sections 2, 4, and 6.
7 The only full presentation of the ever-mutating Wissentschaftslehre published
in the lifetime of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762−1814) is Fichte (1794).
8 The eminent Savoyard theologian, Cardinal Hyacinthe Gerdil (1718−1802),
fervently opposed Enlightenment materialism and became famous as a
critic of Rousseau. He defended Father Nicolas Malebranche (1638−1715)
not only against Locke but also against Catholic enemies, including Antoine
Arnauld. Through Gerdil, who nearly became pope when Rosmini was an
infant, Malebranche remained influential for Italian thinkers, especially
Gioberti, even though some of his books had been put on the Index of Forbid-
den Books; see Gerdil (1748).
263
3
Vincenzo Gioberti
The Moral and Political Primacy

of the Italians1
II. THE ITALIAN PRIMACY IN REGARD TO THOUGHT:

2. ITALY IS THE LEADER IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES
Italy’s supremacy in the practice of theoretical thinking has a number

of causes, the result being that she alone possesses and keeps intact the
protologic principle of knowledge.2 Besides being common to all the
parts of the encyclopedia, this principle belongs in a very special way to
the teachings of reason and constitutes the first science – the foundation
and entryway of all theory. And since the axiom of creation has been dis-
carded or at least obscured and altered by the non-Catholic schools and
by all those who have withdrawn from Italian influences, protology can
rightly be considered a privilege of Italic philosophy. And surely it is rea-
sonable that the first science is neither a futile effort nor a sterile desire
only where the biblical and encyclopedic Prime is preserved.3
Dissenting thinkers, whether ancient or modern, have only the name
and the appearances of that science. Either they do not know the prin-
ciple of creation or they reject it, and this forces them to introduce a
preposterous confusion or an absurd divorce into the foundations of
knowledge, and to base the premises of their arguments on dualism
or pantheism. Those systems, far from aiding science, are its greatest
enemies. By unifying the manifold or multiplying unity, they substitute
darkness and disorder for light and scientific order. The only truthful
knowledge must put unity and variety together in such a way that the
latter obeys the former so that they are neither confused by conjunction
nor separated by distinction as when treated like equals or competitors.
The pantheist, who strives to assimilate contraries and unify the mani-
fold, is compelled to carve unity up and diversify what is identical, on
Gioberti, Primacy
the one hand mixing up what is different, on the other making vari-
able what is the same – exactly the reverse of a thoughtful and scientific
approach. The pantheist forces the reflective distinction of cognition so
far back into the confusion of intuition, which by itself is powerless to
give order to science, that he actually eliminates those first, crude out-
lines of intuition that provide a guiding thread for later reflection. They
are like emplacements or parapets marking an accessible route on which
thoughtful people can reach the goal by a direct path without wandering
randomly. Pantheism can thus be compared to that ultimate and abso-
lute chaos imagined by certain atheist philosophers. Not only would this
reduce the world to primeval disorder, it would also preclude any further
cosmogony, killing the seeds of life that float in the primeval night and
bring forth from its womb the wonders that we see.
The efforts of the dualist are even more futile and paltry. He not only
splits the concept of God in half; he also eliminates the essence of knowl-
edge, which lies in the order, the rhythm, and the placement and system-
atic linkage of principles and conclusions. Just as these things require
number and harmony, they also need unity.
The problems of pantheism and dualism cannot be solved by combin-
ing them and balancing one against the other – as some of the ancients
tried to do, especially Pythagoras, and the famous Hegel among the
moderns. Hegel’s system, to mention it in passing, is basically a renewal
(a worsening, in part) of Pythagoreanism and a return to the infantile
philosophy of paganism. In Hegel’s theory, contrariety is eliminated by
identity, and dualism is corrected and remedied by pantheism – a cure
worse than the disease. The brilliant German was not aware that the
reconciling dialectic must operate on the concept of creation, not on
that of sameness. Nor did he see that one should look not in absolute
thought for the substantial coexistence of contraries but in absolute will
for the cause that produces them.
The principle of creation is the hinge on which the first science must
turn. And this is possible only where the Catholic word resounds in its
purity, where pantheistic teachings in every era have been a scandal –
even stranger than they were rare. Exactly such a place is Italy, whose
philosophy, first-born in the Occident, has renewed itself many times
in different forms, following various political events on the peninsula
but always keeping itself clean of the infection of pantheism – or less
infected than the philosophies of other regions.
Before Christ, all dissenting philosophies vacillated between the pan-
theist system and dualism, producing from these two systems either a
265
clever composite or a shapeless one, more or less homogenous or het-

erogenous. An almost pure pantheism prevailed in the Orient, save for
the sects of Confucius and Zoroaster, which aimed more at practice than
theory. Being more active and ethical than rationalist, they had to stick
with whichever of the two opposed theories did more to preserve human
freedom. Nonetheless, the dualities of the I Ching and of the Nask dimly
suggest a prior pantheistic unity, and the subtle speculations of their
interpreters on the Tai Chi and Zervan Akarana make you suspect the
very ancient emanationism of the first Taoists (before Lao Tse and prob-
ably the same as the Samaneans of Central Asia and Northern India, who
seem to have preceded the last Buddha by a few centuries) and perhaps
of U Sheng and Aoma.4
Now of all the ancient schools, one came nearest the truth by skim-
ming the surface, so to speak, of the great doctrine of creation. Its cradle
was in the Occident, its glory in large measure Italian, and later it became
the ancestress of Greek philosophy. Its three luminaries – Pythagoras,
Socrates, Plato – were all but Catholic, given the times in which they
lived. Compared to them, the other sects of the day seem almost schis-
matic and heretical. All three understood the imperfection of that pagan
orthodoxy, however, and they actually aspired to reconstruct the primi-
tive faith. All three felt deeply the need for a new light of revelation to
dispel the darkness of their age. The first of them – Italian like us as well
Greek, and nourished on the old Doric, Etruscan, and Pelasgian wisdom
– founded the Italic school. His is the most illuminating portrait of Italy’s
ancient wisdom that history provides for us. Pythagoreanism, where one
finds our philosophy in its most ancient form as well as the most exotic,
has four main features.
The first of these is universality in every field. Because the sage of Cro-
ton joined the active life with the contemplative and craft with religion,
his establishment was a cult, a commonwealth, a monastery, a school, a
college, and an academy all at once.
The second characteristic is cultural and scientific universality. The
Pythagoreans were the living portrait of the encyclopedic intellect of the
Italians. They embraced every discipline accessible to their age, not sat-
isfied with separate insights but studying the mutual relations of every-
thing knowable and marrying the delights of myth and the symbolism of
numbers with doctrinal rigour. This is how they foresaw many scientific
findings of the moderns and a few of their fantasies. Applying music to
astronomy, they were Dante’s precursors in poetry and forerunners of
Kepler, Galileo, and Copernicus in theorizing about the heavens.
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The tempering of Oriental pantheism, by way of the categorical dual-

ity of their ten fundamental opposites, is the third hallmark of the Italic
school. What is a step backward in the moderns – in Hegel, for exam-
ple – was a real improvement in the days of the Samian or Tyrrhenian
philosopher. Much more than in Hegelian dualism, the monad clearly
dominates the dyad in the Pythagorean system. The principle that uni-
fies opposites and resolves differences by inserting itself between them is
harmony and not identity.
Finally – their fourth and last distinction – one must attribute to the
sages of Magna Graecia the first seed of theoretical and political real-
ism in the West, the claim to recognize in rational concepts and civil
laws an objective reality, an absolute value, divine and independent not
only of human will but also of the contingency of created things and the
vagaries of institutions made in the mold of humanity. The metaphysical
realism of the Pythagoreans, written up and ripened by Plato and the
Alexandrians with the doctrine of the Logos and Demiurge, passed to
the Christian school, where it was transformed and cleansed of any stain
of pantheism by the special zeal of Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventura, and
Thomas. They are the tetrarchy of Catholic thought that preceded the
revived paganism of Luther and Descartes.
Political realism – hereditary monarchy, in other words, tempered by
natural and elective aristocracy and forming the Doric and Pelasgian
ideal of government – was then transmitted by the school of Croton to
Etruscan Rome. It was modelled on the Pythagorean cosmos, where the
earth and other planets move around a motionless sun in a perpetual
and harmonic cycle. The legend that makes Numa a student of Pythago-
ras, as I have mentioned elsewhere, preserves some of the history.
The Roman Republic was really an interregnum that grew out of
princely abuses. Caesar’s mighty genius, rather than repeat the work
of the Gracchi, resumed that of Romulus and Servius Tullius, bringing
the Latin state back to its foundations, making patricians agree with
plebeians by means of the tempering harmony of royal power. Having
anticipated efforts by Nerva and Trajan that were less durable because
they came too late, Caesar would be the saviour of the fatherland, not a
parricide.
It was not just Pythagorean thought that Etruscan Rome used to
improve its form of government. Theoretical teachings also entered
later when seeds sown by the son of Mnesarchus in southern Italy and
then transported to Greece returned home, crossing into Latium. The
three most famous schools of Hellas – the Academy, Stoa, and Peripa-
267
tos – were children of the Socratic movement but grandchildren of the

Italic cults. From his teacher Anaxagoras, Socrates took the great prin-
ciple of Nous, which gives order to Hyle and remains apart from it. In
substance this concept is Pythagorean. And from the influence of Italic
science came those remarkable moderations of pantheism found in all
the Greek schools without exception, even those, such as the Eleatic and
Alexandrian, that held on to more of the Oriental doctrines.
Latin philosophy, the second form of Italian theorizing, is different
in character from Greek thought. When Greek ideas returned to our
peninsula and settled in Rome, they acquired a more austere and prac-
tical nature – not as broad as Pythagoreanism yet no less wise, and in
accord with strict civic intelligence. Because of this, the Greek sect that
did best in Rome was Stoicism. It became livelier and exuberant and
showed a new face – a system in which ethical issues have greater value
and significance than other parts of knowledge, a system based on the
doctrine of human freedom and intrinsically opposed to pantheism.
And even if Roman Stoicism has more depth than breadth, being more
practical than theoretical, lacking scope but well endowed with power, it
compensates by being more moral and religious than the Greek Porch.
The theoretical weakness of Latin wisdom (the reason for its brief
career) corresponds to a similar defect that ruined Roman institutions.
These were in many ways excellent, but they erred in that the government
of the metropolis fed on the nation. This led to the war of the provinces
(called Italic with good reason) and ultimately to the total destruction of
the Republic. In Roman philosophy, then, science was too narrow and
was smothered by craft, by which I mean the practical application of
principles. The study of ideas was subordinated to that of facts, doing all
the more damage, because, while the periphery yielded to the centre in
the political order, the opposite happened in philosophy. Science, like
Roman literature, had little vitality, and both became sterile even before
the assaults and abuses of the barbarians. Hence it was easy to exchange
them for the divine wisdom of Christianity, in which thought and action,
idea and fact, theory and practice are in wondrous balance and accord.
The philosophy of the Fathers, even though it spread through the
whole Catholic world, was ours especially, and we can consider it the
third form of Italian thought. Establishing its centre in a Catholic Rome,
philosophy drew from the city the breath that gave it life. Tertullian,
Augustine, and Bernard may have been born outside Italy, but they
thought and wrote like Romans, just as Trajan and Seneca felt and acted
like Latins though they were born far from the Tiber and Latium. The
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Fathers restored Pythagorean and Platonic realism, removing it from the

fog of pantheism and informing it with the sovereign doctrine of crea-
tion. The Scholastics, Italian by origin and allegiance, continued their
work and put it in more rigorous form.
Scholasticism, the fourth form of our philosophy, split into the two
opposed camps of nominalism and realism. The former, subdividing into
more sects, represents Aristotelian teaching at various levels of develop-
ment, from the still Platonic Stagirite through the sensism and atheism
of Strato. Between them comes Theophrastus, a wonderful talent, yet
more skilled at observing facts than at theorizing philosophically. The
most celebrated authors and advocates of the nominalist system were
French or English – Roscelin, Abelard, and Ockham – while the leaders
of realism came from Italy. In a daring Platonic way, Anselm of Aosta
and Bonaventura of Bagnoregio expressed the same teaching to which
Thomas Aquinas brought the reserve and methodical stiffness of the
Peripatetics.
Thus, the intellectual war of the Celtic and Germanic mind against
Pelasgian and Italian wisdom started with the Middle Ages and the
beginnings of scholasticism. And even though the divine Bernard was
French, his standing as a monk and the teachings that he upheld in his
fight with Abelard show priestly Roman thought in conflict with Gallic
and secular novelties.
The waning of realism and scholasticism was contemporary with the
demise of papal dictatorship and Italian primacy, and this double decline
followed from the intellectual and political influences of the barbarians
on the peninsula. Because Italy and the Pontiff represent the Idea mani-
fest as a people and a person, they cannot preserve their rule when the
senses take the place of ideas, following the canons of nominalism. This
is pagan sensism brought into Italian Christianity by barbarian teach-
ers under the cloak of a false Aristotle. It was the first step in modern
dissent, which was reared and nourished by the Saxon monk and the
Breton philosopher, just as dissent in the early Church originated with
the Gnostics, who were in a sense the nominalists of emanationism and
pantheism.5
Renewed studies of classical antiquity in the fifteenth century gave
birth to a fifth form of Italian philosophy which in substance was a reviv-
al of paganism. Thus, despite the extraordinary merit of Pomponazzi,
Patrizi, Cardano, Telesio, Bruno, Campanella, and a good many others,
their teachings did not take root among us. The Italian mind, abandon-
ing theory almost entirely, turned its attention for two centuries to politi-
269
cal wisdom and to the science of calculation and experiment, guided by

two of the greatest, Machiavelli and Galileo. In between came Sarpi, who
had the talents of both and greatly resembled them in the breadth of his
mind and the nature of his studies.6 He came particularly close to the
first, applying the rarest gifts while suffering anxieties that matched the
degeneration of the people and the declining times.
The instinct for theory stirred again in Italy with Vico. To renew Pla-
tonic and Christian realism, he had the stunning idea of going back to
their first sources, not Greek but Italic. He would rediscover the ele-
ments of ancient Pelasgian wisdom among the remains of the Latin lan-
guage and reconstitute the body of that wisdom, as modern geologists
reconstructed the dimensions and organic features of another world
from its scattered bones. But Vico was not understood in his time, and
even in our day very few understand him. The problem is not so much
the difficulties of expression and partial mistakes that make some of his
teachings hazy. To appreciate his deeply Italian thought and sensibility
simply demands more strength and subtlety of mind than one can find
today. The New Science can be compared to a fertile land that God set in
the ocean, keeping it unknown and uninhabited for a long time, saving
it for the diligent industry of future sailors and settlers. Thus, a century
after it was written, while still buried under the dust of libraries, this
astonishing work had the allure of a discovery.
Already during Vico’s lifetime, the teachings of Descartes – Protes-
tantism applied to philosophy – had leaked into Italy and flourished
there because the learned were more inattentive than selective or
insightful. I note that Luther and Descartes, the two chief enemies of
Italian wisdom, visited the peninsula and carried back from there a
harsh and secret rancour against our ways, giving vent to this in their
teachings. And if the philosopher was less violent and fearsome than
the friar, at least in appearance, he was also luckier. His teachings won
citizenship in our country under the two successive forms of psychologi-
cal rationalism and sensism. Yet among these aberrations the prudence
of our ancestors still shone forth. While embracing the alien heresy,
we could at least dispense with its most outrageous conclusions and
disagreements. In the past century, for example, Genovesi tempered
Locke’s teachings with those of Leibniz and was more eclectic than Car-
tesian.7 And we remember Romagnosi as a deeper and more moderate
sensist than his contemporaries who taught the same system across the
mountains.
With Romagnosi one can say that the servile habit of Gallic theorizing
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ended among us.8 Still, those who have lived some time among foreign-
ers and have largely forgotten the thought of the fatherland find it hard
to take it up again, choosing to return home only after having sampled
other regions. In the same way, after the Italian mind has shaken off
the French yoke and forsaken the site of servitude, it wishes to try other
countries, wandering in the wilderness before returning to rest in the
promised land, held by the fathers of old. Italy’s is a strange destiny. Hav-
ing lost her self-awareness for many centuries, she gropes her way to find
it again, looking where it is not nor can be, yet believing that she can
have peace without returning, like the prodigal son of the Gospel, to the
bosom of her parent.
Such is the final form of Italian philosophy as it still persists in the
present – a clever imitation of Scottish and German teachings. Our brave
and honoured Galluppi is the Reid of Italy, drawing people back to the
truth by correct understanding improved by deep analysis, but with-
out breaking through the boundaries of observation and experiments.
Armed with these implements, Galluppi gloriously vanquished the sen-
sism of his predecessors, combating it with these weapons of his. He
made our thinkers familiar again with that shrewd forbearance, experi-
mental and inductive, that produces useful discoveries in the sphere of
internal facts – the application of Galileo’s method to psychology.
But direct sensation is not enough for philosophy to be a science. Sen-
sible phenomena cannot be completely explained without rising higher
and entering the secret sanctuary of reason. Thus, as the Scottish school
was displaced by the Critical school in the previous period, in our time
Rosmini succeeded Galluppi. From terminology to incidental themes
and beyond, the sect that he founded cleverly revived the errors and
pretensions of German Cartesianism – of Kantianism, in other words.
Renewed and Italianized by the illustrious Roveretan, in one respect
this Kantianism is inferior to the teachings of the Scots and Galluppi
because it moves away from the reliable guidance of common sense and
experience.9 On the other hand, it provides no remedy for the defects of
the aforementioned schools since the reason to which it has recourse is
a sham, empty and sterile. Reason for Rosmini and Kant is purely subjec-
tive, however they may name or define it, and a subjective faculty cannot
be the foundation of science. It neither helps the mind escape the limits
of psychology nor provides a firm basis for that same psychology. No
wonder, then, that Rosminianism has shown itself up now to be so unpro-
ductive in the hands of its author. He has been able to extract nothing
more from it than an insubstantial ethics bristling with the spines and
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subtleties of Scotism, while really straining to squeeze an ontology of

some sort out of it.
If Rosminianism means to be orthodox, it is infertile, reluctant to
bring to light the consequences contained in its principles, subordinat-
ing a culpable fertility to its scientific impotence. But should the author
and his followers become less pious and timorous than they are, one
would soon see the pantheism of Fichte and Hegel emerging in Italy.
This is where Rosmini’s principles lead, without a doubt. Like the criti-
cal philosophy, his thought moves ultimately to absolute scepticism and
nihilism. They are the ultimate terminus of psychologism, as shown by
the current state of the Hegelian school. The vogue for Rosminianism
that existed for a time in some parts of Italy, even though it is gone today,
is a sign that German dissent could take the place of Celtic dissent if our
native wisdom does not defend against it.
Already circulating on the peninsula are certain works that present
German pantheism as a discovery. These foreign goods, far from
helping science, do it injury. The learned, not much used to fending
for themselves and having no sure rule for judging the real worth of
those works, eagerly accept them. But to substitute German rational-
ism for French sensism would be to leap from the frying pan into the
fire, which should give pause to those few who still see some good in
Rosminianism. If wiser minds today still feel the need to return to the
ancient wisdom of the fatherland, why halt in Germany after leaving
France? Why drink from the cup of error and drain it to the last drop
before tasting the pure waters of truth? Why drag out an apostasy that
has become tedious and annoying even to those who profess it? Why
postpone reconsecration?
You Italians who drink from foreign springs, know that you are exiles
even while living in Italy. Your exile is wilful, not a matter of need, not
innocent but culpable. Of your own will, you disown your native worship
and venerate strange gods from abroad. You are exiles not in body but
in soul. While your person remains on the peninsula, your spirit dwells
across the mountains, conforming thoughts and feelings to the ancient
enemies of your fatherland.
Ah, return for once to your senses! Put an end to a long and sorry
error. Learn to feel and philosophize like Italians. Turn your ears to the
words of your compatriot, harshly separated from our common mother
but perhaps more Italian than you. Even while far away, he lives spiritu-
ally in that sweet fatherland, feeds on her ancient wisdom, and thinks
about her past, while you, breathing her healthy air and enjoying her
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vital light, persist in destroying her reputation by repaying her favours

with ingratitude and insulting the Providence that made you her sons.
Tapping the vein of wisdom on the other side of the mountains is less
reasonable and excusable for us Italians today because it has dried up.
Anyone who makes use of it, and, until recently, found plenty of nour-
ishment in it (illusory though it was) is now forced to look elsewhere.
And so the time seems ripe to restore the ancient Pelasgian wisdom by
perfecting and combining it with the divine illuminations of Christian-
ity, and then to inaugurate it in the rest of Europe. Having squandered
her intellectual resources and being now reduced to extreme poverty,
Europe can restore herself only by drawing anew from the inexhaustible
mine of Italian intellect.
One outstanding talent has already undertaken the work of reform
by leading his compatriots back to the best sources and renewing the
ancient Platonic marriage – which never should have ended – between
delightful writing and rigorous teaching. Terenzio Mamiani, taking up
Vico’s idea, took up the thread of Italy’s philosophical traditions again
and showed by example (as Vico never did, leaving his discoveries largely
ineffective) how one can and must put theoretical ideas into an elegant
garb that is all our own, removed from barbaric crudities and foreign
acquisitions alike.
This is of the highest importance not only for literature but also for
theory. The conjunction between the idea and its sign is so deep and
tight that thinking and reasoning like an Italian becomes difficult, almost
impossible, when one’s consciousness, imagination, and expression are
barbarian. In fact, what is good taste in writing becomes good sense in
thinking when people express themselves with this double endowment
of two different forms of the same thing – good judgment – whereby the
mind grasps exemplars of things in the intellect and externalizes them
correctly. In his latest works, Mamiani comes close to this wise and tem-
perate form of philosophy, in which reason and experience, facts and
ideas, synthesis and analysis are in wonderful agreement because each
of them is assigned to the level appropriate for the work of science. This
form of philosophy is almost a privilege of the Italian genius that excels
in forcefulness because it is the most temperate.
The same approach to thought and philosophical studies shone in a
contemporary of ours whose name is known and beloved in Piedmont.
It would be so in the rest of Italy had his fate matched the goodness
and greatness of his mind, heart, and teaching. Luigi Ornato, close and
heroic friend of Santorre Santarosa, saw the fatherland again after a
273
voluntary exile of ten years only to end his days suffering from a long
and painful illness.10 He was skilled in many fields of learning and quite
expert in Greek, but he directed all this knowledge towards philosophy
and religion, the apex of all his thoughts. He lived and died in love with
the Idea and found consolation in contemplating it, imitating Galileo
and Homer, whose blindness afflicted him in the last years of his life. I
thought it not out of place to mention this man, whose modesty and mis-
fortune deprived him of the fame he deserved, because it seems fitting
to me that Italy should measure her gratitude not so much by results,
which often depend on chance, as by the noble efforts and great-souled
intentions of her sons.
The reform conceived by Vico and pursued by Mamiani cannot be
brought to completion unless the ancient Pelasgian tradition is joined
with the Christian and both are reduced to a single principle whose sub-
stance is based on reason while the expression that gives meaning to it
belongs to revelation. This is the principle of creation, the only act that
comprehends and controls all knowledge, infusing it with a new breath
of life.
The idea of creation is as old among mankind as the truth that corre-
sponds to it. But since it was first obscured and then lost by the dissenting
peoples, this idea has not had sovereign power until now in Christian
philosophy, nor has it gained the supreme place that it would need to
inform every part of the encyclopedic enterprise. There are various caus-
es to which one might attribute the decline of ancient Pelasgian realism
and of the realism that flourished in the two Christian periods of the
Fathers and the Middle Ages. In any event, philosophical opinions based
on truth do not decay or decline except when the method used to devel-
op and establish them does not correspond to their intrinsic truth and
goodness. And since imperfection in methods prevents good teachings
from taking root, they cannot flourish again unless the old flaw is fixed,
and, as the truth unfolds, new supplements and new levels of subtlety
and splendour are added to it.
The Fathers and the most distinguished masters of the schools served
the Pelasgian philosophy very well, to be sure, cleansing it of every stain
of pantheism and handling many parts of it with mastery. Their work was
incomplete, however: the principle of creation as it actually informs the
thoughts and writings of these outstanding figures was not put formally
at the head of their science, so the principle was not established and inte-
grated by means of a scientific formula. One cause of this, I believe, was
that the Christian schools conferred supreme authority on the names of
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Plato and Aristotle. They repudiated their errors but did not improve
their methods. The other cause was the difficulty – almost a moral impos-
sibility – of making a new blueprint for an enterprise as all-encompassing
as the totality of human knowledge.
When false religions and flawed civilizations die, they leave behind
them a clear trail that usually lasts as long as the eras when they pre-
vailed. Hence, since paganism was rooted in Europe’s soil for so long,
many traces of it have naturally survived and still remain in the present.
With these residues so conspicuous in the arts, literature, and laws, in
customs and institutions and even in the names of people and objects,
no wonder that the situation has been no different in the philosophical
disciplines. Therefore, one can truly state – without insulting even the
holiest and most eminent names – that even when European philosophy
was orthodox in substance, it preserved some part of pagan heterodoxy
in its methods and procedures.
Briefly, this heterodox element can be traced to the lack of a genuine
ontologism. Even in full flight, pagan philosophy was psychological or
cosmological, taking mankind or the world as points of departure, or
in any case marrying these two concepts to the supreme and absolute
Idea as the start of its theorizing. Thus, the Prime of the most ancient
Italic school was the duality of the Doric Theocosm, like the Cronoto-
pos of Iran or Chaldaea among the Orientals.11 The pantheism in the
Pythagorean concept was tempered, through its Pelasgian character, by
the distinction between Theos and Hyle – a distinction that preserved
the decree of religion, up to a certain point, at the loss of scientific unity.
With the doctrine of creation, Christianity reduced the Prime of faith
to its ontological simplicity and purity. But Christianity professed not
to intervene directly in the human disciplines, contenting itself with
authoritative instruction about true belief without telling how to explain
or demonstrate it by a scientific method. For this reason, the psychologi-
cal Prime was not rigorously discussed in the Christian schools. Many dis-
tinguished it from the ontological Prime. Others, realizing that the two
Primes are identical, set the concept of Being apart from that of creation
and thereby deprived the protological formula of the most essential con-
dition of its integrity.
These scientific mistakes did not prejudice the essence of doctrine as
long as theology took precedence over theory and religion played the
propaedeutic role – doing duty for intuition, as it were, in relation to
reflective cognition and science in general. But when philosophy was
detached from its leader and chose to go its own way, the defect in the
275
protological principle bore fruit. Within a short span of years, the psy-
chologism of Descartes gave birth to pantheism, biblical rationalism, sen-
sism, fatalism, and immoralism, which were seen combined and unified
as a system in the work of Spinoza.
Today, therefore, we need to construct the fundamental formula of
knowledge. Other philosophical questions are of little moment in com-
parison to it. This question is the basis and meaning of them all, since
the whole structure of science depends on its resolution. Protology is
the primary theoretical need of the current era and is well-suited to its
character.12 It matches today’s aspiration to restore ancient orthodoxy in
the field of reality and knowledge by driving resurrected paganism back
to the grave, while at the same time giving new order to the encyclopedia
and to Europe, shaken and shattered as they are by three centuries of
political and religious schism.
For this reason, the establishment of principles and sources is of the
greatest consequence in every sphere. Today, this is the unanimous
instinct of popular desire, of learned research, and of serious thinking in
the various domains of action and inquiry. But the only possible protolo-
gy is the one that is based on the Ideal Formula, which expresses the first
origin of things and produces the first principles from which cognitions
emerge.13 The doctrine of the Formula is both old and new. It is old in
that its seeds are included in the principle of creation, written by God’s
hand on the frontispiece of the book of revelation. It is new because no
such principle has been scientifically explained until now.
This should cause us no surprise. As I have just noted, Christian philos-
ophy retained part of the procedure of pagan science until the sixteenth
century (beyond the damage done by nominalists, even among the ranks
of the realists), and from then on it was weakened by Cartesianism, which
is a second paganism. This is now throwing off its last sparks, which fore-
tells the coming triumph of Christian ontologism. Burning below the
surface and consuming all their tinder, these fires are naturally dying
out to leave a firm and fertile soil ready for the human industry that
soon produces fruitful fields and populous cities, the nesting-ground of
science and civilization.
NOTES
1 Gioberti (1843) is the first edition; Gioberti (1938−9), III, used here, is the
Edizione nazionale.
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2 Gioberti calls his project ‘protology,’ the study of what comes first – origins
and first principles – and he sees this as a kind of ontology or metaphysics,
as distinct from an epistemology or psychology.
3 On Gioberti’s use of the term ‘Prime,’ see the beginning of the next selec-
tion, from Gioberti (1840).
4 Among the less familiar names in this list, Nasks are volumes or sections
of the Avesta, the Zoroastrian scripture; Zervan Akarana is the Zoroastrian
Boundless Time; Porphyry mentions Samanaioi as Bactrian priests; the
Emperor Huizong (U Sheng) promoted Taoism.
5 Albert of Saxony and Peter Abelard.
6 The Servite theologian Paolo Sarpi (1552−1623), who wrote a critical
history of the Council of Trent and supported Galileo, was a critic of the
papacy and loyal to his native Venice against papal Rome.
7 For Genovesi, see the Introduction, section 3.
8 For Romagnosi, see the Introduction, section 2.
9 Roveretan: Rosmini was born in Rovereto.
10 Annibale Santorre, the Piedmontese Count of Santarosa (1783−1825), died
supporting Greek revolutionaries in 1825, a few years after the failure of his
own constitutionalist uprising in 1821; Victor Cousin and Ugo Foscolo sup-
ported him in exile. Santarosa’s comrade, Luigi Ornato (1787−1842), was
also a philosopher; he studied Plato under the influence of Malebranche,
Vico, and Jacobi: see Gentile (1917): 143−65.
11 For ‘Prime’ see n2 above; both Theocosm (Godworld) and Cronotopos
(Timeplace) express dualities.
12 For protology, see the first paragraph of Gioberti’s statement.
13 For the Ideal Formula, see section 8 of the Introduction and the following
selection from Gioberti (1840).
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Vincenzo Gioberti
Introduction to the Study of Philosophy1
Book I, Chapter 4, ‘The Ideal Formula’
What we call the Ideal Formula is a proposition that expresses the Idea in
a clear, simple, and precise way by means of a judgment. Since a person
cannot think without judging, he cannot think the Idea without mak-
ing a judgment whose meaning is the Ideal Formula. This must consist
of two terms joined together by a third, in keeping with the nature of
every judgment, and it must not go wrong by excess or defect. It would
go wrong by defect if it did not contain all the elements that constitute
the Idea – if, in other words, each notion that occurs in the human mind
could not be reduced synthetically to some one of the elements of that
Formula. It would go wrong by excess if there were something more in
its explicit content than the constituent elements – if, that is to say, one
of the concepts that the Formula expresses were contained in others
signified by it.
In taking up this topic, I do not intend at this time to proceed with
the rigour of method that befits ontology – a pure and strict synthesis
that would be out of place in this introductory work. Since the doctrine
that I am setting forth (though at its roots it is as ancient as the truth)
is completely alien to current practice in philosophy, I thought that I
should smooth the way with the type of presentation that would permit
me to compare the main points of my approach with customary practice
and bring my system as near as possible to today’s science. Now contem-
porary philosophy is by nature psychological. Ontology, even when it is
permitted, is considered only an adjunct to the experimental science of
the human mind. My view is just the opposite, and I hold it firmly: in fact,
in the appropriate place I hope to be able to show, with evidence that will
Gioberti, The Ideal Formula
leave nothing wanting, that ontology is wholly independent of ordinary

psychology and that the latter is entirely dependent on the former.
Nonetheless, since it is quite true that psychology must correspond
to ontology and be interwoven with it as facts are linked with ideas, the
one can serve to confirm the claims of the other and thus promote the
intent of a work, which, like this introduction, is merely preparatory.
Therefore, I will make psychological excursions and digressions when-
ever it serves my purpose, and thus I will proceed as need be, by way of
analysis and synthesis. I will try to do this in such a way, however, that the
main points of the synthetic process are sufficiently explicit, and that the
argument resulting from them is capable either of convincing readers
accustomed to theoretical subjects, or else of giving them the means to
help and correct me, should I happen to fall into error.
Establishing the Ideal Formula goes along with searching for what can
be called the philosophical Prime. Up to now philosophers have laboured
at two inquiries, which in substance come down to just one. One group
went hunting for the first idea, another for the first thing. The first idea
and the first thing are those on which all other ideas, in the order of
the knowable, and all other things, in the order of the real, in some way
depend. I say in some way because philosophers are divided into many
factions on the specific nature of this dependence. I call the first idea the
psychological Prime and the first thing the ontological Prime. But since the
first idea and the first thing are identified with one another, in my view,
and because the two Primes become one, I give this absolute principle
the name philosophical Prime, and I consider it the foundation and sole
basis of all the real and all the knowable.
On the problem of the ontological Prime, philosophers can be divid-
ed into three classes – theist, naturalist, and pantheist – whose names
themselves indicate which Prime each recognizes. The Prime of the pan-
theists is the synthesis of the other two; either the concept of God or that
of nature can dominate it, giving pantheism a particular character. All
the oriental philosophers, who alone deserve the name ancients in an
absolute sense, are theists or pantheists. Pure naturalism – atheism, in
other words – is an analytic, modern, and European commodity. In the
system of Capila, as it appears from the account of it given by experts on
India, the concept of nature is much the dominant, yet it is not the only
concept. Hence, contrary to popular opinion, I cannot bring myself to
believe that the followers of the Sanchia that is commonly called atheist
are atheists.2 Elsewhere I will set forth the reasons why I believe that the
Pracriti of Capila is nature in the pantheist sense and therefore contains
279
a divine element.3 Thus, I regard pure atheism as foreign to the Orient,

at least if we are talking about schools and teachings that have gained
some celebrity.
The idea expressed by the ontological Prime, whatever it may be, is
not simple but composed of more concepts than could make a single
idea without being connected together and organized. Nor could this
organic entity subsist unless, among the various concepts from which
it comes, there were one dominating as the origin or logical root from
which the others merely derive. But this original concept of the onto-
logical Prime, coming before other notions only in the order of logic,
becomes of necessity a psychological Prime, and then from this perspec-
tive the philosophers of whom we are speaking are forced to leave pure
ontology and move on to psychology.
But if the search for the ontological Prime leads of necessity to seek-
ing the psychological Prime, this suggests that the two Primes must make
only one in substance, and that the first thing must also be the first idea.
Nor in truth could it be otherwise, since every thing is a concept and
every concept a thing. Hence, if it is certain that the psychological Prime
must in some way produce all concepts and the ontological Prime all
things, the two Primes must of necessity be identical. Separating the two
Primes gave birth to psychology and completely ruined philosophy, as
the course of our argument will reveal. Reuniting the two Primes in just
one gives us the philosophical Prime, which is absolute – the basis of the
real and the knowable.
Philosophers (including in their number teachers of religion also, as
one should) involved in the search for the psychological Prime, either to
formulate the ontological Prime or to solve a problem of psychology, are
divided into a large number of factions that are quite different, at least
in form if not always in substance. I shall not undertake to make an exact
enumeration of all the ideas that have been baptized as Primes because
it would require great effort not strictly required by my present purpose.
But I think I do not stray far from the truth in reducing the leading ideas
among them to seventeen, as follows: the One, the Necessary, the Intel-
ligent, the Intelligible, the Incomprehensible, the Good, the Infinite,
the Universal, the Immense, the Eternal, Absolute Potentiality, Pure and
Free Act, Cause, Substance, the Absolute, the Identical, and Being.
But a quick analysis that anyone can do for himself shows that the
first thirteen concepts cannot be psychologically primitive. Spinoza and
the modern pantheists of Germany have given greater currency to the
ideas of Substance, the Absolute, and Identity. But these are secondary
280
because they are relative: the first refers to the qualities or modes that
presuppose it; the other two imply the idea of relation in general by
declaring it absent. A relative concept resulting from two prior concepts
cannot be prime. What remains, then, is the concept of Being, which
constitutes the psychological Prime and therefore the philosophical
Prime, according to the stipulation that we have made.
That Being is the philosophical Prime is a claim dating back to primi-
tive times, as we shall see elsewhere. Among the moderns who professed
it outright, the most illustrious, no doubt, is Nicolas Malebranche,
neglected by his compatriots; they preferred German fantasies or the
frivolities of Descartes to the teachings of the greatest thinker of the
age after Leibniz – or the greatest French philosopher of all time. I am
not speaking about any of the Germans who have revived that opinion,
though only in appearance, altering and bringing it into disrepute with
the nonsense of pantheism. In our day, the illustrious Antonio Rosmini,
in his New Essay on the Origin of Ideas, partly renewed the ancient opinion
and brought it into the debate that gives the main theme of his book a
depth and sharpness of insight uncommon today.
As psychological analysis, Rosmini’s work is more complete than that
of his predecessors, and without doubt it has led science forward. No
one before him has made as full and thoughtful an investigation of what
I call the psychological Prime – insofar as reflection can deal with it. But for
theoretical science this is not enough, not enough for that same analytic
understanding of the mind that cannot avoid errors and attain its goal,
even within merely experiential limits, unless it is based on the principles
and conclusions of a higher discipline.
This, in my view, Rosmini has not done. Following the practices of psy-
chologism, he sought new results for science as an analytic observer, but
as an ontologist he may have cut his gains short, not taking science back
to that height where the best of the ancients had put it. This takes noth-
ing at all away from the just praise due him, since in this case the loss
must be attributed to method and the gain to genius, the one being the
fault of the time, the other the merit of the philosopher. But if anyone
should ask me why the eminent Author followed a defective method,
I would answer that it is not given to the best minds to rise completely
above the problems of their times. I will describe the reasons that cause
me to speak in this way, realizing that I am dealing with one of those
people who are not offended when, for love of truth, someone disagrees
with their views and explains the grounds for disagreement. I assume
that the reader is familiar with the work of the illustrious writer; other-
281
wise, it would not be possible to understand what I say since I am forced

to hold myself to a strict brevity and to reduce another person’s argu-
ments to short formulas.4
Rosmini’s doctrine, insofar as it has to do with my subject, can be
reduced to this basic proposition: that the psychological Prime is not
identical to the ontological Prime. This in substance is the whole mis-
taken component of his system, in my view. But since my way of speaking
is different from that of the illustrious Author and outside his system, I
must examine some of his conclusions. I shall reduce Rosmini’s theory
to the four points that follow:
1. All ideas have originated from the idea of being.5

2. The primitive idea of being represents only possible being.6
3. Perception of the real existence of created things is an action of a
judgment by which an equation is made between the idea of possible
being and sensory apprehension.7
4. The concept of the reality of absolute Being, of God, is not had direct-
ly and by intuition but only in an indirect way and by demonstration.8
Let us examine them.
1. All ideas have originated from the idea of being. I accept this first statement
with the qualifications that I will mention shortly but could not express
here without making other points first.
2. The primitive idea of being represents only possible being. If this claim were
true, it would follow that the idea of the possible precedes that of the
real, which in the first place is contrary to the practice of psychology.
Given that the abstract follows the concrete and arises from it according
to the natural process of the mind, concrete cognition of the real must
precede abstract cognition of the possible. But if one asserts that a dif-
ferent practice holds for the first act of the mind and that the beginning
of intellectual activity takes place in a particular way, I note that this way,
whatever it may be, must conform to the practice of logic. But accord-
ing to the practice of logic, the possible presupposes the real because
something possible could not be conceived without something real. If
nothing is in reality, nothing can be. A potency that consisted in a mere
potentiality without a prior act would be nothing, not a true potency.
This is why God is called pure act and why his power is included in his
actuality. Nor can one claim that recognizing this truth is a result of argu-
282
ment, moving up by reasoning from the concept of the possible to that

of the real, since in fact the mind moves down from the concept of the
real to that of the possible.
To prove this, assume that we have only the idea of the possible, and
tell me whether this possibility, as such, is real or apparent. If you say
that it is apparent, the basis of the knowable is destroyed and scepticism
is inevitable. If it is real, the first concept clearly represents not a mere
possibility but a reality in that a real possible, as possible, is real abso-
lutely unless it refers to a prior reality of which it is the abstract – which is
contrary to the present case where we are speaking of the first concept.
A mere possibility, if it deserves belief, is entirely real because it is not
only real but necessary, and indeed everyone agrees on the necessity of
possibles as possibles. But if the possible is represented to a person’s
intuition as real, it is clear that the primitive concept must be the real
and not the possible since the real is nothing but real and becomes pos-
sible by abstraction, whereas by itself the possible cannot become real
and is not possible. Therefore, it is against the practice of logic to make
the concept of the real arise from that of the possible and assume that
the latter can exist without the former.
A question will come up: In what way does the concept of the possible
arise from that of the real? I answer that the possible is the real only inas-
much as it has been thought, and hence it arises from the mind’s reflect-
ing on the first concept of the real. Since a human is endowed with the
faculty of thinking back on his own actions, he can fix his mind upon
the intuition of the real once he has had that intuition. In this reflective
act, the immediate object of thinking is the thinking itself – the intui-
tion. But since intuition apprehends the real, the reflective act cannot
apprehend the intuition without also perceiving the real conjoined with
it. It by no means perceives the real in itself, however, since in that case
the reflective act would not differ from the direct; it perceives the real
in the intuition instead. But the real considered in intuition loses the
individuality that makes it real and keeps only the abstract, generic form
that makes it possible.
The psychological transformation of the real into the possible thus
results from uniting reflection with intuition. Relating the object to
reflection gives rise to the concept of the possible, as relating the object
to intuition produces the notion of the real. Let us then suppose that I
have a triangular body before my eyes. By looking at it, I acquire the idea
of a real triangle. But if I then reflect on this same idea and regard the
triangle not as outside of me but as in my mind, I have the idea of the
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possible triangle because the concept that I have of that triangle applies
to an infinite number of real triangles. In short, the concept of the real
becomes a concept of the possible by losing its concreteness and becom-
ing abstract, which occurs by means of reflection.
With regard to the mind that possesses it, the idea of Being needs to be
considered in two different moments: in the first act and in the second
act. The first act is a work of intuition, the second is a work of reflection. In
the first act, Being is represented as pure reality, completely simple, abso-
lute, necessary, and perfect; in the second act it is represented as possible.
But possibility presupposes reality just as reflection presupposes intuition,
neither more nor less. The proportion and correspondence that hold
between the two psychological acts and the two ontological states is abso-
lutely precise. The notion of possibility implies an intellectual elaboration,
an abstraction, that cannot occur in intuition, a completely simple faculty
that consists merely of contemplating the object as it is, without adding
anything to it or taking anything away. The possible can no more be intu-
ited with the eyes of the mind than seen with those of the body.
And truly, if the object of intuition were the possible, it would be cor-
rect to assume either that the possible is real, which takes us back to the
earlier argument, or that an object can subsist solely in the state of the
possible, which is absurd. Indeed, one can ask if the objective referent
of the idea of Being is in the mind or outside the mind. Anyone who
says that it is in the mind would incur all the sceptical consequences of
psychologism, and the objective truth of things would be destroyed. But
Rosmini expressly embraces the contrary view and states that the idea of
Being is a true entity distinct from the mind, that it is numerically one for
all people, immense, eternal, immutable, and absolute.9
If it is outside the mind, then, how could it ever subsist and be shown
to the human mind if it were merely possible? How could it commu-
nicate to the mind that intellectual light of which Rosmini speaks and
without which intuition could not take place? And what would this pure
possible be, then? The idea of possible being, perhaps, inasmuch as it
is found in the divine mind? But in that case we will have the intuition
of the possible being in the real Being – in God, that is – following the
teaching of St Augustine, St Bonaventura, and Malebranche, which Ros-
mini explicitly denies.10
I confess that I cannot really understand what the concept is that the
illustrious Author makes for himself of the objective character of ideal
being. In some places he seems to treat it as some sort of mean between
God and the human mind – a mean that logic cannot permit, however.
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Between Creator and creature no mean is possible, and Rosmini’s ideal

being, if it is not God himself – the real Being – is of necessity a cre-
ated thing. How, then, can it be taken as immense, eternal, absolute,
and immutable? How can scepticism be avoided? Whether the idea of
being is treated as an internal sensible and a modification of our mind
(a hypothesis expressly repudiated by Rosmini), or is held to be some
sort of externality, but contingent, relative, and disjunct from God, the
ontological consequences are the same. Furthermore, how could this
ideal being ever exist outside the mind without constituting a real thing?
According to Rosmini himself, subsistence is reality, and saying that pos-
sible being subsists is the same as saying that it is real.
What led a mind as careful as Rosmini’s into error was proceeding by a
merely psychological method that consists of dealing with internal facts
by means of reflection alone.11 From what point, really, does the process
of reflection start? It is an act of the mind. The mind turns back to its
own intuition, and reflection consists of this turning back. But we have
just now seen that the concept of the real is transformed into the con-
cept of the possible when it passes from the intuitive act to the reflective
act. No wonder, then, if reflection, turning back to intuition and finding
the concept of possible being, stops there and deems it the first concept
because it is actually first with respect to reflection – the tool that belongs
to psychology. But if the psychologist had not stopped at this point and
had gone on further, if he had put his own tool down to pick up that of
the ontologist, availing himself of the reflection that we call ontological
and turning his own thought not just back to intuition, to be sure, but
to the object of intuition, to being, then he would see being as it is in
itself, in its absolute and simplest reality. But in this final advance the
psychologist would be an ontologist, which is contrary to the practices
and methods of psychologism.
3. Perception of the real existence of created things is an action of a judgment by

which an equation is made between the idea of possible being and sensory appre-
hension. Since equating assumes identity, I do not believe that there can
be an equation between a sensible and an intelligible, which are entirely
different elements. What sameness can the sensible, as such, have with
the intelligible? If the sensible were identical with the intelligible, the
intelligible would be useless, and the sensible would be manifest by itself
because it would be intelligible of its own nature, and the sensists would
be right. If the intelligible and the sensible are unlike, then, how can
there ever be an equation between them?
285
The judgment can be an equation between two different elements only

insofar as they have something in common, something identical between
them. But this identity can consist only of the intelligible. Hence it is nec-
essary for the two terms of the judgment to participate in the intelligible
and to be intelligible so that there is identity and thus the equation. But
sensible apprehension is not an intelligible element. Therefore, the unit-
ing of mere sensible apprehension with the idea of possible being will
never be able to produce a judgment.
Someone may reply that judgment, according to Rosmini, occurs inso-
far as the mind, having the idea of being always before it, sees in the
idea the sensibles of which it receives impressions, and by seeing them in
being, it knows that they truly are, and forms the judgment. But in this
case even phantasms that we form in our thoughts or that arise spontane-
ously from the power of imagination would have to happen through real
things, since we would also see those phantasms in the being of which we
have continuous intuition. Why not believe in their reality, then? Obvi-
ously, it is not enough to see things through the concept of being in
order to be clear about their subsistence, but this makes it necessary to
apply that concept to them through explicit and positive judgment.
But what is the rule that determines this application, I wonder. Is it
perhaps the external and sensible impression, which differs from the
internal and imaginary impression? This claim must be circular, since
the first of these impressions differs from the second only because the
idea of existence applies to one and not the other. Applying the concept
is what differentiates the two impressions, which is a very long way from
determining the application of the concept by the difference between
the impressions. Besides, to apply the concept of being to a sensible
impression, one must know the impression since there can be no apply-
ing to what is blind and random. But if the sensible is already known, the
idea is already applied to it, and applying it anew would be useless and
ridiculous.
In short, one cannot imagine a comparison between the intelligible
and the sensible in general, nor between the real sensible and the imagi-
nary sensible, and then conclude that the intelligible conforms to one
and not the other: this comparison is impossible unless one assumes that
the sensible, whatever it may be, is a concept, since comparison can take
place only between concepts. But one can have no concept of the sen-
sible, as sensible, since what is sensed cannot be thought, as such. The
sensible can be thought only in the intelligible. If it is a concept, then,
the judgment that unites it with the idea of being is already made. If it
286
is not a concept, the comparison and the judgment cannot take place.
The first case begs the question again; the second assumes a judgment
formed with only one concept – a judgment that is not a judgment, in
other words.
Furthermore, with this judgment the illustrious Author wishes to
explain the concept of existence, which he calls the subsistence of things.
But how can this idea arise from the judgment in question, always assum-
ing that the judgment is possible? On one side, we have just a pure sense
impression; on the other, the concept of possible being. If the two terms
are joined together, what must result from them? The idea of a possible
impression, and nothing more. The two terms cannot give what they
do not have in them. Between existence and the possibility of existence
lies an infinite gap that only creative omnipotence can cross. From what
does the concept of existence come, then? From the possible? Surely
not. From the impression? But the impression contains nothing intel-
ligible, is not a concept, and cannot produce any unless one grants the
rejected and repugnant hypothesis of the sensists, to which Rosmini is
most averse. From jumbling the possible together with the sensible? But
if each of them separately cannot give what it does not have, neither will
they be able to do so if they are put together.
In some passages Rosmini hints that the idea of subsistence, as an
idea, is the pure concept of possible being, and that inasmuch as it is
distinguished from the concept, it is not an idea but a judgment. But
he is clear that the term subsistence, or existence, expresses a judgment
only inasmuch as it signifies a concept. Hence, one needs to explain the
origin of the concept. A judgment can be called a concept inasmuch as
it is a composite idea that contains the notions expressed separately by
the terms of the proposition. Now what are the terms of Rosmini’s judg-
ment? They are the sensible and the possible, and nothing more. But
since we have just now seen that putting these two terms together cannot
generate the idea of existence, this cannot be a judgment either.
One must also guard against confusing the idea of subsistence with the
actual subsistence of something. It seems to me that Rosmini may allow
this mistake by making the following claim: that when one conceives of
the subsistence of something, the only intelligible element is the idea of
possible being. If that were true, it would follow that the concept proper,
expressed by the term subsistence, would be the subsistence itself of the
object. Yet everyone sees that the terms possible being and subsistence are
not synonyms. So they have meanings that differ at least in part.
What is the difference? The idea of the real expressed by the second
287
term, not by the first. Therefore, if the concept of the real does not make
up part of the intelligible element but of the thing, it follows that the real
and the concept of the real are the same, which is hard to take serious-
ly. And yet it is this confusion on which the argument of the illustrious
Author is based, so it seems to me. The reason is this: by saying that belief
in the subsistence of bodies is the effect of a judgment born solely from
the idea of possible being and from the sense impression, he assumes
that subsistence and the idea of subsistence are one and the same. But
since we understand what this term subsistence means, it is clear that the
concept, as a concept, and the thing signified are different from one
another. But how can they be different if the only intelligible element
involved in this transaction is the concept of possible being?
This discussion raises a question of the greatest weight and difficulty,
though modern philosophy has forgotten even the motive for it. This is
the question: The concept of the concreteness and individuality of things
arises from what and consists of what? If, as Rosmini believes, every con-
cept is generic, how will one ever be able to conceive of the concrete and
the individual? To avoid this difficulty, the illustrious Author was forced
to deny that the idea of concreteness and individuality is an idea, and to
assert that it is a mere judgment. But this solution cannot be accepted,
which is obvious from what has been said.
A person has a true concept of individual reality – of existence. But
how can it be acquired? By sensation or feeling? These faculties reveal to
us only subjective modifications. By the perception of the Scots? By itself
this perception is not enough because it does not reveal the forces – the
created substances and causes – of which existences truly consist. By the
idea of the possible? The possible cannot give the real. By abstractions of
some other kind? Abstractions follow and do not precede the notion of
the concrete; they presuppose the concrete and cannot create it. There-
fore, one must assume that the concrete and the individual are known by
means of a special and direct intuition, analogous to the perception of
the Scots, from which it differs, however, in that it shows us not only the
surface but the substance of things.
Here I am to content to mention the solution to the problem that I
will shortly clarify; from the argument up to this point, I want no one
to infer that by rejecting Rosmini’s teaching, which explains the idea of
subsistence by that of possible being, I wish to explain it by the idea of
real Being, having substituted one for the other as a direct object of intu-
ition. This explanation would be false, as we will see shortly, and it would
lead straight to pantheism. True, we may see all our sense impressions
288
in the real Being, present to our mind, but this is not the direct concept
from which we deduce the real existence of things. And here is the rea-
son: since the Being intuited is not only real but necessary and absolute,
if we asserted the real existence of things in virtue of this simple concept,
we should have to infer that all things are modifications of God that exist
necessarily, and so we would be pantheists. Therefore, it is not by apply-
ing the idea of real Being to things that we know of their existence.
4. The concept of the reality of Being, of God, is not had directly and by intuition
but only in an indirect way and by demonstration. This proposition follows
necessarily from the two that precede it. Rosmini observes that treating
God as a direct object of intuitive cognition is a view held by St Bonaven-
tura, and he expressly rejects it.12 And surely it cannot be accepted if
intuition apprehends only possible Being. In that case, the only effective
way to achieve cognition of the Supreme Being is demonstration. But
for demonstration to be valid, it must be based upon a prior synthesis,
seeing that deduction is an intellectual artifice by which what was already
known by primitive apprehension is reproduced by the mind in its own
mode: this is clarifying the known rather than discovering the unknown.
Rational synthesis as well as analysis, deduction as well as induction, must
necessarily be based upon a prior and basic cognition, identical in sub-
stance to what follows it but different in form.
The main difference rests on two issues. First, deductive and inductive
reasoning happens in time and sequentially, while what I call primitive
synthesis is instantaneous, has no chronological development, and con-
sists of simple intuition. Second, in reasoning and analysis the mind gives
truth a subjective form, taking it apart, putting it back together, handling
it according to its own procedures, yet without altering its substance,
whereas in primitive synthesis the mind blends in nothing of its own but
simple intuition; it is the simple spectator of the object before it and sees
it as it is in itself, without adding anything or taking anything away.
Far from opposing the assumption that God is known in a demonstra-
tive mode, then, my view is actually supportive because there can be no
demonstration that does not take its strength from a prior intuition. The
proofs of God’s existence are a posteriori or a priori. But since both
kinds are based upon a syllogism whose minor premise includes a simple
contingent fact, external or internal to the mind, neither could have
absolute and apodictic force if the process of demonstration that bases
truth on fact were not preceded by an intuition in which fact is based on
truth, as will shortly be clear.
289
One certainly need not believe that intuition is complete, in contradic-

tion of that opposition established in Scripture between the knowledge
to come and what we have in the present – ‘through a glass, darkly.’13 In
this life the completion of human intuition is potential; knowing taken
as actual is in every way defective. Thus it happens that there are two
sides to the Idea: one of its faces is the intelligible, real Being; the other
is the superintelligible, the inner essence of being. We may apprehend
the superintelligible because by instinct we are conscious of our abil-
ity to know it. The dark knowing of which Saint Paul speaks alludes to
the incomprehensibility of things, and knowledge through a glass is the
analogic knowledge that we can have of one part of the incomprehensi-
ble, either by rational deductions or by revelation. Analogy, in fact, is a
species of intellectual reflex by which one thing is known incompletely
in another, as in a mirage.14 It suffices to mention these things here and
return to them elsewhere.
The philosophical Prime, therefore, is real Being, which as the Mother
Idea and chief cause of all things unites the properties of the other two
Primes. In this composite expression, real Being, the second word points
specifically to the psychological relation, and the first to the ontological,
although the two concepts interpenetrate and make a perfect unity. One
might express this by the word being alone, since Being with nothing
added to it is not possible being but real being. And we will often take it
in this sense, permitting ourselves now and then to add the epithet real
since some ambiguity may arise from the imperfection of the language
that we use.
Having seen of what the philosophical Prime consists, let us stop for
a moment to consider intuition, or rather that first act of thinking that
apprehends the Prime. At this point, I certainly do not want to lay out
the theory of that intuition, which is a whole science by itself, but just
to call attention to certain elements of Rosmini’s doctrine in which the
illustrious Author appears to stray from the truth.
We have just now seen that he considers the first concept of Being
abstract and generic, representing the merely possible, and that he also
holds the view that bodies subsist – not as an idea, certainly, but as the
effect of a judgment. These two claims come from a third that recurs in
every passage of his works, confusing the reflective idea with the direct
or intuitive idea that some call perception, in the sense given this word by
the Scottish School.15
Perception, or the direct idea, is intuition or immediate apprehension
of the object; the reflective idea is the intuition of the intuition, percep-
290
tion of the perception, the process of thought turning back upon itself.
The terminus of intuition or immediate apprehension is the object in
itself – the object, finite or infinite, but always real, concrete, positive,
and individual. The terminus of reflection is the intuition and with it the
idea of the object, not as in itself but abstract, generalized, stripped of all
individuality, and reduced to the state of the merely possible. Thus one
sees that the direct idea or perception converges with the reflective idea,
either because both are one act of thinking or because of the substance
of their object. But they differ in the way they apprehend that object,
since one takes it as it is in itself, in its concreteness, and as real, while the
other apprehends it as it is in the mind, in its abstractness, and as think-
able or possible, inasmuch as the possibility of the thing is its thinkability.
Now my opinion is that Rosmini, in the first place, confuses the reflec-
tive idea with perception and gives the latter the character of the former,
treating it as the mere concept of possible being, abstract and generic.
But from what has been said, it seems that this concept is merely reflec-
tive and presupposes immediate intuition of the object – of Being in its
concrete and individual reality. In the second place, he also confuses the
perception of sensibles with sensation and with feeling, and from sense
he derives the concept that one has of the individuality of things. The
outcome is inevitable if every idea or perception is abstract and generic
since the abstract and generic cannot supply the concrete and individu-
al, which is their chief contrary, but fails if a person perceives sensibles
by an immediate and direct intuition like that by which he perceives real
Being.
This immediate cognition of sensibles is the perception of the Scottish
philosophers, which I believe to be a fact beyond doubt and well attested
by careful observation. True, the perception of the Scots is not enough
by itself to give us a complete notion of sensible, spiritual, and material
things because it shows us only sensible properties without the intelligi-
ble element whereby we conceive of them as substances or causes. The
perception of the School of Edinburgh is not enough, then, for a full
account of the concept of the existence of bodies, and one must resort
to another principle of which we shall soon speak.
Reid’s perception is in substance what Rosmini calls bodily sensory per-
ception. He acutely observes that by itself it does not produce cognition
of bodies and that we still need an intelligible element, which, according
to him, is the idea of possible being. But possible, abstract, generic being
– can this produce the concept of individuality? Surely not. Therefore,
concludes Rosmini, we get individuality certainly not as the effect of an
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idea but rather of a judgment. To me this seems impossible to sustain for

the reasons already stated. Be that as it may, the name individual alone
that we use must also express an idea. This can be nothing but an intui-
tion of individuality itself, like the primitive intuition that we have of real
Bring.
Up to now we have assumed that real Being is concrete, singular, and
individual. This statement needs clarification. The concepts of concrete-
ness, singularity, and individuality are composed of two elements, one
positive and the other negative. The positive element is what is asserted
and thought when others say these words, and I will not try to define it
because any definition would be less clear than the thing itself. Briefly, it
is what is before the mind when one perceives Being and the real in itself
by a direct and immediate act. The negative element is limit, contin-
gency, and imperfection. All concrete, singular, individual creatures are
imperfect because they are finite and finite because they are contingent,
which is also the source of their plurality. But when we apply the notions
of concreteness, singularity, and individuality to real Being, the negative
element must be eliminated from them because Being is absolute and
infinite.
From this it follows that Being can also be called abstract, general, and
universal inasmuch as these concepts express the absence of the nega-
tive element found in the contrary concepts. Being is therefore abstract
and concrete, general and particular, individual and universal all at once
but in different respects, and in a way different from creatures because
Being has only the positive element contained in each of these notions,
not the negative element that goes along with them. Being is concrete
and individual because it is real and positive in the highest degree; it is
abstract and universal because it is pure (free of any form, that is), infi-
nite, and absolute. Concreteness and individuality are the real without
the being; abstractness and generality are the being without the real.
The first belong to real existences; the second to possible being. From
the former come created things; from the latter reflective ideas. The
division between concrete and abstract, individual and general is the
analysis of real Being, and real Being is the synthesis of those properties.
I have given these warnings to make it clear that our psychological
Prime is no mere abstraction but reality itself. There is nothing abstract
in it but purity, which far from contradicting reality is needed to consti-
tute it in the highest and absolute degree. No one starts with the abstract,
clearly, and this observation alone shows that the concept of possible
being cannot be the human mind’s first step – for this reason: that it is
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the concept of real Being made abstract through reflection by the men-
tal separation of objective reality from the cognition of that being. The
majority of modern philosophers also treat the notion of pure being
or real Being as abstract, it is true: hence the statement repeated in a
hundred books that the idea of being is a mere abstraction. Of possible
being, this is entirely true. But if real being is what they mean, it is as true
as saying that infinite space is round since Being in itself is the beginning
of everything, the source of concreteness no less than of abstraction.
Modern logic has a great fear of turning abstract things concrete, and
rightly so, but does not worry about converting the concrete into the
abstract, a different vice and more serious than the first, which it usually
precedes. Because primitive truth, though concrete in itself, still con-
tains the seeds of abstractions with regard to the mind, a person must
turn the concrete into the abstract in order to be able to convert the
abstract into the concrete. Hence, when the second conversion comes
after the first, the work already done is undone, and the genuine Middle
Ages, with their humanness, treeness, and so on, reconstituted the reality of
the being destroyed by the abstractions of the Peripatetics. Transforming
the concrete into the abstract is an evil that does no good, then, since it
negates the primitive truth, whereas the contrary process is an evil that
can become a good, if, at least in part, it restores the truth destroyed a
little while before.
Human speech is a continuous alternation of synthesis and antithesis,
and the labour of reflection is to abstract and concretize continuously.
The execution, distribution, and relating of these operations, for better
or worse, gives rise to the virtues and vices of the scientific method. Two
types of abstraction and composition, one lawful and natural, the other
corrupt and contrary to nature, can be distinguished. Corrupt abstrac-
tion consists of dissociating elements that are in accord and destroying
the natural synthesis of things. Next in line comes the corrupt composi-
tion that jumbles elements which are not in accord, forming a mental
synthesis contrary to real synthesis and producing an actual illusion of
the imagination, like the maya of the Indian schools.
Helpful abstraction takes apart illusory and apparent synthesis, discon-
necting the discrepant elements united by that synthesis. Finally, helpful
composition reunites elements that are in accord and remakes – or, to
put it better, re-cognizes – real synthesis. But abstraction that separates
Being and the One from existences and the manifold by destroying the
imaginative phantasm that completely identifies them, and composition
that restores the intelligible to the rule of Being and the sensible to the
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rule of the intelligible – both of these are helpful and legitimate since in
this case the abstract falsity is turned into a concrete truth by converting
the concrete falsity into an abstract truth.
The idea of Being, as we have stated it, contains a judgment. It is
impossible for the mind to have the primitive intuition of Being without
recognizing that Being is: in the contrary case, to be would be nothing
and real Being would not be real, which is contradictory. Nor does the
reality of Being present itself to the mind as something contingent and
relative, so that possibly it might not-be, but as necessary and absolute, so
that the contrary is not thinkable.
A person cannot think nothing, in fact. And this incapacity is not
merely subjective or dependent on the contradiction involved in think-
ing without thinking something; it is also objective in that the mind
knows that nothing is not only unthinkable for us but also impossible in
itself. Hence, the judgment in question can be expressed in these words,
‘Being is necessarily,’ provided one notes that the concept expressed by
the last word serves only to clarify a property inherent in Being itself, as
Being. But if it seems right to express this latter point by a separate word,
saying ‘necessary being,’ it is because the first of these words, as we shall
soon see, is abused in ordinary language.
The judgment – ‘Being is necessarily’ – contained in the primitive intu-
ition is not rendered by the mind in a free and spontaneous act, like oth-
er judgments. The mind is not the judge in this case, but a mere witness
and auditor of a verdict that it does not issue. In fact, if the mind were
the definer and not simply a spectator, the prime judgment – basis of all
certainty and of every other judgment – would be subjective, and scepti-
cism would be inevitable. It is Being itself that pronounces the primitive
judgment and causes the mind to hear it in a direct act of intuition.
Being posits itself in the presence of our mind and says, ‘I am neces-
sarily.’ In this objective utterance lies the basis of all evidence and all
certainty. The vehicle by which it comes to the mind is the Intelligible
– Being itself. In fact, Being reveals itself and declares its own reality to
a person by means of its own intelligibility, without which the very act
of thought could not occur for the person. By means of the Intelligible,
in virtue of which intuition occurs, intuition takes notice of Being. And
since Being is the Intelligible itself, it follows that Being is understood by
us inasmuch as it is posited, and that it is posited inasmuch as it is under-
stood. The two become one and the same.
When intuition views Being as its object, it sees the autonomy that
belongs to Being but does not assert it in a determinate and volition-
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al act, as happens in other judgments. The mind knows Being by the

simple act that constitutes intuition, but the assertion involved in this
knowing comes from the object – from Being itself – not from the intui-
tion. True, when thinking turns back upon itself and primordial intui-
tion enters the domain of reflection, the person says (first to himself
and then to others) ‘Being is.’ But this is a reflective, not an intuitive
judgment. The reflective judgment is voluntary, subjective, and human,
and yet it is authoritative, legitimate, and objectively valuable because it
simply repeats the intuitive judgment that precedes it and on which it is
based. In this sense, a person’s reason truly is the reason of God.
Repeating the divine and objective judgment in an act of reflection is
the first link in philosophy as human artifice. But this link is joined with a
divine judgment and draws all its power from it. It follows, then, that the
basis of philosophy lies in revelation; that God is the first philosopher, in
the strict sense of the word; and that human philosophy is the continua-
tion and repetition of divine philosophy. Therefore, God is not only the
object of science; he is also its first teacher, the teacher of the knowable
because He is the Intelligible. The work of philosophy begins not in man
but in God. It does not ascend from mind to Being but descends from
Being to mind. This is the deep reason in ontology that makes psycholo-
gism absurd. Before philosophy is a human activity, it is a divine creation.
Psychologists deprive philosophy of its foothold in the divine, detach it
from Being, make it mere human artifice, condemn it to scepticism, and
assign it nothing as its origin and end.
Between the primitive divine judgment and secondary human judg-
ment – between intuition and reflection – lies the medium of speech. It
is by means of speech that intuitive truth becomes accessible to reflec-
tion, putting man in a position to repeat God’s judgment for himself
and others. But the speech that expresses the reality of Being is created
by Being itself. Speech is thus a second revelation, or – to put it more
precisely – the primordial revelation stated in a certain form by its very
revealer. That form is a proposition expressing the judgment. Equipped
with this objective proposition, reflection appropriates the correspond-
ing judgment, repeats it, develops it, and, with its help, weaves the work
of science. Hence, one sees that the divine judgment is expressed by a
proposition equally divine, which, when repeated and reflected upon,
marks the beginning of human philosophy, and its development is the
continuation of philosophy.
To show how the ideas are connected, let me quickly go over what I
have explained in part and will soon explain more fully.
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In the judgment under discussion we have the basis of the Ideal For-
mula. But it was just now noted that this Formula consists of a judgment
made from three different concepts. In the aforesaid judgment there is
only one concept, however, and the three terms result from its replica-
tion. So we must search for another judgment that gives us the three
concepts when joined to the first judgment. This inquiry is based on a
postulate that the solution itself will show to be reasonable.
The new judgment that we are tracking down must be blended with
the first to make a single judgment. Otherwise, the Ideal Formula would
be composed of two separate judgments, giving us two formulas instead
of one. The Ideal Formula is organic, and all its parts must be linked
together logically to form a single body. Therefore, we must begin our
search with some concept that, on the one hand, differs substantially
from the concept of Being and, on the other, has an intrinsic connect-
edness with it. Language furnishes us with a term whose meaning has a
close kinship with the concept of Being, and this is also apparent from its
etymology. The term is existence, common to all modern languages that
derive from Latin. Taking this as our hypothesis, let us see if we can use
it to construct the Formula that we are searching for.
The Latin word exsistere means to appear, come out of, emerge, and be
shown. It is used to mean the manifestation or rather the unfolding of
something previously hidden, wrapped, or folded within something else
and then coming out of it and making itself visible externally.16 This is
its proper and etymological sense, the source of the metaphorical sense
which in our tongue has come to belong to the word existence. However,
even though the relation of the Italian expression to the Latin is meta-
phorical because it expresses for the metaphysical order what the Latin
says of the physical order, on a different level the correspondence is still
precise since in both concepts there is a reference to the passage from
potency to act.17 The Latin exsistere announces the activity by which some-
thing that used to be potentially begins to become actual. And existence
in our Italian language also expresses an analogous concept, as we shall
soon see.
The only discrepancy is that in the ancient word the actualization of
potency is expressed by way of unfolding, whereas in the modern word
the reference is to producing, so that in this respect we make a meta-
phor of the term used by the Latins. Granted, ordinary people – even
philosophers, quite often – use the word exist synonymously with be,
and vice-versa, and so they say that God exists and that the world is. But
these locutions, though very common, have by no means eliminated the
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original meaning. And sensitive ears will certainly pick it up. Vico, for
example, that very diligent and knowledgeable student of philosophi-
cal precision in words, faulted Descartes for having said I think, therefore
I am.18 Descartes, not terribly sharp in such matters, uses the two words
promiscuously all the time, showing not the least sign of recognizing
the difference between them. The guilelessness of the writer proves the
naiveté of the philosopher.
Besides the relation of potency and act, the word exsistere expresses, or
at least suggests, another intellectual element of no small importance,
and we should mention it. As anyone can see, the word is composed of
the particle ex- and the verb sistere. This verb and its cognates or deriva-
tives express, more or less directly, the metaphysical concept that mod-
erns call substance, from the Latin word substantia. Its pedigree is short,
though Seneca and Quintilian used it, and its absence from Cicero’s
philosophical works is often palpable; substratum, beloved by some mod-
erns, therefore also emerged.19 The word exsistere, indicating substance
by its verb and derivation by its particle, includes the concept of one sub-
stance, found potentially in another, which thereby passes to an actual
state and begins to stand on its own. The etymology of exsistere is enough
to suggest this mental synthesis in the originating concept that corre-
sponds to that word.
Note also that the particle ex- indicates, in the direct and material
sense, a movement from inside to out, as the particle in- expresses a
contrary movement – or rather the rest or repose that results from an
effort working from outside to in. This becomes clear if the word exsistere
is compared to insistere. Metaphorically, then, the particle ex- gives the
direction of the action by which cause produces effect. Thus, in the origi-
nally metaphorical meaning which for us has become direct, the word
exist makes the axiom of causality present to the mind, just as the Latin
words subsistere and substare and our word subsist represent the axiom of
substance.
Gathering together all these concepts indicated by the word existence
and expressed by its more direct applications, we can say that existence
is the reality proper to an actual substance, produced from a distinct
substance that contains it potentially. From this it follows that the idea of
existence cannot stand on its own and refers necessarily to another, hav-
ing the same relation to it that the effect has to its cause. But this Mother
Idea can only be that of Being. Treating existence as an effect, the mind
is compelled to seek a cause. But if this cause is another existence, and if
what exists is an effect, the mind is forced to move up to another, higher
297
cause until it finds one that is a pure cause without being an effect, an
absolute cause necessary by its nature. Proceeding to infinity is not possi-
ble because there would be only an infinite succession of effects without
any cause – effects, in other words, that would not be effects since they
have no cause, nor, since they are effects, would they be causes. Pure,
absolute, necessary Being is the only truly first cause because it is the
only thing that is by its own nature and depends on no other. The idea of
existence is therefore inseparable from that of Being and is represented
to us as an effect whose cause is Being.
In what way is existence produced by Being? Proceeding a posteriori,
ascending from effect to cause, one concludes of necessity that the effect
is folded up in the cause, the existent in Being, and that producing is sim-
ply unfolding. Then one will be obliged to reject creation and embrace
the teaching of the pantheists and emanationists. Indeed, proceeding
a posteriori, how could one reach any other conclusion? Whoever goes
this route moves from effect up to cause and concludes that the cause
must contain the effect in potency because the effect is an act that pre-
supposes potency. But the cause can contain the effect potentially in two
ways: either by including in itself the substance of that effect and having
only the ability to change its form by unfolding and externalizing it; or
else by deriving not only the form but also the substance of the effect
from nothing. By advancing a posteriori, one cannot come to know the
creative potentiality because to reach this goal it would be necessary to
eliminate the effect before having found the potency that produces it.
But if the effect is eliminated mentally, its cause can no longer be recov-
ered because the basis on which the argument rests is missing.
In fact, we can represent the a posteriori process as a line B ––––––– A,
where point B indicates the idea of existence, point A the idea of Being,
and the extent of the line the mind’s discursive process. Now if the mind
wishes to conceive Being as creator, its thinking must eliminate point
B, which expresses existence, before reaching point A, since what exists
cannot be created, inasmuch as it already exists. In the first place, how-
ever, eliminating the concept on which the whole argument turns is logi-
cally absurd. In the second place, if one eliminates B before getting to A,
how can the goal ever be reached? Nor, even if B is eliminated mentally,
can one say that a preconceived notion of A allows reasoning to con-
tinue. If there is a preconceived notion of A, it shows that the reasoning is
a priori, not a posteriori. In fact, the usual argument by which philoso-
phers and theologians prove creation is a posteriori only in appearance,
and, like all arguments of this type, rests upon an a priori synthesis. But
298
if one’s route is, in effect, a posteriori, emanationism and pantheism will

be the necessary outcome of reasoning, as we shall make clear in a more
appropriate place.
Instead of asking how the existent is produced by Being, then, one
must establish how Being produces the existent. (These two ways of
speaking point towards the same inquiry but express two wholly contrary
methods.)
Causality is certainly the link that joins the two terms of the proposi-
tion together – what produces with what is produced. Although the idea
of cause is subject to various modifications, it is clear that it must be
taken as pure and absolute, without limitation, when applied to Being.
Otherwise, it would not conform to Being. Now cause in the pure and
absolute sense is first and efficient, and lacking these two properties it
would not really be cause. As first cause, it is not the effect of a prior
cause; as efficient, it does not produce the mere form or modality of its
effects but their whole substantiality. Accordingly, if the cause of which
we speak is truly the first cause with respect to the effect as effect, then,
with regard to the effect as contingent substance, the first Cause is also
the first Substance – what sustains substance, that with respect to which a
thing effected can be had only through a second substance.
The first and efficient Cause must be creative, because, if it were not
so, it could not possess those two properties. It would not be first if it
took the substantiality of the effect that it produces from somewhere
else. It would not be efficient if it kept substantiality inside itself and
then externalized it productively but not creatively. A human being can
be called a truly efficient cause – but of forms, not substances. Even of
forms, however, he is not a creator because he produces them as second
cause by a power received from the first Cause. The idea of creation is
therefore inseparable from that of cause taken in an absolute sense. And
since the idea of cause constitutes one of the first principles of reason,
it follows that the concept of creation must be counted among the most
original and clearest of the human mind. It is not possible, in fact, to
separate the creative act from the active cause, the creative power from
the capacity to act, if the cause and its ability are conceived as infinite
and absolute. But since the concept of causes – even the secondary and
finite – involves the concept of a first and infinite Cause, being just an
abstraction and modification of that concept, it follows that the idea of
creation is in every case inseparable from the idea of causality.
It may be said, on the one hand, that theologians and philosophers
who accept the idea of creation treat it as a great mystery; on the other,
299
that all ancient philosophers were ignorant of it and that many mod-
erns oppose it. Moreover, if creation were obvious to reason, pantheism
would not have tempted the deepest intellects of every era. Nor would it
keep coming up again and again in the schools of philosophy, since one
of the main reasons why so many find pantheism plausible is its promise
to explain the fact of universal existence without recourse to creation.
I reply that the concept of creation is no more clear and no more
obscure than the other concepts involved in the Ideal Formula. Every
ideal concept has two sides, one intelligible, the other superintelligible.
One can compare it to a point of light gleaming in darkness, giving us
not what can be called a view but a presentiment of the two, forcing us
to accept them. The clear assumes the obscure, as in turn the obscure
is not apprehended without the clear. The obscure side of the Idea is
the superintelligible, reproduced in every part of the ideal world and
found both in the concept of Being and in that of the creative act. Just
as the concept of Being is the root and origin of other ideal notions, so
the impenetrability of Being is the root and origin of other obscurities,
which is why we use the word essence to express the unthinkable.
Creation taken as the link between the absolute cause and its effect is
entirely clear – clear because it is the cause, since cause cannot be other
than creative if it is not limited, if, in other words, it is cause simply and
absolutely. But the cause is being in relation to the effect, being as active
and causal. Hence, since the act of the being comes from the essence,
it follows that if the essence is impenetrable in itself, the essence of the
cause must also be obscure, and therefore the essence of the causal act
– of creation – must be obscure as well. The superintelligible of creation
is recast as that of Being and reproduces its obscurity. Since we cannot
conceive how to make something from nothing, we cannot comprehend
the essence of Being or the internal mode of its activity.
But what is incomprehensible from one point of view is quite clear
from another, since the beginning of existence is what constitutes the
effect and its relation to the cause. Without having at least a confused
notion of the creative act, this makes it completely impossible to under-
stand the meaning of the term effect (which comes up so often in ordi-
nary human speech) and of all words that express action. What is the
essence of this creative act, then? In what way does Being activate and
initiate what previously did not exist? In short, what is the inner nature of
creation? The human mind cannot answer these questions even though
its inability does not derive from a special obscurity of the creative act as
such, but from its relation to the essence of the creative cause.
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So evident is this that one encounters the same obscurity just in appre-
hending the efficient causes of forms, since making forms is also a true
creation. If pantheists and emanationists accept this creation, while
understanding it no better than the other one, this happens for two rea-
sons. One is that they are constrained by the axiom of causality, which
would never happen if the creating of forms – like that of substance –
were declared impossible. The other is that human beings have within
them, in their free will, as well as outside, the example and proof of this
effective causing of forms, which is then accepted as a fact of experience
even though it is not understood. But people do not experience the effi-
cient causing of substances, knowing it by the activity of reason alone as
a privilege of uncreated Being.
Pagan philosophers overlooked the doctrine of creation, and many
moderns have opposed it. To avoid the reef of mystery, they wreck on
an absurdity: pantheism. What does this show if not the prideful laziness
of the human mind? And yet this truth had no worse luck than other
ideal doctrines. There were sensists and sceptics as well as pantheists.
The obscurity of creation arises from that of Being. Hence, if panthe-
ists deny creation because it is partly obscure, the more logical sceptics
deny Being because it is not entirely clear. True, by denying Being they
commit an enormous number of paralogisms, but it makes no differ-
ence. Subverting the basis of all logic on behalf of logic itself, reaching
an absurd goal by direct reasoning, is precisely the greatest achievement
of scepticism.
All the false systems of philosophy and religion have in common the
error of denying what is clear while loathing what is obscure, whereas
correct philosophy obliges us to accept what is obscure in gratitude for
what is clear, from which the obscure is inseparable. Idealists and fatal-
ists also deny the reality of bodies and free will because of their arcane
nature.
Moreover, there is a special reason why philosophers, especially the
ancients, have neglected the doctrine of creation along with other parts
of the Ideal Formula: because creation is simply a relation, a link, a
bond between two other terms, whereas these terms express a substan-
tive truth. Being and existences, permanent substances directly present
to the mind – one the root of all knowledge, the others subject to the
senses – could not so easily vanish from sight, whereas the creative act,
immanent and not something substantial but modal, might readily be
perceived as indistinct and therefore altered and excluded by reflection.
What else? The very idea of Being was more or less altered by all ancient
301
and modern philosophers outside Christianity. As we shall see below, this

alteration was the chief cause of their making the concept of creative
action obscure.
If Being is the cause of things, then, it is necessarily the creator. But
is it truly the cause? We have assumed this but not proved it. Actually,
if one proceeds a posteriori, moving from the concept of existence up
to that of Being, the latter must certainly be accepted as causal since its
action is needed to explain the other concept. But then divine causality
can be considered only emanative, not creative, as we have noted. If the
approach is a priori, then, and the reflective concept of existence is not
yet available, how can absolute Being be conceived as cause?
By itself the idea of real Being does not include the concept of a cause
working externally. Otherwise, it would have to be conceived as acting
necessarily. Creation would not be free, and a fated creation leads to
pantheism. In fact, if God does not create freely, his effects must be nec-
essary and absolute, like God himself, and they cannot be distinguished
from the divine nature. The idea of Being includes the capacity to cause
but not the causal act, if this act is to be free in its cause and contingent
in its effects. Indeed, the very capacity to create can be known only after
the act because the capacity is an abstraction known subsequently to its
realization, of which it is the concrete side. Therefore, if the creative act
of Being is not known (and is not known by one who still only reflects on
the intuition of Being itself), its capacity to create also cannot be known,
in which case it will not seem any easier to acquire the concept of crea-
tion a priori rather than a posteriori.
In sum, if the notion of existence precedes that of Being, it is not pos-
sible to move up to creative Being. And if, on the contrary, we have only
the notion of pure Being, without that of existence, how can that Being
be conceived in its role of creative cause?
Nonetheless, I believe that this final step is quite simple in itself. We
encounter no other problem than what arises from ingrained habits of
the mind when it does philosophy. When someone is used to a way of see-
ing, when in his mind a certain attitude and a particular view of things
have become second nature, so to speak, then it is difficult, not to say
impossible, for him to see something that requires a different viewpoint
– indeed, a contrary viewpoint – especially if the custom of present and
recent times, the very heavy weight of universal practice, authority, and
example are added to his own attitude. The more recent philosophers,
not excluding those believed to be ontologists, have become so accus-
tomed to psychologism that this method has transformed their nature.
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Now the intellectual context in which psychologism places the mind is

good and right in some ways, but in other ways it is false – in very impor-
tant ways, I daresay, because it is biased, narrow, eccentric, ineffective,
and full of flaws.
The ontologist goes to the centre and summit of what can be known,
takes all the relations of things in at a glance, and contemplates them
from their peak and their core – from Being. The psychologist, stationed
somewhere on the periphery, can look directly only at a small part of
them. The first can be compared to a traveller who learns the layout of a
city and surrounding hills by climbing to the top of the highest building:
without having to move, only turning his head, he can take it all in from
there. The other tries to do the same, standing at a window from which
only a part of the landscape is visible.
Now one of the most pressing problems in which psychologism has no
competence at all is creation. On the other hand, the ontological solu-
tion of this problem, the only one that I find plausible, is so far removed
from the usual order of theorizing that even experts may be inclined to
reject it before giving it every careful consideration and subjecting it to
careful examination. To avoid this snag, if possible, I would like to ask
my readers – if I may speak with the honesty that may not seem rash to
those who have thought long about the topic and have sifted through
every part of it – to give this matter special consideration and balance it
out with the methodical procedure of the ontologism to which various
parts of my work refer more or less directly.
To clarify the process by which the mind acquires the idea of creation,
allow me a moment to offer a hypothesis, taking as true what this discus-
sion aims to demonstrate. I shall assume that this proposition – ‘Being
creates the existent’ – expresses something real. In this way, we remove
ourselves from the preconceived opinions and errors of the psycholo-
gism that treats the first truth as some unknown mental content of ours
that has, at best, a relation of correspondence and resemblance with the
external object. Let us move outside ourselves in thought and consider
the truth by itself, having been persuaded that the intuition by which we
apprehend it is a pure and simple apprehension of its object, and so, by
way of that apprehending, the mind mixes nothing of its own into what
is perceived.
Thus, when the Formula that we assume to be true is reduced to its
genuine meaning – that of an objective and ontological process – each of
its terms represents an objective reality that actually subsists on its own,
outside the mind. This reality is absolute and necessary in the first ele-
303
ment, in Being, but in its last element, in the existent, it is relative and
contingent. The link between these two elements is creation, an action
that is real and positive but free. Being – the Substance and first Cause –
thereby creates substances and second causes. It regulates and includes
them in itself, conserving them in time by the immanence of the causal
action, which, in regard to the time taken to complete it, is a continuous
creation. In the aforementioned Formula, then, we have three realities
independent of the mind: a Substance and first Cause; an organic mani-
fold of substances and second causes; and a real and free act of the first
causal Substance, by means of which act the one Being is connected with
the manifold of existences.
Such is the ontological process expressed by the Formula that we have
assumed. Now let us add to it the intuition that we have removed by
abstraction and then consider the Formula in its objective character.
When the intuition that perceives the Formula is restored to it, the onto-
logical process becomes psychological, and each objective element of
the truth becomes a concept with regard to our cognition of it. But in
this transformation there is no actual change for either of the two parts.
With regard to the object, the three elements of the Formula – Being,
existence, and creative action – are still realities there as before. With
regard to the knowing subject, there is nothing in it but an intuition
apprehending those same three realities in itself, without taking into
itself alteration or division of any kind.
Here one must not imagine, like the champions of psychologism, that
the cognitive act makes some unknown appearance, image, or form of
external reality enter into us, and that this mental entity is the termi-
nus of our thinking, so that, for our part, the truth is seen not in itself
but in ourselves. Thomas Reid has thoroughly exposed the falsity of this
notion with regard to knowledge of bodies, and here we only extend his
doctrine to the whole intuitive truth, standing on the same basis as the
Scottish philosopher – on direct and objective evidence, in other words.
Nor should one assume, like the same psychologists, that when the
mind apprehends the different elements of the objective truth, it chang-
es their order, starting with the existent and ascending to Being, while in
the cycle of reality Being descends to the existent, and not the reverse.
Assuming the primitive psychological order to be the reverse of the onto-
logical order is not only a strange and gratuitous view, it is also plainly
contrary to the objective evidence that we have of the identity of the two
orders when it implies that our intuition alters the representation of real
things. Granted, a person in a state of reflection can and does change,
304
more or less, the real order of things mentally; in part, this is what sci-
ence is about. But this cannot happen in intuition and has nothing to
do with the first science. Therefore, since the idea is nothing but the
object itself as perceived by our mind, it follows that the ideas of Being,
the existent, and creation are three realities, precisely as proposed by the
Formula. It also follows that the process in which we see them is equally
real, given the sole addition of the mind’s intuition.
The conclusion of these findings is that the Formula proposed by us is
true. Our intuitive cognition must perceive its three terms in the order
of their real occurrence and must therefore apprehend creation as a
fact that the mind witnesses as it descends from Being to existences and
apprehends them in the creative act that produces them. But to convert
this hypothesis into a completely certain statement, it suffices to have in
view the synthetic process that we shall mention shortly. From each part
of this process it will seem obvious that one must either call into ques-
tion the clearest concepts and least doubtful judgments of the human
mind or else acknowledge that the process of ideation takes place as we
have described it. Anyone who understands the nature and value of the
synthesis will ask for no other proof. Before beginning this discussion,
however, we can check the truth of our Formula by a faster method.
That creation is the only way to explain the origin of existents, and that
every other hypothesis leads to obvious absurdities, is too well known to
need proving here. The dogma of creation, then, is a scientifically cer-
tain fact, proved indirectly when reason reflects and argues away from
the absurd alternatives. But if creation really is a fact, how might we ever
get knowledge of it in primitive intuition? This is the question that we
have posed.
The ready answer is that we count it as a fact insofar as we perceive it.
Now to perceive a fact is to see, with the mind, the action – the move-
ment, almost – of which the fact consists, and to see the origin from
which the act moves, to see it as active along with the effect that results
from it. But surely, in our case, the intuiting mind that perceives Being in
its concreteness sees it not in its abstract character, secluded within itself,
but sees it as it really is – causing, producing existents, and externaliz-
ing itself by its actions. Hence, the mind perceives existents as results of
Being’s activity. A person therefore acquires the concept of existence by
having a mental view of the continuing production of that same activity.
Since the psychological process of intuition is identical to the ontologi-
cal, the content of our cognition is not differentiated from the real order
of things. Just as the three real terms – Being, creative action, and exist-
305
ences – follow one another logically in the objective synthesis, so also the
three ideal terms that correspond to them have the same order in the
human mind. The mind then sees existences produced in the Being that
produces them, and at every instant of its intellectual life it is a direct and
immediate spectator of creation.
The result may seem odd, but it is rigorous and irrefutable. It cannot
be called into doubt without doing one of three things: either eliminate
existences and fall into absolute idealism; or accept existences as uncre-
ated and embrace the absurd hypotheses of naturalism, pantheism, and
emanationism; or admit the fact of creation but deny that the psycho-
logical process of intuition, by which we know the fact, is identical to the
ontological process of the same thing. But whoever wants to deny the
sameness of the two processes must establish that the idea is a subjec-
tive unknown, which certainly would not arise from an absolutely simple
intuition but from a mental effort that changes the real order of things.
After the direction given to psychology by the Scottish school, how-
ever, this claim is impossible to maintain. If many today still insist on the
contrary view, it happens because the works of the Scots – and Reid’s
especially – are more cited than studied or understood. Because the idea
is just the object as intuited, the bond that runs between ideas cannot
be different from the nexus that links the objects. Now, in the sphere of
objectivity, Being produces existences by way of creation. Then, in the
subjective sphere, we acquire the concept of the existent because we per-
ceive it, and we perceive it because we actually see it produced, before
the mind’s eye. The scheme of the human mind’s synthetic labour, which
we will explain in due course, will clear up every obscurity and remove all
doubt about our proposition.
We noted above that in the immediate intuition of Being a judgment
is contained that affirms the reality of that Being, and that this judg-
ment, the basis of all clarity, is objective and divine. Now we can add that
Being, considered no longer just as Being but as causal Being, gives us
the perception of a fact that is equally objective and divine – the fact of
creation. Therefore, we become aware by intuiting a divine judgment
and a divine fact.
Through the first, Being says ‘I exist.’ Through the second, it pro-
claims ‘I create’ – for to think of things as real, is, for God, actually to
create them. Both are objective, but one is necessary, the other free and
contingent. One is only within Being, the other is reflected towards an
external object. One is a pure judgment by which Being affirms itself.
The other is a practical judgment, a judgment made actual externally,
306
by which Being posits universal existence. Both derive from the Intel-
ligible because the Intelligible is Being. But the first derives from the
Intelligible because it freely understands itself, while the second derives
from the Intelligible because it freely understands and wills an external
fact. The divine judgment is the basis of knowledge; the divine fact is the
basis of nature.
Hence, in virtue of this supreme judgment, philosophy is something
divine, as psychology and physics are divine in virtue of its operation.
The judgment provides the scope and content of the speculative scienc-
es, as the fact provides for the natural sciences. And the whole human
encyclopedia has its basis in a divine encyclopedia – a primitive Formula,
Ideal or Real, that comes to us given by God, a true revelation. In the
philosophical sciences, the fundamental Formula is governed by the
divine judgment, which is a product of the ideas. In physics, it is gov-
erned by the grand and divine experiment of creation, which is a revela-
tion of things. The first Formula gives us the Intelligible, the second the
sensible. One represents to us Being taken simply, the other depicts it for
us as a creative cause.
The mathematical sciences, as we shall see farther on, have a place
between these two Formulas. Finally, it is important to note that the
divine judgment and fact, the foundation of the real and the knowable,
argue for the personhood of Being. I only mention this as a truth of great
significance to which I will return and explain in the appropriate place.
The true Ideal Formula that we have been pursuing, the ultimate basis
of all the knowable, can therefore be declared in the following terms:
‘Being creates existences.’ In this Formula the Idea is expressed by the
concept of a creating Being, and since this concept cannot be had with-
out that of existence and creation, the latter two notions belong indi-
rectly to the Idea and to the component elements of the Formula that
expresses it. The idea of Being is thus the foundation and organic centre
of the Formula. The idea of creation is its organic state. And the three
concepts joined together form the ideal organism. Without the idea
of creation, the bond between the two other concepts would be miss-
ing. The extreme terms of the Formula would be confused, as happens
among pagan peoples and philosophers; once this most important con-
cept gets lost, they shake the whole organism loose of its rational truths.
Just as the subject (‘Being’) of the Ideal Formula implicitly contains
the judgment ‘Being is,’ likewise the predicate (‘creating existences’)
contains another judgment, ‘existences are in Being.’ However, just as
the predicate explicitly affirms that existences come from Being as from
307
a first Cause, so it also declares implicitly that existences are in Being as

in a first and absolute Substance. But if existences are in Being as in the
first Substance because they are effects of the first Cause, then, as sec-
ond causes and substances, subordinate to the first Substance and Cause,
they are in themselves and depend on themselves. Confusion of the first
Substance and Cause with second substances and causes has produced
pantheism.
The Formula also declares that the existent, having originated from
Being, gets all the reality that it has from there. Hence it follows that, just
as the existent cannot (as a matter of ontology) be without Being, even
though it is distinct, so likewise it is not possible (as a matter of psychol-
ogy) to think the existent without Being itself, even though the two terms
are distinct in their concept. This real and mental simultaneity and inter-
penetration of Being and existent, which still does not eliminate the very
basic distinction and infinite distance between them, is what is called the
entity of existences, taking this phrase in its strictest sense.
Being and existences are two things and two ideas, divided and con-
joined, distinct and inseparable. This real and intellectual inseparability
of Being and existent is such that the two terms gradually get mixed up,
even in the language of the most careful speakers, and the concepts get
confused, as we have already noted. But if one keeps an eye on the dif-
ference between the concepts, the synonymous usage of the words can
help show how they are related to one another. When it is said that ‘God
exists,’ for example, it means that God is the highest reality in himself –
necessary reality and source of that finite and contingent reality found in
creatures. And when it is claimed that ‘the man is,’ it is understood that
the creature is in the Creator, the existent in Being, taking from it that
limited and imperfect reality that we call existence.
The Formula contains an ideal truth and an ideal fact. The ideal truth,
expressed by the divine judgment, is the reality of Being. The ideal fact is
the divine production of the existents, and it is called ideal, even though
it is a fact, because it is divine and comes from Being. The ideal fact arises
from the ideal truth by means of creation, which forms the passage from
Being to existent. Since creation is the bond between truth and fact, it
shares at its extremes in the nature of both. The intuitive cognition that we
have of the ideal fact is accompanied by sensibles. The synthesis between
the ideal fact of existence and the sensibles gives rise to experience, which,
according to Aristotle, is the knowledge of individuals. And surely our
awareness of individuals, as we shall soon see, is given to us by creation.
The doctrine that I am explaining is so alien to the current way of
308
doing philosophy that it is certain to find opponents. Among other

objections that will be raised against me, it will be said that humans start
with the idea of existence and that they move up from there to discuss
the idea of Being rather than follow the opposite route. This is entire-
ly correct – if the topic is the process of reflection. Starting from what
makes the greatest impression on the mind, and is the direct object of
psychological reflection – sensibles, for example – reflection naturally
passes from existence to Being, and not the reverse. For that reason, the
final terminus of the intuitive order becomes first in the reflective, and
it is this dislocation that has led psychologists into error. But the process
of reflection would be impossible if it were not preceded by a process of
intuition like the one that we have described.
In proof of this, one notes that the concept and the very term existence
include and express a relation to Being. But how could one apprehend
this relation if Being were not already known, if the dependence of the
existent on Being were not a consequence of this knowledge? The very
word exsistentia (ex eo quod per se et a se subsistit) – ex ente, as it were – assumes
that the idea of existence not only is not isolated but also derives psy-
chologically from another concept, as the thing represented derives from
Being.20 In intuition the idea of existence could not precede that of Being
or be independent of it without contradiction. Therefore, one sees that
we cannot get hold of existence except insofar as it is created by Being.
And thus, in the moving and immanent process of intuition, the mind
passes from Being to existence by the intermediate link of creation. This
happens because Being is represented to the mind as active and creative.
Hence, even though it is immutable in itself, Being is established in
movement (ad extra) and not in rest, unfolding itself in an external act
and in time, has gone outside that immanent and restful actuality that
belongs to its nature. It is in virtue of this intuition of active Being that
the ancient Orientals distinguished the unrevealed God from the God
who shows himself, paying their respects only to the former. The distinc-
tion was irreverent and absurd, but it has a metaphysical root in primor-
dial intuition, which, in the Idea, represents to us, all at once, both Being
in itself and Being in its external and creative actualization.
NOTES
1 The text followed here is the first edition, Gioberti (1840); see the Intro-
duction, sections 7 and 8.
309
2 [a] H.T. Colebrooke, Essais sur la philosophie des Hindous, trans. G. Pauthier
(Paris: 1834): 9, 17, 34, 35.
3 Samkyha, traditionally the work of a sage named Kapila, is one of the six
main lines of ancient Indian thought. It is the metaphysical theory that
corresponds to the practice of Yoga, and its earliest text survives from the
third century CE. Its cosmology is fundamentally materialist, deriving the
world and the souls in it from a primordial substance called praktri, meaning
‘nature.’
4 The ‘illustrious writer’ here is Rosmini, called the ‘illustrious author’ else-
where.
5 [a] Rosmini, New Essay on the Origin of Ideas (Milan: 1837), II, section 5.
6 [a] Ibid., II, part 1, chapters 2, 5; part 2, chapter 5; part. 6, chapter 2.
7 [a] Ibid., II, section 5, part 2, chapter 4; parts 4−5; III, section 6, part 3.
8 [a] Ibid., II, section 5, part 2, chapter 5; section 4, part 6, chapter 2; III, sec-
tion 6, part 5, chapter 5; section 7.
9 [a] Rosmini, Il Rinnovamento della filosofia del Mamiani esaminato, chapters 35,
39 ff; New Essay, section 5, part 2, chapters 5 or 4, vol. II, p. 135.
10 [a] Rosmini, Il Rinnovamento della filosofia del Mamiani esaminato, pp. 492−3,
nn503−5, 613−21; New Essay, vol. II, pp. 477−80 passim.
11 [a] The illustrious Author confesses that he himself has travelled this road.
Speaking of ancient Catholic doctrine, he expresses himself as follows:
‘Everyone sees that I have come to the same results, but by a different route.
The theological school started, as I said, from thinking about God; I started
simply by thinking about man and found myself nonetheless arriving at
the same conclusions. This reaching the same goal by two opposite paths,
it seems to me, is a confirmation, a demonstration of the truth. Moreover,
doctrine may have received a new illustration and better evidence in this
way, if I am not mistaken, and perhaps language itself also gained more
precision and reason a firmer and more secure way of proceeding’ (Ros-
mini, Rinnovamento, pp. 408−9). The conclusions are not the same since
psychologically Rosmini has been able only to get at possible being, which
on its own cannot have ontological value, cannot serve as the basis of the
knowable, cannot give scientific and objective value to psychology itself. The
whole problem arises from the difference of the method followed. Ros-
mini’s is sound and admirable, yet it is neither primary nor unique in that it
completes ontologism without wanting to take its place. This is the only way
that the new and profound analysis of our Author will be able to purge itself
of its defects, establish a firm basis for itself, and enrich science.
12 [a] See n2 of this volume; [e] Gioberti (1840), I, 711−76.
13 [a] I Cor. 13:12.
310
14 [a] See the passages from Gerson cited in n3 of this volume; [e] Gioberti
(1840), I, 776−83, citing Jean Gerson (1363−1429) as an admirer of Bon-
aventura, especially his account of three kinds of seeing (visio) as face-to-
face or intuitive, mirroring or abstract, and cloudy or obscure.
15 Gioberti uses riflesso and riflessivo throughout, usually to mean ‘reflection’
and ‘reflective,’ but sometimes ‘reflex’ and ‘reflexive.’
16 [a] Forcellini (Lexicon [Padua: 1805], II, 250) makes it synonymous with
prodire, apparere, and exire, expressed by the Italian words to leave, appear, and
go out of. He observes that it is ‘often used for esse, but in such a way that it
connotes some movement of what is leaving or appearing, being present or
absent.
17 [a] The Crusca (Dizionario della lingua italiana, ( [Padua: 1828], III, 519)
calls existence being in act and the existent that which is in act.
18 [a] Vico, Opera latina (Milan: 1835), I, 106−7, 135; cf. 54.
19 [a] Forcellini, Lexicon, IV, 255, defines it as ‘essence, nature, that by which
a thing is’; the definition by the Crusca – Dizionario della lingua italiana
(Padua), VI, 1144 – is somewhat better, distinguishes it as having properly
to do with essence.
20 ‘The very word existence (from that which subsists through itself and by itself) –
from being as it were.’
311
5
Count Terenzio Mamiani della Rovere
The Renewal of the Ancestral

Italian Philosophy1
Part I: Method
Chapter I: The Topic and Purpose of This Book
1. Three centuries have passed since every natural science began to

move wisely and successfully towards its goal. The situation is the reverse
in the domain of philosophy, which today, as in the past, seems troubled
by conflicting systems and utterly unsure of any of its truths. Like many
before us, we too have set out to find the cause of this because we are
unsatisfied with the common view – that every conflict of philosophical
opinion arises from the insuperable difficulty of the subject. The upshot
is that any investigation of a hard subject can always lead to one of three
results: either proving that knowledge of certain parts of the subject is
impossible, as geometers deal with a number of their problems; or con-
structing a field in a purely empirical way while paying no attention at
all to general principles, as used to be the case in chemistry; or only
using analogies that are plentiful or helpful to establish the likelihood
of various things – remote from certainty, more or less – as one sees the
geologists doing. But none of these three conclusions applies at all to
philosophy.
No one has managed to show clearly that it is impossible to construct
a rational philosophy. And yet for their part the sceptics never relax
their zealous efforts, every now and then, to flatten and destroy what
dogmatists have worked hard to build. Likewise, if some are convinced
that philosophy can be no more than some kind of probable or experi-
mental information, empirical and diffuse, a hundred others rise up and
emphatically assert the opposite. For such people philosophy is a real sci-
Mamiani, Renewal
ence and completely dogmatic. Its duty is to provide all the other scienc-
es whatever measure of certainty and rationality they have in themselves.
2. So we have sought some other reason for the turmoil in philosophy,

besides the difficulty of the subject, though we have nowhere to look but
in the nature or use of the faculties employed in the study of philosophy
itself. For in any human activity there are three things, and three only,
to consider: the content, the instrument, and the purpose. Hence, since
the cognitive powers are the same in every field, in that people have no
organ that is better or worse for philosophy, no special means of under-
standing or reflecting, in the end we have had to examine the use of the
cognitive powers and to suspect this use of being deceptive and defective
because it has not been able to lead to any firm and clear scientific result.
Here again, however, the need has arisen to explain why it is only in
philosophy that the cognitive powers have been badly applied … Only
in philosophy does one still encounter a double subject and a double
purpose. As a science of the human mind, which is how many have seen
it, philosophy makes up part of the natural history of our existence. But
as the science that governs all others, it moves beyond the bounds of
anthropology and crosses into metaphysics. Again, the result is plain to
see: in philosophy alone one finds the content and the instrument adapt-
ed to one another and mixed up. While studying the faculties and acts
of the intellect, with what but the intellect itself do we undertake such a
study? This is what multiplies the difficulties and often leads to the error
of arguing in a circle.
3. Thus we have become convinced that philosophy’s mistakes, ancient

and modern, and its incessant disputes are to be attributed to no other
cause than the incorrect use of the cognitive faculties, or, as we would
put it, fallacious, divergent, and distorted methods. In fact, anyone who
reads the records of the whole period from Galileo onward clearly sees
a common direction, always perfectly consistent, governing the various
types of physical inquiry, one after the other. On the other hand, what
one sees in theoretical studies – more and more often – is the emergence
of methods that are not just different but opposed, each incapable of
recognizing the truth on its own.
Indeed, there are philosophers who think that a supreme and com-
pletely certain science, such as a first philosophy should be, can be based
only on the universal, the changeless, and the necessary, and hence
that it cannot come from changeable, limited, and accidental experi-
313
ence. They have therefore constructed an a priori philosophy, follow-

ing the method of geometry. While never proving their authority, they
have thereby accepted absolute and general principles, from which they
derive every subsequent demonstration – not to mention their never hav-
ing succeeded in getting beyond abstractions to particularized knowl-
edge of concrete, sensible objects. Others assume that they can follow
the natural method of the physicists exactly, without regard for the very
special circumstances of philosophy, and the result is that they explain
the highest principles of reason and experience by those principles
themselves.
Having noted this egregious error, some adhere to the natural method
of the physicists only for what concerns the empirical observation of phe-
nomena. As for the highest principles of the intellect, they resolutely
profess neither to know them nor to be able to produce any proof of
them beyond their being instinctively evident. With one blow they thus
abolish any theory of first philosophy and put in its place a bare experi-
ential history of the mind and its instincts. Some prefer a more daring
route and a novel one. Returning to the old geometrical method, they
try to make it productive by applying various clever conjectures, thereby
constructing the whole science of truth and being, partly a priori and
partly ex hypothesi, meaning that they add the flaw of arbitrary notions to
the defects of the geometrical method. Nor do we lack proponents of a
method called historical. They say that philosophy should be constructed
bit by bit of fragments taken from each school in every period. Finally,
others have mixed these various learned procedures together, but not in
a way that has yielded anything better.
By comparing the opposed systems of method that appear in the
domain of theoretical subjects, and by setting what we have said about
them alongside the single system that governs physical studies so effec-
tively, we get a clear sense of the persistent reason why theoretical
subjects remain so contentious and full of obscurity … For subjects of
reasoning, so much conflict and so much uncertainty of opinion can
never in any way be reduced, in our view, unless theoretical minds can
commit themselves, with a shared will, to solve the problem before us,
which is to derive from deep inquiry into philosophy’s content and pur-
pose the specific changes and correct practices that must govern the gen-
eral teaching of the natural method. This and only this, so it seems to us,
must be preliminary to any philosophy.
4. However, as we reached the conclusions that arose in this way from the
314
Mamiani, Renewal
history of instability in knowledge, two forces were acting on us at the

same time. One was a concept of the best philosophical method, which
took shape gradually. The other was the discovery of this rather remark-
able fact: that honour and glory belong to our Italian ancestors not only
for restoring the natural method in all its parts but also for applying
it more than capably to the special circumstances of philosophy, per-
mitting the Italians to begin reaping the fruits of a true and stable sci-
ence from this method. Their honour and glory were then obscured and
interrupted by violent fortune, but it seems to us that this book of ours
should win them back again, if our weak powers are up to the task.
Part of our proposal, then, is to show clearly, though very briefly, that
the best conception of philosophical method possible today, including
its slow and judicious application to the hardest parts of metaphysics,
must be the restoration and pursuit of older principles of method found
by Italians, along with the development of some of the older principles
of truth discovered by them. These are the two things that we entitle
Renewal of the Ancestral Italian Philosophy.
5. As we glanced at the history of knowledge and looked at it compara-

tively, two parallel series of ideas arose in our thought, and they will be
described in the subsequent course of the book. In other words, as we
set ourselves to noting our thoughts on the best philosophical method
and also some of its difficult applications, we shall also note how these
coincide with ancestral Italian teachings. The book’s purpose will also
be twofold. The intent is both to increase honour to the fatherland by
refreshing memories of its ancestral wisdom and also to explain con-
cepts that we have gathered about the method and its applications, thus
finding a way to halt the war of opinions in the realm of philosophy and
bring some of them back to a steady and well-defined state of knowledge.
Chapter II: Attempts to Restore Human Understanding
1. The general history of knowledge reveals this continuing progress of

the human intellect. Humans are taught by nature about the best, and
likewise the shortest route leading to the level of truth that suits the
powers of their cognitive faculties. And yet there are enough causes of
error, multiplying with time, to turn human understanding away from
the route taken by the happy exercise of instinct …
Certainly, Socrates did much and laboured hard to lead people back
to rules of common sense. And in that adage of his, gnôthi seauton, he
315
planted a precious seed of philosophical reform. Besides a moral rule,

this maxim may contain a rule of method – making psychological criti-
cism a basis for philosophizing. But because Socrates had a mind that
turned more readily to practical than to theoretical teachings, and also
because he never taught as if the dictates of common sense could be
kept subject to rigid rules, the madness of the past reappeared after a
short time. Next, the Alexandrian restoration thought to flee to the old
weakness of intelligences by bending them under the weight of new
dogmas coloured by a contrived, mystical glow. Proclus, who set a sad
example by assuming more than he ought about the powers of dem-
onstration, dressed Neoplatonic fantasies in a geometric garment. Only
in Italy, then, and notably through the work of the mighty Galileo, did
the human intellect return with constancy and care to the evidence of
nature.
2. As far as I can see, Archimedes had also begun a philosophical resto-

ration in Italy, even though fate opposed his lofty design. In the time of
this supreme genius, it seems that the Italic school could not rise above
the attacks of sceptics or the quibbles of sophists, such were the depths
into which extravagant Eleatic dogma had plunged it. In fact, this same
school had produced three great principles of philosophical method:
first, a primal certainty, residing in the subjective state of our conscious-
ness; second, Zeno’s dialectic, containing the results and rules of the
technique of demonstration; third, the intention, kept always in view,
to satisfy reason’s demands by attempting to explain the authority of its
supreme laws by way of apodictic science. If one wants to add to this
the observational, experimental, and inductive spirit of old Empedocles,
the whole result might include all the best principles of philosophical
method.
Archimedes then renewed and enlarged the induction of Empedocles
and Zeno’s demonstrative power so effectively that no thinker of later
times has been able to surpass him. Had he been allowed to found a
school of wisdom, however, we have no doubt that he would have started
that restoration of all knowledge that was delayed by seventeen hundred
years and more. At that time, with Galileo’s potent help and that of oth-
er philosophical thinkers of the seventeenth century, the principles of
method, the hidden seeds that we have seen surviving in the ancestral
Italic school, finally sprouted. Of this we will say a little more because we
find that until now no one has adequately defined and described this
wondrous movement of human reasoning.
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Chapter III: The Italian Restoration
1. To form an idea of the value of a task, one must carefully examine the
obstacles barring its completion. Those that the Italians encountered
in the reconstruction of knowledge were the greatest ever recorded by
history. Some impediments were external and had physical causes, while
others were internal causes that damaged the exercise of the mental
faculties. Causes of both types converged in the false teaching of scho-
lasticism, which corrupted thinkers who submitted to it, while afflict-
ing those who were unsubmissive with prison, torture, and the stake.
Petrarch is the first person we meet who had the courage to laugh at the
false philosophy of the schools and use his keen mind to reveal its defects
and foolishness, but the basis of his judgment was a noble and refined
sensibility rather than deep critical inquiry.2 From then on, new access to
sources of Greek wisdom kindled the will to combat scholasticism every-
where, in two ways: by contrasting Aristotle’s plain speech with the spuri-
ous and mystifying talk of the commentators; and by using the charms of
Cicero and Xenophon to wean thinkers away from the barbaric linguistic
habits of the dialecticians.
2. Leaders of this effort were Ermolao Barbaro, Angelo Poliziano, Valla,

and Pomponazzi, the last two deserving special praise and admiration.3
With clear and polished eloquence, and with a sure frankness and inde-
pendence of mind that was quite rare in those days, it was Pomponazzi
more than the others who explained Aristotle in the purity of his text
and his views.
Lorenzo Valla wrote works that were finer, in our judgment, for their
courage, practicality, and insight. Certainly before 1457, the year of his
death, Valla wrote three books On Dialectic against the Aristotelians, thus
breaking his lance not only against the scholastics but even the master
of them that knew. To us, he appears to be the first who directly attacked
a number of Aristotle’s views with arguments and theories of his own,
while others, protected by Plato’s shield and all his weapons, hardly felt
strong enough to combat Aristotle. In his three books, rich with elegant
Latin, he began by ridiculing blind trust in Aristotle’s words. He then
went on to show how the highest categories and first predicables had
been based on false assumptions, proving this by the correct meaning of
terms, by linguistic usage, and by arguments from common sense.
Valla overthrew the classifications of Porphyry in the same way, show-
ing how the basic rules of logic are simple and completely self-evident.
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He attaches great importance to the study of signs, and even though his
treatment of the subject is too grammatical, he also eliminates several
mistakes of the schools. He invites the youth to look at the greatest writ-
ers of prose and poetry for the correct understanding of language. With
this wise counsel, in fact, he grasped one of the most effective ways to
recover the principles of natural method and put them into practice.
Finally, we should not fail to mention that his subtle mind devised for
his time a reduction of Aristotle’s predicaments and categories resem-
bling the reduction of Kant’s forms and categories that some have made
today. According to Valla’s proposal and declaration, in fact, only three
predicaments are distinct, essential, and more comprehensive than all
the others: thing (both as substance and as cause), quality, and action, so
that quality belongs to thing as substance, while action belongs to thing
as cause.4 This is exactly what the modern spiritualists of France have
thought and written.5
In this way, the disgrace and destruction of scholasticism was complet-
ed in the second half of the fifteenth century. A few foreigners cooper-
ated, to be sure, but they came later. And it was on the peninsula that
a great many of them – Rudolf Agricola, Jacques Lefèvre, Sepulveda,
Scioppius, and others, for example – had acquired their learning and
their skill as writers.6
3. With scholastic authority at its end, theological and Peripatetic author-

ity remained. Against the first, Pietro Pomponazzi bravely rebelled, dis-
tinguishing purely rational teachings from the revealed, and stating
that one is the business of the pure philosopher, the other the work of
the theologian. But from reason’s dim and reflected light one should
not reach conclusions like those that come from the splendour of an
inspired science. Although reason must allow for the debility of all natu-
ral philosophy, there is still no substitute for it. Pomponazzi therefore
taught that one must ascend from natural knowledge of things to knowl-
edge of God, not the reverse, never deriving knowledge of natural things
from prior knowledge of God, as was the ruling practice of his era. This
was the second step that Pomponazzi took, at the risk of his life, to move
the human mind towards its independence.
4. Italians sought in three ways to shake Aristotle’s authority, though it

would ultimately survive, seeming to draw new strength from custom and
from the times. First of all, the disciples of the Philosopher themselves
opened a breach in their master’s infallibility by changing some of his
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doctrines and adding new ones. Pomponazzi himself did this, along with
Zabarella, Cesalpino, and Cremonini, for example. Second, Aristotle’s
views were opposed – sometimes by arguing against them, at other times
by restoring the diverse teachings of various ancient sects to a place of
honour and using them against Aristotle. Finally, opposition to Aristo-
tle came from inventing original and impressive systems, like those of
Cardano, Vanini, Bruno, and Patrizi.7
In the fight against Aristotle and his commentators, Patrizi then dis-
played an eagerness, a knowledge, and an immense erudition that was
altogether uncommon. Nearly half a century later, as Gassendi was plan-
ning to continue his Paradoxical Exercises Against Aristotle, he saw that the
Italians had been there before him and left him no fruit worth harvest-
ing.8 What turned out to be most effective in stirring people to think,
however, were refutations aimed at the works on cosmology and physics,
which were convicted of error rather often by sense experience. Telesio
entered this debate and caused a great outcry. Others, less famous than
him, took a better route to reach better results, but they did not attack
Aristotle because it was not their concern.9
5. After that, one might have guessed that the Italians had finally liberat-
ed their genius from any external constraint, retaining only the internal
authority of their own conviction. They were still incapable, nonetheless,
of exercising their faculties of knowledge freely and effectively because
for a long time those faculties had been damaged by bad habits and
had completely forgotten nature’s precepts. Two philosophical practices
became incredibly harmful. The first was to investigate the relations and
consequences of what was already known rather than the obscure and
hidden parts of what was unknown. The second, at the start of any kind
of inquiry, was to begin with various generalities, usually not debated or
demonstrated and often leading to specious results that were abstrac-
tions and purely vacuous.
From those two practices came others equally harmful. They trans-
formed every type of inquiry into reasoning about ideas; the aptitude
for real analysis was lost, and also the trail of discovery. Detailed observa-
tion of psychological phenomena, as opposed to speculative problems,
therefore fell into disdain when it was supposed that observation could
not be a basis for teaching and when the maxim held that particulars
do not constitute knowledge. It was also usual to attribute little value to
bare experimental physics, a science whose metaphysical part was inves-
tigated, to be sure, but not the rest. Overthrowing a good many of Aristo-
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tle’s opinions seemed insufficient to prove the emptiness of his ontology

and his dialectic, which had become a daily tool of reasoning, almost
second nature. This produced an insane presumption about the powers
of our mind and a belief that everything could be known. Finally came
an excess of fantasy, a boundless love for the marvellous and superhu-
man, and then affectations of language and pedantic formulas, feigning
scientific mystery with every word.
Chapter IV: A Doctrine of Method
1. Thus it was recognized that partial corrections could not do much

good, that the effective remedy lay in completely reorganizing the
understanding and tearing out the diseased roots of harmful habits and
unhealthy anxieties. People felt that the time had come for a doctrine of
method, and – much more important – that it was necessary to restore
the natural method. To study in this way was entirely novel, without
example in antiquity.
In Greek texts one read that Zeno had turned everything upside down
with the strength of his dialectic; in the books of Proclus one saw a claim
for the geometric method – or the dogmatic, as it should be called; and
in Plato’s dialogues one could point in many places to quite exquisite
efforts either at the technique of elimination or at that of inference,
and so on; but nowhere did one find an explicit doctrine that dealt with
all these issues. It was a great thing if in Xenophon one encountered
some fleeting hint about the Socratic method and in Galen some special
instructions about the nature of the studies that he professed. In his
dialectical books Aristotle never went further than investigating the syl-
logism and fruitlessly enumerating the sources of invention …
2. Much praise, then, to the ancient Italians for having discovered the
need for a broad and comprehensive doctrine of method, though the
most ancient of them did not feel this need at all. They undertook a
reform of all knowledge, but this discovery alone made it bear fruit.
Granted that the physical sciences, once they found their true path,
prospered and grew without limit from that time on; our task now is to
prove that the speculative sciences cannot in the least be outmatched
by the physical in their certainty, and, so to speak, infinite progress, as
long as speculative philosophers apply to their subject a single, common
method – the natural method – suitably adapted to the very special con-
ditions of first philosophy.
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Among rationalist philosophers, the first in Italy to speak extensively

about the doctrine of method was Mario Nizolio, who in his Antibarbarus
proclaimed the need to reorganize thought by endowing it with true
principles and the true way of philosophizing.10 He refuted not just a few
propositions but all the dialectic and metaphysics of his day, declaring it
partly false, partly useless. He had equal scorn for the species of Aristotle
and the ideas of Plato, finding both entirely out of tune with the facts.
He adopted a style completely divorced from scholastic barbarisms, and
his language was plain, clear, and ordinary. Thus, even more than Valla,
he anticipated and fulfilled the wish of Hobbes, the Port-Royal authors,
and others who were anxious to reduce technical language to common
language. Nizolio certainly understood that the dialectic and metaphys-
ics of the Peripatetics was a constant war of words. Hence, by examining
the strict sense of terms and hidden grammatical structure in light of
ordinary usage and on the authority of the best writers, he was confident
– and clearly he was not mistaken – that the Peripatetic edifice would be
completely deconstructed. It is notable that he foresaw the position of
the Scottish School, which taught that philosophical language must be
determined by the simple guidance of common usage and clear, obvious
etymologies.
Nizolio’s doctrine of method is quite incomplete, to be sure, and
more literary than philosophical. Yet it agrees perfectly with the natural
method. In fact, he trusted too much in the innate capacity of minds,
and he meant to give them sufficient guidance with three precepts, as
follows: first, thoroughly understand and consider the value of the signs
and the language in which philosophers have written; second, conduct
one’s studies with the greatest freedom of mind and equanimity of spirit;
third, study the writings and thoughts of all schools, excluding none,
least of all those opposed to one’s own views. Nizolio’s thought, inert for
two centuries while all philosophers forgot it, cited only by grammar-
ians for their studies of refined Ciceronianisms, was thought by Leibniz
worthy of restoration to human memory in a new printing, which was
honoured with much praise.
3. Jacopo Aconcio, Nizolio’s contemporary, dealt explicitly with method

in a book that he called On the Art of Research and On the Art of Teaching.11
His principles do not stray from the natural method nor do they arise
from any ambitious theory. On the contemplation of the subject, the
ordering of means to the end, the observation and decomposition of
parts down to the final elements, what Aconcio prescribes is wise and
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insightful … He earns our special esteem for having thoroughly grasped

the importance of method when he wrote that ‘out of thirty years of
study it is more useful to spend twenty just on investigating method than
to spend all thirty without the help of method.’12 …
4. Sebastiano Erizzo, a person widely read and uncommonly well

informed, published an elegant and learned book On the Instrument and
the Method of Discovery of the Ancients in 1554. Its topic, as one can see, is
the problem of method, though Erizzo wanted not so much to teach
new principles and new habits as to restore old ones … ‘There are four
methods,’ he wrote, ‘definition, division, demonstration and resolution.
The second, division, is the best – the only one, in fact, that yields truth
– and it made the ancients excellent at discovery.’13 The method now
called analytic corresponds precisely to this method celebrated by Erizzo,
which is also the one proclaimed by Condillac as the unique source of all
knowledge … For all that, it must be said of Erizzo that he presents the
true and good method without having the capacity to develop it; in any
case, the ways and means that he proposes are better suited to analysing
ideas than facts.
5. Bruno’s boundless genius, though far advanced in matters of logic,

still did not let him understand clearly enough what he thought about it,
by reason of the great passion that he had for Lull’s old ideas, which he
hoped to correct, expand, and make productive. Others suppose (and
to me it seems quite likely) that he paraded this admiration of his for the
Lullian art in order to appeal to the masses, to gain easy access to teach-
ing posts, and to seize an opportunity to propagate his daring notions
about first philosophy. Be that as it may, on the topic at hand what can
be said of Bruno and declared confidently is this: as much as anyone
else in his day, he was persuaded of the great need for a reformation of
studies and a reorganization of understanding.14 He grasped the true
and natural division of method in the art of investigating and finding
facts, in the art of judging and putting them in order, and finally in the
art of applying principles.15 He believed that philosophy must begin with
doubt. Lastly, he thought that cognition of particulars and the induc-
tions derived from them make up general truths, on which science is
then securely built …16
Otherwise, overcome by his restless imagination and by the demands
of his ontological inquiries, he certainly used a priori arguments more
than was necessary. Nonetheless, he often turned away from them, and,
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applying a form of critical method, searched for the basis of his teach-
ings in the facts of consciousness …
6. From many directions and by different paths, then, Italians converged

on the common idea of needing intellectual reform and of holding
themselves to the precepts of nature. In the course of this century, no
serious work of philosophy saw the light without some discussion, short
or long, of method. Mocenigo wished to treat it as an elementary opera-
tion of the intellect; in his various Reflections he does not neglect to set
down its laws, which still do not go much beyond the limits of the art of
demonstration.17
Bernardino Telesio rebelled more forcefully against philosophy’s bad
habits. In his nine books On the Nature of Things … he resolved to look
only at the facts and at nothing else – to recognize sensation, along with
things made known by sensation, or things exactly identified with them,
as the unique sources of all knowledge. He wanted to study the world
and all its parts – the ultimate ingredients, operations, and effects of
each part – so that by themselves they would then reveal what they are
and what they produce. These are great and noble promises, as anyone
can see, and while Telesio did little to fulfil them, no one can deny him
the merit of having conceived a physics that was purely inductive and not
based on the abstractions of the ontologists, as contemporary systems
used to be.18
Chapter V: Tommaso Campanella
1. Telesio had followers, and it added much to his honour to count Tom-
maso Campanella, a Dominican friar, among those who learned from
him. From the age of fifteen, Campanella began to doubt the Peripatetic
fairy tales that the friars taught him. As he read and compared those
who wrote glosses on Aristotle, his doubts grew. Then he looked at the
text of Aristotle himself, along with Plato, Galen, Pliny, the works of the
Stoics and the Telesians, and – in his words – he ‘compared them with
the great book of nature, where it was revealed how much the copies
resembled the original.’ While still very young, he became aware of the
appalling practices and methods introduced into philosophy, which is
why he wrote his book on investigation, to criticize the methods of the
schools …
2. He claimed that there are two methods, or, better, two applications
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of the natural method: one in the process of discovery; the other in

that of reasoning; but the second method could more appropriately be
called the doctrinal method …19 He called experience the beginning of
our knowledge and the guide of the intellect. Once experience is aban-
doned, philosophers always fall into empty enthusiasms, relying on the
power of imagination to create accidental likenesses of the truth.
3. And if Telesio conceived the reform of the natural disciplines, Cam-

panella had the courage to extend that reform to every subject.20 He was
the first to devise a new compilation and arrangement of the fields of
knowledge, for he felt himself obliged to begin by gathering his infor-
mation together and testifying to the richness of intellectual resources.
At the summit of all learning he put metaphysics, as the most general
of all the sciences. He then divided the fields into the rational and the
real – those that have more to do with the knowing subject, and those
that are objective and examine the nature of material beings. From these
two lines of theory, he derived the operative and practical sciences, the
disciplines and the arts. While some might find such an arrangement
unhelpful or defective, I would not hesitate to judge it better than the
one developed by Bacon of Verulam …
4. But Campanella’s greatest and hardest idea was to apply doctrines of

method to rational philosophy. In fact, none of those maxims that are
effective in governing science remained unknown to him. The ancients
began by observing the world – indeed, the universe – and moved on as
best they could to mankind. But not Campanella, who wanted to recon-
sider the Eleatic doctrine of the subjective character of all cognitions
and to locate in it the source of primal certainty and the natural begin-
ning of any philosophical analysis. This led him to man, and from there
he followed a path of criticism to the study of the world and the universe.
And he arrived at this concept while looking for the cause of the unity of
human knowledge …
Campanella started with the method of universal doubt, and in four-
teen well-organized chapters he set forth all the sceptical arguments
with extraordinary perspicacity. Then he took up the refutation of each
argument and concluded with the possibility of knowledge, based on
the absolute reality of the sensation of one’s own existence …21 For
Campanella the word sensing means something different than it does
for modern sensists, for whom it goes only as far as that perception of
an external object which is received by the activity of the organs. But in
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the broad Latin sense, sensing sometimes expresses any phenomenon

within consciousness and any act noticed by our mind – a usage also
employed more than once by our philosopher. In this way, he defined
the object, purpose, and possibility of knowledge, proclaiming the prin-
ciple of method that prescribes the route that knowledge must take, and
what kind of certainty it must maintain as the measure and assay of all
other knowledge. To sound out the extent, legitimacy, and origins of
human knowledge, the object of first philosophy, he then felt obliged to
consider carefully the effectiveness and use of the cognitive powers …
5. Campanella clearly understood the timeliness of the doctrine that the

moderns call the critical philosophy, in keeping with Kant. And he wished
to construct it only by means of psychological history and inductive obser-
vation, after which he hoped to move on to deal with being and to clarify
the nature and authority of the highest universals. Telesio had already
begun to outline a detailed account of intellectual phenomena and the
activity of the sense-organs, but Campanella brought greater maturity
of judgment to the task. He often pointed out the defects of views that
claimed to explain the facts of the intellect by weak comparisons drawn
from material phenomena, and he rejected the empty assumptions
that ventured guesses about the first ideas and first judgments of the
newborn … Had Campanella always put his methodological views into
practice in just this way, and, above all, had he avoided the labyrinths of
ontology, he would have become the most important of philosophers,
in my judgment – though in his day this may have been far beyond the
reach of possibility.
6. Even though Campanella defined the true idea of philosophical meth-

od most effectively – better than anyone in his time – a number of other
Italians followed paths much like his in the same field. We will make
special mention of Patrizi, whose love of Platonic abstractions never pre-
vented him from recognizing the value of definite rules of method …22
Patrizi was the first to establish the rule of absolute certainty and of meas-
uring every form of truth by it, as opposed to the practice of assum-
ing general truths as premises of a first science, and he put forward the
observation of phenomena and inductive experience. In the end, with
an eye to first philosophy in the highest sense, he condemned the meth-
od of all those who presume to explain the supreme principles of reason
by purely empirical experience.23
Using such wise and timeless maxims of philosophical method, those
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who wrote in this period often came to agreement; some of them I have
mentioned above, and others will enter my discussion elsewhere.
Chapter VI: Leonardo da Vinci
1. Reviewing what has been shown up to this point about the views of our
Italian ancestors on method, one notes that they were quite well aware of
the need to move closer to the precepts of nature even though these had
not all been recognized and were never practised with good judgment.
They thought about the process of induction, but they did not know how
to follow it clearly. A common failing, in fact, was to make inductions
hastily from a few particulars, and often with only a few weak analogies.
Not only did they spoil inductive observation in this way, they also lost
the fruit of any future experience, inasmuch as they bent and adapted
it by force to general principles wrongly held. Universally established,
nonetheless, was the maxim that facts must provide the basis of every
investigation. Peripatetic abstractions were also overthrown, but this did
not keep thinkers free from the tangles of a new ontology, not much bet-
ter than the old one. The custom of completing and extending theories
with syllogisms did not stop, and they went on rehearsing their debates
instead of experimenting. But the old conceit of knowing and explain-
ing everything no longer ruled. On the contrary, philosophers willingly
agreed to admit their ignorance and the weak powers of reason …
2. But in the meantime a group of thinkers of enormous distinction was

flourishing in Italy. While philosophers dithered, they moved into the
physical sciences, keeping point by point to the pure rules of natural
method, a more expeditious way for them to prepare a great and endur-
ing restoration. At their head was the brilliant Leonardo da Vinci.24 He
was Valla’s contemporary, and he lived half a century or more before
Nizolio, Aconcio, and Telesio. Yet his knowledge of the natural art of
method was so advanced, given when he lived, that one would have to
hail him as the master and teacher of those others, had his writings been
better known and had people been able to judge the qualifications of the
sage as capably as the works of the artist.
The age in which Leonardo conceived such great things, however,
was still impoverished in its mental habits … Many of his contemporar-
ies had occasional success in the practise of inductive observation and
thereby contributed some worthwhile discovery, but this happened only
because of the force of their talent, not from methodical effort. Their
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discoveries therefore lay lifeless, mixed with the most outrageous mis-
takes, like flecks of gold in mud. Such was the case with Giambattista
Porta, for example, and with Agrippa and Cardano. Cesalpino in botany
and Fracastoro in some areas of physics turned out to be acute, care-
ful, and admirable observers. Maurolico and Tartaglia became eminent
in mathematics, Eustachio and Fallopio in anatomy.25 But their achieve-
ment was in the special sciences, which sometimes had to involve either
geometrical proof or empirical observation of phenomena, and it came
long after Leonardo’s.
In any case, he alone had a complete grasp of the gradations and rules
of the art of discovery and used them all … No one in the world observed
more than this Leonardo, and he came across no object without contem-
plating it at length. With exquisite care and in good order, he thought
as much about tiny things as about the large … and this precise analysis
never obscured his view of great syntheses as he applied empirical pro-
cedures. On the contrary, he used induction and generalized as much as
any other philosopher who used demonstrative methods. Starting with
the invention of a thousand practical machines and amazing devices for
use in war or for other public needs, he gradually moved on to investi-
gate the higher laws of hydraulics and mechanics. Broad conceptions of
the most important truths of optics, geology, and theoretical and experi-
mental physics abound in his manuscripts, which thus anticipate many
discoveries of Halley, Kepler, Copernicus, and others of like genius.
Chapter VII: Galileo
1. The great Galileo eventually followed the path that Leonardo opened,
and it was his destiny to bring Italy’s restoration to glorious fulfillment.
People would have deceived themselves had they thought that Galileo
did this by a fortunate instinct of nature and not by enlightenment
gained from philosophy – by long and deliberate inquiry into the nature
of human minds. We would prefer to answer them with Galileo’s own
works, where in a hundred passages one finds evidence of his long
meditations on method. This is why he wanted to be called not only
a mathematician but also a philosopher, making a special point of it,
when he unfortunately agreed to return to Tuscany in the service of the
Medici …26 In the Assayer, he lets us know how he discovered that the
secondary qualities of bodies reside only in the sensing subject, and that
with regard to the external object they are nothing but mere names.27
Once the animal faculty has been removed, all these qualities are taken
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away and annihilated. In subsequent discussions of forces, the vacuum,

space, causes, and other great problems, he displays an insight as amaz-
ing and an approach as confident as any advanced study of those topics
– especially on regulative principles, having tested each of them against
the facts and his penetrating judgment.
2. But his great idea was a complete reform of method, without which
he thought no field of knowledge could prosper …28 Up to now we have
been able to count four or five errors of method which in Galileo’s time
continued to trouble the learned and their studies, such as a certain ten-
dency to trust authority… [To this] he angrily objected … and against
another habit – discussing and debating the known while inquiring no
further into the unknown – his rejoinder was just as angry: namely, that
pride as much as laziness made people in his day incapable of seeking
new and accurate results and unable to derive new proofs from them,
and that it was easier for them to search for books and compare pas-
sages.29 Perceiving, on the other hand, that the teachings of Aconcio,
Valla, Nizolio, Telesio, and Campanella were not enough to detach
people’s minds from their bad and outworn habits, he was convinced
that the same thing would have happened to him had he limited his
work to promulgating and discussing his views on the good and true
method, without extending them by new examples. That he was very
wise to do so was shown a little later by Descartes, who, contesting many
recent teachings of the rationalist philosophers, published new proofs a
priori, abstractions taken for reality, hypotheses treated as theories and
returned to use.
3. Galileo also saw that there can be no certain science of method until
a science of the intellect has been established, and that in the meantime
people have no effective recourse but to return tamely to the dogmas of
common sense. His aim, therefore, was to restore the love of the natural
method and its practices, drawing clear attention to its rules, and, in
the end, making it the people’s heritage once again, perpetuating its
rule with the resolute assistance of the many … He not only wrote in
the vernacular but did so with elegance and eloquence, using his writ-
ing to lead young people to a natural and perfect sense of the beautiful
and the true. At that time, no type of research proved more fit than the
natural sciences to correct their thinking and take away their ills since no
sophisms or veiled words could stand against factual evidence … In this
way, Galileo forced his enemies, the Peripatetics themselves, to stoop to
observation and conduct experiments …
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The natural sciences thus provided the occasion and hope of wonder-
ful discoveries capable of wakening human curiosity – ordinary people
included – and this was how it happened: the invention of the telescope,
the new theory of the heavens, and new experiments on motion stirred
many people and made them want to know more. Another advantage
arising from the things described by Galileo was to persuade everyone
that nature’s wonders belong to one and all, and that for those who use
their eyes and hands there is no shortage of things to ponder. That most
pernicious axiom of the philosophers – that small details do not produce
science – was thus made obsolete. Galileo often noted how he had direct-
ed his research towards problems falsely regarded as commonplace and
frivolous, and he added that on this point his enemies were not behaving
like their master Aristotle … From the love of natural sciences that he
laboured to propagate, this benefit inevitably arose: that in these scienc-
es the facts themselves replace our assumptions and become the mind’s
best guide … What he wanted above all was to plant in each person’s
mind the caution, deliberation, and maturity of the art of induction. He
called doubt the father of discoveries and the highway of truth …
While his contemporaries looked in physics for metaphysics, he
refrained altogether from attempts at explanation in areas where the
senses are incompetent and reasoning is insufficient. In discussions of
the infinite, the continuous, the indivisible, the one or other such fea-
tures of metaphysical being, he actually found express proof that we
deceive ourselves in thinking that we can understand them. And yet
he did not, on that account, call it foolhardy to derive quite plausible
conjectures from the general concept of the system of the heavens that
he had established. The result was that modern science, despite having
made enormous progress, has never caught him in a mistake, except
perhaps on one or two purely conjectural points.
4. Galileo left no part of method without giving an example or a rule. In

his treatise on comets he added a way to eliminate false interpretations,
evaluate conjectures, and allow for helpful hypotheses.30 In more than
one work, especially the polemical writings, he showed how analogies are
gathered together and weighed and how to obtain the criterion of cer-
tainty from their aggregation, or, better, their approximation to identity.
He taught how to divide fields of study and set their boundaries, avoid-
ing the error of his age, which chased after encyclopedias and fantastic
explanations of all creation.
Galileo did not fail on that account to rise to the investigation of
universal truths and the final synthesis of his astounding theories. By
329
carefully connecting experience with reason, he always strove to put his

findings into scientific form … He did not refrain from sharp criticisms
when the speculators egregiously abused the principle of final causes,
and he noted how risky it is to define them. To him it seemed an espe-
cially strange and laughable ambition for humans to impose on the uni-
verse their peculiar notions of what is beautiful, good, perfect, and so
on.31 Only a careless reader of his works could not easily be convinced
of his enormous depth in the demonstrative method, his great skill in
deriving conclusions from arguments so that they correspond precisely
to the import of the premises … It would have been much more just and
reasonable, then, if Galileo had been able to offer that famous observa-
tion of Bacon’s – that if the empirical method were finally married to the
rational, human minds would agree in peace.32
5. Under these rules Galileo set forth the natural method, whose foun-
dations he believed to be no longer in dispute … He taught an applica-
tion of the rules of method that was already so complete that no one in
any period has ever used a better one. And in the art of coordinating
observation, experience, and reason, what his school showed it could
do – whether in analytic insight and accuracy or in breadth and depth
of synthetic outlook – we find unequalled by any modern researcher …
Galileo thought it a piece of wisdom required by his times not to go
beyond the physical phenomena, seeing that intellectual conditions
were not yet favourable enough to risk the thickets of debate on rational-
ist teachings. He had long discussions about this with Hobbes, however,
who came to Florence specifically to hear what the venerable old sage
had to say.33 And although he advised Hobbes on the method that he
should follow in order to bring speculative theory close to geometric
proof, Hobbes then mixed hypotheses with inductions and made inquir-
ies into the natural history of the mind that were too simple.
6. In this way our Italian ancestors brought the reorganization of human

thought to an end. Campanella, Leonardo, Galileo, and others men-
tioned above really came upon a field quite well prepared to nourish the
seed that was cast there. Actually, it is no small wonder to observe that a
positive philosophy and a clear experimental method have always been
suited to the Italian character. This circumstance alone prevented Pla-
tonic ideas from being able to root deeply and firmly in the peninsula,
for if the gentle and elevated nature of the Italians brought them near
to the prince of rationalists, the very strict nature of their judgment drew
them away from him …
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On the other hand, two things especially have worked among us to

keep Aristotle’s authority so lively and persistent: one was that he located
the original source of all knowledge in the facts of experience; the other
was his statement that universals are all formed by induction. Patrizi,
desirous of seducing Italy with Platonic rationalism, therefore hastened
to announce that he intended to ascend to the region of ideas by induc-
tion and experiment.34 And we have seen Giordano Bruno, that rash
dogmatizer, often yielding to laws of induction and looking among facts
of inner sense for the experimental data of his ontological propositions.
This is why no one in this first revival of every sector of knowledge want-
ed to restore the logic of Zeno and Proclus, as the Cartesians did, and
to proclaim it the only true path of science. Everyone kept more or less
strictly to the art of experiment and induction, which, while being debat-
ed by rationalist philosophers and practised in Leonardo’s physics and
by others mentioned above, was also introduced into political and his-
torical topics with subtle and insuperable genius by Nicolò Machiavelli.
Chapter VIII: From Bacon to Descartes
1. In what we have been saying up to this point, we have no desire to

diminish the glory of René Descartes and Bacon of Verulam, recognizing
that our country’s honour must not grow by larceny nor by any invidi-
ous craft. In the histories of all peoples, one finds few as great as Bacon
and Descartes. Our only contention is that in their teachings on method
they did not anticipate or instruct the Italians, and that in this regard the
Italian doctrine, promoted by Valla, Nizolio, Aconcio, Erizzo, and Cam-
panella and then perfected by Leonardo and Galileo, also surpasses the
teachings of Bacon and René Descartes in completeness and utility. In
fact, as far as priority in time is concerned, one need only compare the
dates and the publications of their books, and one will see, for example,
that Descartes issued his work On Method when Galileo was nearly worn
out and that Bacon published the New Organon many years after Galileo’s
writings were widespread, after his discoveries had been made public
and his following was long since established in many places. And while
the whole world talked about Galileo’s results, Bacon’s works and reputa-
tion did not reach beyond the shores of his island for a long time.35
The New Organon and the book On the Value of the Sciences obviously
contain new, important, and productive ideas on the workings of minds
and especially on the art of induction.36 The other parts of method lay
idle, either not discussed or not organized. But the tables that Bacon
proposed, from which facts are to be well observed and collated, become
331
so perplexing that no scientist has thought them worth using, and …

the excessive abstraction and uncertainty of his principles greatly reduce
their effectiveness …
2. Once Bacon got down to dealing with a universal method, it was prop-
er for him to follow the trail of psychological experience. On the other
hand, how could he believe that a first philosophy was not necessary
once he set out to collect and organize human knowledge and to inves-
tigate the highest unity? In fact, the doctrine that he mentions in the
third book of De augmentis, and wants to call a first science, has nothing
to do with the highest universals nor with the common basis of all cogni-
tions …37 Hence, Bacon is to be judged either as a practical person or as
a theorist. If he is practical, who could rank him ahead of Galileo or even
as his equal? If he is theoretical, we would say that he understood neither
the nature nor the importance of certain principles that must have been
known to Italian philosophers before him and subordinated to the laws
of natural method.
3. As for Descartes, and as far as the direction of the mind is concerned,

it is quite right to praise him for recounting the detailed story of his
thoughts and for the four rules in which he wants to collect and enclose
the whole art of method. Because of their excessive abstraction, however,
and because they might include too much, none of them is defined as it
should be. In fact, he and his school adapted these rules to geometrical
method, whereas others might adapt them just as well to experimen-
tal induction. When he made his next move, Descartes quickly aban-
doned inquiry into facts and could never get back to it again. This was
the reason why the schools reinvented many vices of the old philoso-
phy, as when they disdained research into particular phenomena and
asked metaphysical questions about their apparent acquaintance with
what transcends every path of science … Some credit Descartes with the
high honour of abolishing the tyrannical rule of authority; with putting
methodical doubt on guard against every mental bias; with beginning
philosophy where it must and can begin – namely, from the certainty
of inner sense; with destroying the illicit principle of final causes; and
finally with discovering the subjective nature of the secondary qualities
of matter. But we have found that all these things were discovered first
by our Italian ancestors.
4. Campanella’s maxims, both on method and on rational philosophy,
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Mamiani, Renewal
lay scattered throughout his voluminous works, expressed in a dry and

excessively professorial style, encumbered with endless discussions of
Peripatetic dogmas and scholastic subtleties – two things that he would
rather refute than omit. Descartes, on the other hand, coming after
the Italians, found readers ready to applaud his wish to learn nothing
from the ancients or the moderns (more pretence than reality) but to
derive all knowledge from his own thought. It also delighted everyone
to hear him speaking about the deepest problems in plain and pleasant
language, without scholastic pettiness and as if he were involved in social
conversation. His arguments were mostly quite successful; his principles
were few, clear, and simple; all the gears in his machine were intricately
connected and very well balanced. It was especially delightful to have
– or to think one had – the key to all knowledge, all difficulty, and all
mystery in a single book, and to hear it said that studying the Latins and
Greeks was of no value, statements that gratified human curiosity and
human laziness at the same time. Delightful to the fantasy, finally, was a
fine new system of the created universe, written with a geometer’s pen
and so elegantly organized that it seemed truly to master the world. All
this makes it easy to understand how Descartes maintained so grand a
reputation and lined the whole family of philosophers up behind his
views.
5. In England and France, Descartes and Bacon initiated new and pro-
found theoretical inquiries that were dying out in Italy during the same
period. Bruno, Ruggeri, and Vanini died at the stake; Pomponazzi barely
escaped the executioner; Campanella spent twenty-seven years in prison
and was tortured seven times; others were persecuted and scattered. Thus
the noble course of Italian philosophy fell into decline, first the rational,
then the natural, since very few of Galileo’s disciples escaped the poverty,
worry, and mistreatment to which their master was subjected.
Chapter IX: A New Italian School
1. As we thus examine the histories of variation in knowledge, it seems

quite obvious to us that it was Italians who set about reorganizing the wis-
dom of civilized nations, completely restoring the natural method and
carefully laying the foundations of philosophical knowledge. Although
this first effort eventually spread and strengthened its maxims through
the work of the new Italian academies and the cooperation of foreign
societies, things nonetheless went badly for good philosophical method,
333
which had hardly seemed to emerge when it was blocked by the mass of
persecutions and then contradicted again by the bad habits of Cartesian
philosophy.
When we think carefully about these events and make frequent com-
parisons with modern times, we reach the following conclusion: namely,
that the good to be done in every domain of theoretical inquiry would
be quick, extensive, and admirable if a new Italian school could be estab-
lished and if its central task were to pick up the thread of the old abstract
teachings, along with those whose main intent and primary work was to
establish the best philosophical method by carefully adapting the natural
method to the conditions proper to the nature of those teachings – max-
ims for the concerns of first philosophy. For such an enterprise, given
what we have already written, this seems the sole and unique propaedeu-
tic capable of easing the endless discord among systems and bringing
philosophy into any definite and positive state as a science.
We would say that a school must be created, because, in our view, only
the collective activity of many thinkers can work to maintain the author-
ity of secure principles and practices, even when their value can be meas-
ured quickly and confidently from the abundance and variety of their
results. The Italians also believed this when they set the first example and
taught how to unite the strengths of individual minds and multiply them
by mutual influence and by setting definite goals and definite common
standards. Thus arose Telesio’s academy and the one that Porta founded
in Naples; Leonardo’s in Milan and the Platonic group at the Medici
court; also Pomponazzi’s, larger but more secretive; and then the Lincei
in Rome and the Cimento in Florence – and everyone knows what the
civilized world owes these last two for having reconstructed experimental
research.
In this framework, therefore, let us eagerly desire and appeal for a
renewal of the ancestral Italian philosophy, not because we believe there
is no philosophy in our fair land today or that it never follows the foot-
steps of our ancestors. Indeed, it greatly delights our hearts to see it
flourish again – noble, chaste, judicious, and very careful – especially in
the hands of the distinguished Pasquale Galluppi, who deserves to inher-
it all the fame of the thinkers of Cosenza and to propagate the wisdom of
Vico and Genovesi. But what would make us think it impossible today to
renew all the glory of the ancestral Italian school and retake the leader-
ship in theoretical inquiry that we held throughout the whole sixteenth
century, without contest and beyond dispute – even in the judgment of
foreigners? If from one perspective we see a long era of misfortune and
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Mamiani, Renewal
humiliation, from another we recall that nature’s laws are immutable

and that nature has made Italy the happy fatherland of the wisest of
nations …
Chapter XVII: Various Contemporary Philosophies in Other Countries
1. If what we said in opening this book was true, that all the mistakes
of modern philosophy come mainly from errors of method, we should,
after examining the systems most celebrated in our day, find them more
or less out of line with the rules described above. And this seems to be
the case. In keeping with our customary brevity, we shall confirm this
finding with a few selected examples …
2. If we begin to examine our topic in light of the tendencies of modern

theoretical studies, we will see that some philosophers set aside philoso-
phy’s right and proper purpose, which is to complete the knowledge
natural to our being. They then proceed straight to inquiring about pri-
mal knowledge, having begun with abstractions and keeping them cease-
lessly in play. If we turn our attention in the other direction and look at
the school that takes its name from Locke, we will notice that it seems to
increase philosophy’s heritage abundantly, as far as the mind’s empirical
history is concerned. While putting ordinary experience to use, however,
like any other inquiry into nature, this school all but ignores any effort
at investigating first truths. It thus falls unaware into a vicious circle of
argument as it strives to explain many higher truths by other basic and
apodictic principles of common sense for which it supplies no proof.
Both sects, then, Lockeans and rationalists, have made the same mis-
take, preferring to dogmatize and not waiting for research on the mind
to be completed. Thus we may hear the rationalists announcing with
axiomatic confidence that some ideas and some judgments are naturally
innate. And on the other hand we hear the sensists countering with an
axiom of their own, which is that there is no idea or judgment inside
the mind that does not come from the senses. Amidst opposing claims
this remains certain, that neither of the two sects has properly grasped
the empirical history of the understanding. Barely inside the doorway of
psychology, they have claimed to reach a synthetic principle that would
describe the essence and origin of all thought.
But it gets worse: the two sects, infatuated with their dogmatic princi-
ple, often lose the results of subsequent experience, wishing to force the
phenomena to fit the principle, not the principle to fit the phenomena.
335
The Lockeans, for example, once they have found nothing in a sequence
of phenomena to show an apodictic causal connection among them,
immediately announce – in keeping with pre-established dogma – that
the causal principle is the child of habit and of the constant association
of particular ideas. The rationalists, on the contrary, having barely noted
the same fact, rush straight to their favourite rule, their belief that the
highest principles of reason are all transcendent and innate.
Because of a related concern, neither sect bothers much about care-
fully distinguishing the positive part of their work from the conjectural
part, which asks about the hidden origins of thought and the mental
history of the newborn. Lockeans start with the assumption of the tabula
rasa. Kant’s only starting point is pre-existing formative powers, but they
are also semi-hypothetical. So nothing proves that there are not notions
and concepts accompanying the formative powers, even in advance of all
experience. And even if this seems improbable, it is certainly not impos-
sible. True, the philosophers make up for their patchy analysis with a cer-
tain subtlety of argument and elevate their theoretical machinery into
absolutes and universals. We have always noted that Kant’s arguments
are incapable of proving the necessity of his categories. Locke’s argu-
ments are just as defective: they work magnificently against Descartes but
not against any assumption of ideas and judgments a priori.
3. Reid’s way is better. Like Locke and the old Italian school, he held
that the history of the mind – when it is deep, careful, and complete – is
the sum and substance of all speculative philosophy, which must nei-
ther begin with dogmas nor pursue them. Consequently, given his astute
sense of method, Reid thought it useful to cast doubt on many opinions
that were thought to be unassailable and to add substantially to the sum
of psychological facts. But he was less successful at sticking to experimen-
tal research on the mind and not making premature synthetic assump-
tions. He erred by proposing that the basis of every demonstration is
human consensus – good, solid evidence in itself as long as it depends
on other, prior evidence, but meaningless when it becomes the begin-
ning and end of every proof, since it is the very thing that requires proof.
Reid thus mistook the means for the end: common sense is a wonderful
tool for philosophy and an excellent place to start, but philosophy’s goal
is to produce an account, whenever there might be one, of the reasons
behind the axioms of common sense.
Other less patient spirits think they can begin philosophy on a
moment’s notice, leaving aside the natural history of the mind and cling-
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Mamiani, Renewal
ing to some ontological axiom. The result being what it is, impoverished
and unproductive, they keep padding it with broad and rash hypoth-
eses. And then there are others who have recognized the poverty of the
rationalist and sensist systems. But instead of indicting those systems for
their feeble analyses and returning to more exact research on the history
of the thought process, they have put the blame on the poverty of the
human faculties and have gone on to cultivate scepticism in some cases,
mysticism in others.
4. Defects of method exhibited in these doctrines and assumptions and

introduced with a great sense of certainty allowed their falsity to be made
evident only by the final consequences. The result was that all the par-
ticular views of the aforementioned philosophers decayed over time into
other views that were more and more vulnerable to the power of logical
analysis, thus better exposing the root malignancy. Kant undertook to
determine a priori the possibility, principles, and limits of all cognitions.
He nonetheless accepted as primitive truths, and not explainable, the fac-
ulties of the mind, the formative powers, sensible matter, and conscious-
ness. His disciples soon realized that a doctrine established and proved
a priori did not have to lead to many propositions that are revealed by
experience and thus share nature’s limitations and contingency. This
is why Fichte started from a loftier position and set out to prove (so he
thought) the actual origin of the faculties of the mind, of consciousness,
and of sensible matter. And that was not all. If the mind itself is not the
origin of things but is contingent and limited, it cannot provide a basis
for a theory that is the highest and truly necessary. Therefore, Schelling
and others with him took the leap of contemplating the absolute, with a
great deal of profitless fantasizing about what and where it is.
By contrast, Locke had written that the origin of all our thinking is
from the senses and from reflection. His disciples excluded reflection,
proving, in keeping with Lockean dogmas, that while it aggregates, seg-
regates, and distributes ideas, it by no means produces them. Locke had
also stated that bodies give rise to ideas in us by means of certain impulses.
From this his disciples derived a kind of mental dynamics and explained
psychology by means of actions and reactions inside the head. They iden-
tified thought as a secretion in the brain and correlated the power of the
faculties with the structure of the organs. Finding no noticeable differ-
ence between human and orangutan except in tissues of the trachea, they
proposed that the delicacy of those tissues had been the cause of invent-
ing language and hence of the whole perfectibility of the species.
337
Reid had classified certain judgments and instincts, which in humans

he claimed to be simultaneous, as innate and not acquired, and as
secure teachers of the truth, in keeping with the perennial testimony of
all mankind. Beattie and Oswald, students of Reid’s teaching, enlarged
the number of such instincts and judgments by showing that the great
majority of people, if not all, believe in them very firmly, and they added
that nature grants common sense not to all people, but rather to most.
Common sense must therefore be distinguished from common opinion,
the latter being quite uncertain, the former infallible.
5. This has been the subject of our thinking and writing from the day
when we began to look for the shameful reason why the field of phi-
losophy should be so savagely contested by opposing systems, while,
for more than three centuries, the populous family of physical and
natural scientists of every stripe lives happily with its harmonious prin-
ciples and thrives by seeking the truth as its vigour increases. Not many
years ago, that noble thinker, Victor Cousin, was proclaiming in France
that method is a topic of great urgency in the theoretical sciences, and
that he had noticed, corresponding to every basic transformation that
occurred in the sciences, a simultaneous change in method as well.
With this statement we emphatically agree, and we regard it as per-
haps the most useful and productive to have come out of France since
Condillac.
We have no hesitation in wanting this statement to get the attention
that it deserves and to be discussed by a great many different people,
which was the reason for writing and dedicating the first part of this
book. We believe, in fact, that we have shown modern philosophy to
be so remarkably contentious for two reasons: first, not being able to
supply all knowledge with a first philosophy which is open and clear
in its rules and arguments; second, and contrary to the example of all
current fields of human learning, not being able to stop producing
opposed and contradictory positions, so that scepticism wins again and
the fruit of long theoretical study is lost. Now as far as first philosophy
is concerned, this persistent inability to build on bases contested by no
one could have its cause in the weakness of the cognitive faculties. As
for the ever-recurring division of opinions, however, this is purely and
simply the result of a discrepancy in methods – inasmuch as we proved
this at the start. For this reason, then, the doctrine of method not only
has great weight in issues of theory, but also, in a sense, is their form
and essence.
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Mamiani, Renewal
Cousin thought that he had found a good way to bring peace to

all the different conflicting systems by proposing his eclecticism, in
which each of those systems gets part of the glory and keeps part of the
authority. To us, however, it seems that this procedure amounts to forc-
ing oneself to harmonize results by preserving discord among causes –
the causes being different ways of constructing theories so absolute and
so exclusive that to hope for agreement among them is to allow oneself
to believe that there is some middle term between ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ We
have therefore held to the only possible and effective device for quiet-
ing the turmoil and wrangling in the realm of philosophy: namely, we
have proclaimed that nature has taught just one method for produc-
ing all the sciences, and we have done so by showing the following: that
truth is one, and hence there is one sure and best way to achieve it;
that truth can be theoretical or practical, and so method must be able
to take either form; that empirical truth is always prior to the reflective
or theoretical, and therefore the empirical method must come before
the theoretical and doctrinal; and finally, since nature herself teaches
us the original truth, that it is the same with the first original method.
This, then, is how one must undertake any speculative study, just as the
natural philosophers have undertaken theirs, with wonderfully success-
ful results.
Next, we have affirmed that such a reorganization and application of
the natural method to any kind of abstract study rightly belongs to our
very dear country. For she it was that restored this method to health
in the schools of Leonardo and Galileo, having begun to apply it most
skilfully to abstract philosophy through the efforts of Nizolio, Aconcio,
Erizzo, Campanella, and other eminent figures.
Finally, we have proposed our own views on these topics, but we have
derived them from ancestral Italian sources, and in doing so we have
taken our start anew from maxims of the current French school. For the
French have declared that philosophical method consists entirely in the
complete observation of facts of consciousness, a truth that we believe
no sensible thinker will wish to contradict. The problem for the French
school, however, is to find the right and proper way suited to that type of
observation. For by natural necessity everyone makes observations with
the help and illumination of the highest principles of common sense.
But philosophy’s task is to give an account of those principles, or at least
to show that doing so is completely impossible, and neither can be done
with broad practical methods of observation. Hence, there can be little
or no definition of philosophical method as long as the type of obser-
339
vation specific to speculation goes undetermined. And to this task we

have given our special attention by seeking to solve the basic problem
with which we opened this book, expressing it in these words: to derive
from deep inquiry into philosophy’s content and purpose the correct
changes and practices that must govern the general doctrine of natural
method.
NOTES
1 Mamiani (1834) is the first edition; we have used Mamiani (1836); for Ros-
mini’s reply, see Rosmini (1836); also section 10 of the Introduction.
2 [a] De vera sapientia; [e] cf. Petrarca (1496).
3 Lorenzo Valla (1407−57), Ermolao Barbaro (1454−93), and Angelo
Poliziano (1454−94) were all humanists, but Pietro Pomponazzi
(1462−1525) was a philosopher (and an Aristotelian), like most of the
figures from this period named by Mamiani: see Copenhaver and Schmitt
(1992).
4 [a] De dialectica contra Aristotelem (Venice: 1499), book 3; [e] cf. Valla (c.
1497).
5 Mamiani may be thinking of the followers of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin
(1743−1803).
6 For Rudolf Agricola (1443−85), Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (1460−1536),
Juan Ginés de Sepulveda (1490−1573), see Copenhaver and Schmitt
(1992); Caspar Schoppe (1576−1649: Scioppius) was a convert to Catholi-
cism and an anti-Protestant (also anti-Jesuit) controversialist who wrote a
widely read Philosophical Grammar.
7 For Girolamo Cardano (1501−76), Andrea Cesalpino (1519−1603), Cesare
Cremonini (1550−1631), Francesco Patrizi (1529−97), Giulio Cesare
Vanini (1586−1619), and Jacopo Zabarella (1533−89), see Copenhaver and
Schmitt (1992).
8 Pierre Gassendi (1592−1655) turned to his lifelong project of recovering
ancient atomism when he decided that he had been preempted by Patrizi in
refuting Aristotle: Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992).
9 For Bernardino Telesio (1509−88), see Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992).
10 On Mario Nizolio (1488−1567), see Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992); Nizo-
lio (1674) is the edition by Leibniz mentioned just below.
11 Jacopo Aconcio (1492−1567) was a religious controversialist who also wrote
influentially on method in Aconcio (1558).
12 [e] Aconzio (1558): 13.
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Mamiani, Renewal
13 [e] Sebastiano Erizzo (1525−85) wrote on Plato, politics, poetry, medals,

and other subjects, including method: see Erizzo (1554): 49−51, 169−72.
14 [a] Brunus nolanus de umbris idearum, etc. (Paris: 1582); [e] Bruno (1582).
15 [a] De triplici minimo et mensura (Frankfurt: 1591), book 1, chap. 1; [e]
Bruno (1591).
16 [a] De progressu et lampade venatoria logicorum (Würtemburg: 1587); [e]
Bruno (1587).
17 [a] Philippi Mocenici universales institutiones, etc. (1588); Filippo Mocenigo,
Archbishop of Cyprus, was a patron of Patrizi; see Mocenigo (1588).
18 [a] Bernardini Telesii consentini de rerum natura, etc. (1565), part 1, in the
preface and elsewhere; [e] Telesio (1565); a 1588 edition of Telesio’s De
rerum natura is bound with the work by Mocenigo cited in n17 above.
19 [a] T. Campanellae de libris propriis et recta ratione studendi (Paris: 1642); [e]
Campanella (1642): 51−6.
20 [a] Prodromus philosophiae instaurandae, etc. (Frankfurt: 1617); [e] Campan-
ella (1617): 27−31.
21 [a] Universalis philosophiae, etc. (Paris: 1638), in the first part; and Philosophi-
ae rationalis et realis partes quinque, etc. (Paris: 1638), especially the logic; [e]
Campanella (1638a), (1638b).
22 [a] Discussionum peripateticorum (1571), in book 15 of the first volume; [e]
Patrizi (1571).
23 [a] Panaugiae libri 18; [e] Patrizi (1593).
24 [a] B. Venturi, Essai sur les ouvrages physico-mathématiques de Leonardo da Vinci
(Paris: 1797); [e] Venturi (1797).
25 For Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486−1535), Giambattista
Della Porta (1535−1615), and Girolamo Fracastoro (1470−1553), see
Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992); Bartolomeo Eustachi (1500−74),
Francesco Maurolico (1494−1575), Niccolò Tartaglia (1499−1557), and
Gabriele Fallopio (1523−62) worked in anatomy, astronomy, mathematics,
and medicine.
26 [a] Venturi, Memoria di Galileo (Modena: 1818), II, part 1; [e] Venturi
(1818−21).
27 Galileo (1623).
28 [a] Galileo, Opere (Padova: 1744); Delle macchie solari (Bologna: 1655); [e]
Galileo (1613), (1744).
29 [a] Lo Spettatore: Dialoghi di scienza nuova; and elsewhere; [e] Galileo (1638).
30 [a] Macchie lunari [!]; Discorso sulle comete; and elsewhere; [e] Galileo (1613),
(1619).
31 [a] Nunzio sidereo; [e] Galileo (1610).
32 [a] De augmentis scientiarum, preface; [e] Bacon (1624).
341
33 [a] Targioni, Notizie degli aggrandimenti delle scienze fisiche, in vol. 2; [e]
Targioni-Tozzetti (1780).
34 [a] Nova de universis philosophia in qua Aristotelica methodo, etc. (Ferrara:
1591); [e] Patrizi (1593).
35 [a] Cousin, Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie, in vol. 2; [e] Cousin (1829).
36 Bacon (1620), (1624).
37 Bacon (1624).
342
6
Bertrando Spaventa
The Character and Development of Italian

Philosophy from the Sixteenth Century
Until Our Time
Inaugural Address for Lectures on the History of Philosophy in the
University of Bologna, 18601
Gentlemen, the topic of my lectures for this year is the development of
Italian philosophy from the sixteenth century until our time.
To pick up again the sacred thread of our philosophical tradition; to
revive the consciousness of our free thought by studying our leading phi-
losophers; to search in philosophies of other nations for seeds received
from the forefathers of our philosophy and then given back to us in
new and better organized form; to understand this circulation of Italian
thought whose meaning we have mostly lost; to recognize this return of
our thought to itself in the great theoretical insight of our most recent
philosopher; to know, in short, what we were, what we are, and what we
ought to be in the movement of modern philosophy, not limbs isolated
and cut off, as it were, from the life of the world’s peoples, nor captives
bound to the triumphal chariot of a particular people, but a nation free
and equal in the community of nations – this, gentlemen, has always
been my life’s desire and pursuit.
And now that Italy has already accomplished a great part of its renew-
al, and, wholly united in a single purpose, awaits only the time and the
occasion to complete it, I have decided that to declare this plan whole-
heartedly, though not to carry it out entirely, would be the best way to
inaugurate this chair in a university as ancient and as rich in so many
Italian memories as your own. If it is true that nations, like people, also
have their own spirits, and, if the more capable those nations are, the
livelier is their consciousness of this spirit in all its manifestations, then,
if this consciousness is what makes up the true nationhood of a people, I
think it not useless to ask you to hear from me the history of our thought,
the deeds of our heroes – oftentimes martyrs, in fact – of the mind. The
philosophy of a people is not a sterile and abstract business for a few
individuals but the most complete expression of the power of a nation’s

genius.
I will not tell a precise and detailed story of all the systems that arose in
Italy after the Middle Ages. Let us leave this long, novel, and difficult task
for more peaceful times. Here, the main thing is to describe the great
moments of our philosophy by paying a call, as I would put it, at the most
glorious wayposts on the journey that our thought has taken over the
space of nearly four centuries, selecting only those principles and ideas
that have left an enduring mark on the events of history and have thus
become the heritage of European philosophy and have determined the
final form of Italian philosophy. For this purpose a few systems and a few
names are enough: Bruno in the sixteenth century; Campanella at the
start of the seventeenth century; Vico in the first half of the eighteenth
century; Galluppi, Rosmini, and Gioberti in our century. In so choosing,
let us not set other systems entirely apart and break the golden chain of
national tradition, for those other systems are imperfect and transient
forms that have meaning only in the greater systems that complete them.
By giving an account of the latter, we may also account implicitly for the
former insofar as they are true.
This is the case especially for those philosophical systems or endeav-
ours of the sixteenth century through which the Italian spirit strives to
overcome the Middle Ages. The whole period is the time of a new crea-
tion of the Spirit. But the original labour of thinking is somehow con-
cealed in the guise of old forms and movements in conflict. It still lacks
the common consciousness of unity in which different manifestations of
the understanding come together – consciousness, in other words, of the
new principle, which, having brought the Middle Ages to an end, had to
reveal itself as an organic whole in modern times.
Finally, after long exertions by so many different routes, all the power
of Italian theorizing seems almost exhausted and comes down to two
systems that are already knocking at the door of the new world. Their
inner motives are those that somehow form the two poles of modern
consciousness: namely, the real infinity of God and the spontaneity of
human thought. Italy, for a whole century after Bruno and Campanella,
envying the many triumphs of the special sciences, produced no other
original philosophical mind except Vico. At last, following the many imi-
tations, more or less ingenious, of foreign systems in the latter half of the
previous century and the beginning of our own, it was only with Gallup-
pi, Rosmini, and Gioberti that she arose again in a form worthy of her.
Those systems I will not describe at equal length because my main pur-
344
Spaventa, Italian Philosophy
pose is to understand the highest level to which theory has risen in Italy.
Only at this level do we see all our past in its true light, and all our future
as if in its seed. In my judgment, such is that lively, vast, and deep intui-
tion of the universe which – with all the contradictions that are more
apparent than real, perhaps, or, if they are real, are necessary and not
accidental – even Gioberti’s opponents admire so much in all his works.
Thus, all that I shall say of the other systems you should consider only a
general introduction to my account of this last one.
A common belief is that Gioberti is only Rosmini’s antithesis and thus
that the only undertaking worthy of our philosophical activity is to rec-
oncile them, to find a third system that accepts what truth there is in
both and rejects what is false – close to what has long been said about
Plato and Aristotle. This view is in some sense correct. However, taken
as a general criterion of the character of the two Italian systems and as
a rule for the future of our philosophy, it is no less false than the view
that treats Platonic idealism and ontologism (so-called) and Aristotelian
empiricism and psychologism as two equally imperfect and opposed
developments of the great Socratic tradition.
Just as the Aristotelian idea – since by now it is obvious to everyone
that Aristotle, like Plato, Rosmini, and Gioberti, also has his idea – is
the development and necessary completion of the Platonic (the latter
immobile and transcendent substantiality, the former absolute activity
immanent in things), so Gioberti’s intuition and idea contains in itself,
as its first moment, Rosmini’s intuition and idea. By this comparison,
however, note that I do not mean to affirm that our two thinkers relate to
one another in Italian philosophy as Plato and Aristotle relate in Greek
philosophy: that Rosmini is our Plato and Gioberti our Aristotle. Com-
parisons like this, often taken literally, explain nothing; on the contrary,
they frequently breed confusion. Others might say with equal justice that
Plato is the Greek Rosmini and Aristotle the Gioberti, and still one would
not really know anything about any of the four as they really were.
What I want to say is this: just as Aristotle is the more complete Socratic
and thus includes Socrates and Plato in himself, so the reconciliation
of Rosmini and Gioberti is not something that remains to be done but
was already done or at least undertaken by Gioberti himself; it is simply
a question of understanding this reconciliation well and making it bear
fruit. I do not deny that there is a side of Gioberti that appears to be
exactly the opposite of Rosmini; understood in this way, abstractly and
apart from his other features, this side of him for many represents all
of Gioberti. And then they say: ‘Rosmini’s principle is possible Being;
345
Gioberti’s is real Being; their common principle, therefore, is Being,’

which they view from the two opposed and hence partial perspectives of
possibility and reality. Let us combine the one with the other and thus
ascend to a higher concept, to the unity of the possible and the real, to
true Being, in other words.
To put it differently, the main point is to avoid identifying God with the
world. Now this identification is of two kinds, cosmological and ontologi-
cal. The former makes a single reality of God’s reality and the world’s;
the latter makes a single idea of their ideas. By following Gioberti, the
principle of real Being, one avoids the former, and one avoids the latter
by following Rosmini, the principle of possible or purely ideal Being.
The conclusion is that God and the world are not just really but also ide-
ally distinct and different.
The argument is correct, but the flaw is in the basis or common prin-
ciple of reconciliation, which is Being – pure object, in other words,
immobile and indifferent substance, nature or existence, clearly not
activity, thinking, understanding, and willing, personality or spirit.
Accordingly, once it is granted that reconciliation of the two opposites
has been achieved, the unity that results from them is itself an opposite
just because it is the Being that keeps outside of it the other one that is
true principle and true unity together – understanding. In this way, the
flaw in Greek philosophy repeats itself: pure ontologism, Being simply as
Being, sensible or intelligible, as the absolute principle of existence and
knowledge. It is not understood that this philosophy succumbs to the
blows of scepticism and expires in Neoplatonism, rather than reviving,
precisely because the mind has no longer found its final satisfaction in
the pure object, material or ideal, but has searched for something else of
a more human kind as the absolute – namely, the Spirit. The search for
God as Spirit – this is the meaning of the decline of ancient philosophy
and the rise of modern philosophy.
Now if the relationship between Rosmini and Gioberti were really as
described above, all the difference between them would be a question
only of more or less. Their common character would be an ideal objec-
tivism, like that of the Socratics, because Being, for both of them, is not
the sensible but the intelligible, and its reality is ideality itself; except that
for Rosmini the ideal side of Being would have the advantage, and for
Gioberti the real, and thus reconciliation would be found by balancing
the two sides. On this view, Gioberti’s importance in the history of Ital-
ian philosophy would be small or none. His whole worth would amount
to being the same, more or less, as Rosmini, or, to use a phrase made
346
famous by the great philosopher of Rovereto, he would be Rosmini by

excess or defect. And settling the great conflict between Rosminians and
Giobertians would be a matter of arithmetic.
But fortunately Gioberti is entirely different. His true excellence is
precisely the new and deeper concept of the real and therefore of the
ideal, the permanent elimination of the pure ontologism that his friends
and enemies – standing more on the letter of his teaching than on its
foundations and internal relations – believed he had resurrected. For
him true being is not pure being, pure unmediated being, but absolute
Relation. It is not the One pure and simple, but, to use his own language,
the Triune; not the point but the circle; not absolute rest but absolute
motion, which, as absolute and infinite relation with itself, is also abso-
lute rest. Thus he says: ‘Being is thinking; thinking is creating; creating
is revealing oneself.’ Where someone else says is, then, Gioberti says cre-
ates. Here, if I may say so, is the whole revolution in theory that Gioberti
achieved: Being is Creating.
In this way, the idea is no longer the pure Platonic Intelligible, object
and absolute substance, absolutely separate from the world and the
human intellect that contemplates it. It is not the Aristotelian God, who,
as pure and abstract thought, thinks only himself and not the world. It is
not the unconscious universal force that disperses and exhausts itself in
the manifold of its manifestations. But it is that for which to be is to think;
which does not think because it is but is because it thinks; which thinks all
that is thinkable and therefore all that there is; which thinks itself and the
other, and itself in the other; which creates by thinking, reveals itself by
creating, and, in revealing itself, does not vanish but abides and remakes
itself eternally the same as itself; which in this absolute equivalence does
not cancel its own manifestation, which it has posed or opposed to itself,
the natural world and the human, but from beforehand only cares for,
considers, and conceives those worlds eternally, and only in this infinite
preconception is there love, not blind force – absolute personality, not
pure individual; Spirit, not substance or simple nature.
The Spirit: this is the true unity of the real and ideal – the idea or the
universal, in other words. Since it is consciousness and personality, it is
and subsists; it is real and individual as universal. For the idea, any other
way of subsisting, whether as pure universal in itself (Plato’s poetic intel-
ligible) or as the universal immanent and subsistent only in the particu-
lar (the Aristotelian nature), is always either a fantastic reality or a reality
inadequate to ideality, a contracted and not actual ideality, in other
words. This perfect equivalence of real and ideal, or absolute transpar-
347
ency of the real, is found only in that whose Being is its self-knowing and
whose self-knowing is the root and foundation of all being.
Thus what Gioberti in his early works calls his ontologism is basically
nothing more than the true spiritualism. What he says to be present to
human intuition is not being simply as an object or as pure existence or
as unconscious totality of the universal determinations of existence; it is
God himself as absolute personality in the fullness of his power, intelli-
gence, and love, as Creator in the true sense of the term, as creative and
re-creative activity, in other words. He is not external, then, but within
us, and this inwardness is our true inwardness with ourselves precisely
because he is a self-aware personality. Without such inwardness, we, as
personality and awareness of ourselves, would not apprehend him as per-
sonality but only as existence.
It has been said that the ancient world, the Greek world, was beautiful
but lacked love. The cause of this defect is in the very essence of love,
which is two consciousnesses or personalities in one, without the one
cancelling the other but with the one preserved and nourished in the
other. The ancient world did not know love because it did not know
how to conceive of this presence of two in one, and, I would say, their
near identification without eliminating difference. This is possible only
by means of the Spirit and in the inwardness of the Spirit. Antiquity did
not know love because it did not know the Spirit.
Gioberti’s merit is to have included and summed up in his own sys-
tem not only Rosmini, and therefore Galluppi, but also Vico, likewise
Campanella and even Bruno. My bringing all these names together will
seem strange to you, especially when I say that our philosophy begins
with Bruno and ends with Gioberti. What connection can there possibly
be between these two philosophers? I have no wish to stir up old hatreds
here. You all know about Bruno’s unhappy death. In that other era I do
not know what might have been the fate of the author of the Protology, the
Philosophy of Revelation, and the Catholic Reform of the Church.2 But, whether
it is true or false that there may be a certain resemblance between the
two philosophers in some aspect of life, between their teachings there
appears to be no analogy.
Bruno was judged a godless and irreligious man and was burned alive
as such at Rome. Gioberti is celebrated in the public mind, if not by the
Index, as the most forceful defender in modern times of the free alliance
between faith and reason. And so he is, beyond doubt. Granted all that, I
openly affirm that what is great and immortal in the philosopher of Nola
– the concept of God’s real infinity and of divine revelation as nature –
348
lives again and becomes real only in Gioberti.3 To put this another way,
the usual verdict on Bruno needs to be reviewed and corrected. Luck-
ily we can now reconsider this judgment by freely studying the works
of our philosophers, all the more in that there is no question here of
inventing theories but only of making history speak. And the history of
human thought lies more in the writings of victims than in the verdicts
of persecutors.
To disclose my full intention to you, I must make known, as if by antici-
pation, the conclusion of my lectures by telling you about the notion that
I have formed for myself of the character and the development of our
philosophy.
Gentlemen, modern European civilization was born in great part from
that obscure and confused unity of different nations that bears the name
of the Middle Ages. This unity was the very idea of humanity, unknown
to the ancients and revealed by Christianity, even though at the time it
was not realized in its true form. The essence of this idea was the free
community of interests, opinions, feelings, and purposes of all peoples, a
community not possible in Greek and Latin culture because the basis of
that culture was the purely national state and so excluded any different
civilization. And this distinct culture, even though it aspired to embrace
the whole world of nations, could not really achieve unity except by
negating and absorbing every particular nationality in the abstract for-
malism of the Roman city. Humanity for the Greeks was nothing but
Hellenic nationality, and for the Romans only the universality of justice
and law. Rome may have been right, since the national cultures that it
rejected had in them nothing truly human – or Christian, we should say
– but were only natural. Without the Christian idea true humanity is not
possible.
The system of the Middle Ages was a different matter: justice, dignity,
human and social existence were not based on a given nationality as in
Greece nor on the universal city as in Rome. Their basis was the very
nature of man as man, the infinite value of his immortal soul, his inward
affinity and communion with God, in whose image and likeness he was
created and then re-created by redemption. Man’s law was God’s law
applied to the human race. But this unity was still abstract, confused, and
rather chaotic; only time and the perennial action of the Spirit could
cause the moral cosmos of nations to be born of it. It was the idea of
Christianity only in its crude, spontaneous, and primitive form, and it
had no foundation in concrete and living interests. The reason, gentle-
men, is that, like the complete community of a single people, the true
349
unity of peoples – the true existence of mankind, in other words, based

only on the existence, value, and free expression of the various lives of
the nations – consists only of the free and rational development of the
individuals who make it up.
Now the defect of that unity lay in being something entirely other-
worldly and external to what had to be united: the world, life, civil and
political institutions, the state in general, science and art, commerce and
industry – these were thought of as things without truth. As such, even
though they were the work of rational creatures, they could not become
a serious field of human action since they had no part of the eternal
and divine in them. The only serious issue for humanity was religion
as representation of the other life. So much did people believe in the
truth of the world that somehow they all expected to see it end with their
own eyes. Hence it happened that all human interests generally, not yet
permeated and moved internally by the idea that had to be the essence
of those interests, were left to their own devices, producing that state of
moral disorder and brutality that differs little from barbarism.
To achieve a true and concrete unity of peoples by forming them into
nations upon a common basis, which is the Christian idea itself, it was
necessary therefore to negate the unmediated unity of the Middle Ages
and thus the very principle that gave value to that idea. This principle
was the externality of the eternal and the divine – their existence beyond
worldly things, in other words, beyond the nationality of peoples itself,
and, in general, beyond the present and concrete life of mankind. I am
certainly not saying that Christian humanity was considered something
godless at that time; on the contrary, it was held to be sacred. But this
property belonged to it as to an abstract existence, a pure genus unreal-
ized in its species – which are the nations, precisely. Just as they did not
see that a person is not a true and real person without the concrete and
harmonious satisfaction of all his interests, so it was not understood that
humanity exists and is completely realized only through the nations.
Dante himself did not have a correct concept of mankind nor of the
nation. His perfect person was the believer; true philosophy was theolo-
gy; and Italy was the seat of the Holy Roman Empire. Thus the whole law
of humanity appeared to be concentrated in one power alone; the idea
of Roman universalism flourished again; and the only novelty was the
split between the two powers that claimed this universal monarchy and
the struggle between them. The system of the Middle Ages had its root
in an ideal principle, and therefore it could not be vanquished except
ideally. This victory was the result of a resurgence of science and letters,
350
of philologists and free philosophers, and in this resurgence the first

and highest laurels go to Italy.4 Yes, gentlemen, without this victory the
new world would have been impossible – it would have been impossible
to recognize human dignity in all spheres of life, impossible to shape the
peoples of Europe into national states. And Italy, still in combat for its
right to be a nation, is the very one to whom her sister nations most owe
their status.
The truth contained in the system that gave way, especially through
the work of Italian thinkers, was an indomitable aspiration for heaven,
the eternal, the divine. The falsity was to treat the phenomenon – or
rather all the goods that we prefer to call corporeal, worldly, or earthly
– only as a means or a ladder to climb, and, worse, not also as the seat of
that infinite for which they searched so ardently. It was necessary, then,
to make people understand that these goods also contain something of
the ideal and thus of the eternal.
Now for this purpose the new establishment of the State was not
enough, with its emerging independence from ecclesiastical power. In
ordinary awareness the State always appears as a temporal power that
governs only people’s external lives; the meaning that strives for eternity
is thought to be beyond the State’s sphere. In our time, too, the same
well-informed thinking ordinarily sees nothing more in the State than a
purely external arrangement for protecting the people’s common inter-
ests, or, for the most part, a physical force to make justice and equity
rule among them. True, even on this view of the State, the effort that we
make to submit the instincts and natural inclinations to the law of reason
does not fail to leave its traces in the course of time, both on the inner
thoughts of individuals and on the history of peoples. This gives rise to
a great work, a moral world, of which we are just small parts. And unless
one can deny this world an infinite value, it is clear that our ongoing
activity in the life of politics – our share of this work – also has something
of the eternal in it.
But on its own, gentlemen, philosophy is barely capable of grasping
this thought, and bringing it to public notice is quite difficult, if not
impossible. Still, beyond the State is a sphere of human activity where
even ordinary belief can foresee something beyond temporal events. Sci-
ence, literature, and the arts are purely spiritual activities, which, while
providing effectively for the education of the soul, are likewise routes by
which the soul returns to God and reunites with him. Thus they form a
kind of third power, and from now on people will also base their aims on
it. This belief was the true cause of the ruin of the Middle Ages. It came
351
to be understood that man and nature in general are not sin and noth-
ing more, an existence entirely abandoned by God, who can be reached
only in special and extraordinary ways. God exists not only in external
nature but in human consciousness itself, and man has the power to
raise himself to God and realize the divine ideal not only by represent-
ing it and through the vagaries of external worship but also by religious
feeling, by aesthetic understanding, by the practice of social life, and by
knowledge.
This faith in human ability and in nature’s living and divine reality
was the inner motive for the theories of all our philosophers: Telesio,
Pomponazzi, Cesalpino, your great townsman Achillini, Cremonini, Zab-
arella. But in this glorious phalanx of free thought the two greatest are
Bruno and Campanella, who surely mark two special directions in the
development of our thought from that time onward. Defining these dif-
ferent directions is the key to the history of our thought.
In Campanella it is as if there are two persons: the medieval man, the
Dominican, the disciple of St Thomas; and the new man with new aims
and instincts, who always hesitates to contradict the other person, mean-
ing only to reconcile this opposition between the new science – espe-
cially the understanding of nature – and the beliefs of the Church. As a
young man, then, he defended Telesio’s physics against the Aristotelians
of the day. But on the other hand, drawing on the religious piety that he
drank in with his mother’s milk, he seeks to inquire more accurately into
the relation between natural life and the supernatural.
He wants to reform philosophy and social conditions as well, but by
preserving – always promoting, in fact – respect for the Catholic Church
and religion. For peoples he allows progress, but this progress must be
aimed at a universal monarchy with the Pope at its head, at the extirpa-
tion of heresy, at the community of goods and women. He attributes
some importance to worldly affairs and to the State especially, and he
does not treat them as a mere nullity. On the other hand, the world
and the State for him contain nothing authentically divine and absolute,
and they have no real value except insofar as they serve the purposes
of the Church. The divine for Campanella is always the religious ele-
ment alone, and the true state is a church-lay State. He acknowledges
the value of sense and experience; indeed, he bases all of human and
natural science on the latter. As the foundation of all understanding he
posits consciousness of the self and the spontaneous activity of the mind,
so that we must admire him as the precursor of modern empiricism and
rationalism both, of Bacon and Locke and of Descartes. Despite all that,
352
natural science for him is not something divine and is based mainly on
the material soul more than on the immortal, whose sole object is the
religious idea and the world beyond. From this comes the dualism that
divides the natural from the supernatural throughout Campanella’s sys-
tem, and he does not know how to reconcile them.
He also maintains that nature needs to be studied because it is the
great book or volume of God, and he actually says that philosophy con-
sists of this reflection. This puts him in open opposition to the Middle
Ages that sought God outside of nature and outside human conscious-
ness itself. But at the same time he adds that creatures are no more than
images and vestiges of God; the world in general is a sort of statue of
God and nothing more; it is not an aspect of God’s life, and God in his
truth is absolutely outside of the world and exists without it. Therefore,
what makes us know the true God is religion alone and definitely not
philosophy, which for this reason is queen only of the natural sciences
and always the handmaid of theology.
But if philosophy, and, in general, all sciences based on the contem-
plation of nature and man do not make us know the truth that is God
himself, of what use are they? How can we justify the need for their exist-
ence, and, in general, why must we pass through this mutable and mate-
rial life on earth? Campanella replies that he knows nothing about it;
on the contrary, he says, on this topic even guesswork is risky. Thus, in
general, Campanella does not understand the necessity of the finite; he
does not know how to grasp the humanity, and, if I may say so, the world-
liness of God. The finite for him is a pure fact that cannot be explained.
From this, one sees that Campanella’s philosophy has both a theological
and a sceptical character. His scepticism lies in the belief that human
knowledge is not enough for everything because it is always limited and
incomplete. His theologism comes from the need for extraordinary
measures to come to the aid of reason. This second trait also belongs to
the scholastics of the Middle Ages, but the difference between them and
Campanella is precisely his scepticism because scholasticism was dog-
matic and theological without first having been sceptical. In the latter,
theologism is a beginning; in the former, a result.
This scepticism, which must be distinguished from the ancient kind,
is the new element in philosophy. Joined with the study of nature – pro-
duced by it, in fact – it takes various forms in various philosophies and
leads to various results. Thus in Cusanus it had already taken the name
of learned ignorance and served to prove the need for God’s word and
for faith. In Pomponazzi it comes out as opposition between sense and
353
intellect, experience and reason, the one limited but certain, the other
limited and uncertain, so that one must believe more in the former than
in the latter. The same opposition exists between natural knowledge and
supernatural: as philosophers we must follow the first, even when it con-
tradicts the second; as believers and children of the Church we must
stand on supernatural knowledge. Thus, the same sceptical tendency
that results in theological dogmatism for Campanella, for Pomponazzi
produces a separation, if not an opposition, between philosophy and
theology and the division of the human person into two, the thinker and
the believer. This separation becomes deeper in Telesio and others who
came later.
Anyone who thinks about modern philosophy recognizes this scepti-
cal element in all its systems, more or less. Even in absolute idealism,
which claims to know all truth, it manifests itself as consciousness of the
inability of finite understanding to grasp the essence of things, which is
then granted not to simple faith but to human thinking itself as reason
or dialectical and theoretical intellect.
Campanella’s significance in the history of our philosophy is as follows,
then. He is a free philosopher who trusts the senses, experience, and self-
consciousness, but he does not have the philosophical independence
even of Pomponazzi, Achillini, Cesalpino, and the philosophers of the
Paduan school – not to speak of Bruno. He is the least free of our free
philosophers. He is not a scholastic, and he is greater than Bruno insofar
as he seeks to base philosophy on the principle of self-consciousness, as
his master Telesio had based knowledge of nature on the senses. But in
his conclusions he agrees, more than one would think, with the content
of the hierarchical doctrines of the Middle Ages. He removes the shack-
les from science only to let it make new ones of its own and submit itself
freely to faith. In short, he is the philosopher of the Catholic restora-
tion after the Reformation. His goal was to reconcile the old world with
the new, scholasticism with free thought – an impossible exploit, at least
then. Gioberti undertakes the same feat two centuries later, but with a
much different attitude.
Bruno was a different person: a different spirit, a different mind. Cam-
panella, buried alive in the cause of liberty for twenty-seven years in those
pits they call prisons in Naples, bears up heroically to cruel torment
many times, writes the greater part of his many and voluminous works
threatened by torture, and at last by a pope’s favour sees the light of day
again to die old and at ease in Paris. Bruno, also a Dominican, leaves
the cloister as a young man; throws away his monk’s habit; goes wander-
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ing through Europe; visits France, England, and Germany, preaching his
free ideas at every stop, seeking peace everywhere but never finding it,
always unhappy with everything and everyone except one thing alone –
the truth. He cries out: ‘The university I dislike, the mob I despise, many
things leave me dissatisfied, and only one inspires my love; to that one I
freely subject myself, happy to suffer, rich in need, and living in death’;
‘My toil, torment, and agony is for love of this one alone.’5 Driven by fate,
he returns at last to Italy to be imprisoned by the Inquisition of Venice;
turned over to the Roman Office; interrogated, tortured, and burned.
They often say that truth is the greatest suffering in philosophy as well
as its greatest consolation. If this is so, I believe there is no one for whom
truth produced more suffering or more consolation than poor Bruno.
Was this the source of his enormous enthusiasm and that restless spirit
that seemed calm and quiet only when facing death? ‘In Bruno,’ writes
an historian of philosophy, ‘there is the elation of a great soul that senses
in itself the immanence of the Spirit and knows that the whole life of
thought consists in the unity of its being and of all beings. In the depth
of this awareness there is something resembling the sacred frenzy of a
bacchante, something that overflows itself in becoming its own object
and expressing so much richness.’6 And here is the whole difference
between Bruno and Campanella. For Campanella the universe is certain-
ly not a dead thing. All things live; they sense, in fact; and the universal
soul moves and nourishes them. But this life is only a shadow of the true
life; the source of all life is beyond it. One does not reach this source with
the intellect, which is always condemned to feed on water and mud. We
taste only some semblance of it by means of faith.
Bruno also allows this incomprehensible source to exist, or at least he
does not absolutely deny it. But in confirming it he reduces it to the tini-
est little point that causes no torment for the human mind because in
nature, in the universe and in the world – in other words, as Bruno puts
it, in that heavenly Amphitrite who is infinite begetting, a perfect image,
and likeness of the divine begetter – the mind, living, real and unfolded,
contemplates all the treasures that the point can conceal.7 Thus, the uni-
verse for Bruno is not only the statue of God but his infinite revelation;
not the tomb of dead divinity but the throne of living divinity; it is the
true and only life of God, in fact, because to live is to be revealed, and
one who begets, contemplates, and mirrors himself in his begetting is
revealed. Without the universe, God would be abstract infinity, not real
infinity. Bruno concedes the first to the affairs of the theologians. The
second he assigns to philosophers as their only and true God.
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Here is the point where one sees what truth there is in Bruno and what
is false. The scepticism that we usually see crucified as the enemy of eve-
rything good, is, when one reckons it up, often one of the most powerful
allies of faith and religion. The reason is that unless there were some-
thing to show us the limits and weaknesses of human understanding, we
would have no need to believe: everything would be as clear as the light
of day. Now scepticism, which begins after the Middle Ages with Cusanus
and continues with all philosophers after him, reduces to a mere appear-
ance in Bruno. Like Spinoza after him, whose true predecessor he was,
Bruno does not believe because he is not sceptical enough.
He is satisfied with the God in nature. Indeed, for him nature is God
himself in things, as their substance or identity and as absolute lack of
distinction between thought and extension, ideal and real, form and mat-
ter. The supersubstantial and incomprehensible God of the theologians
does not so much set a limit on understanding as show no regard for it.
Thus, if there is a defect or imperfection here, it lies more with God him-
self, as absolute and otherworldly principle, than with the understand-
ing, which cannot know God because as completely simple – as pure
unity without begetting, or, as Bruno also says, without making one thing
different from another – he is in no way knowable, not even for himself.8
The truth in Bruno’s teaching, therefore, is to have confirmed that
God cannot be known unless within him there is real distinction– unless
he manifests himself, in other words – and that nature is God’s revela-
tion. The false part is to have taken nature as a unique revelation, judg-
ing knowledge of God as nature to be the final and most complete level
of knowledge. Since Bruno did not doubt the truth of this knowledge
and did not use scepticism to see the flaw in it, he fell into the following
contradiction. God (the Substance) does not know himself, and inas-
much as man (the mode of the Substance) knows God, man is superior
to God, the mode to the substance, because the knower is superior to
the known that does not know itself. To resolve this contradiction, one
would need to say either that knowledge has no importance and hence
that conscience, freedom, and personality are mere appearance, or that,
if knowledge has value, God is not simply substance and nature.
God as manifest is surely more real than God as a closed unity. But is
there no other? Is there not a God that knows himself, whose essence, in
fact, is self-knowing, and, just because he is known to himself, man knows
him, knows himself, and knows the world? Briefly, what Bruno lacks is
understanding of real divine revelation, of God as Spirit, in other words.
Because of this he has no faith, nor indeed any religion, since where the
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Spirit is lacking, so are both of these. But it is a different matter to say

that Bruno was a man without God. On the contrary, God is everything
for him and in everything, and if there is a defect here, it is in annihilat-
ing everything in God, including the human personality itself. The error
is just an incomplete idea of God, recognizing only one side of his real
essence. Speaking philosophically, at any rate, this side is worth more
than the abstract and empty God of the scholastics.
To be fair to Bruno, one must also note that it would not take much
for him to rise to the true concept of God and man. Speaking of God,
he calls him the highest individuality, the absolute monad, and in the
monad he locates true Being.9 But the essence of his monad is not con-
scious knowledge, not the representation of multiplicity in unity, not the
one that returns and possesses itself in its differences, but the one, the
Minimum, that dissolves and exhausts itself by multiplying, by becoming
Maximum, in other words. He cannot grasp the unity of Minimum and
Maximum that would be the true and perfect Individual.
With Bruno and Campanella in place, the route that modern philoso-
phy must follow is already set: in one direction, the autonomy of the
Spirit as awareness of the self and of things, as intellect and sense; in the
other, God, not as an empty name but as a real infinity living in the world.
The Spirit has come so far that it no longer wants to know about a God
– about a truth, in other words – of which one can say only that there is
nothing to say. It wants a truth that can not only be thought but also felt
as an object of experience. Campanella’s principle – ‘The most certain
first principle is to be and to know’; ‘Conscious knowledge is being’;
‘Knowledge of oneself is one’s being’ – becomes ‘I think, therefore I
am’ in Descartes. His ‘Sensing is knowing’ becomes perception in Bacon
and Locke, the sole source of all knowledge.10 Bruno’s God-as-nature
becomes Spinoza’s God-as-Substance-and-Cause. The consequences that
followed from Cartesian intellectualism and Locke’s empiricism are well
known. The first led directly to Spinoza’s pantheism, the second to the
French materialism of the last century.
Leibniz rose up to combat empiricism and Spinozism. Reproducing
and perfecting the intellectualism of Campanella and Descartes and the
monadism of Bruno, he opposes the innate intellect to the tabula rasa; to
Substance without will and intelligence, he opposes the monad as abso-
lute representation of the whole manifold in the unity of thought; to
the necessary and fated chain of causes and effects, the pre-established
harmony; to existence as a simple modification of universal being – as a
pure particular thing – the ideal universality contained in the individual-
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ity of consciousness; to extension as a divine attribute equal and parallel

to thought, space as mere phenomenon of the idea. This polemic, if it
succeeded against pantheism, still lacked the strength to block the devel-
opment of empiricism and its degeneration into materialism. On the
other hand, with his incomplete concept of the monad, or, to put it more
precisely, of the Spirit, Leibniz helped replace Bruno’s and Spinoza’s
God-as-Substance-and-Nature with something that differed little from
the abstract God of the scholastics, thus contributing to the stubborn
disregard for the true and living side of Spinozism.
Leibniz foresaw the true problem of modern philosophy, the mystery
in which all the mysteries are summed up. For him this mystery was not
nature but the Spirit; if the Spirit were understood, everything would be
understood. But he himself conceived the Spirit as a natural entity, as
being, since, even while restoring its essence to ideality, he still treated
this ideality as merely unmediated and definitely not as its own product
from itself, as the development or energy that overcomes and idealizes
the real. The Leibnizian monad became a pure thing in the hands of
Wolff, and then people were heard to speak not only of material things
but of spiritual things, and of the first and highest thing, which is God
himself. The soul became a simple thing opposed to and different from
another composite thing that is the body, and God became a completely
simple thing above, beyond, and absolutely different from all things.11
Once Spinozism came to be abhorred as contrary to divine and human
personhood, and Leibniz’s monadism was transformed into the atomism
of pure being, which was no match for the strength that empiricism drew
from the life of nature, how could one think about the world, man, and
God? The world was thought of mechanically and explained by purely
mechanical laws. It was the age of natural science and mathematics; eve-
rything was calculated, weighed, and measured. Man was thought to be
either pure will, pure being for himself, unbound by any connection
with other beings, or a purely natural being and a force operating natu-
rally. In the human world, then, in the world that is man’s proper busi-
ness, either there seemed to be no law, because there is no law where
will rules alone, or the law was just the law of nature, and the life of
nations and humanity – history – was a mechanism like the law of nature.
Accordingly, the State emerged on its own from the will of individuals by
means of contracts, and language arose in the same way from a kind of
convention. On the other hand, there were those who said that the will-
ing also wills by a natural law, as water falls, fire burns, and so on.
In short, it appeared that the world, natural and human, had really
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been abandoned by God. God had made the world, but God was not at
all visible in the world. And in truth they had reduced God – when they
did not say that he was the same as matter – to what they could do with-
out. The world looked to itself and went on its way like a watch wound
up for eternity. Plainly, to escape from such degradation it was obviously
necessary to deny both the abstract monotheism that opposed a mate-
rialism no less abstract, as well as the naturalism of Bruno and Spinoza,
and to take from this a theoretical concept of God that would be neither
pure Being nor merely Nature. This could not be done without denying
empiricism and intellectualism at the same time, and making philoso-
phy’s problem not unconscious reality – the pure object, Being, whether
God, soul, or nature – but conscious reality, conscious knowledge, the
Spirit. This problem is the real meaning of all German philosophy –
psychological in appearance, metaphysical at its core, as in fact it shows
itself to be in its most recent phase.
In the first half of the last century, when the damage was not so serious,
the only God that everyone was looking for in the universe and in mankind
was still just nature, since man himself was considered a natural being.
Then, as if foreseeing where things were headed, one person turned up to
claim that he had discovered a New Science. Was it empty boasting, or rather
an insight anticipating what we in our current century know to be the real
problem of philosophy? ‘Philosophers until now,’ he said,
have contemplated God only in the order of natural affairs. Rising higher, I
contemplate in God the world of human minds, which is the metaphysical
world, in order to demonstrate Providence in the world of human souls,
which is the civil world or the world of nations. Contemplating God only
through the natural order – inasmuch as he has given existence naturally to
things and people, in other words, and naturally preserves it – philosophers
have demonstrated only one part or attribute of his providence. Through
the part that most belongs to human beings, whose nature has this primary
property of being social, I shall contemplate God as provident in moral
political affairs or in the civil customs by which nations have come into the
world and are preserved.
And this new and higher contemplation is possible because this civil
world has certainly been made by humans; hence its principles can and
must be rediscovered within the modifications of our very own human
mind. It must amaze us that all philosophers strive to pursue the science
of this natural world, whose science, because the Deity made it, he alone
knows. But they neglect to think about this world of nations, whose science,
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because humans have made it, humans can pursue. This oddity has resulted
from the weakness of the human mind, which, remaining immersed and
entombed in the body, is inclined naturally to sense bodily things, while to
understand itself too much strength and effort is needed.
And yet inasmuch as man becomes almost like God, and this science is
of a kind truly divine, to that extent man himself has made the world that
he wants to contemplate with this science, since in God knowing and mak-
ing are one and the same, and man alone participates in this divine nature.
The difference between man and God is that originally man has made this
world of his without knowing what he has made – believing, in fact, that he
has done just the opposite.
And, in a way, this is a kindly cunning on the part of Providence, which,
without force of laws, but by making use of man’s own customs – whose
practices are as free of all force as man is to celebrate their nature – as a
mind different from and at times contrary and always superior to the par-
ticular and limited ends that humans have proposed for themselves, makes
them the means to serve larger ends and uses them always to preserve the
human race. Thus, men want to act on their animal lust and abandon their
offspring, and from this they produce the chaste state of matrimony from
which families arise; the Fathers want to exercise unrestrained paternal
power over their clients, and cities arise; the nobles want to abuse lordly
liberty over the common people, and they become servants of the laws that
make popular liberty, and so on.
What did all this was Mind, however, because people did it with intel-
ligence; it was not Fate, because they did it by choice; not Chance, because
the same results come perpetually from the same actions. This Mind or
Providence is the unity of the Spirit that informs and gives life to this world
of nations.12
With these words, which I have collected faithfully from the whole of
the New Science, Vico posed a new problem, a new view of man, the world,
and God. Until that time, man had been viewed as a natural being, as a
pure individual, studied only in those abstract, common, and general
qualities that he had brought with him from birth. Nature was viewed
as a whole unto itself and as having its real meaning only in itself; some
made it derive from God, but no one recognized it as a means to a higher
end. God was viewed only as the author of nature. The human world
appeared either as part of the natural world or as the pure product of
man’s will.
Vico wants to find a new metaphysics, a metaphysics of the human
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mind that proceeds according to the history of human ideas, not of

those ideas that result from contemplating the abstract human psyche
– from abstract intellect and abstract sense, in other words, as when phi-
losophers search for the origin of the ideas of space, time, substance,
cause, and such things – but of those ideas contemplated in God as the
Providence or Mind or Spirit that informs and gives life to the world of
nations. The ideas that philosophers studied up to that time were the
general determinations of Being, of the natural and the spiritual. They
were human only inasmuch as they could be thought by a human, but
they were neither human nor even natural as properly representing and
defining humanity and nature, either in their abstract existence or in
their concrete life.
When this being – the person, the plant, the stone, for example – is said
to be substance, cause, space, time, and so on, nothing is said that tells
what the person, the plant, the stone is in itself, but only what all beings
have in common as beings, not as real, concrete, determinate beings, that
is, but as beings in general, as an absolutely neutral average of all beings.
Human ideas, by contrast, are for Vico those that not only can be thought
by man, like any other idea, but also express the human essence – which
are this essence, in fact. They are not the abstract essence, as when one
says that man is sense, imagination, intellect, appetite, and will, and then
these faculties are described in detail, but the human essence as real, liv-
ing, developing, and becoming a true person, family, society, nation, peo-
ple, State, or, in general, history and humanity.
In truth, what acts in the world and makes the world human is not
that isolated abstract psyche and mere skeleton of the spiritual individ-
ual studied by psychologists, but man as belonging to his own family,
nation, or state at a given time and period of history – that psyche, in
other words, that could be called national and, since it is a unity that
informs all nations, universal as well. One example will do. Psychologists
study the movement of cognition from sense to intellect, and they call
this movement the life of the spirit. Their rule is that the mind does not
understand anything for which it has no basis in the senses. Vico studies
the sense and the intellect of the human race, of the Spirit as history,
and the moving from one to the other is the life of mankind. In this
way he shows that the poets at first had sensed as much about common
wisdom as the philosophers later understood about arcane wisdom, so
that the former group could be called the sense, the latter the intellect of
the human race.
Sense is the first life of the people – that level at which the people as
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whole is the poet who sees and does everything in a practical way: it is the
age of myths and false religions. Understanding comes when people are
reflective enough that every people knows what it is and what it wants.
And philosophy is the highest level of this reflection or the most com-
plete consciousness of the being of a people. This movement from sense
to intellect is a real movement, an internal development, and certainly
not merely adding one thing to another. The intellect exists already in
the sense, but only implicitly, and yet what moves the sense and gives it
life and consciousness is the intellect itself, because in the activity of the
sense the intellect makes itself available as its own material.
Vico’s real merit, then, is to have grasped this concept of the Spirit as
free development of itself and to have applied it to explain the human
world. Just as the intellect appears to produce itself from sense, while
really it is the intellect that has posited sense – or, to put it better, has
presupposed sense for itself – by positing itself as true and real intel-
lect, so also in the human world, in the true life of the Spirit, in history,
the universal intellect prepares its own materials in the spontaneous and
animal life of the various peoples, causing the common end to emerge
from particular ends, public life from private interests, marriage and the
family from lust, the city from the excesses of the Fathers, the laws from
abuse of lordly authority, and so on. This intellect is not an external
mover, and man is not a machine that realizes an end that is not its own.
But the universal end that man fulfills by satisfying his particular ends is
his own proper end, and he fulfills it freely because in doing so he cel-
ebrates, as Vico solemnly says, his own proper nature.13
The result of this new view of man and the human world is a new view
of the natural world and God himself. Just as sense has no meaning by
itself, but only as the material and infolding of the intellect, so nature
is nothing more than the cradle of the Spirit. It is a world upon which
another world must arise and develop. Likewise, God’s real infinity – his
Providence – consists not merely of his revelation as a natural system
of things but mainly of his revelation as a human world. In the former,
things are simply posited; in the latter, man on his own makes himself
what he truly is. The former corresponds to God as Being, the latter
to God as Spirit. Of the former, God is the only author; of the latter,
God and man are the authors, God as creator and man as co-creator, as
Gioberti would say, so that this highest creative activity of God as human
Providence is in itself divine and human at once, and for that reason it
is love. Thus, God’s infinity, purely natural in Bruno, became spiritual
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infinity in Vico. One was the negation, the other the affirmation of the
personhood of God and man.
After Vico, what should our philosophers have done? What they
should have done, in my view, was not to stop studying the human psy-
che, which was really the right path. But they should have studied it not
just by understanding its abstract existence with the specific purpose of
confirming the old metaphysics of Being, but by discovering the meta-
physics that Vico described as belonging to the human mind, and by
grasping human ideas instead of ideas merely thought by man. The
problem was to find a new metaphysics to serve as the foundation of the
new science – of the science of the Spirit, that is. This problem formed
the deepest motive of German philosophy: to grasp the Spirit not simply
as the soul but in the full reality of its manifestation – this is the meaning
of that philosophy.
Thus Kant studies the psyche as cognition and destroys the whole edi-
fice of the old metaphysics, which treated the soul, the world, and God as
mere objects. Fichte studies the psyche as pure consciousness of oneself,
and clearly he remakes the natural and human universe as an infinite
production of the I. Schelling studies the psyche as substantial reason
and as equivalent in its two equal and parallel manifestations of the ideal
and the real, reproducing and transfiguring the pantheism of Bruno and
Spinoza. Hegel studies the psyche as absolute Spirit, which, inasmuch
as it is infinite mediation or relation of itself to itself, is presupposed to
itself as pure ideal, as pure real, through its being posited as actual unity
of the ideal and the real. Hence Hegel’s claim to have put a new meta-
physics in place of the one that Kant destroyed, a metaphysics identical
to logic, whose first principle is not Being but thinking as absolute – the
human Idea, in other words, as Vico calls it, in its greatest abstraction
and as its own absolute beginning.14
Our philosophers, by contrast, saw nothing in the new philosophy but
a problem of psychology, not only the minor figures but also Galluppi,
Mamiani, and even Rosmini. Rather than using their psychological stud-
ies to move on to the new metaphysics, they employed them either to
prop up the old one or negate it entirely without putting anything else
in its place. On the whole they did not see that the new psychological
research was not only incompatible with the old metaphysics but that this
research led necessarily to a new metaphysics, and they tore down only to
build anew. Therefore they fought the critical philosophy because they
thought it was the absolute negation of all metaphysics, when it was only
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the negation of the metaphysics that had run its course and planted the
seed of a new one.
Galluppi knows nothing of God but his existence and declares that
the claim to understand him is unworthy of his infinite essence. Rosmini
allows us only negative cognition of God, for which faith then makes up
the loss, so that the God of his philosophy does not much differ from the
Supreme Being of the previous century, which is recognizable neither in
nature nor in the mind. In all this where is the great idea that Vico had
brought to the world and left as a national heritage to Italian philoso-
phers? The services that Galluppi and Rosmini rendered to philosophy
are great, and I am not the last to acknowledge them. As psychologists
they have few equals, but this is their whole value. The negative is that
they grasp only the bare bones of what there is: man, the world, and God.
Of man they say only that he has one faculty or another, from which
comes one idea or another; of the world that it has one determination or
another of the most general kind, which is contingent, temporal, finite,
and so on; of God that he is, is Supreme Being, the most real being; they
cannot even say that he has created the world since their philosophy
comprehends being but not creating. This is all they say about anything.
But as for the life of man, the world, and God, as for their history – since
not only man but also nature and God have a history, and history in gen-
eral is just the divine thinking of creation – they have nothing to say, nor
can they say anything.
So this explains why neither Rosmini nor Galluppi has a philosophy of
the real, a philosophy of nature and the Spirit. They have logics, theories
of ideas, and psychologies. Rosmini also has a philosophy of law, but law
and psychology, as parts of the philosophy of Spirit, are a minor affair if
they are without a philosophy of art, language, history, and religion as
well. These parts are not found in their systems not because they lacked
the time to devise them but because there could be no place for them.
Where the principle is pure being, there can scarcely be an experimen-
tal psychology; were it otherwise, the inconsistency would be egregious.
In our philosophy, then, Galluppi, Mamiani, and Rosmini somehow
continue and complete that sceptical religious approach that we saw in
Campanella. For them, in order to establish the need for another source
of cognition, the chief aim of philosophy is to prove that reason cannot
know everything.
Gioberti’s merit is to have understood the complete vacuity of this
situation. When he utters the word nullism, it is not an expression of his
angry and emotional heart but of his shrewd and thoughtful mind, of
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the deep feeling that he had for the reality of things. Nullism is the abso-
lute unknowability of God. What corresponds to the absolute unknow-
ability of God is excluding any philosophy of the whole real life of the
world and man, of the whole positive dimension of nature and history,
and generally the whole life of creation. What remains is only pure idea
without fact, pure being without manifestation, pure essence without
activity. Everything positive is left to those who are not philosophers, to
their observation and experience. And since these people do not find
the idea at the bottom of their stills or in their microscopes, there is rea-
son to conclude that the living God, the God of nature and the human
race, is the God of faith, not of science.
Even in Gioberti there is a sceptical element. Although the Idea mani-
fests itself to the Spirit in full and absolute reality – as Creator, that is
– there is still a side of it that intuition cannot apprehend, the superintel-
ligible. Nonetheless, when it is seen that this side is reduced to something
quite small, as in Bruno, this real essence of the Idea, which is distinct
from the rational, is certainly not a totality of determinations different
from those that reason knows, but only the unity and nexus of those very
determinations. And if reason could recognize this nexus? If it could see
how one determination produces another? This is what other philoso-
phers claim, and Gioberti certainly has not shown that this is impossible.
Thus he reduces the mystery to its least expression, to a single point that
for some is perfectly clear. On the other hand, the superintelligible that
appears as a fixed and unbreachable limit in the first form of Gioberti’s
system shows itself to be something that keeps fading away as the system
develops. Intuition is no longer a limited potency, capable of knowing
only one side of the idea, but is an infinite potency to know, and in itself
all that is knowable, except that the act is always in time and in continu-
ous progress. Thus the difference between divine and human knowing is
only that between act and potency, but the content of the knowing is the
same. God is just the Idea of the world in its absolute state, and the world
is the Idea divided and multiplied.
Gioberti thus reproduces Bruno’s realism, but by completing and
resolving it in a higher principle, and on the other hand he establishes
the new metaphysics that Vico asked for. At the same time, he meets the
religious needs of Campanella, Galluppi, and Rosmini, not by separating
faith and knowledge but by reconciling them in the unity of the ideal sci-
ence. This science is based on the principle of creation – on the infinite
Idea as development of itself or as absolute relation to itself.
The Idea as pure Being posits the existent, and as existent it returns
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to Being. To put it differently, the Idea is threefold activity: pure and

indifferent activity; activity as pure manifestation and difference in itself;
activity as representation of the manifold and of real difference in the
unity of the spirit, conscious of itself. Actually, then, there are three crea-
tive cycles: the ontological cycle, the cosmological cycle, and the human
or spiritual cycle; in other words, the pre-natural, natural, and super-
natural. God as true God is not any of these cycles but their complete
unity, absolute and indivisible. And therefore he is not pure Being, as
the old metaphysics supposed; not pure nature, as Bruno and Spinoza
affirmed; not pure abstract Spirit, as ordinary monotheism affirms. But
he is Being, Nature, and Spirit, not as they are in their difference and
distinction, but as transfigured and identified in a unique subject. As
such, God is in everything and penetrates everything. Nothing is without
God, but nothing is God because he is the unique God, not as the One
opposed to the many, but as beginning and end of the many such that
none of the many is God because the many are not their own final end.
This immanence of God together with transcendence is what constitutes
Gioberti’s monotheism.
Gioberti reconciles experience to science, history to theory, erudition
to wisdom, and philology to philosophy by appropriating the principle
of creation for philosophy and making creative activity consist not only
of creating the existent – of positing nature, that is – but also of bring-
ing the existent back to Being – of developing the Spirit, that is – and
thereby also including the human as co-creative in this second divine
activity. But in so doing he imposes a serious obligation on philosophy,
whose very existence depends on fulfilling it. As the most perfect form
of the Spirit’s activity, as the highest level of the return of the existent to
Being, philosophy is the supreme science and truly divine. But it is above
everything and rules everything not as something isolated and placed
beyond all other activities and products of the Spirit, but as embracing
them all and using them as matter and sustenance for its own life.
Philosophy is not only the beginning but the final and general result
of all the special sciences. And if it is true that its object is the divine Idea
of creation and that this idea is manifest in all reality, both in nature and
in the spiritual world, philosophy must take the idea wherever it is found,
contemplate it, and reassemble the golden chain that connects and sus-
tains all creation. Forget a single link, and philosophy is no longer a real
and positive science but an empty abstraction. The disrepute into which
it has fallen in recent times, especially in those regions where it had
found its most ardent and impassioned practitioners, has no other cause
366
than this inclination to transcend the real and to be persuaded that theo-
retical insight into the universe can be had only by bare concepts. To
study the real and all the real, to know all the manifestations of nature
and history: this is the absolute state of every true philosophy.
Gentlemen, such is the concept that I have formed for myself of the
character and development of our philosophy. Let me summarize my
thoughts.
The character of our philosophy is just the same as that of all modern
philosophy, essentially different from the character of ancient philoso-
phy: it is the search for the first principle of everything not in absolute
objectivity, material or ideal, but in absolute mind. Its development is the
unfolding, the opposing, and ultimately the uniting of the two moments
of the absolute mind, objectivity and infinite subjectivity, the living real-
ity of nature, and the autonomy of human consciousness.
Informed by this deepest motive, our philosophy overcame that
abstract and unmediated unity of the Christian spirit, which, separated
from its two real moments of nature and humanity, appeared in the Mid-
dle Ages as empty and transcendent Being. From one side, then, came
Bruno’s naturalism, from the other Campanella’s psychologism; from
one side, in other words, immediate intuition of God as simple substance
and cause, from the other, consciousness as direct perception only of
the finite I and finite things. And given the conviction that knowing is
imperfect, given that sceptical approach by which truth – God himself
– was known by way of reasoning and only superficially, the true objects
of knowledge were only the world as mechanical aggregate of entities
and man either as pure will or as himself a mechanical entity. The final
consequence of this approach was, on the one hand, the absolute thing;
on the other, absolute matter as God.
Vico was the first to reconcile the necessity of nature with the free-
dom of the Spirit, but it was only prophecy, not science. He conceived of
God not just as natural order but as the moral order of the world, and
definitely not as two parallel and equally unmediated systems, so that
the moral order was nothing but the same natural order in a different
form (as in Spinozism). Instead, he conceived of God as the intellect
that disposes the natural order as matter and means for the moral order.
Thus, the absolute Prime was no longer substance but subject, not Being
but Mind. Along with this concept, Vico needed a new metaphysics that
would move on to human ideas, and therefore it would be based on the
study of human thinking. Hence the need for psychological research, or,
to put it better, for treating humans as knowing. But this treatment could
367
not be philosophy’s final goal nor a means of propping up the old meta-
physics; the only course for this approach was to build a new metaphysics
on the ruins of the old.
This task of destruction explains the sceptical character of the new
philosophy. Galluppi, Rosmini, and Mamiani represent this direction in
our philosophy after Vico: they are philosophers of knowledge. Superb
psychologists, they study the act of knowing in all its aspects. To this
achievement Mamiani adds the noble enterprise of recovering the philo-
sophical tradition of our ancestors in the Renovation and the Dialogues.15
Wanting real results from his research, he strives to reconcile his philo-
sophical notions with the dictates of ordinary common sense. But the
defect of these thinkers is having failed to see that the whole meaning of
psychology lay in the need for a new metaphysics, to replace the meta-
physics of Being with that of the Spirit.
Gioberti alone realized that psychology was a means, not an end; a
means of putting a new principle in place, certainly not reinforcing the
old one. This new principle he expresses in the Ideal Formula, which
is nothing other than a new concept of the spirit.16 From now on, the
Spirit’s essence is no longer the contemplation of Being but the knowl-
edge of the Spirit that creates the Spirit. Its privilege is to be able to
know its own creation. Thus the Spirit alone is no longer a natural Being,
because, as intuition of the creative act, it assists, as I shall put it, in its
own origin. Its being is the very act from which it sees itself being pro-
duced. This is the meaning of Gioberti’s insight: certainly not that the
newborn person knows God the Creator, but that the human intellect is
in itself the potency of this cognition – infinite potency that embraces
everything knowable and must be actualized infinitely.
To know itself absolutely: this is the goal of the Spirit; this knowing is
its absolute freedom. And this must also be the goal of our philosophy,
the problem for our future. So that this knowledge does not decay into
pure abstraction, however, it must presuppose the whole of reality, not
only the natural but the human as well, all the domains in which the
Spirit’s activity is manifest. If the Spirit is the final end and true mean-
ing of everything, one can say that the Spirit is in everything, and hence
the Spirit alone knows itself absolutely and is free when it knows every-
thing and knows itself in everything. This is the knowledge of the crea-
tive act, of the Spirit as immanent and at the same time transcendent in
all things.
In my judgment, then, gentlemen, the highest level of our thinking is
the philosophy of Gioberti. It alone corresponds to the spirit of the age.
368
It alone sums up and digests in itself all the most glorious moments of
Italian philosophy. It alone brings our philosophy back into the commu-
nal life of European philosophy. It alone can restore to Italian thought
that freedom and that glory that does justice to it as it becomes a nation-
al philosophy. Italy abounds in genius for theorizing; what is missing is
agreement of theory with experience.17 The first principle of this agree-
ment is in the system that will be the subject of these lectures.
You, young scholars, now have excellent support for succeeding in this
enterprise. In this University, risen to a new day, you can now freely learn
all those disciplines that are the basis of philosophy, not only the natu-
ral disciplines but history in all its branches, scholarship, and philology.
‘Freely,’ I said: and you must apply the first act of freedom to this same
system. There is no question of accepting it blindly in all its forms and
propositions, but of understanding, developing, and bringing to frui-
tion all the good that it contains. This system is more a beginning than a
system. You must shape the beginning into a new and complete system.
The beginning is divine creative activity – freedom, or the absolute law of
the Spirit. This freedom and this law you must grasp in its essence so that
with full consciousness you can make it effective in life as human beings,
as citizens, and as Italians.
NOTES
1 The text used here is Spaventa (1972a), I, 295−332.

2 Gioberti (1857−8), (1977), (1989).
3 The philosopher of Nola is Giordano Bruno.
4 In Spaventa’s day and later, the period called the ‘Renaissance’ in English
was often called Risorgimento (‘Resurgence’) in Italian. Burckhardt’s great
book, which appeared around the time when Spaventa gave his speech,
eventually changed this usage in Italy, where the Risorgimento is now the
period that Spaventa lived in.
5 Bruno (1958), I, 346−7.
6 Hegel (1996): 24.
7 Amphitrite, the hesitant bride and jealous wife of Poseidon, is an obscure
character in mythology whose name is sometimes just a synonym for
‘ocean.’ Describing the primeval chaos, Ovid (Metamorphoses 1.14) names
her in this way as not yet distinct from other things. In De gli eroici furori,
Bruno calls her ‘the source of all numbers, of all kinds, of all reasons which
is the monad, true essence of the being of all … From the monad which
369
is divinity proceeds this monad which is nature, the universe, the world’:
Bruno (1958), II, 1125.
8 Bruno (1958), I, 319−22.
9 Bruno (1958), I, 304−5, 332−3.
10 Campanella (1638a), 2.6.8.1, p. 59.
11 Christian Wolff (1679−1754) was a follower of Leibniz who influenced
Kant.
12 Spaventa takes this précis of Vico’s theory more or less verbatim from
several different sections of the New Science, as he says below: Vico (1977):
86−9, 96−7, 232, 244−5, 272, 592, 705−6.
13 Vico (1977): 87.
14 Vico (1977): 243−5, a key passage for Spaventa’s interpretation of Vico:
‘Setting out to find the nature of human affairs, this Science proceeds by
a rigorous analysis of human thoughts about the human necessities or
utilities of social life, which are the two enduring sources of the natural law
of the tribes … Hence … this Science is a history of human ideas, which
seems to be the basis on which the metaphysics of the human mind must
proceed. This queen of the sciences, following the rule that ‘sciences must
start where their material starts,’ began from the point when the first people
began to think as humans, certainly not when philosophers began to reflect
on human ideas … This Science … comes to describe an ideal eternal
history by which the histories of all nations run their course as they rise,
progress, stabilize, decline, and fall … In fact, we go on to claim that anyone
who meditates on this Science gives himself the narrative of this ideal eter-
nal history inasmuch as he makes it for himself, following the maxim ‘It had
to be, has to be, will have to be,’ since this world of nations was definitely
made by humans (which is the first indubitable principle posited above in
this work), and hence one must search for its mode within the modifica-
tions of our own human mind.’
15 Mamiani (1834), (1846).
16 See section 8 of the Introduction.
17 See section 1 of the Introduction for Bobbio’s restatement of this theme
nearly a century later.
370
7
Pasquale Villari
Positive Philosophy and Historical Method1
Today there is much talk about the positive philosophy and its applica-
tions to the natural, moral, and historical sciences. If you take a look at
periodicals that discuss new books or new scientific topics, you will find
the issue constantly debated. There are philosophers who attack and phi-
losophers who support the new doctrine, and it is noteworthy that the
most eminent authors have been joining the argument for some time.
In England it is Mr J.S. Mill who supports the discussion, along with
many others. In France, where the positive philosophy had its origin in
this century, those who have entered the fray as advocates are not only
students of the moral sciences, like Littré, Renan, Taine, Vacherot, and
others, but also some of the most illustrious students of the natural sci-
ences, such as Berthelot and the great physiologist Bernard.2 If we look
to Germany, on the other hand, the positive philosophy has found many
barriers to break because in some sense it was foreign merchandise that
came from France, and Germany greatly distrusts the French philosoph-
ical mind. Today those barriers have been surmounted, however, and
German positive philosophy, while it still has no leader, has countless dis-
tinguished followers. The works of Comte and Mill have been translated,
explained, attacked, and defended. The debate is at its most passionate,
and the positive philosophy has won great victories. I will mention no
names because the young writers are many; a few years ago, Büchner
wrote a book titled Science and Nature in which he listed the most impor-
tant of them.3
How did this philosophy come to be? What is its aim? I do not intend
to give its history because the subject would require too much effort. I
wish instead to define its nature and character. I will say only that the
first origins of this philosophy can be found in many great writers of
the past, both Italian and foreign, but that the first to give it a name,
describing it clearly in many publications and creating what amounts
to a body of doctrine, was Comte in France. And yet he often let him-
self go on with strange and excessive claims that spoiled the success he
had otherwise attained. After Comte came Mill: with his incomparable
insight he distinguished Comte’s mistakes from the true claims, and by
lending the authority of his name to the positive philosophy he gave it
enormous standing in England, where it became widespread earlier than
in France. In truth, however, this was not the work of a single person but
a product of the times, and so it seemed to spring up everywhere at the
same moment. For this reason, I intend to discuss not the opinions of
any individual philosopher but the general direction taken by the posi-
tive philosophy.
How and why did it come to be? And what is its aim?
What happens in the history of the human race often seems to be
what happens in the lives of individual people as well. When we have
been busy for a long time with abstract issues, an intense and passionate
need for poetry and art arises in us. And if we come upon a new poem
or novel, we almost devour the book while reading it. But when we have
grown weary from reading many poems, we want to turn to the philoso-
phers instead. This action and reaction is constant, observed throughout
history as well. After the materialism of the eighteenth century came
the German pantheism that ruled Europe in the first years of this cen-
tury. But when the human spirit had passed through an unending series
of systems, each succeeding and destroying the other in turn, the spirit
became weary and posed a question that could not go unanswered with-
out the gravest consequences.
All the sciences – so it came to be said – after wandering aimlessly for
a long time, finally found a method by which they could make consist-
ent progress, more or less quickly, but also confidently. Each time that
physics or chemistry came upon a new fact or found a new law, science
kept being enriched by these new findings. And once these truths were
accepted and approved by science, they ceased being disputed. Anyone
who tried to resist them would not be listened to – would be ridiculed
instead. All this is exactly the reverse of what happens in philosophy.
From the time of Socrates up to our own day, it has really always been
the same show that philosophy puts on for us. We see a kind of spon-
taneous generation and sustained destruction of systems, a continuing
mass sacrifice going on from century to century, with no way of know-
ing which divinity it is to whom the perennial offering has been given.
372
Villari, Positive Philosophy
And notice: now is not the first time that these charges have been made
against philosophy – and positive philosophers are not alone in making
them. Immanuel Kant was surely the first great innovator in modern
philosophy, having founded the eminent German school that reached
its final form with Hegel but derived entirely from the Critique of Pure
Reason. But Kant began his reform with precisely this same observation:
metaphysics is not a science, he clearly stated; it has been capable of no
real progress, presenting us with so wretched a spectacle that if it cannot
change course, it must resign itself to being struck from the roster of the
sciences. Metaphysics seems to be an arena where all we do is display skill
in a combat that has no goal, a field where no fighter ever manages to
gain an inch of ground, or at least no victory crowned by lasting success.
Kant created a new system that other philosophers attacked in turn;
he thus proceeded to reconfirm in his own case the truth of his origi-
nal observation. Not that there are not many truths and ideas of the
utmost importance in Kant, to be sure, as in all great philosophers, nor
that reading them does not elevate and ennoble the human spirit. But
metaphysics, as positive philosophers say, is an essentially systematic sci-
ence, and it wants to comprehend the Absolute, to explain the universe
with definite formulas of its own, with definite principles that it always
thinks discoverable yet never does discover. The goal of all its efforts – its
essence, almost – is a general system, and it always ends in ruins.
In this way, a science keeps being destroyed without ever managing to
put a single one of its great truths beyond doubt – not one of those first
principles for which it searches across so many centuries. Some accept
and some reject the existence of a personal God. Some affirm and some
deny that the human soul is immortal. Some tell us that everything in
the world is mind, others that everything is matter. If Kant’s system is
true, Condillac’s whole philosophy is a heap of absurdities. If Rosmini’s
system is true, Hegel’s is absurd, and vice versa. You notice, in fact, that
philosophers of the different schools are not fighting about which truths
to add next. They deny the very name of ‘philosopher’ to one another
because their disagreement is about the very nature and essence of their
most basic and general doctrines.
Surely this is a rather deplorable outcome. Perhaps we might resign
ourselves to it if only one of the many subjects that occupy the human
mind were involved. But philosophy is so closely linked with every one
of the moral sciences that it makes them all subject to its own fate.
When sensism ruled in France, we had Rousseau’s social contract and
Bentham’s legal doctrines. Condillac then wrote a general curriculum
373
informed by the same principles, seeing nothing in the whole course of

history but interests and sensations, where Bossuet had seen only Provi-
dence.4 Then came Hegel’s teachings to give us a new science of right, of
history, of beauty, and so on. In fact, philosophy embraces the whole of
mankind’s intellectual and moral life, and thus all the sciences that deal
with people and society in this way are linked with it.
So it is that the question asked of metaphysics by positive philosophers
acquires extraordinary force. Their point is to find out whether we can,
for once, give a firm and secure foundation to all the moral sciences, or
whether we must resign ourselves instead to see them all subjected to
these unending reversals without ever being able to say: Look here, an
indisputable truth has been found at last. These are not unfair overstate-
ments about philosophers. Each of us knows that when one asks what
the good is or the beautiful or the just – ideas that metaphysics treats
at length and that are also the foundations of morality, aesthetics, and
law – spiritualists, materialists, and pantheists, philosophers from every
school, are then immediately ready with as many different answers, all of
them irreconcilable contradictions of one another.
At last the world has wearied of this perpetual contradicting. Some
straightforwardly maintain that metaphysics is not and cannot be a sci-
ence and that we must therefore resolve to abandon it forever as some-
thing that produces only irreparable damage to our powers of intellect
and great disorder in our minds. Keine Metaphysik mehr – no more met-
aphysics! This cry echoes from one end of the educated world to the
other, and at one time it could even be said that the metaphysics was
German. This is the title of many recent works written there and the
motto used by various groups – not to say schools – of German scholars
who have resigned themselves to put metaphysics alongside astrology
and alchemy and say goodbye to them forever.5
Others are not so easily satisfied, however, or they are less resolute or
perhaps more cautious, and they say: It is not for us to eliminate from
history the name of a science that has occupied the minds of so many
famous thinkers for so long. Sciences arise from natural needs of the
human spirit, and since human nature does not change and since such
needs persist, they will not be eliminated from history. Astrology and
alchemy did not disappear but gave rise to astronomy and chemistry.
Let us see instead if it is also possible to rescue metaphysics, along with
all the moral sciences, from their uncertainty, contenting ourselves with
few truths, but well-founded ones, putting aside useless hypotheses and
excessive ambitions. Today, a rather large number of writers has joined
374
in this effort, and I propose to give a brief account of their conclusions

because the topic truly deserves so much of our attention.
If we want to set about putting all the moral sciences on a firmer foun-
dation, one that enables us to distinguish what we really know from what
we do not know, assuring us of progress that is slow but steady, we need
first of all to see if there have ever been other sciences that were once in
the state that philosophy is in today, and then we will have found where
and how to get out of that state. Now besides the moral and philosophi-
cal sciences, there are also the mathematical and natural sciences. And,
as for the mathematical sciences, their origin is almost unknown to us.
We do not know what effort the human spirit made before managing to
abstract numbers from quantities and lines, and surfaces from bodies.
Who first saw an object shaped like a triangle and then derived the math-
ematical triangle from it and began to study its properties? Who derived
the mathematical surface, line, and point from a real surface? We do
not know. From our very earliest days, mathematics appears before us
already formed and equipped with its scientific character; like Minerva
from the head of Jupiter, it was born in full armour.
Even though mathematics does not also refer to the experience that
belongs more properly to the other sciences, it has a method, as we shall
see, that is based on absolute clarity, on the principle of contradiction,
and this cannot give us much help in the philosophical sciences, where
there is so little absolute clarity that disputation never ceases. To believe
that two and two make four, that the whole is greater than the part, we
do not need any proof. But thinking cannot be weighed or measured
or expressed in figures, and so all attempts to apply the mathematical
method to philosophy always turn out to be futile. The dependence of
the method on the nature of the science is absolute, and believing that
numbers and formulas can be applied to passions of the human heart or
to ideas, to insights of our intellect, would display an absolute ignorance
of human nature and of the nature of thinking. If we set pure mathemat-
ics to one side, then, since its original source is unknown to us and its
method cannot help us much in philosophy’s hardest tasks, what we find
next is a sequence of sciences whose primitive history is known to us, and
these sciences give us cause to say a great many things. At last we come to
the crux of the question.
The sciences are certainly the result of that activity through which the
human spirit, by contemplating the truth, seeks to attain it. Now this
human spirit changes constantly. The first inhabitants of the earth con-
templated the world and nature rather differently than we do today. The
375
minds of those who still led a nomadic life or lived in lake-dwellings, who
created the first manufactures and made attempts at the first sciences,
were certainly not in the same state where we find ourselves after so many
centuries and so many generations. Even in our individual lives there
are different stages at which not only the body but also the spirit exists
in various states. The hold that imagination has on us in early youth is
surely not what can happen at maturity when passions and imagination
give way to reflection instead.
Many philosophers have observed that the seasons of our lives are
closely related to the ages of mankind. Our Vico showed that in the world
of nations, as he used to put it, there is also an infancy, a childhood, and
an adulthood. If all that is true, we ought to find the same thing in the
history of sciences as well. Since they are the result of the various opera-
tions and different faculties of the human mind, the sequence of events
ought to be the same. It is at this point that the new positive philosophers
enter the conversation with an observation that belongs to Comte, and
it has a very great deal of truth in it. All sciences generally pass through
three stages, they say, taking three different forms corresponding to the
three states in which the human spirit exists in those periods.
When man acquires the use of reason, he no sooner observes a phe-
nomenon than he seeks its cause inductively. At this primitive stage,
the human race has no method, no scientific discipline, and it is full of
superstitions, and so for every phenomenon it has recourse to an imagi-
nary god. Apollo brings light, Jupiter commands the thunderbolt, and
so on. In this state of affairs, the sciences do not yet actually exist; this is
the time when mythologies are created instead. But priests are the only
scientists or philosophers at this point, and thus the sciences are still in
their first state or stage, which is theological.
Little by little things change, the human spirit evolves, and man is
no longer content to find the explanation of every phenomenon in a
divinity made in his own image. Needing something less sensible and
material, he has recourse for every phenomenon to an abstraction, and
then he seeks a single cause to explain the universe. The Eleatic, Ionian,
Pythagorean, and other schools show us the primitive stages of this new
state of the sciences. One person observes that a living animal generates
heat, that a dead one grows cold, and that two pieces of wood rubbed
together produce heat. And instead of imagining a divinity of heat, light,
or fire, this person then imagines a hot spirit and a cold spirit, asserting
that heat is the vital principle of the animal and the essence of the wood.
He makes still another move and announces that he has finally discov-
376
ered that heat is the first principle of the world, and then he completes
his system with an explanation of the universe. But right away someone
else objects, claiming that the first principle of the world is different:
light, air, numerical harmony, unity, substance, the Idea, the Absolute,
and on and on. Once the word has been found, the system has been
found, and the human spirit has free rein in this new arena. Shackled
neither by facts nor by experience, it assembles and disassembles the
universe at will, demonstrating all its cleverness, all its subtlety, skill, and
flexibility. This second stage that the sciences pass through – the age of
systems – was called metaphysical by Comte, but other positivists called it
scholastic instead because its golden age was in the medieval period, just
when scholasticism was dominant.
At that time philosophy and the natural sciences were in the same
state, somehow forming a single science. As the debate went on in
one domain among Nominalists, Realists, and Conceptualists, seeking
to learn whether beings are pure names or real things or something
of both, what effect did this actually have in the natural sciences, the
part of that philosophy that gave it integrity? They were looking for the
inner nature of things, imagining a third essence in the stars, in water,
in earth, in plants, and so on. Quiet or raging, sad or smiling, these
spirits or essences were the cause of natural phenomena. These meta-
physical abstractions were endowed with all the human passions, as the
more ancient divinities had already been endowed with them. And an
essence of all essences was the vital principle of the world. In this way,
systems were multiplied to infinity, and when the natural sciences were
not inseparable parts of philosophy, they were occult sciences like astrol-
ogy, alchemy, and the rest, forming an appendage that could not be cut
off from philosophy.
So what show did the natural sciences put on for us at that time? The
same one that philosophy puts on for us today. A series of systems that
destroyed one another by turns, with no possibility at all of true and
authentic progress. Now, however, we are used to seeing few years pass
by without physics, chemistry, and all the natural sciences announcing
some great discovery to us, some new conquest. What are the conquests
of the Middle Ages in what was then called natural philosophy, the product
of so much study, so many exhausted minds, many of them even of the
highest level? We cannot give any answer because at that time the natural
sciences were, more than anything else, an elegant gymnasium where the
human mind went for exercise – as it goes to philosophy today – without
ever securing any result. It has been said a thousand times that the Mid-
377
dle Ages made no progress because it was enslaved to authority, because

it did not practise observation, and did not know about induction. But
Aristotle’s authority was overthrown, observation had been born along
with the human species, and alchemists spent their lives making obser-
vations. Induction is also born with our reason, and the scholastics did
nothing but induce and deduce constantly, with extraordinary finesse,
but with never any possibility of certainty.
When Bacon himself – so much in favour of induction and observa-
tion and so unhappy with the Greeks, the Romans, and every authority
– observed a flame flickering, he said that the spirit of fire was rejoic-
ing, and with those words he fell back into the scholasticism that he
fought. Marsilio Ficino was a philosopher and a physician who observed,
induced, and deduced, always finding that third essences were causes of
everything. On them he based a system that was complex and ingenious,
and nothing remains of it today. It was always the same story. Telesio
and Campanella located the first principle of the world in the cold and
the hot, Ficino in third essences, and Giordano Bruno in the single sub-
stance, but they were all stuck in the same uncertainty. And Bruno was
still burned alive because he had been too bold an enemy of authority,
while Telesio and Campanella endured harsh persecutions for the same
reason. They observed, induced, and deduced, but the natural scienc-
es at which they worked so hard could make no progress – obviously a
sign that something else was still missing. Reading what they wrote, one
would almost say that the human mind still needed to test, exercise, and
develop its own powers. And if they still delighted in building those cas-
tles in the air, some of them were daring creations indeed.
One fine day, the world was tired of it. The poetry and the art that had
done so much to educate the human spirit decayed rapidly in Italy. Phi-
losophy dried up, and the ability to generate systems seemed to stop all
at once. On every side the shout went up: facts are certain, experience is
secure! This is what Bacon said, this is what everyone in Europe said, and
many things were tried with some success, but the main road was still not
securely located. Then came Galileo, and, if you’ll allow me an analogy
that is a bit too common, he took the cart of the natural sciences, put it
on wheels, and pushed it down the road at high velocity so that the sci-
ences have still not stopped and perhaps will never stop again. Galileo
brought to completion one of the most extensive revolutions in the his-
tory of the human spirit. And with him, if we wish to use the language of
the positivists, the natural sciences leave the metaphysical stage forever, at
last entering the third and final stage, which is the positive.
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It is very important to see how and in what ways this transition was
made in order to decide next if an equal transformation is possible in
the moral sciences. What did Galileo add to the procedure, then, to the
method followed by the ancients? Certainly what Galileo added brought
about reform so vast and radical that it is hard to comprehend how the
man dared so much and succeeded in it. And yet the thing is so simple
that it turns out to be more difficult to explain why the thought came
so late. The truth is that Galileo’s scientific courage was incomparable
because he said this for the first time: I treat inquiry about essences as
an enterprise that is all but impossible. When you tell me that the cloud
is steam, that the steam is water, that the water is substance or force or
matter, you always come to an unknown that you cannot explain, and
at the end of your account the essence remains as obscure as before.
Therefore, we need to abandon research about essences and prefer just
one small and certain truth to a thousand large truths that are uncertain
and hypothetical. Since Galileo had the courage to renounce the inquir-
ies that for so many centuries had occupied the whole human race and
all the greatest intellects, he ended the Middle Ages for ever with these
simple words and began an era of research and facts.
This was the negative part of his reform, however. The essence of the
world and of things may still remain unknown to us, but if we are to con-
tent ourselves with just a few sure truths, how are we to find and verify
them? Aristotle’s authority had collapsed, as I have said, and observation
and induction had already begun. But as soon as the observer proceed-
ing by induction ascended in this way from the particular to the general
and grasped the first idea, with the help of logic he went right on from
one idea to the next, moving farther and farther from the real world
by his own power and his own imagination. But Galileo said to observe
the phenomena, determine what they are, and then make an induction
carefully, by seeking not the essence of the phenomena but their cause
or law. And when you believe you have found it, stop right there. Before
taking another step and moving on to another law, check what you have
found against nature: test and test again – in a word, experiment.
You see the lamp swinging, and by induction do you not suppose that
the swings are isochronous, all happening in the same space of time?
Even so, do not derive any conclusion from that. Instead, check with
nature and question her, because, if you know how to ask questions, she
will answer. Not only can you make your observation again every time
you see another lamp swinging, you can also build a pendulum in a thou-
sand different shapes and make it swing in a thousand directions with a
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force that is always different. If the law that you have found is correct, the
swings will always be isochronous, and only then will you be able to say
that you have discovered a truth because your idea did not stay in your
mind; instead, you checked it in the external world and asked nature to
confirm it. The law has been verified, and no one will ever be able to call
it in question because you can always check it and ask nature to speak
on your behalf again. I took the pendulum by the end of the cord, says
Galileo, and I held it in the middle, making it move in a thousand direc-
tions, sometimes hard, sometimes soft, and the swings were always equal.
And now also draw the consequences that derive logically from your law.
Having made your induction, also deduce if you like. But when the first
deduction is done, check again. Do not assume that you have found a
second truth unless nature has replied again.
You make a ball roll on an inclined plain, you find that velocity keeps
increasing, and you induce that it increases in direct proportion to the
squares of the distances. Then you experiment, measuring the velocity
and changing the angle of the plane’s inclination over and over. The
law always turns out to be correct, and therefore it has been verified.
But look, your mind takes another step and says that if the ball rolls
down the inclined plain by this law, then heavy bodies ought to fall by
the same law. Once a scholastic was in possession of the first law, he
would have drawn not only this conclusion but a thousand and a hun-
dred thousand others, and he might also have formulated a new sys-
tem of the universe. What did Galileo do when the second idea came
to him, namely, that heavy bodies fall by the same law? He took anoth-
er step, not by going on to another idea but by ascending the Leaning
Tower of Pisa instead. From there, holding a clock, he dropped heavy
objects and measured their velocity, and nature replied to him again
that the law was verified.
We know that there was more, and that we ended up learning that
all bodies are attracted in the direct proportion of their masses and the
inverse proportion of the squares of the distances. This was the law of
universal attraction discovered by Newton. With this law we have been
able to measure the orbits in which the planets move, and we can pre-
dict, many years in advance, the day, the hour, and the minute when a
star or a comet will pass through our meridian. When the day comes, the
astronomer sets up his telescope and looks at his chronometer, and as
soon as it marks the first minute and second of the hour, he goes up to
the eyepiece and sees the star passing by. The star that passes tells him
again that the law has been verified and is correct.
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But now that we have finally succeeded in understanding the law of

universal attraction, what do we really know? Various facts and relations
among those facts. We know that there are heavy bodies and that these
heavy bodies are attracted in a particular way. But what are heavy bod-
ies, and what is attraction? These two things – the only ones at which
the Middle Ages laboured – remain unknown to us, as they were to St
Thomas and the scholastics, and to Socrates and Plato. Today too – as
Galileo said – we can treat knowledge of the essence of bodies and forces
as an enterprise that is all but impossible. Facts and laws, then, or rela-
tions among these facts: that is what we can know in the natural sciences.
Everything else remains deeply obscure. Anyone who lapses into inquir-
ing about first causes, said Newton, shows by that alone that he is no
scientist.
How different such wisdom is from that of philosophers! After Gali-
leo, in fact, natural science and philosophy, which had been united for
so long, said goodbye to one another and parted forever. Philosophers
accused Galileo and his followers of materialism. You look for matter
and the facts, they said. You neglect the first truths on which other truths
depend, those without which no other science is possible. But the follow-
ers of nature have responded: We do not know what universal attraction
is. But we use it to draw the movement of stars on paper and to predict
the point in space where they will be a hundred years from now. We do
not know what light is. But we have created the science of light that uses
the telescope to bring the stars near from millions of miles away, making
us see mountains and valleys on the moon. And with the microscope this
science has discovered a universe that would have remained unknown
to you for eternity. Do you wish to be uselessly persistent about this, or
even to despair, unless you can find out what the essence of the electrical
fluid is, even though we can confine it in a metal wire, make it flow in any
direction we like, and use it to carry our thoughts beyond the ocean? You
look for the essence of steam, again uselessly, while we have calculated all
the varieties of its power. We have created the railroad and the propeller-
boat, transforming industry and renewing it.
Philosophers stubbornly wanted to stay on their path, but students of
natural science followed the road indicated by Galileo. Alchemy, astrol-
ogy, and all the occult sciences have faded away, and real, rapid progress
has begun. For so long has mankind been educated and disciplined by
the schools, by art, and by literature, that as soon as a possibility could
be seen of exiting this completely subjective and ideal labour, people
have turned to reality with uncontrollable ardour, and, instead of mov-
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ing from system to system, they have gone from conquest to conquest,
extracting a new secret from nature every day.
But the most important thing of all to notice is that when any of the
natural sciences has persisted in following the ancient way of systems, it
has never been able to find a way out of disputes, and it has never been
able to make any sure and stable progress until convincing itself – like
the other sciences – to follow the experimental method and renounce
inquiries that are not possible. It was not long ago that physiology still
persisted in research into the vital principle. But what came of it? The
powers of the finest minds were spent in vain on this mysterious some-
thing. One person would say, ‘The essence of life is force.’ Another
would say, ‘It is a certain vital principle.’ And someone could be found
to say, ‘The essence of life is the Idea.’
And so we had dynamism, vitalism, and pantheism, but still no physiol-
ogy. Or to put it differently, science still stayed in its scholastic state, una-
ware of the positive path and unable to enter it. Today, physiology has
taken a big step: its final transformation, though not complete, may have
begun before our eyes. How is all this being done? I shall permit myself
to mention the celebrated Professor Bernard, very much one of those
who have contributed and are contributing to this progress in physiol-
ogy. This is roughly how he puts it. Today, the issue is not knowing what
life is. This we do not know, and perhaps we shall never be able to know
it. Of all the definitions of life, the only one we can accept without protest
is this: life is the opposite of death. Everything that science can attempt
reduces to understanding the conditions that determine vital activity.
But understanding the vital principle, as belonging to the inner nature
of all things in general, seems likely to remain unknown to us forever.
When the scholastic saw venom act immediately to snuff out the life of
an animal, he wanted to know how the venomous spirit ate up the vital
spirit, and he came to no conclusion. We want to know instead how the
venom acts on the blood, the blood on the nerves, and so on, and learn
what can serve as an anti-venom. For the Middle Ages, the generation of
the disease was the development of a febrile idea. Opium caused drowsi-
ness because it had a dormitive virtue. All that has vanished, and physiol-
ogy has renounced knowledge of the why of things, looking instead for
the how. We know that a given amount of hydrogen, combined with a
given amount of oxygen, produces water, and thus we can produce water
when we wish. But what hydrogen or oxygen is, why we need that par-
ticular amount to produce water, and thus what water is – that we do not
know. In truth, as Bernard concludes, absolute knowledge of the simplest
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phenomenon in the universe would require absolute knowledge of the

whole universe, from which every phenomenon somehow radiates and
eventually participates in its general harmony. Therefore, no science is
possible without renouncing, at least for the present, inquiry into first
principles and systems: science cannot be systematic, nor should it be.
What, in fact, is the system of physics, chemistry, or mathematics? We
have only facts – and laws of greater or lesser generality. The science
always stops at the point where it can no longer check or test, and the
system begins where the science ends. In physics, one of the most impor-
tant discoveries of our time has been to learn how motion is transformed
into an equivalent amount of heat and vice versa. Our body can produce
as much motion as the heat that it produces and is not used for other
purposes. The steam engine produces as much motion as the heat that it
can produce and transform. Once a scholastic had discovered the trans-
formation of one fluid or force into another, he would have moved on
right away to transform all fluids into a single fluid, going from there to
the vital principle and thence to the general understanding of the uni-
verse, to the system. Physics stops, however, with just what it has known
and tested. Everything else is outside of science, which searches only
for facts and their relations – or laws. When it is possible to pass from a
particular law to a more general one, from the falling of heavy bodies
to universal attraction, this is the only system that science can aspire to.
And now if we turn to philosophy, what do we observe? Instead of facts
and verified laws, instead of slow and continuous progress, we still have
the eternal conflict of systems destroying one another. In a word, philos-
ophy is still at the metaphysical and scholastic stage. It still looks for first
truths, first principles, and the essence of things, and it never succeeds
in finding them because it persists in an impossible enterprise. It wants
to know the inner nature of God, the soul, thought, the universe, and
all the things that are unknown and perhaps always will be. Our reason
is lost in confusion, powerless in the presence of such questions, and the
mind finds shelter only in faith. But the metaphysician wants to respond
in absolutes. So he fantasizes ingenious systems that give us nothing
more than phrases that very soon will be attacked and destroyed by other
phrases. Such systems often enough give us proof of the author’s talent,
but they are far from hitting the mark that they aim at.
Here is an important observation, however, that there are some parts
of philosophy that also acquire a scientific certainty: there is no doubt
about logic, for example. Laws of reasoning have undoubtedly been
found, and no one denies it. On this point all systems agree – if we except
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Hegel’s, since he deals with questions of metaphysics under the heading

of logic and thus he returns to disputes that come back into play every
time there is a wish to discuss the objective value and origin of those
laws. Well, then, how has logic made such progress? It has observed facts
and looked for laws in them. It has sought to know how human reason
speaks, but it has not troubled itself with knowing what reason is. Is this
not a great lesson for the metaphysicians?
Look at psychology as it studies, examines, and observes the human
faculties and passions. Very good, the disputes are beginning to end even
here, and there is some clarity and certainty. But all this lasts only as long
as facts and laws themselves are not studied. Once you ease up a little and
want to ascend to first causes, you are getting close to metaphysics, and
right away the uproarious battle begins. There is no more truce or peace.
What is at issue, then? One philosopher says: being creates the existent, and
this is the point of departure for building a system. But another philoso-
pher says: possible being, and from here starts a voyage towards a second
system. And so it goes with the many other words – the Absolute, the idea,
nature, substance – that give rise to just as many other systems.6
But what is the method by which you discover and test your assertions?
That’s the question today that has put the field of metaphysics into dis-
array. Some positivist has remarked that metaphysics is a sort of poetry
like any other, and this has greatly scandalized some philosophers. They
have gone even further in Germany, however, where some are plainly
saying that the time has come to put an end to metaphysics and that
the name ‘science’ must no longer be used for a heap of empty words
or clever assertions, none of which can be demonstrated: metaphysics
must be ranked with astrology and alchemy. Goethe had already said it:
metaphysics is a science that teaches the things known to everyone, or
else the things that no one will ever know. It seems that many share his
opinion today. I don’t want to deal with all the personal opinions, how-
ever, and all the exaggerations. Instead, let’s ask what the reform is that
the positive philosophy seriously wants to bring into the study of philoso-
phy. True, some start by claiming that science, for the present, can know
only facts and relations among facts – or laws – and then they go on to
say that all the rest is illusory, that abstract ideas are dreams, and so on.
But then they fall back, by another route, into the scholastic metaphysics
that they want to combat. We cannot deny the existence of certain ideas
just because we cannot have absolute cognition of them now.
Instead, this is the crucial problem: to provide ourselves with scientific
verification of the truth, we have so far only two methods – the mathe-
384
matical method and the experimental – but metaphysics can use neither
of them. It cannot use the mathematical method based on absolute clar-
ity because metaphysical truths are subject to constant dispute. Everyone
agrees that two and two make four, that a straight line is shorter than
a curved one, and that the whole is greater than the part, but they all
disagree about being and the existent, about the Idea and the Absolute.
And how would you like to apply the experimental method? How and
where would you like to check whether your definition of the Absolute,
God, the Infinite, and so on is true or false? What experiment will you
do when called into question about this by systems opposed to your own?
Saying that there are truths accepted by all systems does no good: the
reason is that the primary and least expendable value of a system lies in
its having an organic unity, and disagreements among philosophers go
precisely to the fundamental truths on which all other truths depend.
It seems, then, that only two ways are left to us. One way is to say that
philosophy, by its nature, will never be able to escape from systems, and
so it will never produce scientific verification for the truths that it claims
to have found. But philosophy must in that case resign itself to being
seen as abandoned by the positive and scientific spirit of our times and to
run the risk of being put with old and useless contrivances like astrology
and alchemy. The other way is to attempt a revolution like the one that
Galileo made in the natural sciences and to see if it is possible to find a
method that indisputably verifies at least some, if not all, philosophical
truths.
Positivism has attempted this revolution, which it did not so much cre-
ate as spread, improve, and apply, inasmuch as it could be shown that the
seeds of the reform are very ancient. However that may be, all modern
philosophers always agree just on the issue of the new direction and new
method of philosophizing that they have adopted. They have seen the
new method as having been followed all at once, by many people, in dif-
ferent sciences, at the same time, and always with equal success. There-
fore, we should not be busying ourselves now with the works of Comte
or Mill, nor with those of Taine or Littré or others. We should instead
be studying the road that science has generally taken, more by pursuing
its natural development than by heeding the impulse of any particular
author. Let me therefore describe this method to see what results it has
produced or is capable of producing.
The goal of philosophy, above any other, is knowledge of man. In us
philosophy finds various faculties, various ideas, and a reason that obeys
certain laws, and out of all this it makes a field of study. Consequently,
385
because philosophy is used to searching for the essence and the first and
eternal cause of everything, it has a great tendency to locate humanity
somehow beyond space and time. What we see in the world is societies,
peoples, and individuals in transformation, changing every day. But phi-
losophy thought it would be more successful in understanding human-
ity by skipping the study of the contingent and mutable. And this was a
huge mistake. How would you propose to understand the nature of this
entity that changes constantly if you have no knowledge of the laws that
regulate its inevitable changes? You wish to have absolute knowledge and
find the essence of man, but you do not think to study him first in the
only situation in which you can observe him.
But let’s go further. In man you find an idea of the good, the beautiful,
and the true, and you want to know their nature, essence, origin, and
value. This dooms you to a subjective labour, and you derive your claims
about the nature of the good and the beautiful only from your reason.
But reason can be fooled, all the more when your opponents deny you
even the name ‘philosopher.’ In that case, what will you do to test the
nature of the good, the beautiful, and the true? What will you do to test
what thought, reason, and the human soul are? In a word, how will you
tell whether everything that you find in your consciousness and in your
reason has a real objective value outside you, that in the end it is not an
illusion of your mind? This is philosophy’s fatal flaw, the place of ship-
wreck for all systems.
Who has examined our reason better than Kant? And what was the
conclusion of his system? He frankly declared that reason is powerless
to prove the objective value of its own ideas. Reason can certainly be
said to have an idea of time, space, beauty, and so on, but do these have
value outside us? That, according to Kant, is the question that can have
no answer. Yes, if only we had that absolute knowledge of first truths that
the metaphysicians strangely claim, all other knowledge should follow
from them by logical inference. But the attempt to get to this point has
been made again and again, too many times and without success. What
is the use of starting over from the beginning now that the world is weary
of this and has lost all confidence in it, now that even the fecundity that
creates different systems seems to be extinct?
So the question comes down to this: can we find a way to get from the
I to what is outside the I by checking and testing the ideas that we find
in ourselves, along with what we have thought about those ideas and
what we would like to make convincing to others? If this is impossible,
philosophy again resigns itself to being abandoned by the scientific spirit
386
of our times. So then, these ideas that people find in themselves – this
thought, this reason, this consciousness that philosophy studies – are
they static abstractions or are they something concrete, real, and living
in the world? It is worth giving an example to explain this more clearly.
Let me imagine that you are working on the idea of the good. You read
the interminable volumes written about this by philosophers, and their
contradictions terrify you. You start to think for yourself, and you find
no secure method for knowing whether your novel thoughts are true
or false. Can you get it right when Aristotle and Plato, Locke and Hegel
have not been able to come to agreement? Before abandoning the enter-
prise as hopeless, however, you make an observation: this idea that you
find in yourself is generally found in almost all other people.
So then, take a people or a society: in the abstract imagine a moment
when there is absolutely no idea of the beautiful among these people
except when you have the capability or power of instilling it in them.
What would happen then? As soon as they can contemplate the idea of
the beautiful, the imagination of this people immediately goes to work.
This is the start of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry;
in a word, what some call the world of art emerges and springs forth. And
this is a real, sensible world that you can observe, study, examine, and
classify as you do with all of nature’s productions. What are these works
of art? They emerge precisely from the idea of the beautiful, which,
putting the faculties of our mind into motion, clothes itself in a sensible
form. And then we get the statue, the painting, the poem, and so on.
Suppose further that this idea actually becomes faded or dim but later
lights up again before the mind of this people. Well then, art will follow
its own path because in the end it is just the sensible manifestation of this
idea of the beautiful, about whose essence you have laboured uselessly
for so long.
You go into the Vatican and find yourself in the middle of a city, as
it were, populated by Greek statues. Are they not something that you
can see, touch, and feel? You can arrange them and distribute them by
period, by order of excellence, by artist, and so on. In the final analysis,
just as universal attraction, heat, and light produce natural phenomena,
the idea of the beautiful likewise produces social phenomena, and you
can study them in the same way. And if it has been possible to establish
a science of forces, light, and heat without knowing what they are – and
actually only from the moment when you have renounced knowledge of
their essence – will it not be possible to establish a science of the beauti-
ful by renouncing knowledge of its essence for the present?
387
Perhaps this science will not be able to quench all of your noble desire
for the truth all at once. But it can make you learn what the conditions
are in which art flourishes or decays, what are the means of advancing
it, what conditions and qualities are required of the artist, what conse-
quences follow from the flourishing of art for the human spirit and soci-
ety, and so on. True, these are less ambitious items of knowledge than all
that you might desire on the nature of the idea of the good, just as what
has been learned and discovered by optics is less ambitious than what
scholasticism wanted to find out by looking for the essence of light. In
every case, however, the former items are possible and demonstrable by
facts because you always have the history of art as a check and as a sort
of test of your theories. But the latter items always remain uncertain, if
not impossible.
Take another example, the idea of the just. One person tells you that
the just is the useful correctly understood, and another adds that it is
an eternal idea, independent of the useful and often contradicting it, a
manifestation of the Absolute, and so on. And philosophers have never
been able to establish clear agreement on this point. Yet we have this
idea of the just, and all people have it. Therefore we accept it as a fact
and study it, as the forces of nature are studied. If a people lacked this
idea, what would follow? A society without law and without rule, subject
to unconstrained will. Do you think it possible, then, all at once, for
the idea to penetrate the heart and mind of this people? Suddenly you
would have laws, statutes, institutions, codes, a norm and rule for human
actions, and so on. These are the social phenomena that derive from
this new agent called the just, and from this emerges law, just as optical
phenomena derive from light. Can you not observe, study, and classify
various pieces of legislation in their eras and in their rise and fall, and,
by so doing, learn better to understand the nature of right, its laws and
its various forms? Today, in fact, a science of right already exists, without
any ability on the part of philosophers to reach agreement on giving a
definition of right. With this science there has come to be a good pos-
sibility of improving the law-making of all civilized peoples, something
that the scholastics – with all their discussions about the eternal idea of
the just and its relations with the idea of God – did not do and never
could have done.
Let me go on to another example, since we can repeat the same obser-
vation in all the social sciences. Read ancient authorities on politics, and
what is it that interests them? They end up inquiring about the best gov-
ernment – meaning an impossible government that has never existed
388
nor can ever exist. The best government assumes a populace of the best
people, but they do not exist nor probably will ever exist on earth. Eve-
rywhere we see ambitions, jealousies, and interests battling the nobler
passions, and it is for such people, who change and become different
in every period and place, that we need to find a government. What
good would it do, then, to search for the best government, that abstract,
immutable, and metaphysical government that cannot be applied to any
people? Modern politics, without simply denying society a path towards
ideal perfection – which is easier to foresee than to define – abandons
inquiry into the best government, asking instead which government is
better for a given society.
If there is one problem that I long to solve, it is certainly this: for a
particular society to find the institutions that are the better aids to its
progress. If this new direction has turned less theoretical, it has still been
rather more useful for mankind and has been able to prevent much
unhappiness and many disasters. Where now, in fact, is that string of
impossible plots that took place in the Middle Ages, when every noble-
man thought that a government dreamed up in an hour’s exalted imagi-
nation could be put into practice? Now we know that the greatest person
described in our histories wanted to restore the ancient Roman Empire,
and to call up armies and armed men for this purpose against Florence,
his native land. Ordinary people today would never let themselves be
deluded by dreams like those that for so long ruled Dante Alighieri’s
mind in this way.7 We are all convinced that society’s laws are as inviolable
as those of nature, and that instead of capriciously opposing them, we
should understand them in order to manage and make use of them, just
as we make use of natural laws and agents. Only in this way can new laws
and new institutions be productive.
To add many examples is useless because one could multiply them
infinitely. Examining the whole human being, not as an abstraction but
as what really stands before us, with his faculties, passions, and transfor-
mations from era to era and year to year, we will find that his life has
a constant counterpart in the life of society and in the history of the
human race. Every new idea, every faculty that we observe in the human
person, inevitably gives rise to a new series of social facts. Christianity is a
religious reform that takes place in the individual conscience; well then,
might it not have altered society and modern history? The philosophy of
the eighteenth century is a new doctrine; well then, do you not find it
immediately at work in the American Constitution, and do you not find
it among the primary causes of the French Revolution?
389
In the same way, we can extend this inquiry into infinity. Take the most
abstract ideas, the most metaphysical, or the most concrete, as suits you
best – the idea of God, for example. We are not speaking here of what
faith or revelation can tell us. Faith can believe what reason still does not
understand, but now we are dealing only with reason. The fact is that
the most ardent desire of metaphysics has been to prove the existence
of God indisputably and to get knowledge of God’s nature out of this.
Well then, without being accused of impiety, we can say that metaphysics
has not reached its goal. When I say that the three angles of a triangle
are equal to two right angles, I have a sure way of silencing anyone who
might want to contradict me. But St Thomas, Leibniz, Bossuet, and many
others have spoken without ever managing to silence the sceptics or the
materialists, and even today the battle among pantheists, materialists,
and spiritualists rages livelier than ever. So it is useless to delude oneself.
Metaphysics does not have the power to reach its goal scientifically; it is
not and never will be able to put an end to disputes about questions that
are the most important and vital for its existence.
What does a philosopher do when he wants to write a treatise on
the nature and existence of God? He withdraws within himself, seeks
a cause for the world, seeks in his ecstasy to contemplate the Absolute,
and looks at how this idea arises in him, how it grows bright and grows
dim in his consciousness. But in this state is he sure that his precon-
ceived ideas do not change the meaning of his observations? Can he test
the absolute objective truth of what goes on in his mind? Well then, if
faith makes us believe in a God, and if reason is powerless to explain its
nature, we should not uselessly persist in overstepping the natural lim-
its of our intellect. If this idea is really in us, it must carry its inevitable
consequences into society; it must produce visible facts as real as natural
phenomena. Such facts exist, and they are called religions; throughout
history, the number and various forms of such religions are infinite. You
can study them and understand them, observing the monuments, ritu-
als, commandments, and infinite number of cults that religions produce.
What do you learn by such a study? You will not get absolute and full
knowledge of God, something you have renounced for the present. But
you can experiment and use history to test how the idea of God emerged
– not in yourself, to be sure, but in humanity – how the idea grows bright
and dim, and what consequences this constant alternation has for civi-
lized populations. From the savage’s cruder rituals, you advance to the
gleaming images and timeless serenity of the Greek gods, whom later
you see vanish, destroyed on their altars by a new feeling that emerges
390
from Christian consciousness, and this new feeling changes society, his-
tory, literature, and the sciences.
Might all that not be a practical study – positive, testable, and tested –
of how the idea of God and religious feeling emerge and develop in the
human race? Well then, the science of religions, or rather comparative
mythology, already exists, and it has been an endless source of light for
the history of civilization and for understanding mankind. Only when
we have been able to comprehend and explain Greek mythology, in fact,
and understand the divinities to whom Homer and Plato sacrificed, only
then shall we have grasped the history and humanity of Greece, when it
has appeared to us in a new light. Even the superstitions of the savage
reveal to us the secrets of his consciousness, and thus we learn to under-
stand more about him than he could know about himself. Might this not
be a practical, positive, but also progressive knowledge of the human
heart? This visible study of the ideal world that becomes real, does it not
make our faith more alive and more solid?
I cite a final example. Anyone who has read books about philosophy
knows that one of the questions with which philosophers have struggled
most is the origin of language – human or divine. This thinker supported
one view, that thinker another, and volumes were written without being
able to come to any sure conclusion. Some lost their way in research
about primitive language; having no other device, they thought they
might suggest an experimental method, proposing to keep a baby in a
room and feed it without ever letting it hear the human voice in order
to see what language it would naturally speak. They decided to subject
the infant to conditions that were entirely contrary to nature, in other
words, in order to learn what would happen naturally. Nonetheless, such
problems are very important because the origin and development of lan-
guage is quite closely linked to the history of the human spirit and the
origin of our ideas. Each new word is the sensible image of a new emo-
tion, a new thought. Each new language is the mirror in which a new
civilization is reflected. Accordingly, philosophers gave much effort to
this, but they laboured in vain.
This is a strange thing to say! Languages live all around us: they are
born, they grow, they age, and they die, almost under our eyes, I might
say, just like living things. It is as clear as the light of day that if we want
to understand the history and nature of languages, we should do as we
do when we use botany or zoology to understand the history of plants
and animals. In other words, for the present we give up as pointless any
talk about the inner essence of the plant, the animal, and the language.
391
We study, organize, and classify them, researching the laws of their modi-
fications in various regions and at various times. So then, a science of
language has emerged today, and in effect its method comes so close to
the experimental method that the distinguished philologist Max Müller
has found many reasons to claim that this method should also put the
science of language among the natural sciences.8 We are not obliged to
accept his view. Indeed, we can hold, as we do hold, that since language
is a manifestation of the human spirit – as Müller himself confirms –
then, for that reason alone, the science that deals with it must go with
those that study man’s moral and intellectual nature.
The view of that learned philologist and the reasons he adduces clear-
ly prove what method that science has adopted. Today, in fact, philol-
ogy and linguistics have studied, classified, and organized languages by
period, by family, and by genus and species, so to speak, as they do with
plants or animals. The laws of their birth, growth, change, decline, and
death are understood. But when the philologist has an idea of his own
or devises a new theory, science does not accept it unless he has first
demonstrated and tested it by checking and experimenting with lan-
guages. The savage’s crudest and most inarticulate sounds and the least
respected dialects have thus become a precious archive for the philolo-
gist’s constant toil as he seeks to find the links in the chain of the vari-
ous families of languages. And if today, with some confidence, we can
define the direction and development of the languages of the first Aryan
peoples, tracking them step-by-step up to our time; if we can understand
how dialects rise to the level of educated speech and how they decline
or decay again; if we can stand beside the Kaffir or the American Indian
as he tries to express ideas that are still clouded by his barbarity; have
we not (in little more than half a century) come close to solving the
problem of the origin of language – far closer than philosophers had
come from Socrates down to Hegel? Have we not made progress in our
knowledge of man?
Add up everything I have said, and one conclusion clearly follows:
namely, that if we set aside all the particular forms that positivism takes
and focus on its general character, it comes down to applying the histori-
cal method to the moral sciences and giving that method the same stand-
ing that the experimental method has in the natural sciences. Hence,
positivism is a new method, definitely not a new system. For me, it would
be easy to show that its very first seeds are found in Vico’s New Science and
in other Italian authors, but this is not the place for such a discussion.
It suffices to note that this method, explained rather clearly by Comte,
392
was by force of events introduced simultaneously in many sciences, com-

pletely revitalizing them, and that it saw itself accepted by many people
who had never read the works of Comte.
What is the issue today, then? Can we say that from now on all of philos-
ophy’s problems can be solved by the historical method? Certainly not!
The point is to define two things clearly. Metaphysical systems have not
attained the scientific certainty that they have sought. Using the experi-
mental method, Galileo deprived them of an immense piece of territory,
and now the historical method is going to deprive them of an even more
immense piece by causing a new series of sciences, which constitute an
essential part of philosophy, to pass from a scholastic stage to a positive
stage. The study of the human spirit has finally found a practical, sure,
and positive path. As we move to this path, we must renounce the sys-
tems, absolute understandings, and first causes, which, for now, are too
remote from us. We can understand only facts and laws based on those
facts, but they are facts and laws of the human mind and of thought.
On one side, we have the human being with his faculties, ideas, and
passions. On the other side lie society and its history, which are nothing
more than the reflection, impersonal and independent, of the individu-
al will, of this same human person. In history we find the same ideas and
aspirations and the same passions transformed into social facts. Because
it will always be the great privilege of our nature, then, our spirit also
turns back upon itself, seeking to understand and study the human per-
son. But when it reaches a conclusion about human nature, it stops. It
does not surrender to that speculation, which, guided by logic alone,
would carry it from idea to idea and on to infinity, unable to tell whether
it gets closer to reality or goes farther away. It recalls that the human
person exists in history and that therefore the truth of its inductions
about humankind can be checked and tested against history. If you have
renounced knowledge of essences, and if you want to examine how our
reflection, imagination, and faith are related – knowing that they are also
three real faculties of our mind, and hence three facts whose laws you
can study, observe, induce, and even theorize, if you like – only remem-
ber that from imagination, faith, and reason come art, religion, and
science. Try to see, then, whether your observations about the human
person have analogs in history.
There are certain peoples – or at least certain periods in the history
of peoples – in which art has decayed almost completely, and others in
which scepticism consumes and nearly destroys religious faith, and then
all at once it revives. All this gives you a way to check what you have
393
believed to be laws of the human spirit. Up to this point, you have only
looked in history for facts, and from the human mind you have been able
to get only speculations, never checking them against the facts: from one
you get pure empiricism, and from the other scholastic philosophy. But
after what Vico found – that the laws of the world of nations are the same
as the laws of the human spirit that created this social world: from the
one you can get the science of history and from the other the science
of man, tested and demonstrated. For if history somehow gives you the
external world on which to experiment and verify the inductions of your
psychology, the psychology then becomes a torch that illuminates his-
tory. The laws of the one, if they are true, must be checked against the
other, and vice versa.
What is the reason why you are so eager to read history? Because, as I
have already noted, there is an important relation between the seasons
of our lives and the stages of the human race, and all of universal history
is none too large to include mankind. For what reason, when you were
eighteen, were you an ardent reader of the history of knights and cru-
saders? You could feel yourself, an unknown youth, akin to Godfrey and
Peter the Hermit, finding your own passions depicted in those exotic
adventures. What can the historian’s genius ever do except make past
generations live in front us and stir our passions powerfully by telling
us about the Greeks and Romans? Is this not perhaps the ability to dis-
cover and appreciate the secret relation between us and the history of a
past whose children we are? In our spirit the historian finds the explana-
tion of humanity’s great revolutions, which for us is the source of much
delight because we discover boundless riches hidden inside ourselves,
being made aware of them for the first time. We journey through all of
universal history, finding something that belongs to us in every era, every
society, every great person, something that is like a property of our spirit,
like ourselves. Thus we become aware that there is a kind of synthesis
in us, an epitome of mankind in a determinate form. It is not possible
for you to understand yourself, in fact, unless you also understand the
civilization of your country, where you were born, and where your spirit
took shape.
And how would you propose to understand Italy without also under-
standing the culture of the peoples that surround her – Europe’s cul-
ture? Can you understand Europe without the story of her past? Think
for a minute: if there had been no Empire and no Roman law for you to
learn as a youth, is it likely you would have the same political and legal
ideas that you have today? And if there had been no Greek society, if
394
you had never acquired knowledge of a Homer or a Phidias, of those

monuments and those writings, things that since infancy were like food
for your spirit, would you have the same ideas about art and literature
that you have today? As the geologist tramps across the earth’s differ-
ent strata, he can read the history of the natural revolutions to which
our planet has been subject. In words said unconsciously, the philologist
finds the history of revolutions that language has undergone in former
times. And the philosopher cannot claim to understand mankind unless
he finds the story of past generations there, each one of them having left
its legacy for man. What is the reason why dialects, popular and primi-
tive song, and the crudest mythologies are studied with so much ardour?
Why is it that remains of an unknown civilization – lake-dwellings, for
example, or monuments of primitive America – stimulate almost all the
learned of Europe to do new research? Might it be idle curiosity? Surely
not. The reason is that in every part of history lies a part of ourselves, so
that a new historical discovery can, in some sense, announce a new dis-
covery about the human spirit. Popular poetry and primitive song enable
us to study man when he is still not in a position to study himself.
To conclude, then: the positive philosophy renounces, for now, abso-
lute knowledge of mankind; indeed it renounces all absolute conclu-
sions, but without denying the existence of what it does not know. It
studies only facts and social and moral laws by patiently checking the
inductions of psychology against history and finding the laws of the
human spirit in the laws of history. Thus, it does not persist in studying
an abstract human person, beyond space and time, composed only of
pure categories and empty forms; instead, it studies a real living person,
mutable in a thousand ways, stirred by a thousand passions, limited at
every turn, and yet filled with boundless aspirations. But at this point the
opponents of the positive philosophy ask a good question: after all that,
have you perhaps reached the goal set for itself by metaphysics? You have
renounced first truths, and they are precisely those for which metaphys-
ics has searched, because they are the essence of metaphysics. You claim
instead that there should no longer be such a science and that you put
metaphysics with astrology. But you do not get around to telling us that
your method solves the problems that philosophy has left unsolved.
To this the positivists reply: we are giving you not a new system but a
new method, and it is going to do neither more nor less for philosophy
than the experimental method did for the natural sciences. Divide prob-
lems that have a solution from those that remain unsolvable for now,
and deal only with the first. The medieval physicist wanted to know what
395
force, light and heat are. The modern physicist has created mechanics,
optics, and the science of heat by renouncing knowledge of what those
natural entities are. If the positive philosopher finds the science of the
human being and its ideas without knowing its nature, he surely will have
brought off an equivalent revolution in the moral sciences. Is it possible
that metaphysics and scholasticism have had such success in solving the
problems that positivism abandons?
But there is still more. As you meditate eternally on the essence of
force, you have not taken a single step, while mechanics, which makes
progress every day, discovers the laws of force. And if the day for discov-
ering all those laws had come, would this not be rather close to know-
ing that essence? What else could that essence be but the synthesis of
all those laws? And what else could absolute knowledge of thought be
except what unifies the knowledge of all its laws? But to unify them, they
must first be found. From one side, then, we get a method that persists
in reaching for an impossible goal all at once and cannot move a single
step forward, while from the other side comes a method that renounces
reaching that goal and still gets closer to it every day. But this does not
make the metaphysicians surrender. Indeed, full of indignation, they
give this reply: you deny first ideas, then, you deny the science that Aris-
totle and Plato worked on, and for you there are only facts and laws. So
you are materialists or sceptics consumed by doubt.
Not at all, reply the positivists. We belong to the people who have
renounced the impossible, and we recognize the limits of reason, which
is the only way for it to make progress. And really, what good does it do
to raise those ancient accusations that have been used in vain against
every progressive step that science has taken? They have become dull
and rusty weapons that wound only those who use them. The pyre did
not extinguish Giordano Bruno’s teaching, and the Inquisition did not
silence Galileo: those fearsome phrases have been used too often for
them to have any more value.
Positivism is a method that wants to lead us to study facts and find the
relations between our spirit and human society. It makes us see how our
ideas are the life and reality of historical facts. Can positivism maintain,
in good faith, that it is just the same thing as materialism? True, there
are positivists who are used to denying the existence of ideas, as there are
also others who want to explain their essence. But then those positivists
overstep the bounds of the science that limits itself to saying that we do
not know, for now, the inner nature of ideas, and so, by another route,
they fall back into the metaphysics that they wish to combat. Still, a final
396
word needs to be said on this grave question. The historical method does
not presume to shed light on all problems of metaphysics, much less to
do so all at once, just as the experimental method did not and does not
claim to answer all of scholasticism’s questions. And yet the human spirit
keeps asking itself those questions. There are scientists today who write
clever books about the system of the universe, the plurality of worlds, and
so on. Such books will never stop, and they are not useless: hypotheses
too have great importance, serving temporarily to unify the facts already
known, if nothing else. But real science stops where those hypotheses
start.
And so it is not to be hoped, even after the progress made by pos-
itivism, that people would stop asking themselves what space is, what
the infinite is, what God its, whether my soul is immortal, and what will
become of me in the other life. Science cannot answer these questions,
but they still torment our spirit. Beyond reality, or, if you like, above it,
there is an ideal that flickers confusedly before us and never leaves us,
that keeps tempting and pushing us to ask new questions; in a way, it
is the life of our life, and it keeps making us hope to step beyond our
nature’s limits. Since only vulgar minds do not find this ideal in their
consciousness, we should not deny or doubt it. But it cannot really be
part of the science that verifies by testing, and it keeps going on without
ever stopping. Poetry, music, metaphysics, and faith follow behind this
ideal, from which they cannot, should not, and do not wish to remove
themselves, even though they are destined to stay behind it and never
reach it, feeling it rather than understanding it. This is why it has often
been said in our day that metaphysics is another type of art.
But for now, metaphysics must resign itself to having been abandoned
for some time, and, I would almost say, abased. No one, in fact, wants to
hear it any longer. No metaphysical system prevails in Europe, and were
a new system to appear, it would be greeted with suspicion, and, I would
almost say, with disgust. It seems to have been struck by a sudden steril-
ity, while bearing the burden of the universal suspicion that surrounds
it. We lack the time to chase after new speculations in order to build
new systems. The philosophical spirit is busy, and it is needed for new
and manifold inquiries made possible all at once in so many sciences,
where the laurels gathered are more secure and more useful. To create
comparative philology and mythology, no smaller speculative talent is
required than was needed to build the systems of Hegel and Schelling.
Accordingly, we are far from wishing to discredit the philosophical
and speculative spirit, which is really indispensable for all the inquiries
397
that people are undertaking. Having acknowledged that metaphysics is

not a science, in the strict sense of the word, and having seen its territory
limited by science every day, we declare that the territory still remaining
is vast, that it starts where science stops, and that there is always a noble
job to do there by deepening the thirst for truth and raising the human
spirit to aims nobler than itself. Hence, metaphysics is still an imme-
morial monument to man’s highest faculties and to his deepest lack of
power: it is a noble gymnasium of human talent. A person educated by it
in abstract questions and pushed to reach its unreachable goal will bring
all the more passion for exploration, along with a loftiness of reasoning,
into positive, exact, and scientific research. In such research, going from
the particular to the general, the induction that somehow divines the
laws of nature and proves them by testing needs just such help from the
divinatory genius that art and philosophy develop and instill.
History makes us see that every great scientific revolution has always
been preceded by a great philosophical movement in which the human
spirit somehow sharpens and exercises its own powers and is then empow-
ered to apply them with surer certainty and greater vigour to win new
victories over nature. Scholasticism preceded Galileo; Bacon preceded
Newton; Spinoza and Descartes preceded Leibniz, the mathematician
and philosopher; while Kant and Hegel preceded the whole renewal of
social, historical, and anthropological sciences of which I have spoken
and which is the main business of our century.
And if metaphysics seems dried up and dead today, we must still note
that all the sciences have acquired a more philosophical character. While
they squeeze metaphysics out everywhere and take a new province from
it every day, the sciences are still providing new material for future meta-
physical speculations. In fact, if metaphysics aims at the unity of what can
be known, it must also change because of the uncertainty of its systems,
now that material for science is growing while the domain of metaphysics
is shrinking. If metaphysics cannot or does not know how to progress in
the certainty of the scientific method, it is still a product of the human
spirit, and must, along with this spirit, be changed and transformed, just
like art, morals, and society. Powerless to give us a true and exact under-
standing of man, metaphysics makes the human noble and educates him
to aspire to great ideas. The sequence of its systems becomes, in the
hands of the historian, a sound tool – on a par with religions, languages,
and all of culture – for examining the powers and nature of the human
intellect.
Philosophers, therefore, and especially Italian philosophers, should
398
not be alarmed at the great progress made by the historical method and
the positive philosophy. Metaphysics will not be destroyed, but it certain-
ly will be chased back to its natural borders. Therefore, instead of going
astray to hurl useless accusations of materialism or scepticism, philoso-
phers should recognize in Machiavelli, Vico, and many other Italians the
first seeds of this new and inevitable progress that brings us to the truth
and not to materialism or doubt. They should remember that it has nev-
er been possible, even once, for torture and the stake to stop progress
towards truth, and that today vague threats do not halt progress. They
should remember that every honest search for the truth is equally useful
for all sciences and fulfills mankind’s most sacred duty.
NOTES
1 Villari delivered this prolusione in Florence at the Institute for Advanced

Studies in 1865; it was published in the first issue of the journal Politecnico in
1866 and republished in Villari (1868a), which is the version followed here;
see also Villari (1999b): 111−48.
2 Paul-Émile Littré (1801−81), a classicist converted by Comte to positivism,
was the great French lexicographer of his age; Ernest Renan (1823−92),
a patriarch of academic Orientalism, wrote a scandalously secular Life of
Jesus; the historian and literary scholar Hippolyte Taine (1828−93) was also
known as a positivist; Étienne Vacherot (1809−97), who taught philosophy
and its history in Paris, wanted to reduce metaphysics to psychology; Marce-
lin Berthelot (1827−1907) showed that all of chemistry, including organic
chemistry, had to be understood physically; and the great physiologist
Claude Bernard (1813−78), whose most famous book was An Introduction to
the Study of Experimental Medicine, made lasting contributions to the funda-
mentals of human physiology.
3 Ludwig Büchner (1824−99) was a physician and a philosopher whose com-
mitment to materialism was also political and cultural; the first part of Aus
Natur und Wissenschaft was published in 1862.
4 According to Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627−1704), a theologian
who theorized about absolute monarchy and wrote elegant sermons, since
the Providence known to humans is really God’s law acting in history, his-
tory is really the same as Providence.
5 As a crude slogan, ‘no more metaphysics’ was perhaps inevitable in Ger-
man philosophy after Kant’s searing critique of its failures, and, again,
after Hegel’s aggrandizement of them. But the response at mid-century in
399
Germany, when the context was theological in the wake of David Strauss’s
Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, is more commonly
characterized as ‘materialism’ than as ‘positivism.’ Almost exactly contem-
porary with Villari’s speech was Friedrich Lange’s History of Materialism –
Lange (1866) – a plea to return to Kant for a more cautious resistance to
metaphysics than what was provided in Germany by the current versions of
materialism.
6 For some of these philosophical slogans and bywords, see sections 6, 8, 9,
and 10 of the Introduction, on Rosmini, Gioberti, Mamiani, and Spaventa.
7 Dante argues in De monarchia that the secular authority of the Emperor is
autonomous, not subject to the Pope. He was exiled from Florence in 1302
when the part of the Guelf party that was strictly pro-papal took control of
the city.
8 Friedrich Max Müller (1823−1920) was a philologist whose studies of South
Asian languages, religions, and myths were both formative and controversial
for the fields of comparative religion and mythology.
400
8
Francesco De Sanctis
The Principle of Realism1
Recently I happened to see the Annual of a Philosophical Library pub-

lished in Leipzig at the end of 1868, which had already become a siz-
able collection of sixty-seven volumes. Looking at this series, I was struck
by certain names that have been out of fashion for a while – Descartes,
Bacon, Locke, and finally Condillac. I seemed to be right in the middle
of the eighteenth century. I was also astonished that the study of philoso-
phy was still pursued with such ardour in Germany, that something on
so vast a scale could still be published: among us it would find very few
readers. And this Library contains more than reprints. I find prefaces,
clarifications, and commentaries in it, sometimes taking up several vol-
umes and revealing the presence of an active and organized mind. That
mind is President Kirchmann’s.2
Then I remembered the Berlin Philosophical Society, of which Kirch-
mann is one of the most active and distinguished members. I had heard
about his Philosophy of Knowledge and his Aesthetics, and a few months ago
I was sent a booklet titled The Principle of Realism.3 I became quite curi-
ous to know what this Realism was in Germany, causing so much uproar
and rescuing Locke and Condillac from oblivion. And it excited me all
the more that our philosopher ends his work with the wish for intel-
lectual community among educated people from all countries. Hence,
even though these topics are mainly outside my field – a real digression
in the history of my thinking – I still read and I keep reading and I do
not tire of reading. It was perhaps the first time that I read a book in
German so quickly. This happened not because the author was expert
in that pandering and those cunning moves that the French call the art
of making a book. It is because he does not let his thoughts wander; he
moves straight ahead, always speaking simply and clearly, sticking closely
to his topic. He is austere in his writing, all order and precision, averse
to phrase-making, formulas, and sophisticated fog, free of all sentiment
and fancy. And because there is much talk here in Italy of Realism in art
and science – though it is usually vague and confused – I think it worth-
while to explain the ideas of a writer who has devoted a great deal of his
intellectual life to this problem.
Realism is not to be confused with empiricism and sensism, these being
crude starts on Realism. And it is not the same as materialism, which has
grown up from a rather superficial application of thought to the prob-
lem of matter. Hegel himself condemns empiricism. But he could not
condemn Realism in its present form because Realism puts thinking in
as lofty a position as the Idealists do. Here is the difference. Idealism
treats thinking as the unique and direct source of being because what is
highest and first in being can be learned only from thinking. But accord-
ing to the Realists, existence can be known only by perceiving, and the
only purpose of thinking is to elaborate the content of perception, purg-
ing it of false appearances and deriving the general from it in the form
of concepts and laws.
The instruments of knowledge, therefore, are perceiving and think-
ing. And our author, before giving us the principle of knowledge accord-
ing to Realism, analyses these two instruments. Perception comes from
the senses and also comes from consciousness – from internal sense, or,
as the author says, internal perception. The organs of the first (percep-
tion) are the senses. The second has no organs. At its foundation lie the
various states of one’s own soul as they exist in desire or in feeling pleas-
ure and pain. This could be called apperception (Selbstwarnehmung). But
because this gives you information only about your own soul, knowledge
of the states of souls belonging to other people is missing. By physiog-
nomy, gesture, and attitude you can evaluate this through reasoning and
thus through thinking, but you cannot see any farther into it than your
own experience takes you. The consequence is that Know thyself is also
the basis of all these mental states.
Experience gives you the object as outside you – something out there
– and gives it to you directly and immediately, as the principle of causal-
ity, with no use of categories, without anything discursive, without action
and reaction. And it gives it to you necessarily. Even the most fanatical
Idealist surrenders to this necessity and must locate the object outside
himself, as existing. Without perception the concept of existence would
be absent from thinking. The existent has a content and a form. As con-
tent, the existent comes into the soul by way of perception in the form of
knowledge – something cognized. But it does not get to us in the same
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De Sanctis, Realism
way as form, as just being alone. The resistance presented by this form
through its duration and limitation reveals its presence so that being in
its positive nature eludes knowing, and its concept for us is only negative
– the unknowable in things. When Schelling and Hegel said that being
and knowing are at once the same and different, they spoke the truth,
since they are identical in content, though in form they are eternally
different.
How things work when the content of being enters the mind by way
of perception is a problem of philosophy and physiology, as unsolved
today as in the time of the Greeks, despite so much progress. Science
has only transmuted being into knowledge (Idealism) or knowledge into
being (Materialism). Materialism forgets that all our observations have
managed to establish the reciprocal activity of the brain and states of
the soul – but not their identity. There is no instrument perfect enough
to fix the ultimate boundaries of the bodily, the smallest parts of the
brain and their vibrations. The connection between the end of the bod-
ily and the beginning of the mental is still unknown. Movements of small
parts of the body are and always will be bodily – different from knowing.
All the systems of monism are just a game – that of Plotinus and those
of Spinoza, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. This unity that is immediately
divided again into being and knowing is an empty word. Depending on
how good the magician is, we can get anything we want from this unity,
but it has nothing to do with what can be conceived of.
But there is a second instrument of knowledge – thinking – and if
we carefully observe what it does, we see that it gives us some clues: in
memory, it repeats; in synthesis and analysis, it unites or divides; and it
compares, contrasts, relates, and expresses different types of cognition,
attention, certainty, and necessity. These are its activities or powers. When
it remembers, it no longer needs an object; representation is enough.
When it divides the object into parts, properties, elements, and concepts,
it assists language and cognition; and from concepts it ascends to the laws
that are the aim of science. Joining objects with parts of objects, as the
poet does, it produces new images or representations, without being able
to pass beyond the forms of what exists. Formal unities other than those
that exist cannot be represented; they are empty words, like many such
philosophical notions. To summarize: humans can know the content of
everything that exists – body and mind – only by perception. In its two
forms, perception alone provides the bridge that leads from being to
knowing, and perception alone confirms the identity of the content as
being and as knowing – its truth, in other words. The simplest form of this
principle of knowledge can be expressed in these two propositions:
403
what is perceived exists;

what contradicts itself does not exist.
In the union of these two propositions lies the principle of Realism: from
this comes not just its content but its truth.
Thinking elaborates the content given by perception, and in virtue
of the second proposition (the principle of contradiction), to which
perception is subject, thinking rejects everything that is contradictory
because it is false. And the content thus purified is true. Thinking is thus
higher than perceiving; it is the light and guide of perception. Only what
thinking confirms to be true is a truth. But the work of thinking does
not stop there. With the power of analysis and synthesis it forms species
and genera, finds concepts in things, and uses them to discover universal
laws.
The principle of Realism comes down to the old proposition that nihil
est in intellectu quod non fuerit prius in sensu, including among the senses
also the inner sense, or internal perception.4 Only on this principle do
we get any knowledge of bodily and mental things. Science has no other
way of knowing being. Concepts of things are not innate, not revealed
by higher substances or by divinity. We must get them by our labour, by
the effort of experience and thinking. And since the content of things
is inexhaustible, the labour has no end. Both in practical life and in sci-
ence, this is the only way. Philosophy has no ways of its own. There is no
intellectual vision such as Plato, Spinoza, Schelling, and others describe.
Such a vision is just a jumble of experience and thinking, a hypothetical
faculty of mind that includes the direct content of experience and the
analytic and synthetic power of thinking. There is no mental faculty that
gives a content of being which was not given first by perception. There
is no fantasy of the philosopher or the poet that can augment the types
of simple determinations of colours and sounds or simple states of the
soul – pleasure, pain, desire, and moral sentiment. Absent what sees and
feels, it is impossible for a colour or feeling to be represented to anyone.
Art can put the pieces together, but it cannot invent them.
Most of all, it is dangerous for science to use feelings or desires in its
search for truth, be they moral, religious, or scientific. Leaning towards
the Absolute or unity would be dangerous in this way, like the desire to
find a rigorous logic in the origin and development of things. This is
why the value of mathematics, which is devoid of such feelings, is widely
recognized. The more that feelings operate in the sciences, the more
disputes multiply.
Alongside this knowledge of being there is a different knowledge in
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De Sanctis, Realism
the soul that does not provide any content of being but surrounds it with
an infinity of relations. Forms thereby emerge whose origin is in the soul
and are closely linked with being. A natural illusion will make these also
– these especially – seem to be true being. The forms of relation repre-
sent no being, however, and in their purity they are empty of any con-
tent that exists. But because they can be applied to any content and are
closely connected with it, these relations are confused with the concept
of being, both in the ordinary appearance and in the scientific illusion.
Because they include objects of the most contrary kinds, and because
they mark the same object with the most contrary features, contradiction
arises. Kant’s antinomies and Hegel’s contradictions arise just from this
confusion between relations and the concept of being.
The forms of relation do not arise from one another; they are suggest-
ed by experience as they gradually manifest themselves in the language
of educated people in the form of adverbs, prepositions, and conjunc-
tions – such as not, and, and or; equality, number, and whole; whole and
part; cause and effect; substance and accident; essence and non-essence,
form and content, external and internal. Application of these forms
requires more than one object – at least two. Thus, they are not repre-
sentations of any one object. An object that can take one of these forms
can take the opposite form; in various relations it can be near or far,
young or old, and still remain always that object in its being. The relation
therefore does not acquire being, and it is a mistake to confuse the two.
The same object can be sometimes whole, sometimes part, sometimes
cause and sometimes effect. A part can turn into a whole, an effect can
turn into a cause, accident into substance, and so on to infinity: when
Spinoza plays this game the human becomes a mode or accident of God.
These infinite series that play so large a part in philosophy today thus
belong to relations that express the alternating succession of their oppo-
sitions, but the infinite chain of causes and effects does not lead to an
infinite cause-and-effect series in being as well. This confusion is the
basis of Kant’s antinomies. In the thesis the object is treated as existent
and thus as finite. In the antithesis it is treated as a relation and comes
under an infinite series. To resolve these antinomies it suffices to under-
stand the nature of relations. But since Kant did not understand this, he
was forced to reduce the existent to a mere appearance. There is a simi-
lar confusion in Hegel that produces its own contradictions. He finds a
contradiction in the concept of limit because it establishes the reality of
existence but is also its negation, given that in the limit lies the ending of
one object along with the beginning of another. It is clear that the limit
405
is a determination of being and not a relation, but here it is taken at one

time as existing and at another time as a relation.
But if these forms of relation are not derived from being, where do
they come from? Realism can give no answer: it finds them in the think-
ing that all people do and in all languages, just as the principle of contra-
diction is found there. These forms have the ability to assist thinking and
to provide more accurate cognition of things. By comparisons, contrasts,
and relations, sciences get complete possession of the object. As know-
ing, being has already become spirit: by means of these forms that give
you similarities and differences, connections and sequences, it becomes
even more spiritualized. To these forms the sciences owe a great deal of
their progress.
The various ways of knowing also belong to the activity of thinking.
When I see someone for the first time, my knowledge comes from expe-
rience. When I remember and represent him from far away, the knowl-
edge is of another kind – mere representation. And if I add attention to
it, there is knowledge at yet another level, more intense and more exact.
There is also certainty when knowledge comes from authority or faith,
and there is necessity when it is based on the principle of contradiction.
Now these levels of knowledge do not express a determination existing
in the object but the particular mode in which it has been known. Here
also it may be that the link between the mode of knowing and the object
is so close that ordinary thinking and language treat this mode as a prop-
erty of the object. So we hear expressions like a recognized person, a
certain fact – after lightning there must be thunder. To uncover the illu-
sion it suffices to realize that the same object is known in various modes
– recognized for that person and certain for this one. No one any longer
doubts this.
Meanwhile, anyone who looks at the history of philosophy from the
earliest times will see that the true and first being has been sought pre-
cisely in those categories that express forms of relation and knowledge
but are not images of any being and therefore are not capable of provid-
ing knowledge of being. Experience has been held in low regard as too
crude a tool. And because the being provided by experience is muta-
ble, because experience also has its own illusions and deceptions, and
because it is only concepts that bring the eternal and the immutable
along with their content, experience – according to Kant – cannot give
us general laws. Thinking was proclaimed the unique path to truth, and
alongside intellect a special type of reason was discovered, which, like an
intellectual vision, could effortlessly insert the highest concepts and laws
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De Sanctis, Realism
into our brains. Relations and various modes of knowing – such as those
that do not derive from being yet have the kind of connection with it that
enables them to appear to be its categories – confirmed philosophy in
taking this direction. These categories of pure knowledge thus became
the categories of primal being, and the Absolute was discovered. Kant’s
categories – with the exception of the Real – are also of this kind. How-
ever much he recognizes that they are only forms of knowing and do not
originate from being, he still gives them the meaning of being when he
claims that experience is possible only through them.
The principle of knowledge according to Realism cannot be proved
in the form of a geometrical deduction or syllogism. But a few observa-
tions can support it. Above all, the objective value of perception and the
principle of contradiction are facts accepted by everyone and used by
everyone, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, from childhood
on, even though the child does not recognize them. They are proposi-
tions born into the soul. They are not empty formulas. They indicate
powers of the soul that work according to the aforesaid principle and fill
knowledge with content. Therefore, within human knowledge they mark
out the laws of an irresistible force and a fact. They work by necessity, and
all are subject to them.
Since the principle of Realism is common to all people, since it is that
by which they acquire their cognitions and determine the truth of those
cognitions, it is possible for this philosophy to have a clear and precise
language free of contradictions and accessible to the most ignorant and
simple people, who find in this philosophy the same laws and forces that
operate in daily life and have shaped much of their way of thinking and
speaking. Not only in philosophy but in all other fields of knowledge –
morality, law, the fine arts – Realism provides a solid foundation from
which observation and induction can lead to truth, just as in the natu-
ral sciences. Ethics especially is impossible if time and space are unreal,
as the Idealists claim; if true reality is without space and time, human
actions turn into mere appearance, devoid of moral value. To create an
ethics, Kant, Fichte, and Schopenhauer had to abandon their Idealism;
in an artificial way, they had to give a kind of reality to a world that had
been reduced to a phenomenon.
Beyond this, Realism needs none of the assumptions required for
the functioning of other systems – no categories, no dialectical devel-
opments or genetic sequences. Realism gets directly to its object. To
acquire knowledge a person needs only the senses, assisted by the powers
and activities of thinking to correct illusions, eliminate contradictions,
407
raise knowledge to the highest concepts, and, by means of induction,

elevate it to the highest laws. Then, at those highest levels, thinking grad-
ually diminishes the differences and oppositions that abound in the first
phases of knowing. Realism does not demand that differences disappear
completely, however, nor that the dualism of body and mind, being and
knowing, dissolve in a higher unity of monism. Realism certainly does
not claim that this is impossible, but it does not make it obligatory, as do
Plotinus, Spinoza, and the philosophers of identity. It also manages (and
perhaps it needs) to descend again to differences in order to use them to
achieve analysis and the richness of existence. And just as Realism needs
no assumption nor any higher unity, likewise it needs no schema for the
partition of its material. It does not divide things by twos or threes. It fol-
lows the differences given by the object and uses those concepts that lead
to the knowledge of laws.
Therefore, realism has no absolute system. The order in which a
content appears is a relational concept to which nothing in the object
corresponds, serving only to make knowledge easier. In existence, all dif-
ferences, all concepts – high and low – and all the forces at play subsist
together and within one another. A system is useful for learning and
teaching, and for such a purpose this system or that system can be used.
We can begin from above and descend synthetically to particulars, or
we can begin from below and ascend analytically to the more general.
In physiology we can start with the blood or the nerves and in jurispru-
dence with real or personal rights or with the right of the State. All these
systems have excellent outcomes, and each has its advantages. This shows
that the system does not emerge from the facts, and that there is no
genetic development on which the truth and necessity of the content is
based – as Idealism claims. Similar constructions can flatter our vanity, as
we demonstrate dialectically from the podium what has been achieved
by experience. This method involves no necessity – only a choice. The
whole point of Realism is to develop all the richness found in existence,
leaving the selection of a system to the judgment of teachers and stu-
dents. Idealism puts method above everything, however, and torments
itself about it, leaving the development of content in the shadows. Thus,
Hegel’s logic is just an artificial construct of pure concepts dancing like
spectres before your eyes and leaving you dissatisfied because it gives you
no way to get to knowledge of the world that exists.
It is certain that all systems originating from pure thinking provide a
weak defense against error and doubt; they are easily discredited, and
there is no way to put an end to disputes. Realism provides a basis of fact
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De Sanctis, Realism
about which all people agree, and this cuts off the disputes. It is easy to
correct experience, tracing its illusions back to laws, cleansing it of the
falsity introduced by imagination and sentiment, testing and retesting its
results with new and more accurate research. And when a new discovery
is made, the whole structure does not collapse, as it does with Idealism.
The new settles down upon the old, and when the new is such that it
destroys the whole structure, there is still plenty of material left to con-
struct the new.
Realism not only rejects other systems, it also provides an excellent cri-
terion for discovering what is false in them by showing where they stray
from nature and fall into errors and contradictions. With this criterion,
Kirchmann refutes Kant and Hegel, lingering long over the explanation
and refutation of the system that has recently become so famous: the
philosophy of the unconscious. Hartmann owes his success to a method
that is essentially experimental and inductive, making it possible for eve-
ryone to follow him in his more abstruse and subtle conceptions. But if
the method is based on Realism, the author substantially contradicts it
with his hypothesis of the unconscious. This is a first being outside space
and time and having two attributes, an unconscious ideal and an uncon-
scious will, in the end deriving an Idealism from Schelling that can be
resisted at many points.5
In philosophy, of course, just as in the sciences, we use hypotheses
to explain various problems, and, sometimes – especially in talented
intellectuals – various conceptions suddenly emerge and lead to a new
truth. But Realism, while continuing to admire the intellectualism, is not
satisfied with the obscure and contradictory notions that entangle the
new concept. Wishing to see the concept clear and well-defined, free of
contradictions, and compatible with the findings of experience, Realism
applies to these methods and these products of genius the same philo-
sophical test that applies to all the special sciences. It keeps whatever
passes this test. Anything else will be a nice game but not the truth nor
even a start on it.
Such hypotheses are common to almost all great philosophers: Plato
has his ideas; Aristotle his doctrine of divinity in metaphysics; Stoics the
identity of virtue and pleasure; sceptics the impossibility of finding the
truth; scholastics the harmony between mysteries of the Christian reli-
gion and philosophy; Descartes universal doubt; Spinoza the unity of
thought and extension; Leibniz the pre-established harmony between
knowing and being; Kant the phenomenal character of the object; Fich-
te the subject/object; Schelling the intellectual intuition; and Hegel has
409
dialectical development. Naturally, given these examples, no philoso-

pher today can remain content with the solid foundation provided by
the experimental sciences, so they fabricate new hypotheses and find
true being in them, putting to use all the riches of imagination and sen-
timent. The genuine Realist philosopher rejects these aids, even at the
cost of seeming flat and boring.
Realism is no Minerva suddenly sprung from the brain of a Jupiter. Its
principle has always been in use, but with conscious and scientific rigour
only after the Middle Ages. Bacon, Locke, Hume, the French encyclope-
dists, and even the modern materialists have worked to give it shape. The
example of natural scientists who have achieved such great results by obser-
vation and induction has strengthened this movement. Recent inquiries
into the forms of relation and knowledge aim to restore the a priori to its
true condition, not allowing its links with the a posteriori to lead it into
error or to mix one thing up with the other. This proves that Realism can
follow thinking even to its highest levels and its most subtle operations.
This is not empiricism, of which Hegel could say that it applies the catego-
ries uncritically and without consciousness. On the other hand, the new
Realism can still be considered a recent development of Hegel’s teaching.
All the great ideas of that distinguished philosopher – such as the iden-
tity of being and knowing, the objective nature of concepts, the meaning
of morality in the history of the world, and a number of others – are not
only accepted but reworked by it. When what is obscure and contradictory
in Hegel – the false mixed up with the true – has been removed, Realism
presents these teachings in their full truth and in a clear form.
Concluding in this way, Kirchmann expresses the wish that his account
might win many followers for Realism and eliminate various misunder-
standings. Only through Realism can German philosophers escape their
isolation – the closed circle of initiates and believers – and enter a liv-
ing communion not only with all educated people but also with philoso-
phers from other civilized countries. It is just this wish that has moved
me to provide my fellow citizens with an idea of Kirchmann’s account as
exact as I could make it. We are usually more inclined to admire the Ger-
mans than to study them and acquire full mastery of their culture. The
influence of German thought on our culture is great, and just for that
reason, if we want to be free people and not machines, we must study
their thinking and look at it from all sides. Accurate study of someone
else’s thinking makes us original, even when we convince ourselves to
appropriate it. Kirchmann has produced a work useful for drawing the
proper lines around Realism, distancing it from the crude superficiali-
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De Sanctis, Realism
ties of empiricism and the hasty hypotheses of materialism. In this way,

he has eliminated many preconceptions and many objections that arise
from confusions of this sort.
But he has not succeeded, it seems to me, in attracting many followers
to his Realism as a doctrine. In this regard, his account seems neither
complete nor persuasive to me. Few will be able to share his iconoclastic
loathing for imagination and sentiment, which still coexist in the mind
alongside thinking and give it light and warmth. If these forces lead
thinking astray and deceive it, watch out for them. But it is excessive to
chase them out, as if the spirit could be sliced into pieces. Few will be
able to deny, as Kirchmann does, the presence of thinking in percep-
tion – even in an unconscious way – and its primary importance in the
origin of cognition. If it is true that there can be no knowledge of being
without perception, it is also true that without thinking there can be no
perception. Arguing about before and after is useless; they co-exist and
work together. I tip my hat to perception, but I cannot throw thinking out.
Without these exaggerations and others like them, Realism could
survive, I believe: mainly it could survive as a method; as a doctrine, it
is hard for Realism not to lapse into materialism and sensism, as with
Locke and Condillac. Realism as method is the Realism of Bacon and
Galileo, which was one of the most progressive moves ever made by the
human spirit. If the abuse of thinking and the progress of the natural sci-
ences have led people back to this path, we have only to rejoice for it. In
this sense, Kirchmann has been completely successful, and we can only
accept all his observations with due recognition and pray that Realism
may penetrate even into philosophy if we follow the path already taken
by many stalwart souls.
We have a whole series of economic, moral, and philosophical princi-
ples by which the present generation has lived. It would be good to do
the test again and put the suggestions of pure speculation to the trial
of experience. When pure thinking does not succeed in building confi-
dence in its results, systems abound and confidence wanes. Then we may
stand on experience, and where experience does not succeed, we should
be humble and not rush to conclusions. Realism is the general revising
of our beliefs and opinions, and if there is any point of pride for modern
philosophy, it is just that many of its principles govern this revising. Real-
ism encourages serious study and puts it to use in practical life, detaches
it from hypotheses and generalities, directs it to the possession of reality,
restores confidence in human knowledge, and prepares a new synthesis
– the new age – by amassing new materials.
411
But many are discouraged and talk about the end of metaphysics, as
we used to talk about the end of poetry. Metaphysics and poetry are eter-
nal, however. They have their sunsets, but they also dawn again on the
horizon. We already see how much metaphysics multiplies in the midst
of Realism. And what are natural selection, the principle of heredity and
evolution, the unconscious, and the internal states of atoms but attempts
at metaphysics? What ought to worry us instead is this excessive haste
in metaphysics, perhaps more as a residue of old habit then as a true
awakening, the result of new and sufficient preparation. It is noteworthy,
however, that all these concepts do not come from constructs of pure
speculation, as they used to do. They have come as results of long and
patient observation of things, broadened and elevated into laws through
a process of bold and ingenious induction. They are tools of Realism that
construct new kinds of metaphysics. Constructs of pure thinking have
no more credit and no following. Metaphysics can go nowhere without
Realism as its passport – at least in appearance.
Kirchmann can be happy, then, and declare himself generally satis-
fied. We are deep in Realism. The new generation runs after us with the
same passion that made others of us in illis temporibus run after Hegel.6
Whether it’s Realism or Idealism, however, the important thing for the
young is to study and to study enough. Study is the best system of all. And
serious study is the only source of a people’s greatness. A people that
studies is always free and creative. Today there is progress. But we are still
neither free nor creative.
NOTES
1 This article, or essay review, appeared in 1876 in the Nuova Antologia; we

have used De Sanctis (1990): 121−37, including the very helpful notes by
the editor.
2 On Kirchmann, see the Introduction, section 12.
3 Kirchmann (1864), (1868), (1875).
4 A scholastic slogan based on Aristotle: ‘There is nothing in the intellect that
was not first in the senses.’
5 The Unconscious of Eduard von Hartmann (1842−1906) is a descendant of
the post-Kantian Absolute: see Hartmann (1878).
6 In illis temporibus: in the old days.
412
9
Francesco De Sanctis
The Ideal1
Let me start by welcoming our friends and members. We have had

enough rest and relaxation. Now that the holidays are over, here we are
back at our favourite club. This year let us offer you a regular series of
talks, at least one a month, and also some readings and discussions on
the same schedule. Not to get down to detail, let me now announce a
first reading for the evening of Thursday, 22 November, to be given by
our distinguished friend and companion, Professor Persico, based on
his short story.2 I had been intending to give you a talk myself, but the
hardest thing for me has been finding a topic, a subject for it. I started
daydreaming about it some time ago, but I finally wore myself out and
came to a sudden stop, asking myself: ‘What drives me to spend so much
time on the Philological Circle? What drives all the members to promote
its growth?’ And this was my immediate answer: ‘It’s just that feeling of
duty that drives us to seek the good of others – the feeling of the Ideal.’
Having got this far, I also cried ‘Eureka!’
But a person has a kind of double person inside – two persons, as it
were – and one of them pokes fun at the other. So there I was, inter-
rupted once again by this question: ‘Professor, why would it occur to you
to give a talk about the Ideal? Speaking about the Ideal at a time when
everything is Real? You run the risk of looking like a diehard. Or anyhow
like someone who lives in the clouds or the Kingdom of the Moon, show-
ing that you don’t know that the Ideal is dead and buried.’ Even so, allow
me at least to give the funeral oration. As one who has had the sad task of
recording on their tombs the virtues of many dear departed friends, you
will not want to stop me from saying a few words about the burial of the
Ideal. The Ideal was the companion of my youth and has stirred my heart
many times. In delivering its eulogy, perhaps I can beg a requiescat from
its enemies as well. Let me not conceal from you that in thinking about
giving this funeral oration, I have secretly wished, as we accompany it to
the grave, that we shall realize that it is still alive – immortal, in fact.
The Ideal is dead. The Ideal is alive.
Therefore, as one should when someone has died, I ask myself: ‘How
was it born; when was it born; how did it live; and when did it die, if it did
die? Above all, when the Ideal is born, how is it born?’
We look at an animal. What is it? It is a being with no purpose but
life, no purpose but preserving its life and preserving it in a state of
well-being. Can this purpose be called the Ideal? Certainly not. Let us
move on to the human and think about it first of all in infancy, when it is
almost an animal. The baby is anxious for the breast, driven there by the
instinct for life: is this an Ideal act? No. Now think about the savage when
all he does is hunt and fish, when he has no rule of morality other than
self-preservation, sacrificing even his own kind to it. Is there anything
Ideal in the savage? Again, no. Hence, the Ideal is born when the feel-
ing of being human is born in a human being, when thinking develops,
when a person conceives an idea of what was a feeling for him the day
before. A human comes to generalize human qualities, conceptualizing
glory and the fatherland, for example: at that point, ideas are born. But
we still do not have the Ideal.
When does one of these ideas become the Ideal? This happens only
when that creative human faculty called imagination takes hold of ideas,
and, by working upon them, produces feeling and informs all human
action with it in such a way that the idea becomes like the pillar of fire
that guides the human race. The Ideal then wholly occupies the human,
taking different forms in art, religion, philosophy, and history.
If it is true that the Ideal is born together with the feeling of human
consciousness, how is it born? The Ideal is not something floating in
the air. The Ideal is produced, like everything else. From what is it pro-
duced? From the Real, by that reality which you take to be its enemy.
Here is the reason: as reality evolves, it must reach a point where it is
capable of creating its own Ideal from itself. If the Ideal is the child of the
Real, any historical reality must have its corresponding Ideal. The history
of the Ideal is the history of the human spirit. Since no one has yet writ-
ten this history, it would be absurd for me to pretend to do it in a few
words. Nonetheless, in order to give you some sense of the principle that
it sets forth, I shall mention a few of its large features by way of example.
Suppose the human has reached the point in the development of con-
sciousness where he can think about his animal nature. Suppose he is
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De Sanctis, The Ideal
struck with a kind of terror in the face of nature’s immense fecundity.

Then you will have the idea of the infinite mixed with the idea of nature.
In the corresponding period, we find the Pyramids and vast structures
representing the infinite, along with the Sphinx that represents the mys-
tery of nature. Now take a step forward. Suppose that in the develop-
ment of human thinking, the mind comes to distinguish beautiful form
from ugly form, getting a sense of aesthetic imagination or the feeling
of beautiful form awakening in the mind. The mind will then create the
Ideal of art, which is the Greco-Latin Ideal. Take another step forward.
Suppose that this Ideal has run through its history, its cycle, and has
come into its decadence. And suppose that from then on, in that form,
the person feels bestialized, and that possessing that form feels like a
mind in need of a free and autonomous life. Suppose he feels that in
that form he has found neither a weapon nor a tool but a prison. Then
not only will he not yearn to create a form for himself, he will yearn to
get rid of the one that he has. He will aspire to achieve freedom of mind
as his ultimate purpose. Then we shall see that this person will create a
new Ideal in contradiction to animal form, yearning for a life in which
the spirit is free and independent. For a long time, mankind has lived on
the basis of this Ideal.
But now comes another idea. The human says to himself: ‘I am not
just an individual who must provide selfishly for the salvation of my soul.
I cannot isolate myself from the chores of life and make the idea of reli-
gion my only aim. Human life is no ephemeral appearance. It also has
its own goal, which is to provide for the welfare of humanity.’ And look:
another new Ideal arises, summed up in the Gospel passage ‘love one
another like brothers.’3 Human life becomes a mission.
There you have it, gentlemen, a series of ideas and the Ideal created
from each of them. And this series of Ideals following one another in the
human condition represents the continuous development in us of the
part that is human and not animal. Therefore, it is we ourselves who are
the Ideal, and what we have created is ourselves. It is a negation, and it is
progress, which leaves bestiality behind. But then you ask, ‘Why do you
stay just with this idea so that the Ideal is only the human?’ Because, gen-
tlemen, we find ourselves in a strange time when everything is Realism
and when we believe that the Ideal no longer exists. And I find not just
this Realism that opposes humanity. I find a still stranger phenomenon as
well – a certain satisfaction in looking more lovingly today on our animal
part than on the human. Having had to try to prove that man was born
from the monkey, we end up thinking more of the monkey than of man.
415
Indeed, facing this Realism, what is the Ideal? What gives the Ideal
its logical, typical, and emotional perfection is an illusion of the human
mind. It is a mere extension of the mind that has nothing to do with real-
ity. Thus, as thinking becomes an effect of chemical compositions and
morality a question of bodily temperament, we find ourselves fully in the
animal kingdom. As art follows this impulse, we find that all the qualities
that are really human appear to be bestialized: idea turns into instinct;
imagination is a manifestation of the machinery; passion is appetite. So
it looks to me as if man is walking backwards and reverting to his bestial
side. And yet, as I watch the human race embeasted, what gives me com-
fort is certainly not explaining such a thing but seeing the Ideal peeping
through even from beneath this momentary depravity.
Modern civilization is quite different from the civilization that shaped
the age when Messalina and Agrippina went to the circus to applaud
the gladiator who died elegantly.4 Today people protest. And what form
does this protest take? It is above all the laughter, denied to the ani-
mal and granted to the human, that produces a benign irony about this
dominance by the animal side. There is a great lesson in that laughter
to which we surrender ourselves in carnival. Weary of being human, we
are happy to be animal for a few days. And then, gentlemen, when that
animal nature asserts itself and is asserted as a negation of humanity – of
the homo sum – the human protests, and this protest is called disdain or
indignation. Humanity appears in us and reacts against this degradation.
Another protest erupts when humanity sees the Real immensely distant
from the Ideal and cannot hold back a cry of pain. Look at Schiller and
Leopardi.5
But we ask, ‘Do you not realize that this cry is the swan’s last song,
the funeral bell announcing the end of the Ideal life?’ No, gentlemen.
It is a painful cry full of desire and foreboding, and as long as there is
pain and indignation, the Ideal is present. While believing this, it also
comforts me to discern an enduring fact at the heart of this phenom-
enon: namely, that science prospers and flourishes, that the struggle with
nature snatches new secrets from it, looks in it for laws, and directs its
forces. This forms a richer reality that is more secure in its methods and
criteria than the one that preceded it, and the new Reality is also bound
to succeed in forming its own Ideality.
This has been called an age of transition, an enfantement, an age of
birthing. Indeed, what is this second half of the century but a laboratory
for preparing the reality that will have to produce its own ideality? In the
consciousness of the age, in the phenomena that accompany this animal
416
De Sanctis, The Ideal
Idealism, in laughter, in the grotesque, in comedy, in pain, and in indig-

nation we see nothing more than the sign of something labouring that
will bear is own fruits.
At one time we used to shout, ‘The King is dead. Long live the King!’
Now I say, ‘The Ideal is dead. The Ideal is risen!’
NOTES
1 De Sanctis read this short occasional piece in November 1877 to begin a

second year of meetings for the Circolo Filologico in Naples, of which he had
been a co-founder in the previous year; it was published posthumously, and
we have used De Sanctis (1990): 139−46.
2 Federico Persico (1829−1903), a lawyer, poet, novelist, and critic, was active
in politics, where he started as a follower of Gioberti; he founded the Circolo
Filologico with De Sanctis; and he had recently published Persico (1875),
soon followed by Persico (1877).
3 Cf. John 13:34, but the language is as much Mazzini’s as the Gospel’s: see
De Sanctis (1990): 144, ed. Giovannuzzi.
4 Messalina was the third wife of the Emperor Claudius, followed by Agrip-
pina when Claudius had her predecessor killed for plotting against him;
Agrippina was Nero’s mother; the name ‘Messalina’ became a byword for
sexual debauchery. De Sanctis is thinking of the enormously popular plays
on such Roman subjects, as well as later Italian subjects by Pietro Cossa
(1830−80), Cossa (1876−81), and De Sanctis (1990): 145.
5 Giacomo Leopardi (1798−1837) was a scholar before he became Italy’s
greatest Romantic poet, and a favourite of De Sanctis.
417
10
Marianna Bacinetti Florenzi Waddington
Pantheism as the Foundation of the

True and the Good1
To Baron Bunsen in Cannes2
Distinguished Baron and most cherished cousin:
It was truly a comfort to receive your most interesting letter; it makes

me very happy and does me honour. Any praise coming my way from a
person like you, so wise and so fair, gives me courage and strength. I like
what you say, and it gives me matter for meditating much more carefully,
inasmuch as we may find ourselves somewhat at odds.
But we agree to the extent of not accepting a personal God outside the
universe. Indeed, what would that God be who contemplates the universe
from some faraway place, like the head of an army watching his troops?
Aristotle, who wants to claim that God is detached from the world, has a
nothing-God. To find Aristotle’s God, we must look for him in that rich,
infinite, eternal nature of his that he paints in such lively colours. Bruno,
too, after describing an infinite universe that is full of life, living spirit,
soul, and mind, sets God apart from it, as inert, barren, and useless in
equal measure. Schelling posits a nature full of life and strength in which
is contained, and from which develops, a child-God who grows up like a
human and at last becomes the reason in which God attains his end and
his perfection. Such a God cannot be the true God. Therefore, all those
philosophers who have expanded nature into God and God into nature,
have, in some sense, left the true divine nature unstated while by implica-
tion demonstrating it absolutely. But in order to escape the accusation
that we have been hearing now and then – absurdly from some people
– that these philosophers are pantheists, they do not want to emphasize
this or clearly admit it in so many words.
Florenzi Waddington, Pantheism I
In every ancient and modern philosophy, however, no matter what the

system is, I always find a foundation of pantheism that is more or less
explicit. Indeed, it is mainly in this foundation, I believe, that God’s uni-
versal potency, supreme excellence, and superabundance of expansive
and universal action shows itself. In this universal nature lies the infi-
nite divine Ideal that contains everything and makes everything. And all
the things that are in that most perfect Essence are without defect; they
become disorderly and unruly only from their own limitation as they
depart from the complete infinity in which they exist. But their ideal
goodness always remains intact in the divine thought. And as they with-
draw from that real and ideal existence, they themselves carry with them,
along with their limitation and imperfection, something of that infinity
and excellence in which they never cease participating. In humans espe-
cially, where there is receptivity of ideas – of those eternal principles that
are the source of every virtue and all our goodness – the dignity of their
derivative nature manifests itself in a better way.
What is there to oppose, then, to the true meaning of the infinite uni-
versal world? Is it not perhaps true that the nature of things is in God and
that things are in God? When is it not the true meaning to say that God is
everything, and, at the same time, that all things are God? This is why Saint
Paul said that God moves in us and we are moved in God – a statement
worthy of that great mind, but susceptible to a pantheist interpretation.3
But is Bruno’s ideal ontological pantheism not compatible with the mor-
al practice of good? Do we not find one Being, good and perfect, when
Bruno moves, as he does, from the One to the variable and multiple and
from the variable and multiple to the One? Do all things not derive from
this one Being, and do those things not still participate in the qualities and
nature of the Cause from which they proceed, though in a fragmentary
way? Do we not aspire to the Infinite? Do we not participate in the Spirit
that penetrates everything and is in everything? Through the elements
and our own aspirations, then, we get the capacity for good. As Bruno him-
self says, each of us has a little bit of holiness up to the moment of our first
appearing in the world. And since God is all goodness, all will, and free
necessity, we possess something of God at the appropriate level that befits
our finite nature, and therefore we can behave according to our capability
and the principles that form the personal essence of our soul.
You say quite correctly that in order to recognize the laws of the mind’s
operations, we must observe and analyse the mental facts recorded by
history, just as one does in the natural sciences in order to discover the
laws of physical phenomena and to gain certainty of the inner connec-
419
tion that exists among various things. This enables us to see how the
inner facts of understanding and consciousness proceed in parallel with
physical and moral facts. It is true, then, that in the progressive course of
history and in the analysis of the visible universe – just as in the course of
each of our own lives – we can find the link that unifies all human knowl-
edge under a single point of view. But it is also undeniable that the high-
est metaphysical truths are those that really constitute pure knowledge
and cannot reach our minds by way of analysis and experience, coming
only from a primordial synthetic vision that the mind has and which we
get from the mind. Analysis and experience follow later, affirming our
intuition of what is positive and higher. And in those true and purest
essentials shines a light so bright that it gives them an undeniable clarity
needing no proof; it emerges from their objectivity and has none of the
subjectivity that might produce error in them.
And if this were not so, how could we have the idea of Absolute Being?
But the radiant light of that universal Idea illuminates all the other ideas,
and it is this precious ontological Idea to which we must turn for the
stability and veracity of knowledge – a deep, pure, and uncreated Idea
that resides in our soul and that humans cannot acquire on their own,
neither through reasoning nor through any conclusion. In the best and
highest sense, it is this Idea that stirs us to search for the origin of things.
With its truth and sublimity, it does not leave us content to search fee-
bly and ineffectively, wishing us instead to rise, with settled confidence,
towards what it wishes not to be unknown to us.
As I read your learned letter again, I am delighted to see your fondness
for our Bruno, a great talent and a free one deprived too soon and too
cruelly of life. I have been writing on matter now, treating it at first meta-
physically and then physically, focusing especially on the Idea of Bruno
that makes matter divine. I have also written about the disorder of indi-
vidual existences and the eternal order. And I have brought up another
topic, the infinite striving of the human mind and the constraints on it. I
am still thinking about related matters as well, while waiting for happier
times to do philosophy, and then I shall see if these things can be pub-
lished. But since I have taken none of my inspiration from the living and
little from the dead, just as I have always done, I have no expectation of
doing anything whose merits deserve praise or print.4
Whatever comes of it, I follow the impulse of my spirit and take delight
in dealing with philosophical topics, rising in desire to the high places
of wisdom that we mortals can still reach only fleetingly. The answer to
so many large questions rests only with the One that comprehends all, is
all, and knows all. We are happiest, meanwhile, when the Idea of ideas
420
Florenzi Waddington, Pantheism I
shines so brightly upon us that it permits our spirit, impassioned and

inflamed, to move for a few moments to the supernal spaces, and, filled
with desire and love, to rejoin that eternal existence in union with which
we taste a little of the beatitude that is the life of the Absolute, towards
which we feel an inborn and irresistible drive.
After Schelling’s death, King Maximilian sent me a very interesting
manuscript containing Schelling’s whole philosophy compiled by his
best student, whose name I do not now recall. Had I read it sooner, I
would have organized my Bruno in a different way.5
We have not had the pleasure of seeing Charles and Mary again because
the time was too short for them.6 I pray God that sometime soon I might
have the pleasure of seeing you again and talking with you about philoso-
phy. I am sure that your conversations with me will be productive and will
make me a great admirer of your profound wisdom and deep learning.
Trust that I am your affectionate cousin, Marianna Florenzi Waddington.
2 May 1860
NOTES
1 This text, a private letter written in 1860 and not published by Florenzi
Waddington, may be found in Florenzi Waddington (1978): 25−35, with
notes by the editor.
2 Baron Karl von Bunsen (1791−1860), a Prussian diplomat in Rome, Bern,
and London, studied theology at Göttingen and published in a number of
fields; he was the Marchesa’s cousin by marriage and corresponded with her
about translating Schelling. For the letter from Bunsen to which this letter
replies, see Florenzi Waddington (1978): 30−2.
3 Acts 17:28.
4 For the Marchesa’s published views on pantheism, see Florenzi Waddington
(1863).
5 For Schelling, Maximilian, and the Marchesa’s translation of Schelling’s
Bruno, see section 13 of the Introduction; her translation of the manuscript
is Florenzi Waddington (1864b).
6 ‘Charles and Mary’ may be Charles Waddington-Kastus (1891−1914) and
his wife; Florenzi Waddington (1856) is a translation of Waddington-Kastus
(1848), whose author taught philosophy in Paris: see section 13 of the
Introduction.
421
11
Marianna Bacinetti Florenzi Waddington
Remarks on Pantheism: The Infinite,

the Finite, God, and Man1
God is the Ideal, the infinite Ideal, the infinite Thought from which eve-
rything develops in immensity, eternity, and variety. Being infinite, God
cannot create the finite because the finite of itself cannot be perceived
by an infinite mind since that would be to create something contrary to
its being. Also, by having to create from nothing – which seems to me
absurd – God would not be able to create something that was not in con-
formity with his infinite being because that would be to create something
not worthy of his eternal power. To create the finite, it would be neces-
sary for God to have created a substance different from himself. Because
he contains everything, God creates nothing. Everything unfolds from
him, and thus there can be no existence different from him because
two different substances imply a contradiction. Either there would be
two equal Gods, which cannot be, or two unequal Gods, which again
is impossible. By accepting a lower God and a higher God, or rather a
God of good and a God of evil, we will get the doctrine of the Persians,
and with that we accept two Gods, one opposed to the other.2 Spinoza
says that a substance conceived per se cannot include the concept of
anything else. It is being in itself, the cause of itself, whose nature entails
existence. And since its attributes are its essence, it is therefore all exist-
ence, the essence in itself of uncreated nature, the cause of the existence
and essence of everything. If the substance had been produced, it would
need to have an antecedent cause, and then it would no longer be a sub-
stance because substance has the principle of existence in itself.3
For this reason, the finite must be indistinguishable with respect to
the infinite and identical with it. And every individuality is just a finite
appearance, a phenomenon, which, from our point of view, can be called
a relative substance at whose base there is always infinite potency. The
Florenzi Waddington, Pantheism II
life of things is really phenomenal because when mind is wedded to mat-

ter, the ideal to the real, and when this is organized in time, the organi-
zation is inconsistent, temporal, and subject to dissolution. And since
there is nothing essential in this union, the only union that remains is
empty and phenomenal: in things there is not really that identical life
that is true life in God, where mind and matter are one from eternity.
Matter or bodily substance is identical with spiritual matter and form.
Ideal and real, finite and infinite, are substantially one. Conceived in this
way, matter is just divine substance – a single substance inseparable from
the One. And those philosophers cannot be called materialists who have
elevated matter and acknowledged it as actually identical with mind, not
divided from it. The only materialists are those vulgar philosophers who
have taken matter down from its elevated position and dropped it to the
bottom, reducing it to a living death of mechanical motions and thus
abasing this divine and holy principle. But in divine matter lies all the
restless possibility of the immaterial principle that arouses it to call forth
from its breast the whole infinite infinity of its products, the things that
exist wholly in it and have their true, eternal, luxuriant, and magnificent
life in that eternal One, the God who is aware of himself.
But in transient life it is only the non-transient Idea that lives in indi-
vidual things, as the idea of life realizes itself in organic being. Like every
other idea or essence, the idea of life is eternal. And ideas have a special
autonomous life in that every idea is true, eternal, alive in itself, and
infinite in its kind – contained in the infinite thought and in every kind
that the idea realizes in individuals, many of which carry the imprint
and mark of that living typical Idea. Only the essence of things is real,
then, and not subject to time. But the organic individual that is pro-
duced infinitely in time is condemned, made subject to the condition
that the very image of life in it is temporal: it is condemned to pain and
death, and only the idea of life is immortal. But since things that appear
in time always have infinite potency as a foundation, since neither mind
nor matter is corruptible but eternally alive in the infinite absolute Ideal,
because there is this infinite possibility and actuality in things, it follows
that they always go on reproducing themselves visibly under finite fea-
tures. And their apparent finitude is just an infinite finitude, indistin-
guishable in the complete and perfect Being that is the All.
This Being that is God, then, is all potency, an immense ocean, and
we are a drop in that ocean. This drop always has the nature of that
ocean. It is a finite appearance – finite because it is no longer in the
infinite ocean and now has a life apart, an incomplete life. In the finite
423
drop the infinite potency is unhindered, however; it is finite only to our

imperfect eyes. But in its full being the infinite and finite, the perfect
and imperfect, are just the same. They do not exist, in fact, because in
the infinite ocean all is infinite, all is perfect. Everything that shows itself
comes under various forms, various modifications of divinity that mani-
fest themselves everywhere and variably. Hence, this drop is the form of
divinity and preserves its nature. And even though it loses the perfection
of the whole through its individuality, there is still no doubt that it has
in itself a certain freedom and a certain necessity of the same kind from
which it emerged, having emerged from that ocean which is all freedom,
necessity, eternity, and infinity.
Through this freedom the individual has a certain responsibility, a
moral sense, recognizing good and evil, reward and punishment. Good
and evil exist in the human will, but since there is still necessity in the
human (prove necessity), what is wholly evil from a human perspective
is not wholly evil in the sight of God.4 Humans have put things in various
categories, and if actions do not correspond to those categories – to clas-
sifications and qualifications made by humans – this is how evil arises. But
good is the love of the Good itself – the love of God, which is the Good in
itself. The rewards and punishments of the next life will be participation
in divinity and proximity to God in greater or lesser degree. Therefore,
if we always take the love of God as the rule of our actions, we cannot but
realize the Good, passing through successive transformations (metem-
psychoses) until we become worthy of reaching the immense divine
ocean and returning to where we emerged. In this immense ocean, in
that blessed unity, there is one life, one activity in which there is never an
end to the infinite potency of unfolding and becoming manifest. Since
there can be no inert potency, which would be nothing, this potency is
all potency – activity within and activity without – so that it cannot exist
without a subject to work on. It finds this subject in itself, taking its own
visible development as its own proper term or subject. The potency is
the free cause of what it reveals through the necessity of its own nature.
In infinite uncreated potency, therefore, there is no creating by will and
choice. There is only full, immense, and eternal development of the infi-
nite Thought in which are the ideas, the imperishable types of things.
The books of Moses say that after God created each thing, it seemed
good to him.5 Anything that he might have wished to call ‘good’ in that
way must always have been something determinate, able to be better or
worse, permitting a choice, a distinction among the things that arose
from his divine potency. This is not acceptable, then, because God knows
424
neither the beautiful nor the good. God is neither beautiful nor good
but the perfect infinite Idea of each thing. Since God is itself all beau-
ty and all goodness, how can infinite absolute beauty see beauties and
goodnesses apart from itself? How can it judge and create one object
that emerges from it as more beautiful and more good than another?
More and less, small and large, least and greatest are all human things,
and by going that way we do not make ourselves like God; we make God
like us instead. God cannot will to choose because he is neither will nor
intelligence nor freedom – nothing in particular. God is the whole uni-
versally and contains it all. God’s understanding is infinite and does not
understand one thing better than another. God is without number, with-
out quality, and without quantity. God is each thing identical in the One,
the identical in itself. In God the ideal blends with the real, number with
unity, and the finite with the infinite, and in everything that appears in
the finite is the incarnation of the Infinite, where infinite potency always
shines forth.
There is an All that is all, then. There is nothing but God, and God
exists, as Spinoza shows, because existing is a potency and not existing is
an impotency, and there can be nothing but God because there is noth-
ing but God. There cannot be any other substance of a different nature,
and the divine nature cannot be affected by the action of any other sub-
stance. All things are in God, and everything that happens, happens only
through the laws of God’s infinite nature.
If I distance myself from the idea of pantheism, everything confronts
me as determinate. Everything becomes barren and dry. I no longer see
that infinite production of things – magnificent, eternal, and unceas-
ing. I no longer see that infinite and mighty Being into which my soul
needs to leap, in which it takes nourishment, comfort, and hope, break-
ing those too confining bounds of individuality. To say that the idea of
infinite space and time comes to us from cognizing finite space and time
will be useless. No: this finite notion does not take us towards the eter-
nal and infinite. That idea, that certainty, that inexplicable cognition
comes to us from direct intellectual intuition. Our mind sees, feels, and
contemplates truths whose proof is inward and invisible, just as undeni-
able as truth itself. But this view that we have comes from the view of the
soul’s essence, which is eternal in God (to be proved).6 Therefore, by the
same mark of necessity, truth, and eternity that they have in God, we see,
feel, and cognize all those eternal, necessary, and true things. We realize,
then, that true knowledge comes from divine knowledge, which in God
is a complete whole. We get it through a vision in God, so to speak.
425
Here it is as if one could say – as Malebranche affirms – that everything

is seen in God as if in a mirror, by way of intellectual intuition. Schelling
and Gioberti, those two illustrious philosophers, therefore maintain with
great truth that science and philosophy have direct intuition as their
foundations.7 And without this the science of all sciences – philosophy –
could not be constructed and could not exist.
Indeed, if there were no direct intuition coming straight from God,
what certainty and what knowledge would sensible things produce by
empirical means alone and by the experience of the senses? Based on
what truths could humans have and get knowledge of the highest things?
Otherwise, humans would be little more than animals. Because we have
come from God, it is absolutely necessary that we have something higher
that things here below would not permit us to have. Intellect and reason,
in fact, are the most divine faculties that we have; they give us evidence of
God and are of that same infinite nature that the most perfect Being pos-
sesses. In order to be fit for the world, products of what might be called
a lower God – though not the true God – will conform to the world. By
reason of cause and effect, this could not be unlike ourselves. But we
also have infinite and eternal features like those of the eternal and infi-
nite Cause. The individual and contingent features that the soul gives to
things, and the power of determining them in time and conceiving them
under the notion of time, is a temporal power found only during the
soul’s existence in the body. Otherwise, determination would be impos-
sible, since the soul that has the eternal feature could never be measured
or extended in time.
Schelling – one of the greatest minds of our time – reveals to us a doc-
trine that is wonderfully sharp in insight and majestic both in its sublime
poetry and in the logical apparatus that he means to take all the way to
its conclusion. But I can neither praise nor be fully satisfied with the
notion of a somnolent God that he posits. At first God is a child in whom
all things are stored as in a state of lethargy. Power, Spirit, and life then
appear when God reaches his full development. God is not God except
when the universal Spirit in its highest development becomes reason
in mankind. God has then achieved consciousness of himself, meaning
that he is understood and felt in consciousness, in human reason. At this
moment, when he is reason and absolute Knowledge, aware that he is
God and that he exists as a real living person, God has reached the point
of his full greatness. It is not as his essence or action that God becomes
God in human reason, but, as has been said, as life and real existence.
Thus it seems that in his God, Schelling locates the essence – the seed of
426
being – of possibility and becoming, but not the existence that God gets
from man or from human reason and consciousness. It is therefore in us
that divine activity attains consciousness of itself. At first this activity of
the divine Spirit was the activity itself, the Spirit that stirred unconscious-
ly in its spontaneous development. Now it is no longer unconscious; it is
the absolute Reason that is identical with human reason.
On that assumption, it seems to me that the great philosopher gives a
kind of superiority to man, in whom and through whom God becomes
God and develops in his absolute fullness. If we accept this, might God
not instead be called ‘negated’ and subjugated to man, so to speak?
Granted, God is realized in his highest freedom as essence because in
that uncreated essence, existing from eternity, is the seed of each thing,
and before it there was nothing at all. But during the same time, God
turned out to be wanting because of blind action and by an involuntary
law, lacking consciousness. In short, God showed himself unfolding as
pure necessity striving for expansion and externality.
This God of Schelling is not the one that I know because I think that
God has always been immense – equally infinite, eternal, and uncreated.
Therefore, God is without beginning and without end, and everything
that arises and develops from God has in its foundation the mark of the
divine nature. In every finite thing is the infinite potency, and by the
law of cause and effect, things cannot be of a nature utterly unlike what
produces them. I maintain, however, that human reason derives from
the divine, not the divine from the human, as one might conclude if God
really attained self-consciousness in human consciousness. In the end,
without the human from which God gets life and absolute reality, God
could not be God, according to Schelling. It is therefore evident that
man actually becomes a divinity before God.
But I think that human reason comes from the divine instead, from
absolute Reason, and is part of infinite Thought. From that aspiration,
that anxiety that we have to seek the divine and the infinite, it is clear
that human reason gets part of the divine. And our reason seeks to grasp
the holy Knowledge from which it emerged by seeking to understand
itself and to understand and contemplate God – eternal primordial
Activity, absolute Substance, the universal Essence that has produced
everything eternally in its own eternal immensity, necessity, and com-
plete freedom. I understand this necessary development of divinity as
always immense and equal, not reaching its fullness by different degrees
yet revealing itself in different degrees. Rather than accept the principle
proposed by the illustrious philosopher for the production of things, I
427
would be tempted instead to accept a creation ad onta from Genesis.8

The latter diminishes divinity, but Schelling’s view totally deprives God’s
majesty and infinite potency of its rank and dethrones it. This is why I
wish not to accept the common account of creation, since it puts divinity
into decline, for every created thing brings with it a special act of will, a
special act of intelligence, particular acts of determination and choice,
while God reveals himself in constancy, variety, and immensity through
the free necessity of his nature. God is no thing in particular. God is not
intelligence – let me repeat – nor will, nor goodness, nor happiness, but
is all potency in immensity and continuity, without distinction of number.
Bruno’s system is much more useful, to my way of thinking, because
Bruno sees matter as the immense Ideal, the possibility of things united
to actuality, which is form identical with matter. In All there is life, and
this results from the antagonism of two potencies united by a third force:
the result of this bonding is that existence appears.
NOTES
1 For this unpublished work, see Florenzi Waddington (1978): 99−110.

Although the manuscript is undated, its content places it near the Marche-
sa’s letter to Baron Bunsen of 2 May 1860, and before the Filosofemi pub-
lished as Florenzi Waddington (1863). The prose is unfinished, clearly not
meant to be read except by the author as notes in draft.
2 The Zoroastrians of ancient Persia recognized two high gods, one good and
one evil.
3 ‘Product’ and ‘production’ are terms of art for Schelling.
4 ‘Prove necessity’ is the author’s note to herself.
5 Gen. 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31.
6 ‘To be proved’ is the author’s note to herself.
7 Malebranche explained his illuminationist theory of cognition – seeing in
God – by analogizing God and a mirror: just as seeing objects in a mirror is
not the same as seeing the mirror, so seeing things in God is not the same as
seeing God’s essence; for Gioberti on intuition, see section 8 of the Intro-
duction.
8 The phrase ad onta combines a Latin preposition (ad) with the neuter plural
of the Greek word for being: the Marchesa may mean to revise the usual
understanding of the Genesis story so that God creates only in a diminished
sense, using what already existed.
428
12
Francesco Fiorentino
Letters on The New Science to the Marchesa

Florenzi Waddington1
LETTER 1
Distinguished Lady and Friend:
In our frequent talks together about the enormous value of The New Sci-
ence, you have pointed out to me various statements that clearly fore-
shadow German philosophy, and you have asked why people have tried
so hard to conceal these similarities and twist the teaching of the greatest
Neapolitan philosopher into such strange shapes. I have answered with
a few words about this, but since the question is a serious one and needs
more clarification, I have decided to write about it, in confidence that
this will please someone who finds philosophical debate (a rare thing in
our day) neither tiresome nor annoying.
Now that Vico’s name has escaped the oblivion that gripped it for so
long in the previous century, Italians and foreigners alike invoke it today,
making it the object of praise as excessive as the scorn heaped upon it in
other periods. The way of the world, as we almost always discover, is Gol-
gatha yesterday, Tabor today, the Bastille then, and now the Pantheon.2
After Vico published The New Science, he avoided crowded places so that
he would not run into anyone whom he had mentioned, probably fear-
ing their rebukes and sneers. Were he alive today, he would have quite a
different reason to hide. Rightly or wrongly, everyone wants to be seen
as Vico’s follower. For every statement he made, there are a thousand
interpretations, and his words are cited and distorted to the point where
none of their meaning is left. In the academies, among philosophers and
jurists, there is a real struggle to be or to appear to be Viconian – at any
cost. In my opinion, however, going overboard with praise is as harmful
as the ceaseless denigration used to be. And I have always felt that one
bit of misplaced praise takes Vico to be the author of a metaphysics not

just unlike the one begun by Descartes and cultivated with special care
in Germany but also completely opposed to it, thus cutting Italy off from
the progress of knowledge in the rest of Europe. Should we welcome
this privilege as our heritage, we would be forced either to certify what
we know as infallible or confess its impotence, stuck in a rut that would
embarrass the Chinese.
But I think I am built neither for the arrogance of the first claim nor
the fecklessness of the second. We Italians are people like everyone else,
fit to share the common destiny of our nature, frequently off course but
always moving towards the goal that never changes, on the path that
always leads there. The haughtiness that nations have, a stimulus useful
to peoples in decline – and one that our heroes therefore revived at a
certain point – would be awkward and childish today. And in our boast-
ing surely we would not be forgiven for what people put up with a little
while ago when times were bad. Having grown stronger, we therefore
seek to be fairer, and we set national hatreds aside when the stakes are
the fate of human knowledge.
And you, my lady, have you not read or heard it said that philosophy –
true philosophy, anyhow – is all Italian and only Italian, not much done
by other peoples, and done just to the extent that they have imitated us;
that Vico erected the Pillars of Hercules for philosophy; that he is the
only leader worth following, any other being untrustworthy and ready
to rush headlong into a bottomless abyss; and that he was the steadfast
opponent of Descartes, implacably objecting to the modern aberration,
as it is called? Speaking for myself, I have heard all too much of such
things, frequently even from people of talent, and this confirms my inten-
tion to air the main arguments because a view so widely accepted deserves
serious examination since it must have come from some deep source.
I want to start by finding out whether Vico really has nothing in com-
mon with Descartes – with the modern thought that came before him, in
other words, and also what came after him. Then I will try to figure out
why some interpret Vico in the one way, others in the other way. Finally I
will touch on the clearer and closer connections between Vico and Kant,
especially between the New Science and Kant’s Critique. If only because of
the nature of the texts – and because I am talking with you, a learned
devotee of the theoretical sciences – I shall refrain from going into those
more minute details that would soon become tiresome.
It was as if Vico foresaw the disputes that would arise from the secret
inner workings of his genius, for he had the brilliant idea of providing
his own self-revelation. He set about writing a Life where he speaks at
430
Fiorentino, Vico and Kant
length about his studies and the thinking that produced his books.3 But
this far-seeing effort was not much help because any truly creative genius
has something inside that remains unclear to the person himself. Some-
thing flashes through his mind unawares, which he cannot escape and
cannot hold still enough to see it squarely from every side. In science as
in poetry there is inspiration, and this sudden flash, whence the mind
catches an unexpected glimpse of an unknown world, evades the search-
ing thoughts of anyone who finds himself struck by it.
The task of real criticism, then, is to investigate what not even the
author himself understood, to uncover the hidden struggles of his gen-
ius and shed light on the shadowy workings of the remotest reaches of
his mind. In every great genius, the old person confronts the new, and
they fight so fiercely that the battle stays long undecided while the mind
wavers in doubt. Then, as if by instinct, it takes shelter in the past, and
the old person prevails. But final victory always goes to the new person,
whom the struggle makes stronger while the other weakens, and, in the
long run, gives up. The creator of a new system can be called a battle-
ground that no one sees. Hence, it is not a wise plan to make one of the
parties to this conflict disappear by suppressing it or by describing great
people as if they were formed in an instant. History done in this way by
lopping off the process of coming-to-be is a falsification of science.
Not departing from our plan, we are presented with two lines to notice
in Vico, as there were two before him in Descartes, and two after him in
Kant. Vico lays out of one of these lines; he traces its origin to Plato, and
he is on the right track. But the other line, not understood by him, is
based on the new principle of Descartes – the Descartes whom Vico fol-
lowed and made productive while believing that he was attacking him.
In his learned work on Vico’s thought, Ferrari is not interested in these
various details that the modest Neapolitan investigated in the history
of his great predecessors.4 For him The New Science is a solitary monu-
ment with no basis in past advances, rising as if by enchantment like the
palaces described by Ariosto. In his view, neither Plato nor Tacitus nor
Bacon nor Grotius – the four authors from whom Vico took inspiration –
had enough power to cause the new science to be born.5 Ferrari is right,
in one sense, because no haphazard erudition does any good without
a mind to develop it. Books create opportunities, but they are useless
without intellectual energy. Just as the apple that fell in front of Newton
cannot be called the discoverer of universal attraction, neither could
the lamp in Pisa’s cathedral, swinging there in plain sight for Galileo,
disclose the laws of the pendulum to him.
But besides external events and the talent that belongs to the indi-
431
vidual, which are almost accidental factors in discovery, there is a logi-

cal and necessary process by which the human spirit develops. When it
reaches a fixed boundary, the spirit needs another route, and, if it finds
one, new ideas are required. These ideas the spirit knows how to call up
as needed, and they present themselves in obedience to its irresistible
command. The route is still the old one, but new needs have broadened
it, and these ideas that seem so novel were latent and implicit in those
that came before. Vico was there in Plato, then, but incomplete, unde-
veloped. There were seeds to be fertilized and then sprout, causing the
New Science to spring forth from the Republic.
As a ‘matter of fact,’ Plato said that there were as many ways to rule
as the spirit has faculties, and that the latter sequence also preserves
what we take to be our mind’s structure and hierarchy. And since reason
comes first among powers of the mind and reigns supreme among all the
others, rule by the best and the wise, which corresponds to reason, must
likewise necessarily be first. After reason, courage comes second, submit-
ting to reason’s wishes and defending it against the force of the sensual
appetites, and the corresponding result is that rule by warriors comes
after rule by the wise. Finally, since appetite is the lowest of our faculties
and by nature formless and variable, the democracy that derives from it
also takes the lowest place and represents just that manifold variety of
inclinations that Dante symbolized by the beast with the speckled hide.6
Vico acknowledges that after he read Plato there began to form in him,
without his being aware of it, the notion of thinking about an ideal eternal
law, and, along with that law, an eternal city, which in turn would be the
model for commonwealths of all eras and all nations.7 There is no need
for us to treat this idea as outside Vico’s plan or dragged in by force and
unnaturally, after the New Science was written, to explain a work already
completed. When we read how all forms of government arise from one
another in a way explained not by chance external circumstances but by
the internal order of the faculties of the mind, we cannot help noticing
that the Greek philosopher’s Republic and the Neapolitan philosopher’s
New Science are based on a common design.
Next, once I saw that Vico had reached two very weighty conclusions,
I was persuaded that he took Plato’s principle seriously. The first is that
Plato’s ideal republic is a consequence of the metaphysics that he adopt-
ed, meaning, in fact, that the science of ideas and that of the spirit must
proceed in tandem, bound together by unbreakable bonds. The second
conclusion is the brief but profound criticism that Vico makes of Plato’s
Republic, which deals with mankind not as it is, after the Fall, but only
as it ought to be. Vico therefore noted that the Athenian philosopher
432
misses that development, which, supposing humanity to be what exists

in primitive times, then gradually arrived at the model government that
Plato depicts right away, almost hastily, in the Republic.8 Thus, where Pla-
to starts his sequence with the initial assumption that reason rules, Vico,
by contrast, begins with animal appetites and proceeds along exactly the
opposite path. One assumes that man is perfect and starts his account
with the ruling faculty; the other, treating man as fallen, begins from the
senses. Plato models the Republic on metaphysics. Vico disconnects the
two things and claims that the world of human souls moves away from
the world of minds, and, while metaphysics connects directly with God
by the faculty of contemplation, the philosophy of history, basing itself
instead on faculties of will, uses a process by which we gradually get closer
to the immobile idea contemplated directly by metaphysics. In short,
metaphysics for Vico aims at the true, and it has no process, just as the
Idea has no process. But the philosophy of history is based on the certain,
and it has a process, just as mankind has a process.
Who is right, Plato or Vico? This is the question that follows automati-
cally from what has been said above. But before answering, I wish to note
that between Plato and Vico there is a real shared design, and that the
Greek philosopher’s Republic is the first earlier work connected with the
New Science. For the sake of the immobile idea, Plato forces human facts
within limits equally immobile. Vico breaks these boundaries and sets
mankind free, but he does not dare to unshackle the idea. He is half-
modern and half-antique, and for now I believe I must content myself
with having described him in this latter way. At another time, I shall write
you about what I take to reveal the first traces of the modern Vico, and all
this chatter of mine may not seem entirely pointless to you.
Meanwhile, guard your friendship for me, which is precious – believe
me.
Bologna, 27 March 1865
LETTER 2
I’m not sure what it amounts to, this bit of babble that I’ve started to put
together for you, nor if it seems mostly a waste of time. Since it’s no both-
er for you, anyhow, I intend to go on with it to the finish. Who knows?
By continuing, we might get to an issue that more reluctant minds and
433
those more remote from theoretical subjects might find worth thinking
about. I cannot conceal from you that I have become hopeful about this,
convinced as I am that in Vico’s new science we find not only discus-
sions of a philosophical problem but also material with implications for
problems of origin – the origins of history, art, religion, and law, topics
continually discussed but never finally resolved.
In the meantime, we cannot do without these things, and anyone who
tries not to deal with them often turns back to them despite himself – an
indisputable sign that all these issues are living in human consciousness.
But in getting back to origins, as it gets darker and darker, the thing
that you’re looking for gets smaller and smaller, and, for one reason
or another, dismay overcomes you and you’re tempted to abandon the
task. Proof of having great talent – and a privilege that comes with it – is
not letting oneself be defeated by difficulties, redoubling one’s effort at
every obstacle. For a good twenty-five years Vico laboured over his book
and gave it a title that he himself calls invidious, The New Science.9 Over
so long a period he had to overcome many serious obstacles even within
himself, not counting external impediments, for it is in the nature of
the human spirit to turn on itself if there is nothing outside to attack it.
The Neapolitan philosopher therefore had plenty of problems, and they
came to him from the very teachings that had helped him in his early
efforts.
The last time I wrote you, I mentioned how Plato first suggested to
Vico the design for thinking about the new science, and this theory,
which was effective when he first started his project, began to be only
half-useful to him quite soon. Plato, being too fond of ideas and their
immobility, was happy to squeeze everything inside this cage, as he did
with the history of humanity in his Republic. From his own experience,
Vico perceived – and would have occasion to say – that the ideal nature
of Plato’s conception cannot be identified with history without doing
grave harm to it. He therefore hastened to extract history from this ideal
and base it on a different principle. Vico thus arrived at the cardinal dis-
tinction between the true and the certain: where the philosophy of history
was a science of the true for Plato, for Vico it becomes a science of the
certain. And we can describe the certain as the living truth and human
fact, which gradually escapes the confines of particularity that encumber
it and keeps reaching for universality and convertibility with the true. In
this exchange, as the true acquires awareness, the certain, for its part,
gets the benefit of universality, with the following result: although the
true lies beyond the mind that contemplates it, according to Plato, and
434
therefore cannot attain awareness of itself within human consciousness,

Vico claims that it can do so by means of a process.
Now this process whereby the human spirit comes to be recognized as
such is history, which is either completely missing in Plato or else stuck on
like an ornament, for no other reason. This defect did not escape Vico,
who observed of Plato ‘that instead of confirming his secret wisdom with
the common speech of Homer, he decorates it.’10 This remark is quite
profound, for the Neapolitan philosopher reveals the secret that he used
to complete the Athenian’s half-complete theory. History cannot be for
the Idea what a frame is for a painting, an empty ornament and nothing
more. On the contrary, history needs to be so connatural with the Idea
that the Idea becomes history and history becomes a confirmation of the
Idea. Should that marriage not take place, the Idea would be sterile, and
history in turn would stay empty and disconnected. Moreover, note that
what Vico wants is not a systematic, artificial history produced without
spontaneity, but the common history recounted by Homer. And Plato
could find no excuse in the Cratylus, where he resorts to philology in
order to authenticate philosophical systems, which is why the two schools
called on philology, rather than reason, to serve them in that most cel-
ebrated era.11
Vico took the historical element seriously, on the other hand, and
made it one of the foundations supporting the new science that he was
devising. He makes two things converge on history as if on a single goal:
the philosophy that is based on the true and grounds itself in reason; and
the philology that springs from the authority of human will as it labours
over knowledge of the certain. Reason and authority are therefore the
two components of the new science, and if it was Plato who suggested the
first to Vico, the second had an entirely modern origin. For any compa-
triot of Machiavelli, examples of this must have been available right next
door. However, the two main ingredients, quite attractive and well fitted
out, were available before Vico, but they were disconnected – indeed,
regarded as incompatible. Philosophy worked by abstractions: arrogant
about the heights it had to attain, it paid little attention to the course
of history and human events. And history did just the opposite: content
with the solidity of its documents, it either took no notice of ideal proc-
esses or went even farther and mocked them. Philosophy and history
were both losers, the first being short on evidence, the second on ration-
ality and coherence.
Johann Georg Hamann, whom Goethe compared to our Vico in tal-
ent, used to say that nature is a Hebrew word having only consonants,
435
and that reason must add the vowels.12 It seems to me that this is exactly
how Vico looked at knowledge as a whole, dividing it into two domains,
one covered by reason, the other by authority. And then he showed that
philosophy contained the vowels of history, while philology contains
only its consonants. Vico gave philology a very large role, describing it as
‘the theory of everything that depends on human will.’13 Yet his solitary
researches may lack the evidence and support from oriental languages
that assist modern philologists. Being too shut up in the world of Rome,
neglecting the rest and evaluating what little he knew of it by the Roman
standard, may have done him harm. Despite all these failings, we still
cannot deny that he is immeasurably far ahead of those who travelled the
same road after him. He made philology important, raising it from the
detailed study of words to the lofty position of a scientific system. And he
studied the lives of peoples in all the most important phenomena that
usually characterize them, never content with collecting witty anecdotes
and popular stories as many do today – to what end, I am not sure.
When Vico came on the scene, there was no shortage of erudition.
Every book published carried an unbearable load of it, or else it would
have had no value, giving the swarm of learned experts no reason to
applaud. The only thing lacking was to use erudition moderately and
know how to direct it to some reasonable purpose. In order to do so,
erudition had to be subjected to regular laws, distinguishing what was
real and solid from the worthless and spurious, tracing the provenance
of scholarship, and using such connections to link it with thought.
No longer trusting that this could be done, Descartes took himself
out of it and disowned the attempt: rather than untie the knot, he cut
it. The Discourse on the Method marks a cross on the back of every such
inquiry, revealing its uselessness and showing that a mind encumbered
with so many little bits of information would then be ill-equipped for
the richer and very important task of knowing oneself. Descartes may
not have been entirely wrong about the academies and scholars of his
day, but he had not seen that while a person or an academy might look
for childish amusement, the human mind produces nothing without
meaning. His plan went too far, then, for there was an alternative not
opposed to the Cartesian principle, I believe, but derived from the very
same method – a plan to redo those learned inquiries from a different
point of view, inasmuch as they uncover the hidden nature of the spirit
that becomes concrete in its products. And had Descartes reinstated the
thinking that was banished for so long, he would not have needed to
leave it naked and impoverished in order to complete its restoration;
436
instead, he could have diligently procured it a retinue worthy of so great

a power. He would have needed to look at every move already made and
look deep inside in order to extract the seed, forgotten but still fertile,
from the shining husk.
And this was the inquiry that Vico undertook, a plan to enlarge the Car-
tesian method without altering it. In his hands, philology was no longer
the irreconcilable enemy of philosophy, as it appeared to Descartes. Each
is bound to the other by a knot that cannot be untied, using speech as
the transparent mirror that reflects thought. History thus becomes phi-
losophy’s mightiest adjutant, and the fact can actually substitute for the
deepest truth. Vico thus completes Descartes by reclothing his thought
in forms that had been taken away. He took on the task that the Touraine
philosopher no longer believed in, and he reconciled Plato and Tacitus
forever, the man of ideas with the man of history. By sealing that mar-
riage, Vico made the philosophy of history possible, though as long as
the world had kept reason in confinement, this philosophy could not
aspire to the level of science, ending up in Bossuet with the threadbare
concept of a heavenly Providence regulating human actions until their
ultimate and external resolution by the Incarnation.14 It never hurts to
repeat that an external cause is never enough to make knowledge. If a
person does not look inside himself to dig out the true causes of facts,
he will wait a good long time before heaven rains them down upon him.
And here I want to put an observation before you that will be better
supported by what comes next, and it is that the Providence we meet
with in The New Science is more in name than in truth, so much so that it
has nothing to do there except make us recollect Vico’s first steps. But
this is not yet the time to examine the titular rights of all the words found
listed in The New Science. Meanwhile, let us consider how its result could
be a notion of human development based on the very nature of the spirit
but without recourse to supernatural causes or events partaking of mar-
vel and mystery.
Vico told us the story, how he spent nine years in the castle of Vatolla
and how those years – putting it in Machiavellian terms – were not spent
sleeping or playing games.15 However, although we know what books he
read and the circumstances that brought them to him, we do not know
how he used them. But with his own works in front of our eyes, it is
easy for us to figure these things out, trying to guess what path he took,
noticing the pauses where his unquiet spirit got some rest. The main
stopping-points appear to me to have been The Most Ancient Wisdom of the
Italians, The Sole Origin and End of Law, and The New Science.16 The first of
437
these works was printed and published in 1710, and please do me the
favour of noting the dates, whose importance for our purposes we shall
see later. Its intent is to track down in a few Latin words the remains
of the remotest Italian philosophy, which, so it seemed to Vico, had to
be found hidden beneath that covering. There our Vico sees truth con-
verted into what is made in a mind located above our minds, as the eye
of reason catches its solitary existence in a distant glance. And while that
sovereign mind makes all and knows all, ours rests content with a science
of smaller scope, as it keeps harvesting the elements of things scattered
hither and yon. The only making suited to us is the mathematical, whose
deep structure we therefore see, whereas in physics we see no farther
than external appearance since physical things are copies and simulacra
of divine ideas.
But who does not portray the old metaphysics – the Plato of the Repub-
lic and Timaeus – along these lines? In this first work, then, Vico is still
Platonic, just as Descartes is a Platonist when he sets aside his I think,
therefore I am and takes a big leap into the most perfect Being and St
Anselm’s famous argument. No wonder, then, that some have thought
that this is where Vico and Descartes agreed – as Bouillier, among others,
did in his history of Cartesianism.17 But they did not realize that on this
point Vico and Descartes are not so much alike as both modelling them-
selves on ancient metaphysics. Both Vico’s sovereign Mind and the most
perfect Being of Descartes bear the imprint of the Good from Plato’s
Republic. It is still a resemblance, but copied over, not an original resem-
blance. From this we see why Vico, at a more mature stage – actually,
a year after publishing the New Science – scolds Descartes for this same
failing, of which he too had been guilty in The Most Ancient Wisdom of the
Italians. Indeed, writing to Esperti he says that ‘Descartes establishes as
a rule of truth that the idea has come to us from God, but without ever
defining it.’18 And the Cartesian idea lacks definition because defining
implies connecting and linking by genus and difference, so that an idea
is interwoven with the most universal items by way of the genus and with
the most concrete by way of the difference. But if Vico’s observation
is correct, it could then be a rebuttal against the infinite mind that he
himself proposed, since it too is without definition and isolated from the
rest of the system.
After a while, Vico figured out the difficulty involved in accepting a
mind of that kind, and in The New Science he turned to a living psyche that
is both defined and capable of development in a logically and histori-
cally organized system. And in this transformation he was truly Cartesian,
making no use of any other mechanisms than those that thinking sup-
438
plied. Therein lies Vico’s novelty, and therein lies the real resemblance
to Descartes – not the old one copied over from Plato, which is the only
one noticed by the French critic.19
Next you will ask me the reason why he changed paths, at what point
he changed, and whether he changed all at once or slowly? These are
the questions that I think I hear you asking, and I shall answer them at
another time. Now I only mention to you that ten years after The Most
Ancient Wisdom of the Italians came the Universal Right, and fifteen years
later The New Science.20 In addition to the actual content of the books,
which we shall discuss when we have a chance, that sequence of publica-
tion clarifies for us how Vico finally came to rest in The New Science, from
which he expected more glory than from any of his other works before
or after it. Hence, when Solla wrote to tell him that he thought more of
his oration for the death of Angiola Cimini than of any of his other works
– including The New Science – the kindly Vico, seeing what a stupid thing
his friend had said, quietly replied that his own opinion was certainly just
the opposite.21
What a hard life that unfortunate genius lived, so that regret had to
come to him even from the praise of close friends, along with the cer-
tainty of having wasted his labour, at least as far as contemporaries were
concerned! If it were me, I would have been much more contemptuous
of Solla’s praise than of the miserly refusal from Cardinal Corsini or the
painful neglect of the three generations who allowed that astonishing
talent to be a teacher of rhetoric.22 Thus I cannot forgive him for having
desired and requested approval and favour from vulgar minds and from
hearts hard in the way of the courtier when there would have been more
glory for him in not seeking this at all. Perhaps his name would have
been much more famous – as a person, anyhow – if in his mature years
and as a professor in Naples he had been able to preserve that youthful
audacity, which, in the solitude of Cilento, pushed him almost to boast
of his misfortune, scornful of all comfort.23
What do you say about this, distinguished lady? I can see you smiling
at these words of mine and perhaps reproving me gently for having left
The New Science in order to be annoyed with its most excellent author. But
what do you expect if I cannot stick to my target, even when very great
persons are involved? I ask Vico’s forgiveness, and yours, and in letters to
follow we shall discuss the rest of his works. Keep me in your friendship
then, which honours me greatly, and consider me yours.
Bologna, 3 April 1865
439
LETTER 3
The last time I wrote you, I ended with various questions that I promised
to answer, one by one, and now, to keep my promise, I begin by making
another question out of them. Have you never found yourself faced with
something so difficult that it has made you change your mind, forcing
you to reach the same goal by a different route? I think so, since this is
what normally happens to everyone who wants to find the truth without
being too careful. And if less educated people are taken to be change-
able at every shift in the winds of theory, the learned commend them for
it, and science pays them back.
In my view, then, Vico found himself in that same place, more or less,
where all distinguished thinkers end. Having accepted a philosophy that
I call Platonic (more to accommodate popular opinion than to express
my own views), Vico sought to make it fit the primordial era of Italian
philosophizing. There he did his best to investigate various words that
he believed to contain a hidden wisdom perfectly suited to that type of
philosophy. A clever strategy – had it been more successful – since his
aim was to give an air of venerable antiquity to new concepts, most of
which he had proposed for the first time. With great courtesy and pre-
cision, the Giornale dei letterati published at that time in Italy made him
realize that various interpretations were inexact, that the conclusions of
the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians led to contradictions, and finally
that the basis on which his whole system was built was dubious.24 Vico
replied once and replied again, countering with new clarifications when
objections were restated and defending himself as best he could. But he
went no farther with the second and third parts that made up his original
design – an absolutely sure sign that the difficulties had defeated him.
Thus, the controversy had a double outcome, which is not very common:
first, it ended politely; second, it led such a person as Vico to think things
over again for himself.
I will not go into all the details of this controversy, nor will it be
necessary to do so, since everyone knows them. My only point is this:
how could so subtle and perfect a philosophy be found in the Lat-
in language, seeing that the Romans began to philosophize only at a
rather late date, and even then, lacking knowledge of their own, they
borrowed all their inquiries of this kind from the Greeks? This obser-
vation was so much on the mark that when Vico could not make the
440
rough and warlike Romans the actual authors of such enormous wis-
dom, he turned back to the Etruscans, concluding that the Romans
could have spoken their language as philosophers without their hav-
ing been philosophers themselves. A quick way out, to be sure, but
no longer enough to sustain the intrinsic and hidden power of Latin
words – words whose learned interpretation was supposed to be a rem-
edy grafted on at a later date and lacking the native and spontaneous
value of the words themselves. If so, what did the Etruscans do to get it?
On Vico’s new hypothesis, the problem would have been displaced but
certainly not solved: if there were primitive words, and if these words
could have a deep and arcane wisdom within them, it still remained to
decipher it.
It was suggested to Vico that he apply himself instead to Rome’s most
ancient laws, where an original manifestation of that people was surely to
be found, and where indisputably there was a collection of practical wis-
dom, at least, if not theoretical wisdom. At first he seemed not at all com-
pliant with this advice: repaying his advisors with problems that they had
first brought forward, he claimed that uncertainty and scarcity might
be no less an issue in those legal documents than in what produced the
labile language of metaphysics. Either because self-regard yielded to con-
cern for science or because the choice seemed not so hopeless to him,
he gave the question more deliberate consideration than he had before
and turned from the wisdom of Socrates to that of Romulus, from the
school to the assembly, a direction apparent most obviously in the Sole
Origin and End of Law.25 This work of Vico’s makes the transition from
inner speculative wisdom to the common and spontaneous kind; it is his
progressive step towards the true sources of science and history. Since
law-making stands between the particular interests of life and the abso-
lutely universal ideas of the mind, it is the natural mediator between
theory and practice, between remote abstractions and what is alive and
concrete. Professor Giani, in the learned interpretation of this work that
he provides – the first one produced in Italy – astutely recognizes its
special, characteristic feature, its treatment of the conciliation between
philosophy and philology.26 Hence, one realization after another made
it impossible for Vico not to notice that the Twelve Tables, with all their
marks of coarse rigour, had something reflective in them and a kind of
generality that did not belong to a truly primitive people. And he went
back even farther, to the cave-dwellers, to the earth’s virgin forests and
their thunder-struck sons, to the crude, savage rites that inaugurated the
birth of the first civilization.
441
Thus, it seems clear enough to me that when Vico’s problems provid-

ed the occasion and the material, the ensuing philological investigations
caused him to move on from the most ancient wisdom of the Italians to
universal law, and then from this to the new science. The process that
led him there was philological, then, and not philosophical, as it was for
Kant after him. This also seems to be the reason why Vico lacks the aware-
ness of his own path that shines through so clearly in the philosopher of
Königsberg; why the foundation of his philosophy constantly conflicts
with his own teaching; and, finally, why Vico describes the development
of the human psyche as it reveals itself in history, whereas Kant outlines
the process as it hangs together in individual consciousness. When Kant
saw the weakness of the philosophy of experience and the validity of
Hume’s objections, both these considerations caused his resolve to pro-
vide a more stable basis for science, which he found in the intrinsic form
of thinking. Vico, on the other hand, kept to the same course by explain-
ing history, convinced by the thought that primitive words could have
been neither universal, like those of the most ancient wisdom of the
Italians, nor general, like those of the Twelve Tables. But since all these
products belonged to the same human mind, though at different points
in time, he foresaw the unity that by developing itself gives birth to his-
tory. Like a distant prophecy, the new metaphysics that still had to be
born with Kant flashed before his sharp eyes. And then the new guest
whom Vico admits unawares comes to blows with the old residents, but
Vico can’t figure out the real cause of the scuffling that he hears in his
house. Joking aside, Vico often does not understand himself because no
one really understands anything without having consciously deduced it.
But there is more, and it is more remarkable than what happened up
to this point, meaning that Vico makes not only what he did not know
how to make but also what he had at first thought unmakeable by human
knowledge.
In fact, having carefully noted that knowing goes along with making, he
regarded the latter as real knowledge, which was capable of explaining
how things came to be. But he thought that such knowledge belongs
only to God – except for mathematics, where humans truly have knowl-
edge because in this case it is the human himself who is the maker. And
for that reason the criterion of clear and distinct perception proposed by
Descartes seemed to Vico not enough to give certainty to scientific cogni-
tion since its use in physical and practical matters does not give the kind
of proof provided by mathematics: in mathematics, we know the truth by
making it, but not in the other sciences. But then if we look at The New
442
Science, we notice that humans no longer make just the mathematical sci-
ences but also the others that Vico calls ‘practical matters’ – history, reli-
gion, art, law, and science.27 Thus he violated the prohibition that had
been established, extending the limits within which he had imprudently
confined the human mind: a venturesome violation, whose fruit was The
New Science – as a pedant would surely be aware.
It is not enough to register the violation, however, unless we emphasize
the cause from which it came, and to me it seems to lie in this, that when
Vico rejected the Cartesian principle and criterion, his rejection did not
produce the unshakeable contradiction that others have surmised. That
this is the case is not a claim of mine based on guesswork or imagination;
I find Vico himself saying so in his first reply to the Giornale dei letterati.
This revelation is precious indeed because it puts us inside the thinking
of this great genius and also because it provides new confirmation of an
ever-enduring fact, which is that people who exaggerate corrupt what is
taught instead of defending and clarifying it. Thus, Vico says that he does
not confirm the Cartesian principle, ‘but that the cogito is an undoubted
sign of my existence, and yet since it is not a cause of my existence it
does not produce knowledge of existence for me.’28 Here his distinction
reveals itself clearly: while the direct consciousness of Descartes could
give him the certainty that he existed, it was still not enough to show that
thinking produces existence.
In other words, this is what Vico wanted to say: If you make me see
how I think is a cause of my existence, then I too will surely be Cartesian;
but as long as the I think is only a direct certainty of this existence, I shall
never regard it as a scientific principle. Now this was bringing Cartesian
consciousness to completion, not weakening it, much less denying it. It
was an elevation of thinking from the level of subjective certainty, where
Descartes had confined it, to that of a universal and creative principle.
Immanuel Kant also went beyond Cartesian consciousness and moved
up to the transcendental consciousness where he found the primitive
unity of the categories, and he did not profess to have contradicted
Descartes in this. On the contrary, he considered himself the new and
improved Descartes. Moreover, I will say that Kant completes Descartes
by putting Vico’s presentiment into effect, the reason being that the Ger-
man philosopher was the first to try to make us see how the I think that
contains the categories or specific functions of thinking is the universal
and necessary condition of the human mind.
My claim, then, is that Vico does not contradict the progress of phi-
losophy that developed between Descartes and Kant but that he actually
443
reconnects them both and that he is the successor of the French philoso-
pher just as much as he is the precursor of the German. But since Kant
had thought in a mature way about the course of Locke’s philosophy
and about Hume’s serious objections to it, he could consciously state the
problem that Vico had only divined. The Neapolitan philosopher did
not have confidence that he could untie the knot that he surely loosened
up a bit in The New Science, the knot that Kant sets out to untangle with
his fearless and self-aware critique. Vico teaches how the human being
makes history, Kant how the mind makes knowledge, and in this they
both reveal that thinking is the supreme maker, thus fulfilling the prom-
ise that knowing should depend on making – the one unconsciously, the
other fully aware – and both observing the rule made by the Descartes
who wanted the new science to be based on thinking.
Now you will tell me that it is my duty to prove that Vico’s new science
was really based on thinking, as understood by Descartes and Kant, and
not on divine thinking, as Providence is still called – which is what some
believe. I know that I have taken on this duty, and I will try to do the best
that I can.
Please accept my feelings of esteem and friendship, then, and con-
sider me always yours.
Bologna, 18 April 1865
NOTES
1 The text used here is Fiorentino (1876).

2 Golgotha was the hill where Christ was crucified, Tabor the mountain where
he was transfigured. Fiorentino actually mentions the Gemoniae, not the
Bastille; it was a notorious Roman site where the execution of criminals
began. And the Pantheon he had in mind was the famous Roman temple in
Rome, not the later Parisian monument.
3 Vico began to write his autobiography in 1725 at the age of 57, two years
after having failed to progress from his chair in rhetoric in the University
of Naples to the much more important chair of law; the first version was
published in 1728 and updated in 1731; see Vico (1975).
4 Vico (1975): 121−30; Vico (1835−7), a six-volume collection of Vico’s
works, was edited by the historian Giuseppe Ferrari (1811−76); see also Fer-
rari (1839).
5 Vico (1975): 154 says that he ‘found a fourth author to add to the three he
444
had set before himself’ when he read On the Law of War and Peace by Hugo
Grotius (1583−1645), a towering figure of the day who made fundamental
contributions to the notion of natural law in political and legal theory.
6 Dante, Inferno, 1.42: ‘quella fiera a la gaetta pelle.’
7 Vico (1975): 121−2.
8 Vico (1975): 122.
9 Vico (1977): 696 explains that he could not avoid the ‘invidious’ title
because he had, in fact, invented a new science that reveals ‘the ideal history
of the eternal laws on whose basis the deeds of all nations operate in their
rise, progress, stability, decline, and fall,’ this being ‘a universal topic in that
it deals with the nature common to nations by that property possessed by
every science that is complete in its idea.’
10 Vico (1975): 154.
11 By ‘the two schools’ Fiorentino may mean the Italic and Greek traditions
from which later Greek philosophy emerged, the former represented here
by Pythagoras, the latter by Plato; although Vico saw Pythagoras as a better
route than Plato to native Italian wisdom, he took Plato’s Cratylus as his
model in Vico (2005), and a great deal of his evidence in The New Science is
also etymological, and often far-fetched, even by the standards of the day;
see Vico (1975): 148−50.
12 Hamann (1730−88) was an early reader of Vico in Germany: Berlin (2000):
243−358. He made the remark about the Hebrew alphabet in a letter to
Kant: Hamann (1955−75), I, 450.
13 Vico (1977): 91.
14 For Bossuet see the notes to our translation of Villari’s prolusione.
15 Vico lived as a young man, from 1686 to 1695, in the castle of Vatolla in
Campania, with the support of the owners, the Rocca family, for whom he
worked as a tutor; Vico (1975): 119−23
16 De antiquissima italorum sapientia, the first part of a larger work that was
never completed, appeared in 1710, followed by two critical reviews in the
Giornale de’ Letterati; Vico replied at length to both reviews in 1711 and
1712. De uno universi iuris principio et fine uno, inspired by his reading of Gro-
tius, appeared in 1720, as the first of three volumes of a work on universal
right. In 1723 Vico began what was to become The New Science, publishing a
first version in 1725, a much different second version in 1730, then adding
corrections and additions through 1733; the final version overseen by Vico
appeared posthumously in 1744, the year of his death. See Vico (1722),
(1977), (2002), (2005).
17 The famous ontological argument developed by Anselm of Aosta and
Canterbury (1033−1109) aims to prove God’s existence from a definition
445
of God as that than which nothing greater can be thought. Descartes first
used a version of the ontological argument in the Discourse of 1637. See also
Bouillier (1868): 521−45.
18 Fiorentino read Vico’s letter of 1726 to Giuseppe Luigi Esperti, a cleric who
was part of Vico’s complex network, in Vico (1835−7), VI, 5.
19 The French critic is Bouillier, in Bouillier (1868).
20 See n16 above, on the chronology.
21 Nicola Solla was a student of Vico who wrote an early biography of his
teacher; Vico discusses the learned Angiola Cimini (or Angela Cimmino) in
Vico (1975): 180−1; for Vico’s answer to Solla, see Vico (1835−7), VI, 6−10.
22 When Vico dedicated the first version of The New Science to Cardinal
Lorenzo Corsini in 1725, the implication was that financial support would
follow, but the Cardinal, who became Pope Clement XII in 1730, reneged;
Vico (1975): 11−17, 173. While waiting in vain to be called to a chair in law,
Vico taught rhetoric, a less prestigious subject and less rewarding financially.
23 Cilento is the part of Campania where Vico lived as a young man in the
castle of Vatolla.
24 Although Vico himself says that the dispute with the Giornale de’ Letterati was
polite, it was also long and intense; Vico (1975): 152−3.
25 Vico (1722), begun in 1720.
26 The legal scholar Costanzo Giani (1826−69) was the editor of Vico (1855).
27 Vico (1977): 185, 323, 600.
28 Vico (1711): on the Giornale de’ Letterati, see nn16, 24 above.
446
13
Francesco Fiorentino
Positivism and Idealism1
No one used to thinking about the course of human events can help
noticing the variable success enjoyed by various fields of study, no less
than by any other institution or practice. It will be easy for any such
person to see that some fields that were once sought after and fashion-
able were soon completely forgotten or taken up without enthusiasm.
Usually, in fact, the eventual oblivion has been in proportion to the ante-
cedent ardour: the greater the expectations engendered, the more dis-
tressing the consequent disillusionment. Nowadays – and it could not be
otherwise – philosophy has met a similar fate, sometimes praised to the
skies, sometimes trampled in the dust, depending on which intellects
are in charge, whether they are the haughty young or else older people
given to circumspect doubts. So goes the world! History has its own ups
and downs, just like people: sometimes the human race sails on, as fast as
desire; sometimes it runs aground in dismay and disillusionment.
Reversals of this kind do not lack causes, however. Every era is made of
an aggregate of traditions, principles, and doctrines with which it stays
content until it occurs to someone to suspect that they are unstable.
Until that moment, there is no hint of suspicion, which for most people
is not an issue. But then – as with a building whose walls tumble down all
at once, and no stone is left upon a stone – not one principle or doctrine
in this whole mental world any longer has any value or authority at all.
It must be completely rebuilt, completely redone from the start, and
reconstruction begins with a preconceived dislike for anything from the
past. But this dislike too is unreasonable. And history takes on the dif-
ficult task of keeping what must be kept, leaving in the rubble the useless
weight of countless frameworks worn out by time.
Nowadays we are in the habit of getting upset with any speculation at
all – indeed, any idea of any kind. And since we still need something to
do, what has become fashionable is careful research about facts. Positiv-
ism is the name given to the philosophy that takes this path, and Idealism
is the name that we usually give to its opposite. Two philosophies, Positiv-
ism and Idealism, have been set up facing one another, and two catego-
ries have been walled off, the category of facts and the category of ideas.
This sharp opposition does not mean the end of all philosophy, how-
ever, only that one philosophy takes the place of another. The founder
of the positive philosophy, Auguste Comte, in the famous Course that he
published from 1830 to 1842, proposes to find the most general rela-
tions of objects belonging to the different sciences, and because rela-
tions of quantity are simpler, he puts them first.2 Accordingly, he puts
mathematics at the base of the whole encyclopedia, and mathematics is
supposed to be the key to explaining chemistry. Chemistry is the key to
biology and biology the key to sociology. Starting with quantitative rela-
tions, Comte gradually moved up to more complex linkages and finally
reached the most complicated connections of social life. That was his
plan, but it did not last. As soon as he started to think about life, he real-
ized that he could go no farther with mechanical laws alone. He sensed
the need for final causes and admitted it – those same final causes that
he had proposed to banish in the first sections of his Course of Positive
Philosophy. Then he formulated a principle that departed from his earlier
view: namely, that higher forms cannot be explained by lower forms.3
Through George Lewes, Positivism travelled across the Channel to a
soil where it could take root more easily. Here were the traditions of
Berkeley, Hume, and Bentham. Here, as Stuart Mill wrote to the same
Auguste Comte on 4 March 1842, the nation had more positivity.4 Any-
one who knows the history of English philosophy understands that theo-
rizing was gradually restricted there to the phenomena alone. Locke had
banished every idea of substance. Berkeley had banished every cause.
Hume had reduced every nexus of causality to a mere association of
ideas. Accordingly, a philosophy based on the phenomena alone, which
excluded everything absolute and all necessity, could not help being
favourably received in England. Bentham emphasized utility. And if,
as Macaulay said, the glory of modern philosophy lies in seeking the
useful and shunning ideas, then, from Bacon until now, no nation has
done more to make this maxim effective.5 But the fact is that a question
remains: Is this really the glory of modern philosophy? Will we be wiser when
we have extinguished the light of every idea and when we have pursued
every means of multiplying the comforts of life? And the most brilliant of
448
Fiorentino, Positivism
your philosophers, those celebrated as ancestors of this positive philoso-

phy, is this also how they understood the destiny of their science? When
Galileo founded mechanics and discovered the phases of Venus and the
satellites of Jupiter, was he interested in nothing more than utility?
But let us set these questions aside. Positivism formulated its rigor-
ous laws on the logic of Stuart Mill – laws that are not new but newly
assembled and stated more emphatically. There is no deduction of ide-
as, no necessary link between one idea and another, merely an associa-
tion that is almost accidental. There is no definition whereby, once we
know a thing’s essential features, other features can be inferred. There is
only description: a thing is thus and so, disconnected, without a reason.
No demonstration holds: reasoning shows only that after one thing we
encounter another thing that we might just as well not have encoun-
tered. And so induction – the much exalted induction – has no other
value for Mill than adding these facts to those facts, an unfruitful type of
addition that fails to extend our knowledge beyond what direct sensation
grasps and perceives. None of these doctrines is new, nor does plenti-
ful learning suffice to excuse Mill’s impoverishment of reason and his
reduction of it to impotence. Locke had already contested the validity of
the syllogism. And Hume had shortened the reach of induction, limiting
it to a mere expectation of like events based on the subjective link of the
association of our ideas.
Stuart Mill is the genuine article for Positivism – the philosophy that
is the genius of his nation, so horrified by ideas, so anxious to corner
the facts. Not even in Comte did he accept the frequent use of the term
system. Because this word suggests a common nexus of dependence, it
seemed suspect to him; such a thing simply did not exist, so he thought.
And Mill goes still farther. Although Comte called a halt at the problem
of life, declaring the lower sciences of mechanics, physics, and chemistry
powerless to explain it, and putting what new ideas he had back into
sociology, there was no obstacle that could stop Mill, who wants to use
the same methods for the moral sciences and the natural sciences. It
does not escape his attention – and for this he earns all due praise – that
the eternal question for every religion and every philosophy is whether
human actions, like all other natural events, are subject to invariable
laws. Do we really find in these actions the causal constancy that is the
basis of every scientific theory of consecutive phenomena? In fact, he
does not use the term natural laws to cover that necessary dependence
whereby, when one term is posited, the other must inevitably be posited.
Instead of natural laws, he would much prefer the locution natural con-
449
formities. Call it what you will, natural conformity or natural law, it still
remains true, in any event, that one thing connects with another in the
sequence of natural facts. In moral actions, however, there is an inde-
pendent activity that posits and determines itself by breaking loose from
the adamantine chain of the causal series. That said, I do not intend to
settle this question, simply to mention it.
Claiming that we must use the method of the natural sciences in the
world of ethics and human history appears to assume an answer to the
prior question – specifically, it assumes that there is no activity that does
not come into the sequence of cause and effect and is not determined
by another action preceding it, which, in turn, determines the action
subsequent to it. Now this verdict has not actually been rendered, and
we still have no arguments on one side or the other that are unobjection-
able. On the one hand, some people say this: I know only facts, and facts,
inasmuch as they enter into consciousness, exist in a nexus of causality
and occupy a moment of time with a before and after. This is the argu-
ment made by Kant, adjusted later in various ways. On the other hand,
some people make an objection: there is something in our thinking that
experience does not supply but that all experience assumes. There is
something primitive, irrational, and a priori, which, in the domain of
practice, is freedom. If experience is powerless to grasp it, reason can
only accept it. This is another thesis proposed by the same Kant, and
when it is opposed to the first it constitutes one of his famous antinomies.
So then, with all this show of judgments straightforwardly rendered,
we have still not wriggled free from the fatal grip that held Immanuel
Kant, that giant of intellect. It’s no use, then: we apply the method of the
physical sciences to the natural sciences, but first we must decide wheth-
er the forces that we have in mind are all equivalent to physical forces.
Clinging to the doctrine that the whole fabric of nature and that of mind
as well reduce to a single law of causality does not mean that all debate
has been cut off and that this single law has necessarily been proved.
Herbert Spencer made great efforts to close the distance between
natural causality and freedom, finding clever ways to bridge the gap by
bringing memory as close as possible to instinct and instinct as close as
possible to intelligence. He thinks that the theory of the average person,
upon which statistics is based, has confirmed as much stability in human
phenomena as can be found in natural phenomena. Considering the
movement of the whole human race in the aggregate, he thinks that
exceptions conflicting with this stability can be seen to grow sparse grad-
ually and finally vanish. All this we may not understand. We may indeed
450
be content to contemplate the mighty effort and ingenious inquiries

involved in settling the dispute that separates mind from nature. But
our admiration does not mean that without further ado we would simply
believe such a thesis to be definitively demonstrated.
When Positivism does not simply boil down to Mill’s scepticism, it
shares with Idealism the aim of basing all knowledge on a single prin-
ciple and the same method. Comte among the French and Spencer
among the English walk this same path. Halfway down the road, Comte
becomes more timid as he gets deeper into what he calls the inner soli-
darity of life. Spencer is more daring, never turning back before the fear-
ful distance that separates instinct from intellect. Hence, anyone who
thought that evicting Idealism would forever end the effort to construct
an ambitious and audacious synthesis must be disappointed. It is true
that all Positivists agree in speaking only of relative knowledge and in
entirely excluding the Absolute from what we know. And for Spencer the
Absolute is still just the antithesis of science, a term without which the
relative is not possible, the dark basement where religious faith has its
place and spreads out without hindrance. This notion of the relative is
not new in the history of speculative thought, however; it was advocated
by the Sophists, who made man the measure of all things, the criterion
of all truth. It lies at the foundation of Hume’s philosophy and Kant’s
critical philosophy especially, which excluded any knowledge of the nou-
menon or thing in itself.
In this regard, then, the novelty has nothing to do with Positivism.
Indeed, let me note that one finds this sort of relativism in Absolute Ide-
alism itself, which has seemed to be the system most sharply opposed to
such a view. If certain bothersome and parrot-like imitators of Hegel had
got it right, that conflict would be immense and impossible to resolve, as
even I understand. Given that Spirit is essentially history, however, who
does not see that absolute knowledge, absolute religion, and absolute
art cannot, even for Hegel, imply a goal that is definitively established
and cannot be surpassed? Who does not realize that nothing is more
opposed to that decree of Idealism – those pillars of Hercules that cer-
tain annoying commentators have tried to erect and thus block any fur-
ther progress?
That something is absolute can mean only that, at some given time,
mind can no longer conceive of anything but that particular form. In
ancient Greece, Greek science, art, and religion were absolute because,
at that point, Spirit could take only those forms, in the same way that
one cannot make an armful bigger than an arm (to use a phrase of Mon-
451
taigne’s) or a handful bigger than a hand.6 Understood in this sense,

Idealism’s notion of the Absolute implies nothing more nor less than
Positivism’s notion of the relative. If some form or other were absolutely
complete – maximal and unsurpassable – such an Absolute would not be
becoming, and thus it would be present to us not as history but as sterile
repetition, neither of these consequences being compatible with the real
essence of Hegelian thought.
Nonetheless, this difference remains: for Positivism, especially as Mill
understands it, there is no reason that governs and unifies the forms that
change through history, while for Idealism nothing happens without
reason. For Mill, history might well have turned out otherwise. The way
that it turned out was pure chance, for better or for worse. Now without
excluding the role of accident – of which there is also a great deal in the
history of human affairs – will anyone be content to eliminate all the
guidance that reason gives? Let the threads in history’s cloth be as varied
as you like and as randomly coloured: do all of us still not detect a pat-
tern beneath them that plans and places the threads? If there must be
one method for all the sciences, as Mill also holds, are we all not aware
that the rule of chance, so recklessly wild, will even invade the territory
of mathematics, and that not even the rigid relations of number and fig-
ure will be secure? From so extreme a conclusion Mill does not shrink,
depriving even mathematics of reason’s invariability.
Between chance and reason the human mind will never hesitate to
choose, resolutely and scornfully rejecting any science that would deny
it that firm foundation.
Grounds for consequences as outrageous as this are there to find in
the analogous excesses of Idealism, which, as it departs more and more
from facts, gets lost in the inaccessible and cloudy heights. But as it turns
out, Positivism has neglected ideas instead of neglecting facts. Since Ide-
alism starts from the knowing mind and recognizes the impression that
mind can make on the coarse material of experience, it sees value only in
the stamp of the idea and disregards the objects stamped. But Positivism,
starting contrariwise by observing facts, registers their faintest features
and varying linkages. Naturally, it is struck by their stunning mutability
and remains unconvinced that there needs to be anything changeless
hiding beneath that changing surface. Furthermore, since Positivism
lacks the stability of the knowing mind, there would be no place from
which it could gaze at these fleeting phenomena, and without that gaz-
ing no science would be possible. Each of the two systems has its own
flaw, then, depending on where it starts. Idealism puts too much trust
452
in deductions based on the eternal fabric of cognition. Positivism wavers

and worries too much about tying up loose threads. Indeed, sometimes
it loses all confidence in itself; thinking it impossible to put cloth on the
loom once the cloth is already woven, it gets the threads tangled as soon
as it touches the first knot.
Positivism and Idealism have a common aim after all, and the two can
be seen as different faces of a larger system that we can call Monism.
Here too, however, there are different ways of proceeding. Positivism
gives nature the upper hand, and man does not figure in nature except
as an appendix. This is the position of Renaissance naturalism, writ large
but unchanged in substance.7 Alongside nature’s immensity, the human
being dwindles and nearly vanishes – a nameless atom. The contrary
response from Idealism is that without this atom that immensity would
be lost and unrecognized. Only this atom has the power to stand up to
the whole vastness of nature, says Idealism. This atom resists nature and
from its consciousness unleashes an undetected force, thereby knowing
the laws of nature, and, in knowing them, coming to regulate them and
make them serve its needs.
Which of these two sides of Monism gets the right measure of things?
The founder of Positivism, Auguste Comte, begins by magnifying the
importance of nature and ends with these memorable words: ‘The study
of mankind and humanity is the leading science: more than any other,
it should attract the regular attention of highly intelligent people and
stimulate continuing concern through public discussion.’8 In his view, it
is obvious from the very expressions we use that other fields serve only as
introductions to the human sciences. In fact, when we use words like ‘inor-
ganic’ and ‘inert,’ they make sense only in contrast with the human. He
concludes that the science of sociology – the moral study of mankind – is
the ultimate science and that biology itself is just its final prelude. In this
last part of his course on philosophy, the disciple of Saint-Simon got the
best of the disciple of Broussais. In fact, Stuart Mill noted that while Comte
had attributed the origin of positive chemistry to Lavoisier and biology
to Bichat, he reserved for himself the glory of opening the positive era
of sociology.9 Perhaps progress in research caused him to see the greater
significance of human history. Or perhaps the poetry and music that he
took up in the later years of his life tempered the mathematical rigidity
with which he had begun. However, whether it was art or science that led
him to see that the study of mankind is primary, it is no small credit to him
that he came close to this distinctly modern view: that without the human
mind, nature is a closed book with seals that cannot be broken.
453
But can nature and mind be studied in the same way, by the same
method, and with the same results? This is another controversial ques-
tion about which it is easy to get confused.
Ever since the great Galileo rejected all authority and all the problems
of the schools to turn to experience and to induction, nature has revealed
itself in new ways. The laws that Galileo discovered, even though they did
not reach beyond facts of sensation, had the great virtue of producing
a need to see the world of Spirit transformed in the same way. What he
did for external facts, Descartes attempted for subjective consciousness,
and Kant achieved this in his immortal critique. The problem was that
it was hard to apply the powerful inductive method to the individual
and solitary mind because mind lacks that indispensable point of control
and connection that facts provide, and that becomes clear and concrete
only in the collective psyche. Giambattista Vico, inventing a science that
was both a philosophy and a history of the human race – and trading
the truth of science for the certainty of history, as he himself used to
say – completed Galileo’s project and made the inductive method of the
experimental sciences available to the science of the mind.10 I am cer-
tainly not claiming that historical induction left Vico’s hands in as com-
plete a state as experimental induction had left the hands of the scientist
from Pisa. In fact, after criticizing Descartes for being shut up inside a
single consciousness and neglecting philology, what did Vico himself do
but apply to the psychology of peoples the same hierarchy and the same
faculties contained in the individual psyche: sense, imagination, and rea-
son? But anyone who wants to take into account the greater difficulty of
the philosophy of Spirit, as compared with natural philosophy, cannot go
too hard on the philosopher from Naples.
And here it is not beside the point to sketch the difference between
natural induction and history in order to reply to those who are too
quick to preach and teach that the moral sciences should adopt the same
method if they want to do things reliably.
The basis of natural induction is solid, whereas the basis of histori-
cal induction is mobile and always changeable. Natural facts are always
present to us either as stable or as readily reproduced, and most of the
time, from our point of view, they are exactly identical as long as circum-
stances are the same. Therefore, the observer can grasp them in their
native integrity and honesty as he assembles them, disassembles them,
and tests them in countless ways. With mental facts it is not the same.
When such facts pass us by, they leave no trace, or else whatever trace
they leave cannot reach us unaltered by time – or without the actual
454
imprint of the person who has transmitted them to us. It is not within the
power of humans to reproduce such facts entirely. What creates them is
already different; the environment in which they move is different; and
the sequence to which they belong is different. Induction cannot get
started in a reliable way, then; it is forced to proceed by guesswork that is
rarely correct and often misleading.
Calm, stable, and serene, nature does not alter the measure of its prod-
ucts in order to change what it produces. Under the crust of earth that
we walk on, the planet has stored away for us the buried and ineradica-
ble proofs of its distant transformations. But the ephemeral commences
with life and reaches its peak with mind – this fickle, gabbling Proteus
that has no constant face. Like a raging blast of wind, mind goes so fast
that there is no time for any one of its actions to get a grip on another.
When one act begins, the other is already gone forever. Nor is memory
so very prompt or so fixed on taking everything in, or, having done so,
on preserving them all. Thus, in individual consciousness, as in the his-
tory that mirrors the collective life of peoples, the activity that creates is
never the activity that reflects. If the point is to re-weave the course of
history, then, how can we re-enact a process that is so long, so fast, and
so laborious? How can we return to the infancy of our race? How can we
revive that unthinking childhood when languages, myths, customs, and
religious rites were created without yet giving birth to science, without
reflection to inspect or regulate creative activity, without the forethought
of a riper age to see to the preservation of the evidence?
Littré, in the wonderful preface to his Dictionary of the French lan-
guage, claims that the history of words can be treated as equivalent to
natural facts since what he calls the ‘drawplate’ of words – the sequence
of all the words roughed out before reaching final and finished form
– should be treated like the methodical process by which the experi-
menter moves from the sequence of observed facts to the result of induc-
tion. But what is his point? What Littré says is all well and good, but
how can we have access to all the rough forms of which his drawplate is
constructed? Would we not need to fall back on guesswork most of the
time when a link turns out to be missing from the chain?11 If this hap-
pens with a language formed so recently, how great will the problem be
for very old and primitive languages? The equivalent of natural facts will
never have the same value, the same persistence, the same undeniable
reality as the natural fact accessible to observation. The same argument
holds for all other products of the mind, not all of whose intermediate
forms can possibly persist.
455
This is why all those who attempt these researches into origins slip
unconsciously into guesswork, more like philosophizing than telling
a story. The result is that philosophy, having been banished in name
from the class of positive sciences, comes back into all the philologi-
cal disciplines, unsummoned and unwanted. Indeed, who else but the
philosophical soothsayer is there to reconstruct the first enthusiasms of
the mythopoeic imagination? Who else repopulates the first temples,
descries there the first artless acts of worship, and restores the first crude
rituals? Who divines the first anxieties of moral awareness and the shame
that coloured the cheeks of the person who first felt guilt? Who goes
down into the hollowed caves, approaching the household fire to recon-
struct the first ties that bound primitive families together?
How little evidence remains of the kind called positive today! And how
much, by contrast, does the reason of the philologist, the moralist, the
jurist, and the historian perceive as unavoidably primitive? Cut away
inductions by reason, and how large a piece of positivity will you have
chopped off along with them? Reduce induction to the poor sterility to
which Stuart Mill has condemned it, and very little of the positive will be
left in these researches.
But this is not the end of differences between natural and historical
induction. Natural forces remain always the same while changing their
forms. But the primal forms, those that make up the skeleton of the
world, as it were, neither increase nor decrease. In the domain of Spirit,
however, increase is undeniable. The moral and intellectual environ-
ment not only changes but also expands as the number of ideas devel-
ops and enlarges. And as it expands, it weighs more on individuals,
substantially altering their activity. In fact, what happens in the world
of nature also occurs in the world of Spirit: the mind is surrounded by
an environment of customs, beliefs, languages, traditions, and ideas no
less than the body is surrounded by the atmosphere. The mind lives,
breathes, and moves in that environment without being aware of it and
without feeling the immense weight pressing on it from all sides. Unlike
the quantity of gases that surround the body, however, the moral and
intellectual environment is not always given. It grows in the course of
history. And it is both producer and product of that history, both origin
and result. This constant variation in one of the most important agents
of history – indeed, the most important agent of all – makes it rather dif-
ficult, not to say impossible, to check on human actions. The changed
environment teaches and guides the people living within it in different
ways. The dispositions that develop there propagate, and each genera-
456
tion thus becomes astonishingly unlike the next. But, always assuming
that these generations are not transformed physically and do not inherit
good or bad habits from their ancestors, could anyone say that they act
under the influence of the same mental causes if, beyond any doubt,
these are perpetually mutable?
That is how it is with history, then: those are the difficulties of recon-
structing it and basing it on valid inductions. More than the rushing
waters of a river into which no one plunges twice (to put words in the
mouth of the Greek sophist), the torrent of human affairs permits no
halt or respite.
Given all these difficulties, then, all we can do is philosophize. We
practise philosophy as we practise religious faith or art. Show that such
things are useless, and the human mind will answer with the words that
Madame de Staël gives to her Corinne: ‘How I love this uselessness!’12
But it is not only the heroine of a novel who will say this: Stuart Mill him-
self, that most austere spokesman for the English mind and positivism,
will also tell us so. ‘It would be a serious mistake,’ he says, ‘to believe that
thinking – intellectual activity and the search for truth – is to be counted
among the most powerful inclinations of human nature or that it holds
the highest place in human life except in entirely exceptional individu-
als. And yet, despite the relative scarcity of this element in comparison to
other social forces, its influence is the chief cause that determines social
progress.’13 In other words, while few are made for hard thinking, and
though the human race cannot stick close to these few bold and restless
spirits, it will still always travel behind them. So where will that proud
irritation with ideas lead? Where will that vaunted preference for the
useful lead?
Galileo, who among us can be called the founder of the positive meth-
od, knew almost by heart the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, the creator of
those vivid fantasies, so remote from the real world, that Leopardi cor-
rectly called ‘empty pleasantries.’14 For us, awareness of the real and of
life has never destroyed or diminished the splendours of imagination
and the deep speculations of intellect. And if the hasty and hazardous
syntheses of Idealism have shown Positivism to be right, this does not
suffice to deny the human mind any conception at all of system and any
synthesis. Cut away the branches growing wild and fruitless, but do not
rip every seedling out by its roots and stock.
For the rash claims of the one group and the disheartening denials of
the other there is always a constraint that is healthy for both. This is to
use ideas, but not arrogantly, and to study facts, but not narrowly, and
457
then to weave facts and ideas into a broad system where the one does not
conflict with the other and where all have a place and a reason. Idealism
can be empty and Positivism can be blind if one is detached from the
other, following the judgment that Kant reached about the pure concept
and bare intuition. An idea that is not verified and not checked by facts
is not an idea but a daydream. A fact that does not hinge on an idea, that
does not express a reason and give evidence of law, serves absolutely no
purpose. Given the strictest dictates of Positivism, such a fact must be
condemned as useless.
What lights up the fact is the idea shining inside it, raising it from the
sphere of mere accident to that of lasting reality. How many lamps were
there swinging in the world before the one in your cathedral caught
young Galileo’s attention? Who noticed them? Who remembered them?
Who made use of them? And what good did this swinging do until your
great townsman extracted the laws of the pendulum from it? The pre-
tentious contempt for ideas, the even more pretentious curiosity about
disconnected facts bundled together in great heaps without the light
of the idea and without that secret control which is the ingenious and
divinatory role of the inductive method – this will cause amazement in
fools but will surely not satisfy the minds of intelligent people.
Meanwhile, indefatigable compilers of catalogs have now replaced
indefatigable builders of systems. It used to be deductions from an
assumption of some kind that suffocated us. Now it is the recorders of
varieties and anecdotes who bore us to death. Here it is the claw of a
monkey or there the tail of a fish or the shape of a prehistoric tool that
takes the place of the risible quibbling that Cremonini employed to fight
Galileo and prove Aristotle right.15 In me they all awaken the same sense
of disgust – those who believe they can explain everything with the mar-
velous fecundity of the Idea, and the others who think they hold the key
to unlock every secret chamber of nature and mind just because they
have gathered up and recorded all the curiosities and anecdotes.
Needless to say, I have no particular person in mind; I regard every
discipline as necessary and useful; and it really delights me to see anyone
enthusiastic about his own studies. But I believe that philosophy has the
special task of correcting these exaggerations that are so much opposed
to one another. Even in the judgment of a famous Positivist it is phi-
losophy’s duty to coordinate all the sciences and find a way to unify all
human learning. Experience, says Herbert Spencer, ‘is knowledge of the
most humble kind, and it is not unified knowledge; science is knowledge
partly unified; philosophy is knowledge wholly unified.’16
458
But precisely because philosophy has this moderating function, it must

be careful and cautious in its statements. Philosophy, Kant used to say,
must not teach thoughts but teach thinking − specifically, by impressing
on the mind that habit of honesty, criticism, and organization that is so
large a part of intellectual development. Not being satisfied with argu-
ments that are too easy, weighing and evaluating difficulties, knowing
how to highlight facts, and knowing how to control the risks of deduc-
tions; keeping an eye on the historical development of humanity, judg-
ing everything in its context and every institution in its time, and always
remembering that the criterion of truth lies not in the proud isolation
of the sciences but in the mutual linking of particular truths so that one
can give strength and emphasis to the others: these are the main fruits
of this intellectual education, the difficult task that is entrusted today to
philosophy. True Idealism must not neglect the results of the positive
sciences nor neglect history, and true Positivism must remember that
the most important of all facts is human thinking, which not only stands
above all other facts but is also the one without which the others would
be as if they did not exist for us.
In my lectures, then, I will follow this path faithfully – the path of
trying to show in my ideas not only the internal process by which they
are worked out in subjective consciousness but also the historical proc-
ess by which they have emerged in human affairs. Both these processes
are histories: one history is hidden and happens in the deep recesses
of the mind; the other is open and reveals itself widely in the passage
of centuries. Thus the streams of Alpheus and Arethusa ran unseen in
the depths of the sea before coming into the open and flowing togeth-
er.17 One story will help the other. Internal history supplies those sub-
tle touches and quick strokes that have left no trace on the large story.
External history provides a more visible version on a larger scale of
those same results that consciousness has sketched only with faint lines
and shadows. The first will give us a basis for deduction, the second for
induction: the former is philosophy’s primal warp and woof; the latter
contains the countless and varied threads used by the human race to
weave and embellish it.
Hence, if I cannot apply to our science the same method used in the
positive sciences, I shall apply the one that is more akin to it and that we
call the historical method − historical obviously in the double sense that I
have described, without denying the need for unity, which for my pur-
poses is not just useful but indispensable. Indeed, in order to philoso-
phize it is necessary that facts and ideas can be linked together in a single
459
sequence – like the golden chain that the Homeric Jupiter trusted he
could use to tie up all the gods.
So if facts cannot enter into what we can know, we will take care not
to let them do us violence because they force themselves on us. And if
the connections and conjunctions by which I try to link them up are my
conjectures, or mere need rather than undeniable proof, I shall not hesi-
tate to say so explicitly, thinking it much more helpful to admit difficul-
ties than to beguile your minds with false and fanciful demonstrations.
In short, I shall see to it that the study of philosophy in this flourishing
University works with the same seriousness – though not in the same way
– that leads to success for philology, mathematics, law, and natural sci-
ence. Here the tradition of wisdom is ancient. And the rebirth of science,
though it began elsewhere, found its final expression here with the great
Galileo, whom your Fabroni was not wrong to call almost a god among
philosophers.18 So while Galileo did not set out to do philosophy in the
strict sense, he nonetheless paved the way by perfecting the inductive
method, an indispensable precursor of the historical method.
Here, where the government set up a normal school many years ago
and assigned it to educate new generations for the difficult task of teach-
ing, here it is also necessary to strengthen the minds of these students
even more by training them in the strict discipline of argument, care-
ful inquiry into the facts, precise definition of ideas, and that sense of
measure in all things which is the source of lucid mental clarity and firm
integrity of character. As our new institutions are attacked on all sides,
sometimes by troubles so stale that they stink, sometimes by rash and
half-baked novelties, all apparently turned loose and whipped up by
winds blowing in opposite directions; in this circumstance it is the duty
of science to make our minds stronger by bringing under control the
excesses that claim the pretentious title of principles and beliefs and by sub-
mitting the unruly person of talent to the conquering force of reason.
From ideas well defined and well organized come firm convictions;
from convictions well rooted come steady personalities; and from them
both States get exuberant life and truly lasting glory.
NOTES
1 Fiorentino read this speech in Pisa on 24 January 1876; it was published a

month later in Naples; we have used the text in Fiorentino (1935): 9−23.
2 Comte (1830−42).
460
3 [a] To call attention to the contradiction that Comte encountered would be

pointless unless it were from the same work that contains his early doctrine;
we would by no means insist if it were from the other work where he tries to
find a basis for the religion of humanity. To me it seems that an honest critic
has this obligation above all: not to judge an author except for a doctrine
explicitly held and acknowledged by him. But in the second work that
Comte wrote between 1850 and 1856, titling it Positive Religion, he bowed to
a form of mysticism wherein, with Mill, one must deplore the decline of that
great intellect. Born in 1798, Auguste Comte died in 1857. I plan to write a
short biography taken from Littré’s and from the trial held in Paris on the
occasion of his last will and testament.
4 As the editor of the Fortnightly Review, George Lewes (1817−78) promoted
positivism in England. The material that Fiorentino mentions is in letters
from Comte to Mill, 4 March 1842, and Mill to Comte, 22 March: see Haac
(1995): 54−62.
5 Macaulay (1861): 341−408.
6 Montaigne (1967): 251.
7 Following the normal usage of the time, Fiorentino has Risorgimento for
‘Renaissance.’
8 For Comte see part 11 of the Introduction.
9 Comte studied and worked with Saint-Simon from 1817 to 1824; Marie
F.X. Bichat (1771−1802) was a pioneer of modern histology and pathol-
ogy; François Broussais (1772−1838) was also a physician and pathologist,
and his conception of disease as deviation from a normal state influenced
Comte: see Mill (2007): 37−8.
10 Vico (1977):177−8.
11 Littré (1863−77), ‘Introduction,’ 9.5, where he is thinking of a drawplate – a
tool used to make wire by drawing it through a series of successively smaller
holes or channels: ‘The drawplate (filière) is, by comparison to the tool of
that name, a series of channels (pertuis) through which the word must pass:
these channels are the forms that the word has in the Romance languages.
For an etymology to be valid, it is not enough for it to fit the state of the
French word; when the word is common to all the Romance languages or
to several, it must fit the Italian state, the Spanish, the Provençal … What
makes the etymology of the verb so difficult … is that the drawplate does
not let all the Romance forms pass through …’ Fiorentino transliterates
filière as filiera.
12 Inspired by the poet Diodata Saluzzo Roero, Madame de Staël (1766−1817)
published Corinne in 1807, after a trip to Italy with Schlegel and Sismondi:
see Staël-Holstein (1841): 230.
461
13 For Mill see part 11 of the Introduction.

14 Leopardi’s ‘To Angelo Mai’ (see Leopardi [1824]), which was addressed
to an eminent philologist, expresses nostalgia for Tasso’s epic of medieval
chivalry:
You towers and cells,
you knights and ladies,
gardens and palaces:
thinking of you,
my mind is lost
in a thousand empty pleasantries.
15 Cesare Cremonini (1550−1631), a distinguished Aristotelian philosopher,

became notorious for refusing to look through Galileo’s telescope.
16 Spencer (1901): 119.
17 When the young huntress Arethusa could not outrun Alpheus, the river-god
who chased her, Diana turned Arethusa into a spring that ran all the way
from Greece to Sicily and in which the waters of both Arethusa and Alpheus
mingled.
18 In the late eighteenth century, Angelo Fabroni edited a Giornale dei let-
terati in Pisa, where he was also the head of the university: see also Fabroni
(1778−99) for his biography of Galileo.
462
14
Antonio Labriola
History, Philosophy of History, Sociology,

and Historical Materialism1
It perplexes us that the word ‘history’ has been used to express two dif-
ferent levels of ideas: the totality of things that have happened, and the
totality of literary devices used to attempt an account of them.
The Greek word actually corresponds to the second level of ideas
and expresses the subjective attitude of inquiring. The literary sense of
the word, then, starts with the father of history: ‘This is the account of
the inquiry made by Herodotus.’ Around the middle of the nineteenth
century, when the need for an organized discipline of historical inquiry
began to emerge, Gervinus devised the term Historik, by analogy with
Grammatik and Logik.2 The German word Geschichte, however, which
comes from geschehen, ‘to happen,’ represents the first level of ideas, or
rather it represents the series of events that have happened. This, seem-
ingly a matter of no consequence, becomes a major issue for the concept
of a philosophy of history. I site as examples the many blunders made
recently in Italy in discussions of historical materialism. In these debates,
many people, even those with intelligence, have not understood that this
doctrine has to do with the notion of a fact or an event, not with a phi-
losophy of inquiry or a narrative art.
Hence, when some people ask if history can become a science, two
approaches are required, depending on whether the word is applied in
the first sense or the second. In the second case, it is especially important
to remember that until the nineteenth century there were no scientific
procedures for historical research. Even when some clever person made
tacit use of critical method in writing a literary account of a particular
period, it was never the case that this criticism took the form of a princi-
pled statement of rules and standards. Hence, as people felt the need to
deal critically with history, particular doctrines of exposition and inter-
pretation took shape and solidified, so that today one can talk about
being trained philologically to be an Italian medievalist, for example.3
It is not history in the narrative sense that has become a science, then,
because narration will always end up in the sphere of intuition. If our
means of achieving the reconstruction of the past have become exact or
scientific, we classify this as linguistics, epigraphy, and so on. If writers
who discuss these issues carelessly wanted to pose the problem correctly,
they would have to put it this way: How much technical education is
needed to master the evidence required for an examination thorough
enough to recover the form of the commune of Florence at the begin-
ning of the fourteenth century?
If instead we apply the dilemma of science or art not to these techniques
of ours but to the totality of things that have happened, we immediately
realize that the dilemma does not apply. In all likelihood, no one will ask
a physiologist if digestion is an art or a science, even though one can say
that physiology is an art – or rather an experimental technique – and, at
the same time, a science in its conclusions. And when we say that history,
insofar as it is the sum of events, is not subject to the art/science dilem-
ma, we have in mind something very basic that is not merely an obvi-
ous observation. If, as noted above, we need many scientific means and
methods to recover the truth about facts that we then wish to recount in
a narrative or expository art, it is because history in the objective sense
no longer appears to us as an accidental product of a set of random acts
– nor as the promulgation of a higher plan, which would be the theologi-
cal explanation – but as something spontaneously self-moving that rep-
resents the sum of human actions in the development of humanity itself,
from the animal level up to its current state. And after we have acquired
the notion of this multiform process that is history in the objective sense,
it is absurd to be asked if it is art or science since it is really the basis of
all art and all science.
The arts and sciences are moments, aspects, and so on of this same
human development. When we establish criteria in aesthetics for epic
poetry, for example, or establish principles of law and economics in the
practical fields, we are doing nothing but extracting from history some
of its conspicuous forms, some of its decisive elements – not because
these forms stand above it as its rule or model but because they are his-
tory itself in action. And, finally, given this way of seeing history as an
objective sum of events, it is understood that from the new scientific
conception comes a change in the direction of research for anyone who
studies history as a discipline that must start with exposition and narra-
464
Labriola, Materialism
tion. I have expressed these things in somewhat difficult language pre-

cisely because the difficulty of expression helps me remind you that we
are dealing here with science or philosophy, not with literature, because
the greatest difficulty – especially for Italian thinkers, who are said to be
artistic by nature – lies in grasping that history is not a genre of litera-
ture and that it is not covered, as it once was, by books of rhetoric in the
chapters on eloquence.
And even at the risk of seeming to waste time by repeating myself, I
wish indeed to repeat myself and restate the problem. The word ‘history’
expresses two levels of concepts: with respect to the object, it is the sum
of events; with respect to the subject, it is the art of narrating them. This
art arose originally by accident from secondary aims of moral education,
political apologetics, and a taste or a talent for storytelling. Disciplines
dealing more or less scientifically with historical research emerged only
in the nineteenth century, at which time historical narration came to
depend on a scientific education in research. To get a clear idea of this
process, compare the first books of Titus Livy with the first chapters of
Theodor Mommsen: Romulus, Remus, and Rhea Silvia have vanished,
but in their place an exact conception of the social condition of the
ancient Italians has appeared.4 And we can look at Dante, our father,
with a bit of a smile because he actually believed that Aeneas had come
to Italy to prepare the way for the papacy.
But the concept of objective history has changed because in us the
basic notion of humanity has changed, because the way is open for us to
reconnect history with prehistory and prehistory with theology; because
we have substituted a clear idea of collective forces for the notion of the
inventive individual; and, in short, we have rediscovered the true subject
of historical action in the formation and development of societies. And
this precisely is the true and proper object of the philosophy of history
when it aims to understand the direction of events that have already
been confirmed by research. That field of inquiry, when it does not deal
with general problems, starts with what is traditionally called history –
namely, narration and exposition.
I will not stop here to describe the encyclopedia of various disciplines
required for anyone preparing to do historical research. Such an intro-
duction to method is no longer limited to the little work by Gervinus
(the one that introduced the word Historik), but extends, for example,
to the large volume by Bernheim, the Manual of Historical Method.5 It is
understood that all parts of the discipline of philology enter into this
preparation, and that is not all. It is understood that the content and
465
instruments of this preparation change, depending on whether the peri-

od is ancient or modern. Today, there is a philology for the French Revo-
lution as there is for the New Testament: no wonder there are so many
specialists, so many special publications, so many historical journals and
academies to oversee these studies.
In this field of research, we are constantly threatened by that extrava-
gant empiricism that torments itself with details and ends up making
scholars out of people who have no wisdom. No need to mention here
that as the mass of details has always increased and always keeps increas-
ing, the capacity for artistic exposition keeps declining because it is
just where the mass of details grows beyond bounds that the capacity
to organize, summarize, and relate them to one another is at its rarest.
Hence it is never superfluous to recall what Mommsen says, that writing
history requires imagination more than anything else – as big a slap as
could be at professional scholars.6
My point here is to shed new light on the relations between the two
senses of the word ‘history’ that we have already explained. Whoever
undertakes to tell a story, whatever the sum of particulars may be that he
has gathered, and whatever effort he may have made to arrive at a sin-
cere and intuitive representation of the past, when that person attempts
such a representation, he always ends up letting himself be guided by
certain conceptions and preconceptions about human nature, about
human destiny, and about the ethical, theological, or philosophical
meaning of events. The manner of representing events is a reaction to
conceiving the nature of the event as objective. There is no historian
who can really be called impartial, then, since to be so he would have
to stand outside all points of view, which is as contrary to the natural
position of the intellect as to the natural position of the eye. I mean that
those who prepare themselves to study history can say that they are really
prepared by a scientific method only when, besides mastering correct
methods for learning the facts, they also manage to acquire an adequate
idea of the principles that direct events, inasmuch as these principles are
in the events themselves. And I mean to say that the scientifically trained
historian must also have attained that degree of intellectual maturity that
consists in being able to deal with those questions that constitute the
philosophy of history as a whole.
Why would you want to call a historian scientifically trained if, after
acquiring mastery of the linguistic, paleographic, epigraphic, and oth-
er tools needed to study the history of Egypt in remotest antiquity, for
example, such a person then found himself looking at more or less certi-
466
fied facts but had not decided between the theory of race and the theory
of the natural environment; did not know whether religion is the cause
or the effect of social conditions; had not made up his mind about the
customary or the authoritarian origin of law; had not mastered the psy-
chology needed to judge whether the force of individual personality is
indifferent to chance or providence, to predestination or mechanical
causality? Since Villari has stubbornly maintained in so many polemics
that history is not a science, I would ask – with his kind permission – how
he, of all people, could attempt in his various studies to explain the ori-
gin of the commune of Florence?7
Now we can see what the art/science dilemma comes down to. Main-
taining the double sense of the word ‘history,’ we have shown, in the first
place, that research about facts has become and continues to become
always more scientific, which does not exclude narration as the final goal
of research. Secondly, we have seen that understanding the confirmed
fact depends on the implicit or explicit philosophy on which the histo-
rian bases his interpretation. Now it would be out of keeping with the
current state of the social sciences and the current state of scientific phi-
losophy if the majority of historical researchers, like so many new avatars
of Thucydides, Tacitus, or Machiavelli, wished to abandon their distinc-
tive bent when they interpret. And they will do well instead to acquire
whatever complement of philosophy they may need from the science of
others.
Twenty or thirty years ago, when all Europe was in a state of philo-
sophical decay, all this would be seen as heresy. Now, however, Bernheim
concludes his treatise on historical method by discussing the philosophy
of history – that comprehensive interpretation without which facts have
no meaning.8 The result is clear in itself, that the philosophy of history
deals with history only as objective – with the event, in other words – and
does not deal with history as subjective and therefore not with research
about the event. Every time we talk about the philosophy of history, we
mean to refer to principles that we take to be directive for the sequence
of events, and, when they are known to us, they help us understand the
events themselves.
Let me propose, then, that progress, in the broad sense of the term,
is history’s directive principle. It is important to note that this concept
was unknown to the ancients, just as it was unknown through the Middle
Ages; it is an idea that gained depth and precision only in the eighteenth
century. This concept, once it was grasped, became the standard meas-
ure for classifying historical facts no longer in terms of perspective but as
467
an ascending series. And hence we speak of conditions that are primitive

or advanced, declining or static. The concept of progress, applied more
and more often to the different conditions of human life, thus turns into
the notion of a ladder or an ascent, mankind’s developing perfection on
the path of civilization.
When this habit of comparison has taken shape, we seem to be able
to apply a standard criterion for gauging the differences that separate
the Greeks of the Homeric world from those of Periclean Athens, the
Romans of the first century Empire from the German barbarians who
stood against them. Through this process of adding quality to the histori-
cal facts, as I would call it, the facts acquire the feature of value. And if
there were no such values, it would be useless to spend time reconstruct-
ing the past because – if my colleague Professor Ceci will permit me,
though I have still not read his ‘Bibel-Babel’ article – it would not have
justified the effort of working for a century on Old Testament criticism,
and would not have been worthwhile for every civilized nation in the
world to labour away at excavating Nineveh and Babylon if, in the final
analysis, we did not manage to understand what the value of Babylonian
culture is.9 By this I mean its intrinsic value; its value in relation to Egypt;
its value in relation to later Indo-European civilizations; its value for the
non-Semitic components that originally constituted it as well as for the
Semitic components that it assimilated; and, above all, its value for that
small Old Testament people whose world-historical importance – which
seemed enormous as long as the prior history of Asia was unknown to
us – has been reduced to a minimum, so that we can regard that people
as a small or secondary link in the great chain of events of Asian history
in general and Semitic history in particular.
And thus, little by little, we have arrived at one of the other themes
mentioned at the start, when I said ‘history’ and ‘sociology.’10 Just now,
in fact, while identifying the object of the philosophy of history, I hap-
pened to mention in passing that this object consists of differences,
oppositions, and sequences of social forms. I will not stop here to deal
with the origin, development, and criticism of the concept of sociology
from Comte onward, nor do I feel obliged to examine exactly what the
positivists have meant by using that term. When I say sociology here, I
mean to refer to everything that can be an object of our thinking when
society exists. In this sense, sociology existed in fragments before Comte
468
– and long before, I would claim, since there was a generalized juris-
prudence called Natural Law as well as research on the production and
distribution of wealth that forms the content of economics. These two
disciplines have belonged to the modern world since after the Renais-
sance.11 Going back to antiquity, however, many problems of sociology
(so-called) entered into what Aristotle called politics, for example. And
the very historians who were interested only in narrative, even without
saying so, were forced in various ways to use as evidence what we would
now call the social context or environment.
With these observations, I do not intend to cast doubt on the more
specific features of scientific autonomy that the positivists have under-
stood to belong to sociology because its task is to study all social phenom-
ena globally, going beyond the particulars of law, economics, history in
the strict sense of the word, and so on. On this assumption, we see for
ourselves that sociology – which really still needs to be established and to
develop – would occupy the whole field of the philosophy of history. This
was the view of Paul Barth, extraordinary professor at the University of
Leipzig, who wrote a book titled Philosophy of History as Sociology last year.
The second volume has never appeared. Paul Barth has been busy with
many other things, and I hope that he leaves the first volume without a
successor.12
Therefore, standing on our assumption and avoiding all questions of
terminology, competence, and disciplinary boundaries, I mean – and I
mean to say – that every time we propose to study the directive principles
of history’s movement, our first obligation is to get completely beyond
the external narrative in order to represent the character and constitu-
tion of the specific society that we call the people of Israel before the
Assyrian conquest, for example, or the Roman people as one of the Ital-
ian societies. And then we may begin to ask ourselves: are we dealing
with a large grouping or a small one; is the grouping solid or unstable;
does the grouping have a fixed location (and is therefore agricultural),
or is it still inclined to nomadism? Then we can ask other questions: is it
a grouping by blood, where race and society coincide, or is it a coalition
of various groups related by blood? At what level is its social differentia-
tion; are all the people free, or are they free, less free, slaves, clients, and
dependents? In this way, classes are gradually defined by the economic
situation and by the functions that they fulfill; and as we immerse our-
selves deeper and deeper in this social analysis, we begin to see what the
history really is – to see, in other words, how that state of coexistence is
produced. The manner of that production is the object of research.
469
I will not say that we are at the point of being able to group all histori-
cal facts under distinct sociological forms so that an art of recounting
them would be the equivalent of a scientific representation of events.
If that were the case, the problem – or rather, problems – of the phi-
losophy of history would already be solved and there would no longer
be any discrepancy between history and philosophy of history. In some
cases, even those sociological forms that are easier to characterize are
always presented in the concrete and with great detail and specificity,
because, in fact, while in the abstract we can make the agricultural phase
something precisely distinct from the industrial phase, no people has
ever really existed that was exclusively one or the other. Thus, because
of the difference between industry in Rome and industry elsewhere – at
a time when industry was never absent, even where conditions of living
were mainly agricultural – Rome’s situation in a certain period took on
a particular character as compared to that of another Aryan land that
came close, more or less, to its situation.13 The same can be said of trade,
which can indeed become the predominant and best defined mark of a
whole population, as was the case with the ancient Phoenicians. But in a
more or less elementary form, it is never absent, if only as the adjunct of
that basic economic life that will be a hallmark even of primitive peoples.
With these brief remarks, I have wanted to say that the historian must
be on guard against classifications forced on us by a schematic sociology
that would like to claim that the way of life of a particular human group
could be indicated in a few rather short strokes. And the reason lies in
the fact that history begins to have society as its object after society has
already been differentiated and become complicated. Yes, the prehis-
toric horde can present homogeneous features of people related purely
by blood, people who choose to keep themselves spatially separate from
other tribes and vaguely express the form of law, morality, and religion in
simple custom. But when we find a particular arrangement in which the
specialty of the priests has already emerged, for example, even though
they are just magicians or sorcerers; or else the class of warriors has taken
shape and the distinction of lordship has arisen from their privilege,
along with its consequences of slavery, and so on; and this gives rise to
the need for a leader and then to the origin of dynasties; at this point, we
are far from the primitive and homogeneous, and we are moving step-
by-step towards those internal and external struggles that constitute the
main fabric of history.
If you stop and give careful attention to these ideas that bring with
them the novelty of rigorous criticism, you will find there not only a com-
470
plement to those first remarks that posed the art/science dilemma but a
good answer to this new issue: sociology or philosophy of history?
And now we wish to give a brief summary of what this answer is:
A. When we set out to think historically about a series of human events

– the Punic Wars, for example, or the German Reformation – we must
always refer first to their social features, not only to understand the ter-
rain on which the facts develop, but also to understand the motives for
the struggle between the classes, for the warfare, for the innovation in
legal institutions or economic affairs. In this sense, the sociologists are
right to maintain that the closer historical research comes to a scientific
way of thinking, the more support and guidance it finds in the direction
of sociology – insofar as human groupings can be thought of as elements
in morphologies.
B. But it would be a serious mistake to follow the professional sociolo-

gists in their assumption, which is that history is destined to be absorbed
by sociology. Sociology deals with types, meaning that it deals with what
is abstract in relation to the concrete of history. When the sociologist
speaks of the feudal type, he abstracts from all the other elements which
in addition to feudalism constitute France of the twelfth century, for
instance. If these elements had not existed in part, they would not have
developed later into what is called either the authority of the monarch or
the power of the judge, or the merchant class and then the middle class,
and so on and so forth. And this is why one cannot apply the concept of
the organic to sociology, because, for example, one would first need to
assume that the feudal type of society itself automatically became bour-
geois, although the class struggle cannot emerge except where classes
already exist.
C. The historian always works on the heterogeneous – one people that

has conquered another, one class that has overcome another, priests who
have overcome the laity, and lay people who have put the priests in their
place. Now all this is sociological, but it is not typical as in the schema-
tisms of sociology because the heterogeneous has to be grasped empiri-
cally, and this grasping constitutes what is proper to historical research
and what is difficult about it. Even if I grasp the general process of the
formation of the middle class, no abstract sociology will ever make me
understand why the event called the Great Revolution occurred only in
France. Being a philosopher by trade, not a historian, and teaching the
471
philosophy of history, I have always been happy to defend the particular-

ity of research methods, not because I become an admirer of simple par-
ticulars, but because I hold that the interests that lead us to study history
do not rest only on those merely sociological schemes, useful though
they may be, but on our confidence that the interpretation of history – of
complex aggregations of facts linked to one another – must lead us to say
something deeper, something called understanding human destiny in the
language of the ideologues.
D. And it is precisely on this general and complex understanding that

the philosophy of history rests, inasmuch as we are interested not in
generic social forms (the economics of slaves or of wage earners) but in
the complexity of these forms when they carry the names of Athenian
life or Roman life, Romans of the Republic or the Empire, neo-Germans
or neo-Latins, the discovery of America and the colonies, the nineteenth
century and world trade, and so on. The concept of what is called his-
torical values, the values that refer to the general and complex idea of
progress, appears only in relation to these concrete and complex forms.
E. If the word ‘progress’ is limited to this meaning, no one will want to

confuse it with that disastrous idea of evolution that has given so high a
price to all the more or less triumphant idiocies now in circulation. Evo-
lution is an excessively generic term that covers every form of becoming.
But someone who will work hard and dig deep to understand the lexi-
cal development of neo-Latin forms from Latin forms will not thereby
understand the evolution of fungi or the natural history of the crab. The
generic idea of evolution remains a postulate of what Aristotle called
first philosophy, and the special sciences must deal with single lines of evo-
lution. The generic idea of progress implies that concept of evolution
which gives us the right to evaluate the various forms of human life. By
having a connection with history, the abstract features of the concept
of evolution acquire just enough of the concrete to support a concrete
appraisal.
When we say that we have made more progress in civilization than peo-
ple of past times, we do not mean to say that the abstract entity, human-
ity, has somehow grown a new skin or a new beard. Instead, we mean
to say that slaves no longer exist, for example, that all people are equal
before the law, that wives are not bought, that children are not sold, that
priests do not have the right to send you to heaven on a whim, and so
on, up to the point that consciousness of progress has become faith in
472
progress and a reason to have faith. And, if one eliminates this concep-
tion, the study of history no longer has a rationale and is once again
confined to the useless multiplication of particulars.
The analysis that we have given of the concept of sociology in relation to

history, and the question that we have posed – whether the problems of
the philosophy of history can simply be reduced to sociology – lead us
naturally to examine a line of thought called historical materialism.
First of all, I note that in many books and journal articles appearing
in Italy one sees discussions of the term historical materialism that show a
strange passion for wordy sophistry. Someone has even made this aston-
ishing claim (and honoris causa I will say that it is Professor Asturaro):
that historical materialism would be a good thing except that the name
has ruined it.14 There is also another person who would be absolutely in
love with the theory but for the unfortunate fact that its two most impor-
tant advocates were the great communists, Marx and Engels, who, natu-
rally, had received neither the Order of the Red Eagle nor the Order of
Saints Maurice and Lazarus.15 No one need make a serious reply to crit-
ics like these, who would judge a theory good if they could suppress the
names of its inventors. I realize that even if the name were different, the
issue would have the same importance, and that the point of the debate
is really this: the existence or non-existence of that famous thread run-
ning through the material conditions of human life, so that when those
conditions change, everything else changes. But even the case for the
terminology is not irrelevant since it somehow summarizes the historical-
psychological origin of the doctrine.
It is quite well-known that Hegel’s dialectical idealism had its nega-
tive resolution in Feuerbach’s materialism. But Feuerbach’s materialism,
while denying the ideological basis of Hegel’s doctrine by putting the
individual person face to face with nature, reduced religion to a merely
imaginative projection of the individual’s needs. Feuerbach’s material-
ism paid no attention to the historical world, just as eighteenth-centu-
ry materialism had paid no attention to it, while exactly reflecting the
needs of that Great Revolution, which, in the name of natural right,
denied historical rights. But, when Marx and Engels began to criticize
both Feuerbach and Stirner and the Hegelian Left, at the urging of the
contemporary Socialist movement, they found that traditional material-
ism up to Feuerbach offered no explanation of history – and that is how
473
the theory got its name.16 Although one can ask whether the project of
historical materialism was a success or not, one can certainly not pretend
that the doctrine is true but the name is false.
I shall clarify this with an example.
The general schematic psychology that I have outlined in my other
course is based mainly on the assumption that psychic phenomena start
and stop with the life of the individual.17 But we know that the sensists
were inclined to claim on the basis of the materialist hypothesis that all
complex psychic phenomena must be explained by the primitive data
of sensation. However, our individual consciousness contains many ele-
ments that cannot be explained without the existence of society and his-
tory. You use language not as individuals but as social subjects. And thus
one may say of law, religion, and moral ideas that they exist in us only
through the medium of history and society. But biological materialism
does not tell me how the dogmas of Christianity emerged, nor how the
grammatical forms of neo-Latin emerged, nor, in general, how social
structures exist.
The task of historical materialism has been to find the material condi-
tions of the historical social world. This task is parallel to – not derived
from – what the pure positivists have called sociology. Let me note here,
by the way, that when I mention the word ‘positivism,’ I always do so with
great hesitation, because positivism, as it developed from Saint Simon to
Littré, was essentially historicism, the urge to explain history. All those
who call themselves positivists in Italy, however – with the single excep-
tion of Angiulli, who really came from the Hegelian school – have lapsed
into materialism as it was before Feuerbach.18 They always start with the
individual and always end with the individual, and so they do not under-
stand the morphology of history. Our positivists generally fall short of
Comte, who was so much a historicist that he denied the possibility of an
individual psychology.
Having claimed that the name is neither accidental nor irrelevant,
that it actually reveals the origin of the doctrine and its stance towards
those contemporary or somewhat later views that struggled to overcome
the limits of idealism and ideology, and before going on to discuss the
content of the doctrine itself, to the extent that it reflects my own views
about the philosophy of history, I must define the general concept of
the social phenomenon. A social phenomenon occurs only when relations
of action, cohabitation, and cooperation exist between people. To ask
how far the form of cohabitation reaches makes little difference here.
It can happen in a small, simple tribe geographically isolated from the
474
rest of the human race. But this will not happen – namely, that there is
a small tribe – without phenomena of correlation that are not directly
explained just by the bio-psychological state of each of the individuals
and that arise only from the fact that the individuals depend on one
another. For continuing cohabitation to go on in such a tribe requires
a particular form of speech that must arise from the successive adapta-
tion of different individuals not only to specific and stable associations
of sensations, memories, and so on, but also to sounds and grammatical
forms. The origin, stabilization, and development of language are the
most general and direct signs and symptoms of social states of mind. It
was precisely the effort to provide reliable canons of interpretation for
the science of language, in fact, that gave rise to the notion of social psy-
chology in one of the successors of Herbart’s school. The proper content
of language recurs in forms of custom that precede law or take its place.
And it recurs again, especially in elementary forms of the acquisition of
material goods, or in what is distinguished later by the name of economics.
All those who deal with psychology, staying with the pure schema of
individual psychology, can only stick to pure abstractions. Anyone who
sets out to study the forms of the will, for example, pursuing the project
that I proposed in my course on theoretical philosophy (and I no longer
know how far I will be able to take this), must almost entirely avoid the
true and proper content of the forms of volition since this content is
always social.19 The will that takes shape is not the will that wills itself;
it is the will by which one learns to make shoes or play the piano, to
recite verses like Pastonchi or read badly like Formíggini.20 Those few
generalities that I have just mentioned about features of the social fact
do not claim to be anything like an introduction to sociology, much less
a chapter from the concrete logic used by Wundt and company.21 Speak-
ing to students and not to members of an academy, I have tried to intro-
duce the most basic distinguishing conditions of the social fact, as it then
becomes the real basis and subject of history, as I once said in dealing
with the question of sociology or philosophy of history.
And, by briefly showing where the true difficulty of understanding the
social fact begins, and by showing this right after defending the terminol-
ogy of historical materialism, I have certainly not meant to attribute the
discovery of the social phenomenon to the inventors of that doctrine. I
do not belong in the illustrious company of those Darwinists who only
just miss attributing the discovery of nature to Darwin. To justify the term
historical materialism, I have looked at it from the point of view of that
internal crisis that Marx suffered when he broke with Hegelian idealism.
475
Independently of that, however, the definition of the social phenom-

enon was constructed during the nineteenth century through studies of
law, economics, mythology, linguistics, and so on. In this way, the term
sociology finally came into use, employed more as an encyclopedic sum-
mary of a whole new view of human life than as the name of a special sci-
ence with a special method. With regard to this whole great movement,
historical materialism is a special case, and now that we have given a
preliminary defence of the terminology, we can move on to explain the
content of the issue.
I have often said that there is no way to substitute science for history,
as if all historical narrative and exposition could be reduced to schema-
tisms of reason. But I once noted that while history remains what it is –
the representation of the event – it is also true that, in light of the great
progress made by the social sciences, our mental attitude in thinking
about events has changed. You will recall that I have denied that sociolo-
gy can be substituted for history. I have been especially opposed to treat-
ing as equivalent to history that abstract sociology which, for example,
treats a feudal society as isolated and autonomous, whereas concrete his-
tory, once there are class differences and state power, has no knowledge
of a time when the social type was purely homogeneous. In consequence
of all that has been said up to now, when I speak of historical materialism, I
do not mean to refer to a sociology which, by isolating the type of feudal
society, let us say, from what is historically concrete, then tries to prove
analytically that political institutions and moral habits, let us say, are cor-
related with that economic type. Instead, when I speak of historical mate-
rialism, I mean history recounted in materialist terms, as I have shown
in ten or twelve years of considered accounts of specific historical topics.
And I have done this without worrying about two questions that I find
completely irrelevant: namely, whether in so doing I might really be the
rightful heir of Karl Marx, and whether or not, by so saying, I might
have helped a particular political cause. The last course that I taught, for
example, when I still had the use of the pedagogical and democratic tool
of a human voice, was dedicated to short chapters describing the life of
the nineteenth century as it passed into the new century.22 And in that
description I was far from lavish with prophecies of imminent victory for
democracy and socialism.
If the genius of Marx, a communist, was just what was needed to discov-
er the defining principles of historical materialism, and if, just because he
was a communist, he was infinitely far from defending the existing social
order – to understand is to overcome, says Hegel – that does not mean
476
that the final fortunes of historical materialism as a doctrine depend on

the séances pratiques of socialism. Suppose that the current stage of Euro-
pean civil society, dominated by the middle class, were still to perpetuate
itself for centuries: this would by no means contradict historical materi-
alism because the perpetuating would only show that society based on
competition can still exist. A few years ago, it is true, Bebel promised a
social republic in Germany by the year 1910. Apart from the fact that I
do not know whether Bebel was pulling his neighbour’s leg, it is certain
that he was never offered a chair of philosophy of history.23
No abstract sociology, then, and no worrying about practical projects
‘when socialism comes,’ but real, authentic philosophy of history, as we
have just defined it – history recounted in an understandable way. Here,
I insert something parenthetically that also comes into my other course
on theoretical philosophy. Having often described the various issues that
I have dealt with up to this point, and in defining the social complex as
the subject of history, it occurs to me to use the term social consciousness as
well. However, while sociologists of every stripe and colour use and abuse
this term and thereby leave a chaotic impression in the minds of readers,
and while many people try to use this expression to signify things that are
obscure, I think it useful to subject the term to critical examination in
order to bring more clarity to what has already been described.
The term we often describes the exponent of social consciousness. Now
turn your attention to the variable content of this we. At one moment,
you can say that we are all in the same family, that we have a certain
name, that we live on a particular kind of food and do a particular kind
of work, and that through these conditions of our existence we feel set
apart from the rest of the world. At another moment, we students and
professors mean to speak as members of this university, in which we par-
ticipate while also being individuals able to enter into and to exist, as we
do exist, in as many other spheres of the we as are expressed by saying
‘we Romans,’ ‘we Italians,’ ‘we Catholics,’ and so on. That we contains
nothing mystical or mysterious, then, nothing surprising or miraculous.
Indeed, the more it is used to express or describe something, the greater
the development and definition in many individuals – each calling him-
self I – of a conscious grasp of connection to a family, a clan, a people, a
party, and, if you like, even a mafia or a band of thieves – which is all the
same to psychology. At a high level of development of civilization and
thought, this we can be as broad, for example, as all of Indo-European
civilization. If you deprive the we of its natural centre in the many cases
of I that feel something in common, the we becomes merely a useless
477
symbol. The we exists only in the consciousness of each one of us insofar

as we are individuals. But it is not the sum of individuals because its con-
tent lies in the bonds that connect individuals, bonds that are primarily
material – bonds of shared blood, shared food, shared housing, and eco-
nomic cooperation.
Already contained in the brief description of the fact that I have pro-
vided here is what I would call a topical outline of the explanation of the
fact itself. Given the broad meaning that we have attributed to facts of
consciousness, in that consciousness represents an aspect either of a bio-
logical situation or of a social situation, there is no discrepancy between
the meaning of I and the meaning of we.
When psychology was not yet a science, when spiritualists of every type
could indulge themselves by making I the extra-temporal attribute of a
spirit standing above all creation, when idealists repeating Fichte could
make the I a transcendental self-positing, either the problem of the we
did not arise or it appeared as an imaginary claim for a collective and
extra-individual spirit. But now that we use the I as a variable expression
for internal apperception of variable states within us, so that – beyond
the empirical I expressed when I say, ‘Here I am, teaching’ – we do not
accept an I that is purely possible or transcendent, no wonder that the
function of apperception, in one and the same framework of conscious-
ness, uses both expressions – I and we. This does not mean that no one
makes mistakes in applying these words, since their correct use can be
achieved only by sophisticated psychological science.
A little commentary will clarify these statements, which really need
lengthy exposition. It is obvious that in the advanced state of our civiliza-
tion, individuals can make mistakes in using the expression I as opposed
to we. One reason is that most people do not know that what is attributed
to individual consciousness is, in most cases, nothing but a residue of
custom and tradition. But this same mistake – one that anyone who is
not a real expert can make – is evidence for the fact that as civilization
grows, the inclination grows in individuals to extend the range of their
I, and yet the more we turn inward, the more we also find that the sense
of the collective prevails over the sense of individuality. By now it is a set-
tled empirical certainty that the human race emerged from the horde
that was a continuation of the animal horde. In this horde the we was
everything – the we that expressed the need to live under coercion in
conditions without which the struggle for existence would not have been
possible. The emergence of individuality as true authentic consciousness
is a late product of more recent historical events. This subjectivity of
ethical or aesthetic consciousness appears so natural to us because our
478
reflective education knows no more than the ancient Greeks, who tell us
that Solon makes the law, that Herodotus writes history, and that Alcaeus
composes his haughty personal poetry. To us it seems almost inconceiv-
able that millions and millions of humans from various races have lived
for untold thousands of years – or centuries – with their individuality
absorbed in custom and the I wrapped in the we.
If we stand back a bit from the prosaic discussion in the preceding
pages, we may fall again into what Marucci, along with other enraged
positivists, calls metaphysics, for lack of another terminology that would
be more exact.24 The trouble, however, is that making such a metaphys-
ics out of sociology is just what the positivists have done, for we read that
they have filled the world with an endless number of symbols for the
social organism, the collective spirit, and so on.
Our prosaic statements, if I may review and compare, come down to
this: Nature produces male and female individuals of a particular race.
But when these persons come into the world, they do not develop as iso-
lated subjects face to face with nature and living only in nature. Instead,
they develop within a social group that gives homogeneous features to
each of them, and these are just the product of that social relationship
– a certain way of speaking, a certain emotional rhythm, certain shared
fantasies and, above all, the imitation of practical functions. As internal
apprehension of their own conscious existence emerges – what we call
the I – the function naturally divides into I and we. Yet the individual can
be mistaken in referring some particular content of experience to the
subject I rather than the subject we. All those scientists – idiots, more
or less – who used to deduce language, law, justice, and the state from
choice, inventiveness, and individual will, knew nothing at all about
these two major issues: that at first individuals were born in the horde;
and that individual consciousness based on the I arises little by little in
the heart of the we.
That is all I have to say by way clarification. If what I have said up to this
point is insufficient, anything else would only make it obscure.
NB: As in previous lectures I have explained the concept of historical
materialism, and along the way I have alluded to socialism. I believe it
useful to note that many now think they can account for their socialist
aspirations by forming a collectivist mental representation of the society
in which the we would again reabsorb the I – a lovely way to return to
primitive conditions. Not because it affects the explanation of socialism,
but because it is important for the subject of my course, it helps here to
recall that everything supports the claim that the gains made by indi-
viduality will never again be lost, and, in fact, that recent progress in
479
the civilized world will empower the personal more and more. By giving
a theoretical account of a society that is communist in the economic
sense of the word, we mean only to say that the means and instruments
of production could no longer be private property but would belong to
the collective through the exercise of labour needed for the production
of material goods. This means that a great many individuals, now subject
to a hierarchy of bosses, would gain greater freedom because, since the
labour of the one (who are many) could not produce wealth for others
(who are few), each person would be allowed the most favourable condi-
tions for intellectual and moral development.
All of you now present are masters at claiming that such things are
purely utopian. But I, dealing here with social consciousness and with
individual consciousness, must make you understand that this so-called
utopia is not meant to be a return to mankind’s primitive state – in keep-
ing with the old Egyptian image of the serpent that bites its tail, and
other such old saws of the decadent rhetoric that the illustrious Profes-
sor Loria finds so delightful.25 Ancient Egyptians have no right to have
their images and symbols recognized as meaningful for modern science
because those ancient Egyptians, in fact, never created Greek science,
nor the Latin city, nor Roman law, nor those other things on which our
civilization is based.
Following my digression on the reduction of social consciousness to
the we and my prosaic explanation of it, and focusing on everything that
I have already said to put the concept of history into helpful terms, we
can now offer a brief review of the essence of that historical materialism
whose definition we have been seeking.
At first sight, it might seem needless to say that every society depends
on the material conditions of its existence since this amounts to translat-
ing an observation of common sense into a technical formulation. For-
get those people who look after the happy concerns of science and art;
forget those often superfluous categories of the professors and priests;
forget – in other words – all those who live at third or fourth hand on the
products of another’s labour. The basic framework of society depends
on relations that hold among those who produce material goods directly
by their labour and with its instruments. This is what Marx called the
form of production. That the basic structure of society, or rather its eco-
nomic framework, has varied from prehistory until our time is beyond
all doubt, and that these variations must have their rhythm and must in
themselves show signs of process is more than likely, if we recall all that
we have said before about making history something like a science. His-
tory is, above all, variation in the basic frameworks.
480
But what is the specific character of historical materialism? That spe-

cific character is represented, in the first place, by a rather simple state-
ment: namely, that human beings have produced the law and have tried
the various schemes of organization that eventually become political,
always in keeping with the corresponding state of the economic frame-
work. The second statement is more hypothetical in character: that man-
kind’s mythological conceptions, and therefore religious conceptions
as well, and also moral dispositions, have corresponded to a particular
social condition, which means that the history of religion and ethics is
psychology in the broad sense of the term. Another key element implicit
in this conception is that the social framework is a framework to the
extent that society presents itself to us as a hierarchy and as an arrange-
ment of collaboration and of division into peoples and families and
classes in various relations of dependency and superiority. The result is
that society always has in itself the tendency to instability and is therefore
given to conflict and corruption, progress and regress. The doctrine of
historical materialism, given the two elements of the economic frame-
work and class conflict, becomes the key to understanding the real and
authentic revolutions, those changes in the complex state of society from
which innovations in law, new political directions, and new moral atti-
tudes are derived.
In the section dedicated to asking whether history is science or art,
I said that there is no substitute for telling the story, as you will recall.
When historical materialism has reduced to its simplest expression the
sum of conditions that make up the passage from the feudal age to the
age of the middle class – let us say – it will have done everything that
it should to explain the general causes of the French Revolution. But
when the task is to provide an intuitive representation of that unique
thing which is the Revolution itself, we can proceed only by natural
norms of exposition and narration, which will be congruent with the
theory as long as the narrator or expositor applies the same criterion to
each detail and illuminates the linkages between events by always paying
attention and making sure that they are not out of harmony with the
general perspective.
NOTES
1 We have used the text edited by Franco Sbarberi, Labriola (1976a), where
the editor describes it as ‘notes for a course on the philosophy of history
given by Labriola at the University of Rome in the academic year 1902−3.’
481
2 The books written by Herodotus in the fifth century BCE came to be called
‘Histories’ from the word historia used in the first sentence of his work,
where it means ‘inquiries.’ Georg Gervinus (1805−71), an historian whose
liberal hopes were shattered after 1848, was known first for his history of
German poetry and later for a progressive history of Germany in the nine-
teenth century, which led to a charge of treason and the end of his career;
Labriola is thinking of his Principles of History (Historik) of 1837: see Gervi-
nus (1835−42), (1837), (1854−60).
3 The target of one of the polemics that runs throughout Labriola’s notes
is Villari (see the Introduction, section 11), who discusses medieval Italy,
among many other things, in ‘Is History a Science?’ (1891); his study of
medieval Florence is Villari (1893−4).
4 Theodor Mommsen (1817−1903) was the leading ancient historian of his
age, best known for his History of Rome.
5 Bernheim (1899); see also our notes to Croce, ‘History Brought Under Art.’
6 When Mommsen won the Nobel Prize for Literature around the time when
Labriola was writing this essay, the speech conferring the award stressed his
powers of imagination. See Mommsen (1886): 6.
7 See n3 above on Villari.
8 See n5 above on Bernheim.
9 Luigi Ceci (1859−1927) pioneered the study of historical linguistics and
taught it in Rome when Labriola was there; he was also active in educational
reform and administration. The Bibel-Babel controversy erupted in 1902
when Friedrich Delitzsch, an Assyriologist, claimed that Mesopotamian
myths were the basis of what most people believed to be the biblical record
of mankind’s origins: see Ceci (1882).
10 Both words occur in the title of this piece.
11 Unlike many earlier Italian authors, Labriola uses ‘Rinascenza,’ perhaps
because by 1902 ‘Risorgimento’ had more pressing uses.
12 Paul Barth (1858−1922), a critic of Hegel’s philosophy of history, taught at
Leipzig; the title of the work that Labriola mentions is reversed, Die Philoso-
phie der Geschichte als Sociologie: see Barth (1890), (1897).
13 Greece would seem to be the other ‘Aryan land.’
14 Alfonso Asturaro (1854−1917) taught sociology in Geneva: see Asturaro
(1897), (1903).
15 The Order of the Red Eagle was a Prussian military award, and that of Saints
Maurice and Lazarus was bestowed by the Kingdom of Savoy.
16 Max Stirner (1806−56), whose name at birth was Johann Schmidt, was
a theorist of anarchism and a critic of Feuerbach who influenced Marx,
Engels, and many other nineteenth-century thinkers, often negatively; he is
a prominent target of The German Ideology: see Stirner (1844−5).
482
17 The role of the individual in society is a major theme of Herbart’s psychol-

ogy: see section 14 of the Introduction.
18 Andrea Angiulli (1837−90) was a positivist who focused on problems of
education: see Angiulli (1868), (1888).
19 Labriola alludes to the illness that prevented him from speaking in public.
20 Labriola jokes about two of his students: the poet Francesco Pastonchi
(1874−1953) was writing for La Stampa and other newspapers during this
period; Angelo Formíggini (1878−1938) later became an important pub-
lisher.
21 Wilhelm Wundt (1832−1920), who led the development of experimental
psychology in his period, also had enormous influence on the philosophy of
mind and the philosophy of science.
22 Labriola refers again to the illness that prevented him from speaking.
23 August Bebel (1840−1913), who founded the Social Democratic Party in
Germany, believed that socialism could be effective in his lifetime.
24 Achille Marucci later wrote about the psychology of will.
25 Achille Loria (1857−1943) was a prominent authority on political economy
in Labriola’s day whose theories were determinist and cyclical. The serpent
that bites its tail is the ouroboros, described in the imaginative account of
Egyptian hieroglyphics by Horapollon.
483
15
Benedetto Croce
History Brought Under the

General Concept of Art1
Is history a science or an art? This question has been asked many times,
but the usual judgment of the educated world is that the question is
trivial, one of those usually raised only out of common confusion and
then badly answered. Those who have asked and are still asking it, in fact,
either fail to give it a precise definition, or, if forced to offer one, limit
themselves to indicating merely this question: whether history, besides
being verified exactly, should be represented in a lively way and be well
written in the artistic sense. And the vague sense of the question tallies
with that of the answers, the most common being that history is science
and art all at once.
A different answer, that looks much sterner, however, has taken shape
among the most learned authorities on history, notably in Germany,
where experts on history have a mental habit widespread there and often
feel the need to philosophize about their discipline.2 Given the growing
sense that their work is important, serious, and difficult, a certain natu-
ral pride has emerged among historians and has contributed to their
response. Indeed, everyone recognizes the amazing progress, starting a
century ago, made by historical studies both in methods of research and
criticism and in methods of interpretation and understanding. Whole
histories of civilization utterly unknown before have been discovered,
and histories already known have been understood in an entirely new
way. Experts on history have therefore discarded the old chain of roses
that used to link their discipline to the belles lettres and have proclaimed
its strictly scientific character.
No one has stated this with more clarity, perhaps, than Johann Gus-
tav Droysen, distinguished author of the History of Prussian Politics, in an
important and intriguing little book on the Elements of History (Grundriß
Croce, The Concept of Art
der Historik). History for Droysen is science and certainly not art; science
and art go in opposite directions and are irreconcilable; artistic concerns
are harmful to history; the so-called artistic histories, especially abundant
in English and French literature, are nothing more than works of rheto-
ric – rethorische Kunst.3
Such ideas have prevailed among experts on history, from high to low,
and we find them explained in great detail in the extensive and excellent
Manual of Historical Method (Lehrbuch der historischen Methode) published
some years ago by Professor Ernst Bernheim of the University of Greif-
swald, which in effect collects the views of the discipline that are wide-
spread among German historians. We can see them in their fullest form
in this book by Bernheim, thus sparing us from multiplying footnotes,
which would be easy to do but also redundant.4 In his conclusion, Bern-
heim claims: (1) that history is a science and definitely not an art because
its aim is to provide not an aesthetic pleasure but knowledge (Erkennt-
nis); (2) that the results of historical science, since they are reported in
prose, obviously fall within the domain of art, in one sense – because
prose is a type of art – but this says nothing special about history as com-
pared to any other scientific account; (3) that it may sometimes turn out
that a work of history can be a work of art as well, but for Bernheim this
is a very rare event, and, in any case, purely coincidental.5
Obvious answers, are they not – quite clear and crisp? You would
give exactly the same answers to anyone who asked you if chemis-
try and physics are sciences or arts. The question would seem to be
closed. Attempting to reopen it would be the only reason to find one’s
thoughts faced with that charge of Begriffswirrung – conceptual confu-
sion – which Bernheim describes as reaching its peak whenever some-
one claims that history is art, or science and art at the same time.6 Yet
when two words are frequently brought together, there is almost always
some real reason for the juxtaposition. When a question arises persist-
ently, however confused it may be or badly put, one must be wary of
easy answers that seem to cut the knot. At the bottom of the poorly
framed question must be some problem to discover, which is its real,
though unconscious, motive. Now if people ask and keep asking if
history is science or art, there is one answer that settles nothing and
almost begs the question: that history, being a science, has the same
relations with art that all other sciences have with art. If the question
has come up for history but not for other sciences, it would mean, on
the one hand, that history seems not to be a science like the others,
and, on the other hand, that its connection with art appears greater
485
and different than that of other sciences with that very same art. We
need to stay with these two points and clear them up.
Actually, after the incisive claims about history’s scientific character
that I cited above, it is intriguing to see Droysen himself letting this sen-
tence slip from his pen: ‘And it would not be without interest to seek the
reason internal to history that makes it, alone of all the sciences, enjoy
the equivocal fate of having to be an art as well, a fate shared not even
by philosophy, despite Plato’s dialogues.’7 He does not realize that the
problem starts just at the point where he thinks he has finished with it.
To seek the internal reason for the connection that some detect between
history and art, and then to determine what this connection or relation
really is, we must go back and clearly establish the content of the three
concepts that come into such a discussion: science, art, and history. An
odd, but not uncommon, fact arises for these three concepts: we believe
that there is an agreement about their content that does not really exist,
and this gives rise to endless ambiguity, making some see the problem as
entirely without substance, while preventing others from saying exactly
what the problem is.
Experts on history, for example, usually start with too narrow a con-
cept of art and too broad a concept of science. Popular opinion goes
wrong, however, by using all three concepts in an imprecise and contra-
dictory way. As it happens, nonetheless, we shall find our inquiry lead-
ing us closer to this popular opinion – that history shares the nature
of art – than to the view of those who locate it definitively among the
sciences. And no wonder. However vaguely it may be expressed, a true
feeling for the real nature of science, art, and history operates in ordi-
nary consciousness, although it has been completely lost in the course
of learned polemics – as often happens. Let us begin, then, by establish-
ing these basic concepts. And I hope that readers will not be scared off,
having been assured that we are not attacking the question at too great a
distance, but bringing it back to its own territory instead, the only place
where it can be quickly and easily settled.8
1. The Concept of Art
I was speaking, then, of the apparent accord on what the concept of

art is about, and, generally, on the aesthetic contemplation of things
that involves art. To questions about the nature of the aesthetic world in
general and the world of art in particular, the answer is unanimous: the
world of the aesthetic is the world of the Beautiful, and art is an activity
486
aimed at producing the Beautiful. But trouble starts with the meaning of
the word ‘Beautiful.’
May heaven save me from getting into the endless and subtle disquisi-
tions that form the object of aesthetic science! That science was born,
grew, and bore wonderful fruit in Germany, though in other countries it
has never been much cultivated nor well – particularly in Italy, where it
is now completely neglected. I forbear lamenting this neglect and move
on.9 For my purposes, it suffices to mention the essential features of the
view of the Beautiful and of art that I find acceptable.
What is the Beautiful? Up to now, as far as I know, four main answers
to this question can be or have been given. First is the answer of Sensu-
alism, which reduces the Beautiful to a type of pleasure. The second is
that of Rationalism, which identifies it with the True and the Good. The
third is the answer of Formalism, which makes it consist of uncondition-
ally pleasurable formal relations. The fourth belongs to what a recent
historian of aesthetics calls Concrete Idealism, which arose mainly from
the deep insights of Hegelian aesthetics and sees the Beautiful as the
representation or sensible manifestation of the Idea.10
Now as for the first two, they are still tending wounds inflicted on them
by the mighty Kantian critique. Never again will it enter anyone’s mind
to confuse the Beautiful with the pleasant, save perhaps some French or
English pseudo-philosopher, one of those who call their chattering ‘phi-
losophy’ for the same reason the good people of Florence used to call
Dante’s beloved ‘Beatrice’ – because they knew not what to call her.11 Like-
wise, no one will any longer locate the Beautiful in the world of theory or
the world of ethics, however deep that view may be in other ways, since
an invincible impulse of our mind pushes us to seek out the relations
that must exist among the highest idealities of the human spirit – among
the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.12
More than anything else, the formalist theory of aesthetics is an anom-
alous episode in the history of philosophy, and I shall say something
about it mainly because it has remained totally unknown to us. Herbart,
wishing to detach aesthetics from approaches full of fantasy and from
vague intuitions and reduce it to an exact science – having already done
so quite successfully with ethics, psychology, education, and other disci-
plines on which he made a still indelible impression – correctly asked
that one begin by analysing individual instances of beauty.13 By analys-
ing the simplest aesthetic facts about music and observing that a simple
tone is never either beautiful or ugly, that the judgment of beautiful
and ugly always emerges from a relation between at least two tones, that
487
two tones coming in one order are pleasant, but unpleasant in another
order – by these and similar observations he was forced to the hypothesis
that the Beautiful consists solely of formal relations of pleasure, and that
every aesthetic pleasure therefore arises from form, independent of con-
tent. Having no chance to develop a complete theory of aesthetics, Her-
bart left only a few remarks on the topic that the reader finds scattered
through his works. Disagreement about the teacher’s thoughts arose
among his students, some supposing that he did not mean to exclude
the expression of content from the Beautiful.14
But Robert Zimmermann, advocating the strictly formalist interpreta-
tion and following the partial efforts of others whom we need not name
here, tried to construct a complete system of aesthetics based on Her-
bart’s views. First he brought out a major critical history of the discipline,
followed in 1865 by the publication of his Aesthetics as a Science of Form, in
which all the phenomena of the Beautiful are explained as purely formal
relations of pleasure.15 In a work of poetry, for example, what is ordi-
narily called poetic content gives pleasure – according to Zimmermann
– through particular formal relations of character, of feeling, and so on
among the persons in the piece. What is called expression gives pleasure
through the formal relation of correspondence between content and
form. And the so-called externals of form (verses, stanzas, and so on) do
the same through formal relations of pleasure. All these various rela-
tions, of which the work of art would be the sum, Zimmermann classifies
and reduces to a few first principles – five aesthetic ideas meant to tally
with the five practical ideas of Herbart’s ethics. But after Zimmermann,
who remained the only preacher of formalist aesthetics, no one contin-
ued with it.16 And we agree entirely with Hartmann in judging it ‘the
contrived construct of a perfectly fruitless insight.’17
The last of the theories that I mentioned, which has given rise to a very
rich aesthetic literature, remains robust. And it is this one that prevails
among the well-informed, if I may speak in broad terms. This theory
locates the Beautiful in the expression of some thing, called the ‘sensible
manifestation of the ideal’ in Hegelian terminology. I cannot establish
this claim, which at first glance seems strange and yet is the only one
that explains all the aesthetic facts. I am forced to refer to the works of
specialists, of which the last to be published, and the most noteworthy in
many ways, is Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Beautiful.18 Nor can I describe
how the process of expression works, which is actually one of the most
successful parts of Hartmann’s study, titled ‘Theory of Levels of Con-
creteness in the Beautiful’ (‘Die Koncretionstufen des Schönen’).19
488
Suffice it to say that expression of a content appears decisive in the

phenomenon of the Beautiful, even in the simplest, and, may I say, the
most physical cases of beauty. Herbart was wrong to believe that pure
form is what gives pleasure in the relation or consonance of two tones.
Leibniz peered much more deeply into the nature of the pleasure pro-
duced by musical consonances, defining them in a rather bizarre way as
‘a covert exercise of arithmetic by a mind unaware that it is counting.’20
And we can confirm that in pleasurable impressions of the senses – those
that derive either from agreements of tones and colours or from other
senses said to be lower – what gives them their aesthetic character, albeit
unconsciously, is always the (symbolic?) expression of a given content.21
It appears that pleasure comes just from physiological stimulation, but it
is not so. With Leopardi, we might almost say
with love bending, even as bodies clasp,

just towards this, but not towards that –
not the physiological stimulus but the meaning that makes it full, the
idea of which it is the bearer.22
So also, if we go to the opposite extreme and consider mathematical
propositions or philosophical concepts – the most rarefied products of
the mind, of thinking at its most abstract – we see that these become
objects of aesthetic discernment only when they are embodied externally
in speech and other means of expression. And they are beautiful insofar
as their expression, in every respect, is adequate and effective. Aesthetic
form is not, as some believe, something that has aesthetic value in itself –
applicable to some contents, supposedly, but not to others – like a coat of
many colours or a diadem of sparkling jewels. It is a projection, we might
say, of the content. When the topic requires it, even technical language is
aesthetic, and in the event that it is required, it is actually more aesthetic
than any other language.23
Starting with that concept of the Beautiful – understanding the Beauti-
ful as the expression of a given content, in other words – we easily explain
the judgments of approval or disapproval that the aesthetic sense cus-
tomarily gives of its various objects of nature and art. We also explain
the relativity of judgment according to which an object is seen from one
point of view or another, as the saying goes: actually, the object is treated
as the expression of one content or another. A specimen of an animal
species will be ugly, for example, if viewed as an expression of what is
animal in general, because, in the given specimen (the form), animal
489
life (the content) may not be fully reflected, though it could be beauti-
ful if viewed as a typical expression of a given species of animal, since in
that case it is treated as an expression or form of a different content.24 In
short, an object is beautiful or ugly according to the category by which
we apperceive it.25
Now one specific category of apperception, in fact, is art. And in art,
all natural and human reality – beautiful or ugly from various perspec-
tives – becomes beautiful because it has been apperceived as reality in
general, which we want to see fully expressed. When they enter the world
of art, all characters, all actions, all objects lose (artistically speaking)
the features that they usually have for various purposes of real life, and
they are judged uniquely by the greater or lesser perfection with which
art depicts them. In reality Caliban is a monster, but he is no longer a
monster as a figure of art. One sees from this how wrong it is to believe
that the proposition, ‘art represents the Beautiful,’ entails that art has as
its content those objects that seem beautiful from various natural points
of view. ‘The Beautiful!’ De Sanctis once wrote: then tell me ‘whether
there is anything as beautiful as Iago, a form that has emerged from the
utmost depths of real life, so full, so concrete, so finished in all its parts,
in all its gradations, one of the most beautiful creatures in the world of
poetry.’26 And he was right. Without doubt, the concept of the Beautiful
is the same in art as in nature, but in art the ideal that we keep present –
the content that we want to see represented – is simply reality in general,
whereas in nature the idealities are particular forms of reality. From here
comes the distinction which, though not at all abstruse, is not easy to
express clearly and often gives rise to confusions.
If we restrict ourselves to this concept of art and view it as a represen-
tation of reality, then clearly most of the reasons that scandalize many
people, making them deny that history is a product of art, disappear.27
Such scandal is entirely justified when it starts from one of the three
theories about the Beautiful or art that we have rejected: namely, when
it is thought that art’s purpose is either (1) to develop the pleasure of
the senses and imagination, or (2) to represent the True and the Good,
or (3) to create a summary of formal relations of pleasure. The goals
of doing history are incompatible with these three aims, or compatible
only in unusual and accidental circumstances. But outrage seems not to
be equally justified when we accept the definition given above: that art
is the representation of reality. May history not also be a representation
of reality?
Yet those who oppose identifying art with history say this: ‘You are
490
mistaken. History does not represent reality, as art does, but studies this
reality scientifically, which is a far different matter. Therefore, there can
be only one artistic feature of historical writing, the same that belongs to
any type of communication that must be turned into good prose. History
is a science.’
So let us see what science is.
2. History and the Concept of Science
On the concept of science there are certainly not the disagreements that
we have described about the concept of art. Yet one should not believe
that there is agreement. Some – many, I would have to say – confuse
science with knowledge or with learning in general. Any proposition
expressing a truth, then, is a scientific proposition according to them.
But when I say ‘I took a walk today,’ their procedure does not give me the
right to conclude that I am making a scientific statement. Such a concept
is so broad that it really lacks all the distinctive features of science. And
anyone who wants to give precise meaning to the function of science will
agree with those who distinguish it from knowledge in general, pointing
out that science always seeks the general and works by concepts. Where
no concepts are formed, there is no science. According to Herbart’s
excellent definition, philosophy itself, highest of the sciences (if there is
a hierarchy also among the sciences), is just the working out of concepts
left confused and in mutual contradiction by the special sciences.
Now if we start from this concept of science – which is the only precise
one – we can justly ask: ‘Of what is history a science? What concepts does
it develop?’ Bernheim (I continue to cite his book for the reason men-
tioned above) immediately supplies an answer to our question. ‘History,’
he says, ‘is the science of the development of humans in their activity as
social beings.’28 And so we would have learned what history is a science of.
But reflecting a bit on this string of words suffices for us to discover that
the definition of history given here is merely apparent. History is not the
science of development; it does not tell us what development consists of;
history sets forth or rather recounts the facts of development. Defining
the concept of development is a job for philosophy, actually for meta-
physics, and it would occur to no one to shelve a book that dealt with the
concept of development alongside books about history. If the book dealt
with historical development in the proper sense, the most one would do
is to put it with books on the philosophy of history.
In a few well-known pages of his great work, Arthur Schopenhauer
491
became the first to give serious reasons for denying that history has any
scientific character. ‘History lacks the basic feature of science, subordina-
tion of the things that come into consciousness, and it knows only how
to present a mere coordination of the facts that it has registered. This is
why there is no system in history, as there is in the other sciences … As
systems of what is known, sciences always speak of kinds; history, how-
ever, always speaks of individuals. History would then be a science of
individuals, which entails a contradiction.’29
An excellent study by the philosopher Lazarus expresses that distinc-
tion between science and history even more rigorously.30 History deals
with individual and concrete facts; history obviously relates particulars to
the whole but does not thereby acquire a scientific character; the whole
is different from the general, the proper object of science. ‘What inter-
ests science is not the single fact but the law that recurs in each fact; for
history, the goal of research is each single fact or the ensemble of such
facts. History does not deal with facts, events, actions, or persons as such,
but always with this fact, this person, and so on. For science, this determi-
nation is entirely without interest because science looks for the general
– what exists in all the individual objects, in other words. Summarizing
briefly, on one side we have logical abstractions, on the other simple
processes of psychological condensation; on one side, general concepts,
on the other, condensed concrete representations, even if they are not
quite individual; here the singular as abstract specimen, there the singu-
lar as concrete individuality; here the goal of research is the general law,
there it is the individual process.’31
I agree entirely with those observations. History has only one aim: to
narrate the facts, and saying narrate the facts also means that the facts
must be collected carefully and shown as they really happened – traced
back to their causes, that is, and not just set forth as they appear superfi-
cially to the untrained eye. This has always been the ideal of good histori-
cal writing in all periods. And even now, while methods of research have
made progress, while the interpretation of the data of historical tradition
has made progress, the ideal of doing history has not changed because it
cannot change. History narrates.32
A writer who deals with historical topics, not knowing how to evade the
arguments presented above, has said this: ‘History is not a science like
the others, but it is a science, not an explanatory but a descriptive sci-
ence, like geography.’33 But I challenge him to tell me what descriptive
science means.34 The character of Don Abbondio exists in rerum natura.35
Is the quite perfect description that Manzoni gives of it science, then?36
492
As for the example of geography, if geography finds itself in the same

position as history, it too is no science. But let’s stick to the task at hand
and not try to skin two cats, as they say.
From the strong feeling that history is not a science, and from the
comparison between history and the sciences in the strict sense, have
come the many things written up to now about history’s uselessness and
uncertainty and so on, and here, out of regard for our native land, I shall
mention our countryman from the Abruzzi, Melchiorre Delfico.37 From
the same source came Buckle’s great enterprise, which caused a stir in
the world of science thirty years ago; whether its failure was more comic
or tragic is hard for me to say.38 Finding his scientific sense unsatisfied
by tales of history, Buckle proposed to make history a science, extract-
ing the laws that govern it from the mass of facts, as science requires.
But little by little his celebrated work fell into oblivion, and now it is not
hard to see that he made an egregious blunder, even setting aside much
that one could say about the very existence of historical laws themselves
– laws which, in any case, could lead to another discipline but could not
eliminate history in the proper sense, which does not deal with laws but
narrates what has happened.39
Therefore, in denying history the character of a science, we must take
care not to connect this claim with a negative judgment about history.
Schopenhauer exaggerates in this direction, as usual, even in oppos-
ing the excessive regard for history in Hegelian philosophy, and Buckle
is ruled by the same sentiment– not to speak of poor Delfico, who is
absolutely obsessed with it.40 History is not a science (nor is poetry a sci-
ence!), but in saying this we do not mean that it is not something of great
importance or that one need not keep doing it as it has been done up to
now, teaching it in the schools and giving it the place that is given to it in
the life of the modern mind.
Alongside history – or rather, alongside the doing of history – a sci-
ence is taking shape, which, even though it is not what Buckle imagined
as a determination of the laws of history (Buckle’s four laws!), is defi-
nitely a search for the concepts under which we think about history, and
for the first time it really deserves the name philosophy, or, if you will,
science of history.41 But we must take care not to confuse this philosophy
of history in the modern sense with philosophical history as it developed
in idealist philosophy and then, with Hegel, reached the state in which
it became popular for a while and then was discredited forever – justly
so.42 The new philosophy of history studies the process of facts to deter-
mine the real principles in which they are grounded, along with the sys-
493
tem on whose basis acts of historical knowing can occur. It also deals
with those particular problems of the theory of knowledge that relate to
the method of doing history. This set of issues, which arise from think-
ing critically about history, is something solid, quite different from that
alleged rhythm of ideas that Hegel meant to depict in his treatment of
these issues.43
To conclude, then, the material of history can certainly give rise to a
science, which is philosophy of history in the sense described above. But
in itself history is not a science. Now if history is not a science – and if at
the same time it is not the futile labour, unworthy of the human spirit,
that Schopenhauer supposed it to be – what is it?
3. History and the Concept of Art
Presented with any object whatever – a person, an action, an event – the

human mind can carry out only two different operations. It can ask what
the thing is, and it can imagine the object in its concrete appearance.
The mind can aim to understand the object or simply picture it. In short,
it can submit the object either to a scientific process or else to an artistic
process. It does no more than this.
A psychological event (a feeling, desire, or action of some kind), an
instance of kindness or cruelty, of love or ambition, and so on can lead
an artist to portray them with the tools of his art and lead a scientist to
analyse them for motive and development and locate them in a category
of psychological science. Macbeth and Richard III, represented as they
appeared to the poet’s imagination, are two artistic creations; studied in
their internal workings, they add a page to criminology, as the science of
crime has recently been called.44 A flower on the painter’s canvas is an
object of art; the botanist describes its features and assigns it a place in his
classifications. What gets done, then, is either science or art. Whenever
the particular is subsumed under the general, the result is science; when-
ever the particular is represented as such, it is art.45 We have seen that
doing history does not develop concepts, but reproduces the particular
in its concreteness, which is why we have denied it the characteristics of
science. Therefore, it is an easy inference that if history is not science, it
must be art. Bernheim says that history is the science of development. We
say it is the representation of development, the representation of human
affairs inasmuch as they develop in time. And as such it is a labour of art.
Having put this proposition forward, we should now add some clarifica-
tions and eliminate any possible difficulties.
494
In the study already cited, Lazarus analyses the psychological proc-

esses that belong to history, according to him, but which are actually just
those processes expected of any artistic representation. They add up to
the two principles of condensation (Verdichtung) and substitution (Vertre-
tung). By means of the first process, many long sequences of representa-
tions are turned into a few short series, something like what happens
when an orchestral piece is arranged for piano. And by means of the
second, many representations, or entire groups of them, are included
in just one that stands for all the others.46 Note carefully, moreover, that
it has not been said that representation of history must occur solely by
means of imagination and the art of language. Architecture and music
have no way to portray historical reality, of course, but for painting and
sculpture this is not so. Records of the life of the Stuart court under
Charles II left by contemporaries – Hamilton’s Mémoires, for example –
are they not perhaps equalled by Lely’s paintings that can be seen in the
museums of Bethnal-Green and Hampton Court, having preserved for
us just as lively a record of those ladies and cavaliers and their way of life?
And the Roman history paintings of Louis David, have they not as much
historical value as Rollin’s Roman history?47
This bringing of history under the general concept of art – once the
concept has been correctly established – seems almost obvious. And tes-
timony could be collected in great abundance to prove how it has been
constantly accessible to empirical observation.48 Objections or possible
objections to this evidence are all based on misunderstandings.
Since Schopenhauer, in the pages already cited, wishes to condemn
history as futile and mistaken labour, after having excluded it from the
domain of science, he also excludes it from that of art. ‘The material of
art is the idea, that of science is the concept, so that both art and science
have to do with what always is – and is in the same way; both have to do
with what Plato clams to be the object of true knowledge. Not so for
history … it does not deserve to be taken seriously by the human mind
and to have so much hard work spent on it.’49 But this objection arises
from one of the views about art that we have treated as wrong because
Schopenhauer, on the fact of aesthetics, falls into rationalism or abstract
idealism.50 That art represents the idea of things is not true – or rather it
is true in a sense that can also be claimed for history.51
Droysen, on the other hand, counts this among the chief incompat-
ibilities between art and history: namely, that art represents objects that
are complete in every part, whereas the content of history is often frag-
mentary, uncertain, incomplete. But that would be just a defect of his-
495
tory, not its nature; the historian aims to represent his object as fully as
the artist, and if quite often he does not succeed in this, it is the result
of external circumstances (lack of documents, unclarity, and so on) and
not because the effort is impossible in itself. It would be odd to make the
absence of history part of the nature of history! That would be like saying
that error is a component of science because scientists are often in error.
As for Droysen’s other observation, that the artist presents only the final
product of his labours while the historian must put the work that got him
to his results on display, we will have more to say later, noting for now
that history is one thing and historical discussion or argument another.52
More popular is the objection that history deals not just with events
and persons but also to a great extent with ideas, opinions, and the like,
and that the history of mathematics – or Lecky’s book on the Origin of the
Spirit of Rationalism in Europe – is also history.53 In this is seen – I know not
why – opposition to the procedure of art. Perhaps there is some topical
limit on the content of art? Can the exposition of a series of thoughts not
be a content of art? The psychological novel and the philosophical lyric
exist, do they not? Think for a moment about a book treating the history
of philosophical sciences in Italy as a psychological novel, for example,
and the analogy will help remove prejudices that may still remain in your
mind against the artistic nature of any sort of history. Truly, what psycho-
logical novel is more interesting than the history of philosophy?
4. Art, in the Strict Sense, and History
But if history is art, the question will be what place it has in relation to
other products of art. What relations of similarity and difference hold
between works like Dante’s Comedy and Machiavelli’s History of Florence,
between Faust and Mommsen’s Roman History? Here is my answer to this
entirely legitimate question.
Without addressing the many attempts at classifying the arts – Hegel’s
historical-ideal version is famous, treating the arts as symbolic, classical,
and Romantic54 – let me simply express my view that the only solid cri-
terion for classifying the various arts is one that derives from the means
that each art uses: the means that define a special field of representations
for each one.55 According to this classification, doing history would be
included in the class of arts of language – both those of prose and those
of poetry, since examples of verse histories abound and are not at all
unjustified historically or aesthetically. But neither should one forget –
speaking with the rigour appropriate here – that the telling of history can
496
also be expressed by means of the figurative arts, as I mentioned above,

and in that sense history would sometimes enter into painting (portrai-
ture, history painting) and into sculpture (monumental sculpture and
so on). By this route, then, we do not get to a distinction between history
and other products of art. It is clear – in the purely aesthetic sense, or as
a mode of representation – that history does not constitute a genre but
is a product that makes up a part of various genres, a content that can be
expressed by various means.
Hartmann strongly insists on a partition of the arts into the non-free
(unfrei) and the free (frei). Included among the former are all that have
as their aim not just the appearance of reality (Schein) but reality itself,
exactly as it would be for historical narrative, rhetorical discourse, and,
in short, all prose that sets a real goal for itself – and architecture too,
which Hartmann declares not to be a free art because it pursues a utili-
tarian end external to aesthetics.
But either I misunderstand or else this partition is scientifically base-
less and, in a word, superficial. The arts that have a real goal, as arts, take
into account just exactly the appearance of this goal, and only this, and
for the purely aesthetic spectator this appearance is enough. A temple is
a work of art in that it effectively represents a particular religious senti-
ment in the lines of its architecture; the aesthetic spectator is fixed on
this relation, and so we can admire a Greek temple as much as a Gothic
cathedral, an Arab Mosque as much as a baroque church, without being
pagan and Christian at the same time, or Moslem and Jesuit. There may
be no real sharing of any of these beliefs. The religious person, on the
other hand, to the extent that his religious activity is in play, apperceives
a temple simply as a means of expression for his real spiritual need and
as an instrument of his worship. But how can an objective classification
be based on this differing psychological perception? Even a love poem
can be as useful for purely aesthetic contemplation as for the expression
– from the lover’s perspective – of real feelings that fill the heart. Hence,
neither from classifying the arts by their modes of expression, since his-
tory has no mode of expression of its own to determine its nature, nor
from Hartmann’s classification, which must be decisively rejected, can
we infer the relations between history and the other products of art.56 We
must derive such a determination from an entirely different criterion,
not the purely aesthetic criterion of the mode of representation, but the
criterion of content, which is extraneous to aesthetics – or the material
or topic or whatever else you want to call what history sets out to develop
as compared to other products of art.
497
And here we must deal briefly with another large problem – the con-
tent of art. In science the content is everything that exists: the ambition
of science is to leave not a single manifestation of reality behind with-
out bringing it under the category to which it belongs. Everything must
be brought under concepts; this is the domain of science. But does the
domain of art have the same extension? Can art represent everything?
As a general principle, where there is a work of art, there is always
something fully represented – abstractly speaking. But while the goals that
science pursues are universal, art limits or circumscribes its task accord-
ing to the various circumstances in which it develops – in life lived con-
cretely.57 Now what is the principle of this limiting or circumscribing?
This amounts to asking what the content of art is. On this point, theories
endlessly various have been proposed by aestheticians or simply by con-
noisseurs. But most of them quickly collapse because they are tightly tied
to those aesthetic doctrines that we have already mentioned and discard-
ed as false. Thus, sensualist aesthetics must necessarily locate the content
of art in objects that give pleasure.58 And rationalist aesthetics locates it
in the moral ideal or in the representation of a type. We have seen that
Schopenhauer, just as a result of this view, makes the idea the object of
art, and Schiller had already said that it is the universal. But then no
content of art exists for formalist aesthetics, since on this view the object
of art is always a formal relation of pleasure.59 Those connoisseurs and
popular critics who keep insisting that some one content is aesthetic,
and another one non-aesthetic, are also harnessed (without realizing it)
to these various views. From time to time, therefore, those problems that
have no beginning or end come up in the domain of art, continuing for
a while and then ceasing not because they have been resolved in any way
but simply because it is annoying to air them without effect – like the one
that plagued us in Italy for two or three years after the publication of Car-
ducci’s Odi barbare (still lively and fresh) and Stecchetti’s Postuma (long
dead and desiccated) – the so-called problem of idealism and verism.60
What should the content of art be? That question can be posed only by
the aesthetics of concrete idealism, the aesthetics represented mainly by
Hegel. The admirable criticism of De Sanctis, wholly inspired by idealist
principles, is the best proof of that doctrine’s fertile truth. He once wrote
that ‘the science (of art) was born on the day when content was not
set aside and declared irrelevant … but assigned its place, treated as an
antecedent or a given of the problem of art. Every science has its assump-
tions and antecedents. The assumption of aesthetics is abstract content
(among others). And science begins when content lives and stirs in the
498
artist’s brain, becoming form, which therefore is content itself insofar as

it is art.’61 Now once content has been assigned its place as an antecedent
of the aesthetic process, and when it has also been confirmed that it is
not irrelevant, we must determine what it is to which it is not irrelevant
since it certainly is irrelevant to the aesthetic process.
Köstlin, a German aesthetician who wrote a treatise on aesthetics from
an eclectic point of view, has a view about aesthetic content that to me
seems the closest to the truth. According to Köstlin, aesthetic content is
what is of interest: what interests humans as human, both from the theo-
retical and from the practical side, thinking along with feeling and will,
what we know and do not know, what gives us joy and makes us sad – in
short, the whole world of human interest. And the value of the aesthetic
content is greater to the extent that interest in it is more general: hence,
those contents that affect humans as human come first; next, those that
affect them as belonging to a particular race, nation, or religion; then,
those that interest people of a specific class, and so on down to what
interests the person only as an individual.62 Except for some careless
phrasing, this concept is perfectly correct. Without doubt, the content
of art is reality in general in that it presents interests from various points
of view – intellectual, moral, religious, political, and so on, including
the aesthetic.63 If a content of art is of no interest in any way, the work
that develops it can be aesthetically perfect, but it will be one that pub-
lic opinion condemns summarily as cold and boring. Voltaire’s remark
applies quite well to the content of art: ‘Every genre is good except the
boring genre.’64
It is also evident that such interest cannot be constant, like that of
the pure science that relates to the spirit as intellect.65 Instead, depend-
ing on complex human development, it varies in part with time, place,
and other circumstances. We, as modern people, what different interests
we bring to our thinking about works like Homer’s poems or Dante’s
Comedy, compared to what their contemporaries brought to them! And
how much less, or how different, from ours will be the interest that our
descendants bring to their thinking about works like La Dame aux caméli-
as or Rabagas!66 We understand, then, that in great artistic creations
there should almost always be something that has interest for all times
and in all circumstances because it is deeply human – not to say that the
perfection of the representation also has its lasting appeal. In a certain
sense, then, that sculpted line of Carducci’s is true: ‘Zeus dies and the
poet’s hymn remains.’67
The content of art is classified according to the variety of interests
499
that it presents. This is what distinguishes comedy from tragedy, figure

painting from landscape, and so on; all these are not different forms,
certainly, but different contents of art.68 And in this way the product
of history is also distinguished from other products of art, which is the
point I wanted to reach by my long discussion. History, as compared with
other products of art, deals with what is of historical interest, not with
what is possible but with what has really happened.69 And it relates to the
complex of artistic production as the part to the whole, as the represen-
tation of what has really happened to that of the possible.70
Now in the current sense of the word, we call art only that activity
which is directed at representing the possible. And for my part, I see
no problem in accepting this use of the word ‘art,’ in the strict sense, as
long as this goes along with the consciousness that history – the repre-
sentation of what has really happened – is, at bottom, also essentially an
artistic process and has an interest equally artistic. With that we come to
distinguish history from art in the strict sense.71
Interest in history is so widespread, however, that it gives rise to enor-
mously abundant productivity and employs a great many people. The
material scope of historical production equals and perhaps surpasses
that of the artistic. This is the source of the popular confusion that treats
artistic activity and historical activity as two activities of equal importance,
such that one cannot be subordinated to the other. But clearly, one is a
question of scope, the other of nature. On the other hand, what is inter-
esting historically often does not have broad human interest as well, and
this produces another apparent conflict between the content of art and
that of history – a conflict that does not exist when one gets to the bot-
tom of it. I cite these popular confusions because they often appear even
in works by serious scientists – not in their popular form, of course, but
as psychological motives for theoretical mistakes.72
5. The Concept of History and Historical Studies
The result of what has been said is that history may be defined as the type
of artistic production that takes what has really happened as the object
of its representation. From this definition it follows that historical accu-
racy is an absolute and indispensable duty of the author of history. Just
as an artist may not lapse into the false, so the historian may not lapse
into the imaginary. To achieve honesty and avoid falsity, the artist usually
completes a series of preparatory works, generally summed up in what is
called the spirit of observation, which often does its work unconsciously.73
500
But in other artists the preparatory efforts are, in a straightforward and

conscious way, special studies of psychology, society, anatomy, physiol-
ogy, and so on. Likewise, before moving on to representation, before
the narrative, the historian needs to check the material to be presented.
His preparatory efforts are called research, criticism, interpretation, and his-
torical understanding: they succeed to one degree or another, sometimes
achieving their full effect and sometimes not. They produce an enor-
mous amount of writing, and works of narrative history seem to be a
small minority in comparison to them.74
Now these preparatory efforts, are they history? Just to state the ques-
tion answers it: surely not. In current usage we call them works of his-
tory, but doing research to find out which German or Latin components
contributed to the birth of the Italian commune or to establish the part
that Mary Stuart played in Darnley’s murder, investigating the historical
value of Tacitus or proving the inauthenticity of Matteo Spinelli’s Diur-
nali – these are not history, strictly speaking, just as the artist’s collection
of notes and observations, or his palette, whatever precious ingredients
it may contain, is not a work of art.75 The first condition for having real
history (and thus a work of art) is the possibility of constructing a nar-
rative. But constructing a complete narrative is something that seldom
happens, and for this reason the definition of history that we have given
represents an ideal that the historian can very rarely attain. In most cas-
es, only preparatory studies or a fragmentary account can be offered,
and these are constantly muddled by disagreements, doubts, and res-
ervations.76 We can point to many pages of completed history but few of
genuine history – and perhaps no extensive work.77
This lies in human imperfection and the limitations imposed on our
actions by chance. But it cannot prevent our loudly proclaiming what the
ideal of history must be, even though achieving it in full is plainly impos-
sible. For we would have no need to distinguish ideal from real if the
ideal were to coincide with reality. Not coinciding with reality deprives
the ideal of none of its value, nor is any person exempt from making
every effort to achieve the ideal, or, at least, to strive for it longingly. ‘God
must write the real story,’ says Friedrich Schiller’s Don Carlos at a certain
point, and Faust told the pedant Wagner that ‘the book of the past is
sealed with seven seals.’78 Now and then we can break a seal and read a
passage of that book which is never fully communicated to us. The ideal
of art is likewise not easily attained, but the conditions required for it
depend less on chance and external causes, which is why art (in the strict
sense) leads to complete creations more often than history.79
501
When some historians – and it is them that Droysen correctly treats

as pseudo-historians, defining their works as rethorische Kunst – face the
artistic need for complete creation, they fill the voids that remain in their
knowledge of reality with imaginings that are not even conjectures, or at
least are not presented as such. Renan often does this: from his books
and those of other historians, the French especially – eloquent writers, to
be sure, and very talented – one can take various typical examples of the
invasion of history (the art of what really happened) by art (in the strict
sense: representation of the possible).
From what I have been saying, it is clear how misplaced are the fears
of the corporation of historians (to use Buckle’s phrase): that affirming
the artistic essence of history takes something away from its accuracy
and rigour. As usual, I make Bernheim the spokesman for these fears:
‘It is only a traditional prejudice that makes one say that history is an
art, or rather science and art at the same time, a prejudice that must be
opposed with all our might because it damages the rigorously scientific
practice of history.’80 Nothing of the kind! Asking whether history is sci-
ence or art has, in this regard, no practical importance: historians must
always complete all those efforts of preparation that Bernheim analyses
so minutely and illustrates so learnedly in his valuable treatise. Debat-
ing the basis of morality – Hegel once said this, if I am not mistaken
– does not mean that there is any doubt about keeping the Lord’s Ten
Commandments. Likewise, defining the nature of a work of history does
not amount to changing the procedures established by correct historical
understanding.81
But in the end, can one deny that all the effort at preparation goes to
produce narratives of what happened? And when it has been proved that
narrative is not science but art, how is any harm done, may we ask, to the
seriousness of history? This brings us to the end of our task, which was
to prove that there might indeed be an internal reason for so often con-
necting the words ‘history’ and ‘art,’ and to show what the connection
really is. This task is accomplished by bringing history under the general
concept of art.
NOTES
1 Croce read this paper in the 5 March 1893 session of the Accademia Ponta-
niana; the text followed here is the first edition, Croce (1893).
2 [a] Germany possesses a very rich literature on historiography, like no other
502
country. The book by the English historian, E.A. Freeman (1886), The
Methods of Historical Study (London: Macmillan), is mediocre in every way,
though it has been rather fashionable in recent years. [e] Influenced by
Ranke, Edward Freeman (1823−92) was an ideologically liberal medievalist
who looked for the Germanic roots of English liberty.
3 [a] Johann Gustav Droysen (1882), Grundriß der Historik (3d ed. Leipzig):
81 ff; [e] Droysen (1808−84) wrote history with a political point, aiming his
enormous History of Prussian Politics at the unification of Germany; his influ-
ential Grundriß first appeared in 1858 and grew through many editions –
see Droysen (1977) – criticizing the prevailing orthodoxy, which was based
on Ranke’s views, as philosophically naïve, and dismissing the fashionable
positivism of Henry Buckle (see below) as morally bankrupt.
4 [a] We note that Bernheim depends especially on a work by Heinrich
Ullmann, ‘Über die wissenschaftliche Geschichtsdarstellung,’ in Von Sybel’s
Historische Zeitschrift, 4 (1885): 42−54; [e] Despite challenges from Droysen
and later from Karl Lamprecht, Ranke’s views – cautious respect, not with-
out theological commitments, for documentary evidence – became dogma
for many German historians; in 1889 Ernst Bernheim restated the consen-
sus in his Lehrbuch, which became the standard work.
5 [a] Ernst Bernheim (1889), Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (Leipzig:
Duncker und Humblot): 81−90 (‘Das Verhältnis der Geschichte zur
Kunst’).
6 [a] Ibid.: 82: ‘That people often call history an art marks the peak of the
conceptual confusion that dominates our subject.’
7 [a] Droysen, Grundriß (1882): 85; [e] Droysen (1977): 483.
8 [a] I have not managed to see the work by Bruno Gebhardt (1885),
Geschichtswerk und Kunstwerk: Eine Frage aus der Historik (Breslau: Preuss &
Jünger), which Villari mentions briefly in his study, ‘La storia è una scienza?’
published in the Nuova Antologia, 1Feb., 16 April, 16 July (1891). Nor have I
been able to make much use of this work of Villari’s (however much its title
and opening words might seem to coincide with mine), because, among
the various questions of historical method and philosophy of history that it
deals with, there is barely a passing mention, here and there, of our prob-
lem – not to speak of purposeful discussion of it.
9 [a] In Italy, Antonio Tari (d. 1884) dealt with aesthetics and was well
acquainted with German academic ideas, and Vittorio Imbriani (d. 1885)
produced some good writing, particularly a sharp, witty, and energetic cri-
tique of the aesthetics of the Abbate Fornari. A Hegelian aesthetician in Ita-
ly is Nicolò Gallo, author of two works on Idealism and Literature and on The
Fine Arts, among others. I need not mention De Sanctis, enormously fertile
503
in aesthetic observation but not systematic, and, in any case, inspired as well
by Hegelian aesthetics. Among professional philosophers, we owe to Masci a
very laudable study on the Psychology of the Comic. Save for some insignificant
omissions, this is what the recent literature on aesthetics (the part that can
be taken seriously) boils down to in Italy. But anyone who wants a quick idea
of the development of this science in Germany should look at the histories
of aesthetics by Zimmermann, Lotze, Schasler, Neudecker, and Hartmann,
along with the one just published by the Englishman Bernard Bosanquet.
[e] Antonio Tari (1809−84), a friend of De Sanctis and the Spaventa broth-
ers, wrote about philosophy, literature, and music. Father Vito Fornari
(1821−1900), a highly placed Neapolitan academic, was active in politics
and promoted national unity by way of linguistic unity. The prolific and
tempestuous Vittorio Imbriani (1840−86) studied with De Sanctis; although
reading Hegel converted him to a politics that put him to the right of the
Destra storica, he founded an important journal with Spaventa and Fioren-
tino. Of the opposite political persuasion was Nicolò Gallo (1849−1907),
who taught aesthetics in Rome and held high ministerial and elective posts.
The Neo-Kantian Filippo Masci succeeded Fiorentino in Naples: see Fornari
(1866), Gallo (1880), Imbriani (1872), (1907), Masci (1889), Tari (1863).
For the histories of aesthetics mentioned by Croce, see also Bosanquet
(1892), Hartmann (1886), Lotze (1864), Neudecker (1878), Schasler
(1872), Zimmermann (1858); and for Hartmann see section 17 of the
Introduction.
10 [a] Eduard von Hartmann, Ausgewählte Werke, III: Aesthetik, 1: Die deutsche
Aesthetik seit Kant (Leipzig: Friedrich, 1886): 107.
11 [a] Spencer, who will perhaps stand as the symbol of the philosophical
mediocrity of our time, has downright childish theories and views about
aesthetics. To show how thin his literary and philosophical education is,
it suffices to say that he bases the explanation of aesthetic phenomena in
great part on the concept of play, which he says that he saw attributed to
some German author, ‘whose name I do not recall.’ The author is Friedrich
Schiller! Writing a book about aesthetics, how does one manage not to
know how much the concept of play (Spiel) occupied the thought of Ger-
man philosophers at the beginning of the century? For an essay on positivist
aesthetics, see Les Problèmes de l’ésthétique contemporaine (Paris: Alcan, 1891)
by Guyau. [e] Dante, Vita Nuova, 2: ‘la gloriosa donna de la mia mente, la
quale fu chiamata da molti Beatrice li quali non sapeano che si chiamare’;
‘the glorious lady of my mind, called Beatrice by many who knew not what
they called her’: ‘Beatrice’ means ‘she who blesses.’ See Schiller (1967) for
the concept of play in The Aesthetic Education of Man.
504
12 [a] A triad that has become a bit ridiculous, to tell the truth, ever since it
provided Italian titles for several works by the splendid Conti; nonetheless,
I take heart and mention it because I cannot resign myself to the fact that
windy philosophers need to discredit even the True, Good, and Beautiful.
[e] Augusto Conti (1822−1905), not to be confused with Auguste Comte,
wrote on philosophy and education, locating the beautiful between the true
and the good: see Conti (1872), (1876).
13 [e] For Herbart see the Introduction, section 14.
14 [a] One can get a good look at the controversy, particularly between Nahl-
owsky and Zimmermann, in the Zeitschrift für exacte Philosophie, 2 (1862):
309−58; 3 (1863): 384−440; 4 (1863): 26−63, 199−206, 300−12. [e] Robert
Zimmermann (1825−1904), an Austrian, taught Herbartian philosophy at
Prague and Vienna. Josef Nahlowsky (1812−85) was also a Herbartian: see
Nahlowsky (1863), Zimmermann (1862−3).
15 [a] Zimmermann (1865), Allgemeine Aesthetik als Formwissenschaft (Vienna:
Braumüller); [e] Zimmermann (1858).
16 [a] Attempts at conciliation between formalism and idealist aesthetics are
those of Köstlin and Siebeck; [e] see Köstlin (1869), Siebeck (1875).
17 [a] Hartmann, Die deutsche Aesthetik, p. 304: ‘Das verkünstelte Gebaüde eines
völlig unfruchtbaren Scharfsinns’; also quite apropos are the observations
(pp. 282−3) by which Hartmann means to put the public on guard against
the growing ambiguity of the word ‘formalism,’ as if, by opposing idealism,
formalism were defending the rights of aesthetic form against abstract con-
tent, or else the freedom of art against preconceptions about the value of
content, whereas really it is just the reverse. While idealist aesthetics in Italy
has produced the criticism of De Sanctis – the most effective declaration of
the freedom of art known to me – the practical results of formalism would
lead to a petty and academic art criticism.
18 [a] Hartmann, Philosophie des Schönen.
19 [a] Ibid.: 72−208.
20 [e] Leibniz to Christian Goldbach, 17 April 1712, ‘Musica est exercitium
arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi’: Leibniz (1734), I, 241.
21 [a] On this, see Hartmann’s acute discussion in the Philosophie des Schönen,
pp. 82−6, and elsewhere.
22 [a] Leopardi, Aspasia; [e] Aspasia, a poetic name for Fanny Targioni Tozzet-
ti, is a cycle of five poems written by Leopardi in the early 1830s to express
his unrequited love.
23 [a] It helps to remember the poet’s lines:
Nur durch das Morgenthor des Schönen

Drangst du in der Erkenntniss Land.
505
No appearances are neither beautiful nor ugly. But it is possible to leave

aesthetics out when considering a given fact, particularly if interests of a
different nature are salient for that fact; [e] Schiller, ‘Der Künstler,’
ll. 34−5.
24 [a] In aesthetics, content and form are purely relative terms, as Hartmann
(Philosophie des Schönen, p. 33) has proved; one and the same object can be
related to a second in the relation of form to content, and to a third in that
of content to form.
25 [a] The saying, ‘not bad, for a hunchback,’ would then seem not so pecu-
liar. In his essays on ‘Vito Fornari estetico’? Giornale napolitano di filosofia
e lettere, 1872, Imbriani cites a passage from a German comedy in which a
character sees an old woman and calls her ‘very beautiful.’ ‘Well, I may be
too old,’ she replies, ‘and now I have all these wrinkles …’ ‘That’s exactly
why you’re beautiful: because you are the perfect old woman, and the more
wrinkles you have, the more beautiful you are.’
26 [a] In the essay by De Sanctis, ‘La Critica del Petrarca,’ Nuovi saggi critici
(1872): 281; [e] Croce cites the 1879 edition.
27 [e] In later editions, Croce changes storia in this sentence to storiografia; on the
distinctions among history as past events, as an account of past events, and as a
method of producing such an account, see the Introduction, section 14.
28 [a] Bernheim, Lehrbuch, p. 4, ‘Begriff der Geschichtswissenschaft’: ‘Die
Geschichte ist die Wissenschaft der Entwicklung der Menschen in ihrer
Bethätigung als sociale Wesen.’
29 [a] Schopenhauer, Die Welt as Wille und Vorstellung, 3.38; [e] Schopenhauer
(1859), II, 500−1.
30 [a] Moritz Lazarus, Über die Ideen in der Geschichte: Rectoratsrede am 14 Novem-
ber 1863 in der Aula der Hochschule zu Bern (Berlin: Dümmler, 1872), first
published in the Zeitschrift für Völkerspsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, of
which Lazarus was one of the directors; [e] Lazarus (1824−1903), influ-
enced by Herbart, was a proponent of comparative psychology (Völkerspsy-
chologie); reacting against metaphysics as well as materialist positivism, he
advocated a social and cultural perspective for psychology as a way out of
the dead end of introspection; Lazarus (1865) is the first edition.
31 [a] Lazarus, Ideen, pp. 21−3.
32 [a] Antonio Labriola, I problemi della filosofia della storia (Rome, 1887):
45: ‘All the trends and all the scientific studies, which for some time have
modernized the traditional writing of history, keep pushing it closer to a
considered representation of causes operating individually and collectively
in a particular period. As much as history uses science as support and pre-
supposition, however, its function is still always narration and exposition.’
506
33 [a] I read this in a review, published four or five years ago in Von Sybel’s
Historische Zeitschrift, of Labriola’s work; [e] see n32 above.
34 [a] Wilhelm Wundt, ‘Über Ziele und Wege der Völkerpsychologie,’ Philoso-
phische Studien 4 (1888): 4−5, has this to say about so-called natural descrip-
tive sciences: ‘No scientific researcher today will any longer accept as correct
the distinction between a merely descriptive treatment of a given fact and
an explanatory account of the same thing. Zoology, botany, and mineralogy,
no less than physics, chemistry, and physiology, want to explain the objects
of their investigations, and, as much as possible, understand them in their
causal relations. The difference lies much more in the fact that the former
deal with knowledge of individual natural objects in their mutual depend-
ency, and the latter with knowledge of universal processes of nature.’
35 [e] in rerum natura: in nature.
36 [e] Don Abbondio, a village priest, is a leading character in I Promessi sposi
(1825−42), the novel by Alessandro Manzoni (1785−1873) that established
the Tuscan dialect as literary Italian, thus providing a linguistic basis for
Italy’s eventual political unification. Manzoni became a major force in Italy’s
cultural, religious, and political development. Don Abbondio, who naively
and fearfully tolerates wrongdoing and thereby sets the novel on its course,
is one of his most memorable characters.
37 [a] Melchiorre Delfico, Pensieri sulla storia e su la incertezza ed inutilità della
medesima (3d ed.; Naples: Agnello Nobile, 1814); [e] Delfico (1744−1835),
like Croce a southerner, lived long enough to see Italian philosophy move
away from the sensism of Condillac and other thinkers of the French
Enlightenment, but Delfico himself continued on the path towards mate-
rialism. His views on history, which included hostility to Roman law and
civilization, were also uncompromising: he believed history to be useless
and pernicious.
38 [a] Note the curious resemblance between the first pages of Henry Buckle’s
History of Civilization in England and Delfico’s little work. [e] At the other
extreme from Delfico, Buckle (1821−62), inspired by Comte, believed that
history could derive scientific laws by observing the basic forces of nature
and that the scope of such laws extends beyond politics to all aspects of the
human condition: see Buckle (1857), I, 1−35.
39 [a] Cf. Georg Simmel, Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (Leipzig: 1892),
chap. 2, ‘Von den historischen Gesetzen,’ especially pp. 36−8, where he
discusses the impossibility of establishing laws of complex events (‘Unmögli-
chkeit von Gesetzen über Gesammtzustände’); [e] The philosopher and
sociologist Georg Simmel (1858−1918) wrote about social groups, modern
city life, and money.
507
40 [a] The same sense of scorn comes up in the recent book by Ludwig
Gumplovicz, professor at the University of Prague, La Lutte des races: Recher-
ches sociologiques, French trans. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1893): 165−7, 363−78;
[e] Gumplovicz (1838−1909), a Polish Jew who taught at Graz in Austria,
studied conflict between ethnic groups: see Gumplovicz (1883): 169−72,
366−76.
41 [a] Here it is useful to cite the words found in the introduction to one of
the notable recent attempts at historical science, Hermann Paul, Principien
der Sprachgeschichte (2d ed.; Halle: Niemeyer, 1886): p.1, saying that he wants
to avoid the expression, philosophy of language, because ‘our unphilosophical
age detects in it a mild case of metaphysical speculation … But in truth what
we have in mind is no less philosophy than physics or psychology.’ Hegel
identifies the two terms; see his Philosophie der Geschichte (Berlin, 1848),
‘Introduction,’ section C, pp. 11ff; [e] In later editions, Croce added this
note on Buckle’s four laws: ‘What Buckle’s four famous laws were will be
recalled: (1) the progress of the human race is the successive extension of
the knowledge of the laws of facts; (2) every stage of progress is preceded by
the spirit of scepticism; (3) scientific discoveries increase the effectiveness of
intellectual powers and correspondingly diminish that of moral powers; (4)
the chief enemy of the movement of progress is the defensive spirit. Laws
like these (Droysen was right) are found by the dozen every day, and better
than any other is this splendid example: ‘the measure of a people’s civiliza-
tion is its consumption of soap.’’ [e] Hermann Paul (1846−1921) taught
historical linguistics, grammar, and lexicography at Freiburg and Munich.
42 [a] See the valuable work by Labriola, I problemi della filosofia della storia,
which is perhaps the only thing written in Italy on this topic in the sense
stated above. Here I might mention a few previous Italian attempts at a sci-
ence of history, like those by our Cataldo Jannelli, that refer again to Vico’s
fertile views, but I plan to deal with them elsewhere when I have the oppor-
tunity. [e] Cataldo Jannelli was a classicist and Egyptologist who defended
the usefulness of history in 1817 in a book that invoked Vico’s authority;
Jannelli (1832) is a later edition published by Gian Domenico Romagnosi.
43 [e] In later editions, Croce replaced this paragraph, as follows: ‘Having first
emerged as inquiry into the laws and meaning of history (Vico, Herder),
it confined its speculations about idealist philosophy almost exclusively to
the latter of these two problems, and it gets confused with the philosophi-
cal presentation of universal history. The classic work in the genre, and
the mother of many others like it, is Hegel’s Philosophy of History. Fallen
into disrepute and considered ‘quite dead,’ it has come to be restored in
recent years as a treatment that covers a series of problems suggested by the
508
critical examination of history and historical writing, such as those related

to the cognitive development of the historical fact, to the real elements of
history, and to the meaning and value of the course of history. And, while
expressing my reservations about the possibility of giving life to a specific
and coherent science that involves problems of a disparate nature, I have no
doubt that the term philosophy – or rather, science, if I may – of history should
be assigned only to inquiries of that kind.’
44 [e] Cesare Lombroso (1835−1909) began the social-scientific study of
crime in 1876; when the word ‘criminology’ entered English in the 1890s,
Italian sources were credited.
45 [a] Vico said that ‘metaphysics (read here science in general) abstracts the
mind from the senses; the poetic faculty must immerse the mind completely
in the senses; metaphysics rises up above to universals; the poetic faculty
must go down deep to particulars’; [e] Vico (1977): 563.
46 [a] Lazarus, op. cit., especially pp. 15−20, where, among other things, he
says that ‘the real historian’s task is to transform certain groups of represen-
tations into other representations, neither complete repetition and mere
ordering, nor mere segregation and grouping of the material investigated,
but free creation from different series of representations that contain the
equivalent of the group from which its content has been formed’; cf. Bern-
heim, op. cit., chap. 6, ‘Representation,’ pp. 511−28.
47 [e] Hamilton (1713) narrates the life of Anthony Hamilton’s brother-in-law,
the Comte de Grammont, a nobleman exiled by Louis XIV to the court of
Charles II. Sir Peter Lely (1618−80) was working for Charles I by 1647 and
later became Charles II’s court painter. Pictures in the museum that opened
in 1872 in Bethnal Green (Tower Hamlets) in East London are now in
the National Portrait Gallery; London’s Hampton Court Palace is a public
museum. (Croce could have seen them when he visited England as a young
man.) Jacques-Louis David (1748−1825) became famous for stirring depic-
tions of Roman and Greek heroes before moving on to revolutionary and
Napoleonic subjects, long after the Jansenist Charles Rollin (1661−1741)
had written his stiff and superficially learned but influential histories of
Rome and the ancient world: see Rollin (1738−41).
48 [a] In the work by Villari (La storia è una scienza? pp. 430−2) already cited,
where problems are dealt with mostly – and purposely, I believe – from an
empirical point of view, I find the following observations: ‘If, in fact, I read
an accurate and lively description of an auto-da-fe in Spain or of one of those
cruel massacres that took place in the prisons of Paris during the Reign of
Terror, I admire the historian’s power and have no need to hear a moral
or political disquisition from him. But then we ask again: What is the point
509
of all this? What is the purpose of working so hard to summon from the
grave persons and peoples who no longer exist?’ (At this point I would say
with De Sanctis that anyone who asks this question is like those who want
to know what good poetry is and what we learn from it.) Villari concludes
with a question: ‘How can history, whose means are so different than those
of poetry, ever produce effects on us that are so much alike?’ [e] In later
editions, Croce adds the following: ‘Simmel, Geschichtsphilosophie, pp. 82−3,
n 1, using a better method, continually makes use of comparisons with art;
see also Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundle-
gung für das Studium der Gesellschaft under der Geschichte (Leipzig: Dunker and
Humblot, 1883), I, 49−50, 114.’
49 [a] Schopenhauer, Welt, p. 503.
50 [a] In fact, Hartmann, Die deutsche Aesthetik, pp. 44−61, puts him in the sec-
tion of his history of aesthetics that deals with abstract idealism.
51 [a] If this claim means, for example, that the artist, presented with the raw
material of his observations, completes a process of idealization, then the
historian also completes this process.
52 [a] Droysen, Grundriß (1882): 85; [e] Droysen (1977): 483−5.
53 [a] William E.H. Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Ration-
alism in Europe (London: Longman, 1865), often reprinted; [e] Lecky
(1838−1903) was among the few who tried to emulate Buckle, first in his
evolutionary intellectual histories of rationalism and morality, then in a
more specialized but very extensive study of the eighteenth century, espe-
cially valuable for its treatment of Ireland.
54 [a] Formalist aesthetics also preserves the partition of the classical and the
romantic.
55 [a] Chiefly on this point, Lessing’s Laokoon is a remarkably suggestive work;
[e] Lessing (1766) argues that painting and poetry can be distinguished by
their different objects, which are bodies for painting and actions for poetry;
see also Croce (1956): 449−54.
56 [e] This sentence is omitted in later editions.
57 [e] The following sentence is added in later editions: ‘It is important for us
to know the laws of reality, though it is not important – it is actually against
our interests – to know all the facts, whatever they may be, of reality.
58 [a] Here is a sample of this aesthetics: ‘These laws (the laws of art) direct
it to please, to charm, to enchant, and in order to produce these happy
effects, it is obliged to respect what people respect, to exalt fine sentiments,
and condemn the base, as everyone does,’ and so on. I take this verbiage
from a text on ‘La Moralité dans l’art’ in Constant Martha, La Délicatesse
dans l’art (Paris: Hachette, 1884): 201; [e] see Martha (1897): 201.
510
59 [a] This is the position of Formaesthetik (aesthetics of form) as against all the
other aesthetic doctrines included under the term Gehaltsaesthetik (aesthetics
of content).
60 [e] The poet and scholar Giosuè Carducci (1835−1907), who first pub-
lished his Odi Barbare in 1877, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1906.
Orlindo Guerrini (1845−1916), whose Postuma also appeared in 1877
under the name of Lorenzo Stecchetti, was a follower of Carducci. These
champions of realism or naturalism (verismo) in art opposed Manzoni’s
influence, described as idealist. A major point of contention was Manzoni’s
success in prescribing a single literary language for Italy, which supporters
of verismo feared would obliterate regional (especially southern) dialects,
the ‘real’ languages of the people: see Carducci (1877), Stecchetti (1877).
61 [a] De Sanctis, ‘L. Settembrini e i suoi critici,’ in Nuovi saggi critici (Naples:
1872): 241−3, in the note; one notes that the sense in which De Sanctis uses
the word ‘form’ is significant, differing from ordinary usage and debatable
in its appropriateness; cf. Hartmann’s correct observations in Die deutsche
Aesthetik, pp. 311−12, and in Philosophie des Schönen, pp. 29−33.
62 [a] Karl Köstlin, Aesthetik (Tübingen, 1869), 1.2.2, pp. 53−62.
63 [a] I say aesthetic as well because it is very frequently the case that art is
inspired by spectacles of natural beauty, and then the work of art is a beauti-
ful object reproduced in a beautiful way. But the artistic process stands
entirely on this second use of the adjective ‘beautiful.’ Art as art gains
nothing from the content that is beautiful for reasons extraneous to art. For
a different view, see Zumbini’s essay on Settembrini’s Storia letteraria in his
Saggi critici (Naples: 1876): 300−20.
64 [a] In the ‘Preface’ to L’Enfant prodigue; [e] Voltaire (1738), sig. Aivr.
65 [e] Later editions add ‘and seeks total domination of reality.’
66 [e] La Dame aux camélias, first an autobiographical novel (1848) and then a
play (1852) by the younger Alexandre Dumas (1824−95), inspired Verdi’s
La Traviata as well as much subsequent criticism; Rabagas (1872), a play by
Victorien Sardou (1831−1908), has been less successful with posterity.
67 [a] His sonnet ‘A Dante.’; [e] Carducci (1871): 212.
68 [e] Later editions add ‘roughly distinguished and designated.’
69 [a] On historical interest, see Labriola, I Problemi della filosofia della storia, pp.
8−9, and Dell’insegnamento della storia (Rome: Loescher, 1876).
70 [a] On differences between the historian’s procedure and the poet’s, see
also Lazarus, Ideen, pp. 12−15. The poet and the historian, he says, both
take the elements of their creations from what is given empirically. But
while the poet is guided only by the principle of aesthetic connection, the
historian is also subject to the principle of real causality. And we note that in
511
suggesting these differences Lazarus is in some sense under the influence of

formalist aesthetics.
71 [a] Capuana, a contemporary Italian critic, while discussing the biography
of Gavarni written by Goncourt, writes that ‘it reads as hungrily as a novel:
perhaps it is the first sample of what the novel will be in the future, a simple
biographical study based on the most intimate documents’: Studi di letter-
atura contemporanea, 2 series (Catania: Gianotta, 1882): 114. Realistic trends
in the art of our times lead straight to the production of works of art that
are also works of history, or generally of accurate reporting, at the same
time. In the artistic period that we are living through, the real event is gain-
ing ground on the ideal possibility. [e] Paul Gavarni (or Sulpice Chevalier,
1804−66) was a brilliant cartoonist and illustrator whose work in French
magazines and novels (especially Balzac’s) became a powerful medium for
social criticism. Edmond de Goncourt (1822−96) was a very influential
critic and publisher.
72 [e] This sentence is omitted in later editions.
73 [a] On the psychology of the artist, see, in addition to Hartmann, Philosophie
des Schönen, ‘Die künstelerische Anlage,’ II.8.3, pp. 558−87, the recent work
by G. Hirth, Physiologie de l’art (Paris: Alcan, 1892). [e] Through his maga-
zine Jugend, the polycephalous Georg Hirth (1841−1916) promoted the Art
Nouveau movement, but he was also close to Ernst Haeckel and prominent
in the natural and social sciences: see Hirth (1891).
74 [e] Later additions add a footnote: ‘However alike their methods may be,
the difference of objects (the ideally possible for one, what really happened
for the other) causes a special difficulty for the historian, different from
the artist’s problems. The artist himself establishes the conditions of the
reality that he depicts: a character motivated by purely selfish influences,
for example. Given this starting-point, through all that follows he can make
no change in the reality; he must respect psychological causality, and so
on. By contrast, the historian does not establish the conditions of what he
represents but must seek them out, and here lies his special difficulty. Given
person A and fact B, he must depict them in their motivations, which are
not given. From the hundred possible explanations for a given fact, the art-
ist chooses what pleases him (or explains the fact according to the impres-
sions that he gets from it) – what is true subjectively. The historian must
choose only what is true – what is true objectively. Here is the source of what
is called (with small accuracy) the freedom of the artist as compared to the
historian.’
75 [a] We often use the term history books for works that are no more than
learned and reasoned confessions of our ignorance of definite, specific his-
512
torical facts – ‘minutes of scarcity,’ as poor Vittorio Imbriani used to say; [e]
For Imbriani, see nn9, 25 above. Cornelius Tacitus wrote the most impor-
tant histories of imperial Rome. Communes were forms of civic government
in medieval Italy. Matteo Spinelli was a chronicler of the Kingdom of Naples
in the thirteenth century. Henry Stuart Darnley, Mary Stuart’s husband and
the father of James I, was murdered in 1567 in a plot that involved her next
husband, the Earl of Bothwell.
76 [e] Later editions insert the following sentence: ‘The historian watches with
“a knitted brow,”
as men at dusk beneath

a new moon would watch one another,
certainly not in the full light of the noonday sun, like the artist’; Dante,
Inferno, 15.17−21:
… e ciascuna
ci riguardava come suol da sera
guardare uno altro sotto nuova luna;
e sì ver’ noi aguzzavan le ciglia
come ’l vecchio sartor fa ne la cruna.
Seeing Dante and Vergil, members of a group of souls look at them ‘as one
man watches another at dusk beneath a new moon, knitting their brows at
us like an old tailor threading a needle.’
77 [a] Bernheim (Lehrbuch, pp. 84−7) agrees with the observation of this fact,
but he explains it differently. A shrewd and learned friend of mine (a pro-
fessor of philosophy, as it happens) also used to admit to me that he had yet
to find a single work of history that satisfied him completely, having come to
the conclusion that it is much easier to do philosophy of history than to do
history.
78 [a] Goethe, Faust, I, 2.1.222−3:
‘Mein Freund, die Zeiten der Vergangenheit

Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln’;
[e] Schiller, Don Carlos, 3.10: ‘Dass Menschen nur – nicht Wesen höhrer Art
– die Weltgeschichte schreiben!’
79 [a] On the other hand, artistic creations have their disadvantages when
compared to products of history, and here some observations of Labriola
(Dell’insegnamento della storia, pp. 43−4) on the educational effect of history
are on target: ‘Situations,’ he says, ‘which as history develops are prepared
513
by the encounter of character with the larger or external course of events,

are no less effective than poetry in shaping the active and felt participation
of the spectator. In fact, history has an advantage over poetry – its ability to
excite the emotions with clear, precise, and particular facts, while it is quite
difficult for art not to lapse into abstract types, given the rare occasions
when a writer reaches that level of perfection, which, in Shakespeare’s plays,
for example, makes us admire the naturalness of a perfect psychological
causality.’
80 [a] Bernheim, Lehrbuch, p. 88: ‘… weil es den streng wissenschaftlichen
Betrieb der Geschichte schädigt.’
81 [a] Only on this definition of history (as a work of art) can we rigorously
establish the historian’s obligation to make the object of his narrative a well
determined, real process of facts, unless we want to end up with a mere enu-
meration of facts or a work whose only connections are purely chronologi-
cal and external – a chronicle, in other words, or a handbook. But in practical
terms, this is saying nothing new: we constantly use such a criterion to judge
one or another work of history to be organic or inorganic, so the only issue
is to show justification for this by deriving it from the very nature of history.
On another occasion I shall return to this topic.
514
16
Benedetto Croce
Logic as Science of the Pure Concept1
I THE PURE CONCEPT, INDIVIDUAL JUDGMENT, AND LOGICAL SYNTHESIS A PRIORI
5. Critique of Divisions of the Concept and a Theory of Distinction

and Definition
Just because they are formations of different kinds, pure concepts and
pseudo-concepts do not constitute divisions of the general concept of
concept.2 Assuming that they do so would be a grave confusion of terms,
not much different from Spinoza’s example of the person who divided
the genus dog into the animal dog and the constellation dog, basing
this on the fact that poets once said that the celestial dog also ‘barks and
bites’ when the implacable sun burns the fields.3
And since we are in the domain of logic, it does no good to make
another division of the concept that enjoyed much fame and authority
in the past: namely, dividing it into obscure, confused, clear, distinct, and
the like – according to different levels of perfection attained by the con-
cept. Such a division can have rough empirical value, and in this sense it
may be hard to reject it completely in ordinary discourse, but it has no
logical and theoretical value. Obviously, the concept that we are talking
about is the complete concept, certainly not the concept interrupted
or gone astray along the way. Nonetheless, the aforementioned division
has had great historical importance ever since people tried to use it to
distinguish the concept, under the name of a clear and distinct thought,
from an intuition, as a clear but confused thought, and then to distin-
guish both from a sensation, impression, or emotion, which was called
obscure cognition. People tried, but they never got there; the problem
was posed, but it was not solved because the solution came only when it
was seen that in this case the issue is not three levels of thought, as abso-
lute logicism supposed, but three forms of the Spirit: the forms of think-
ing or distinction; intuition or clarity; and practical activity or obscurity
and naturalness.
Logically, the concept does not give rise to distinctions because there
exists only one form of the concept, not many. In our Logic, this conclu-
sion is the analog of the one that we reached in the Aesthetic with the
theory of the unicity of intuition or expression and the non-existence of
special modes of expression (except in an empirical sense, where we are
always allowed to establish as many modes or classes of whatever kind
we like). When we distinguish forms of the Spirit, after dividing the two
main forms, theoretical and practical, and then subdividing the theoretical
into intuition and concept, we do not get another subdivision of theoreti-
cal forms: intuition and concept are both indivisible forms.
The reason for this indivisibility is made clear only by the full devel-
opment of the Philosophy of the Spirit. Here, by way of suggestion, we
can only say that the division of intuition and concept has at its base
the division of individual and universal. Since there is no medium quid
or ulterius in this, no intermediary, or third or fourth form, and so on,
there is likewise no subdivision:4 from the concept of individuality we
move to each particular individuality, which is not a concept, and from
the concept of the concept we move to the particular act of thinking,
which is no longer the simple definition of logical form, but logical form
itself made effective. Having ruled out any subdivision of the concept as
logical form, we can refer the manifold of concepts only to the variety of
objects that come to be thought in that form. The concept of goodness is
not the concept of beauty, or rather, both concepts are a single act logi-
cally, but the aspect of reality that the first designates directly is not the
aspect designated by the second.
Still, in circumstances where the concept would have to supply the uni-
versal, it may be asked how we ever get so many universals, so many dif-
ferent forms of reality, so many distinct concepts (passion, will, morality,
fantasy, thinking, and so on) by working out reality as universal through
the concept. If this variety were not overcome and could not be over-
come by the concept, we would have to conclude that the real universal
is not attainable by thinking, and we would have to turn to scepticism or
at least to that peculiar form of logical scepticism that makes an act of
real life – a mysticism with no logical translation – out of the conscious-
ness of unity.
The distinction of concepts, deprived of unity, is apartness and atom-
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Croce, Logic
ism, and surely it would not be worth the trouble to leave the manifold
of representations if we were then to fall back into the manifold of con-
cepts. The one no less than the other would be subject to a progressus in
infinitum.5 Who could ever say that the concepts discovered and listed
were all the concepts? If there are ten of them, why could there not be
twenty, a hundred, or a hundred thousand, if we took a closer look?
For that matter, why will there not be as many concepts as representa-
tions – an infinity of them? With perfect coherence, Spinoza counted
two attributes of substance – thinking and extension – without any inter-
mediary between them, while acknowledging that the attributes of sub-
stance must be considered infinite in number, even though those are the
two known to us.6
The concept needs and demands that this manifold be negated,
then, and in return we affirm that the real is one because the concept
by which we know it is one; the content of thinking is one because its
form is one. But here is what happens when we meet this demand: we
fall into another error because we throw away distinctions, and the unity
obtained thereby is an empty unity, without organic character, a whole
without parts, something simple beyond representations and therefore
ineffable, and so we return to mysticism by another route. A whole is a
whole only because, and insofar as, it has parts – indeed, it is parts. An
organism is what it is because it has, and is, organs and functions. A unity
is thinkable only insofar as it has distinctions in it and is the unity of the
distinctions. Unity without distinctions is just as repugnant to thinking
as distinction without unity. It follows from this that both are necessary
and that the concept’s distinctions entail neither negating the concept
nor that something falls outside the concept; rather, distinctions are the
concept itself understood in its truth, the one-as-distinct, which is one
only because it is distinct and distinct only because it is one. Unity and
distinction are correlative and therefore inseparable.
But distinct concepts, constituting unity by their distinction, cannot
be infinite in number because otherwise they would be equated to rep-
resentations, nor can they be numerically finite and yet located on the
same plane and capable of being arranged in one grouping or anoth-
er without altering their being. In other words, by way of example, the
Beautiful, True, Useful, and Good do not constitute the first steps in a
numerical series, nor may they be distributed arbitrarily by putting the
Beautiful after the True, for instance, or the Good before the Useful,
or the Useful before the True, and so on. Their arrangement is neces-
sary because they imply one another reciprocally, meaning that we defi-
517
nitely do not apply the determination of finite number to them because

number is entirely incapable of expressing such a relation. Numbering
means being presented with objects that are separate from one anoth-
er, whereas in this case we are presented with concepts that are distinct
but inseparable. The second of them is not just second but also first,
in a certain sense, and the first is not only first but, in a certain sense,
also second. When we deal with these concepts, we cannot avoid using
numerical terms because of the needs of communication. We cannot
avoid talking about ten categories of the intellect, for example, or three
modes of the concept, or four forms the Spirit. But in this case, numbers
are mere symbols, and beware of understanding the objects counted by
them as if they were ten sheep, three cows, and four calves.
This relation of distinct concepts in the unity formed by them can
be compared to the spectacle of life, where every fact stands in relation
to all other facts, and while the fact that comes later is different from
the one that comes before, it is also the same. The reason is that the
consequent fact contains the antecedent, just as the antecedent fact, in
a certain sense, contained the consequent virtually and was what it was
precisely because it was equipped with the ability to produce the conse-
quent. We call this a history. Consequently – continuing the comparison
in this terminology – we can call the relation of distinct concepts in the
unity of the concept an ideal history, and people have called it that.7 We
then call the logical theory of such an ideal history a theory of levels of the
concept, just as real history is conceived as a series of levels of civilization.
And since the theory of levels of the concept is the theory of distinction,
and since distinction is not something different from unity, it is clear that
such a theory can be separated from the general doctrine of the concept
– being substantially identical with it – only for pedagogical convenience.
Metaphors and comparisons (let me repeat) are metaphors and com-
parisons: as it always happens when we talk, the risk of misunderstanding
noted above goes along with the usefulness of such devices for purposes
of discussion. To avoid this risk, but without rejecting the benefits of
those modes of expression, it will be well to insist on this: that the histori-
cal series wherein distinct concepts seem to be linked is ideal – eternal,
beyond space and time – so it would be wrong to think that in some
smaller fragment of reality, in some one of its more fleeting moments,
one of its levels is to be found without the other, the first without the
second, or the first and the second without the third. We must also take
account here of the pedagogical convenience, which, with the aim of
shedding light on the distinction, sometimes leads us to describe one
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Croce, Logic
level in relation to another as distinct entities – as if there were a practi-

cal person really existing alongside the theoretical person, or the poet
alongside the philosopher, or the work of art standing on its own, apart
from the work of reflection, and so on. Although a fact of history can,
in some sense, be considered existentially distinct in time and space, the
levels of the concept are not existentially (and temporally and spatially)
distinct.
The opposite error, but no less grave, would be to conceive of the levels
of the concept as distinct only abstractly and thus to make abstract con-
cepts out of distinct concepts. The abstract distinction is unreal, whereas
the distinction that we are dealing with here is real. And (speaking here
of the concept) its reality is just ideality, not abstraction.
In each smaller fragment of life, in the so-called physical atom of the
physicists or the psychic atom of the psychologists, we find the universal
and thus all forms of the universal; we find the concept, and therefore all
the distinct concepts. But each of them stands as distinct in that unity –
in such a way that a human person is human insofar as he affirms all his
actions and his whole humanity, and yet he cannot do so except by being
specified as a scientist, politician, poet, and so on. The thinker cannot
think reality except in its distinct features, and only in that way does he
truly think it in its unity. A work of art and a work of philosophy, an act of
thinking and an act of will, are surely not things that the hand can hold
and the finger can point out. Only in a rough and practical sense can we
say that this book is poetry and that one is philosophy, that this action
is a theoretical act or a practical act, a utilitarian act or a moral act. We
obviously understand that the book is also philosophy and that the act
is indeed practical as well, just as the other one is useful and also moral
and theoretical too – and likewise the reverse. But to be precise, except
by thinking distinctly about its features, we cannot think this or that fact
and recognize it as an affirmation of the whole Spirit. This is what estab-
lishes the possibility of a critique of art conducted on the rigorous crite-
rion of aesthetics, for example, or of a moral judgment that deals purely
with the individual’s moral action, and so on.
Here too, then, in this case as in the one before, we need to be care-
ful not to push the comparison with history too far by introducing into
it divisions just as rigorous as those involved in the concept. If distinct
concepts are not entities, entities are not distinct concepts: a fact cannot
be located, in regard to another fact, in the relation that holds between
one level of the concept and another, and this is precisely because all
determinations of the concept are in every fact, and because one fact, in
519
regard to another, is not a conceptual determination. Distinct concepts

can be converted into simple abstract concepts, without doubt, but only
when taken in an abstract way, detached from one another, lined up and
coordinated by an active mental choice that also employs pure concepts
of its own. In that case, distinct concepts change into pseudo-concepts,
and the feature of abstraction belongs to the latter, not to distinct con-
cepts as such, which, in their being distinct, are always a unified whole
and therefore concrete.
In works on logic we encounter other forms of concepts, like those
called identical (which clearly they cannot be, except as synonyms or
words); and dissimilar concepts (which are the same as distinct concepts
insofar as they are in a relation which is not really that of distinction
itself and hence is arbitrary, so that such concepts, presented without the
required intermediaries, cannot be linked up and are dissimilar); and
the double class of simple, primitive concepts along with the derived and
composite (a division that does not occur with pure concepts, which are
always simple and primitive, never composite and derived). But the dis-
tinction between concepts as universal, particular, and singular deserves
some discussion. In this connection, our first observation has to be that
concepts which are only universal or only particular or only singular or
that lack any such determinations cannot be thought. Universality signi-
fies just that the distinct concept as a whole is the sole concept of which
there is a distinction and which is constituted from its distinctions. Par-
ticularity signifies that the distinct concept is in a determinate relation
with another distinct concept. And singularity means that it is wholly
itself in this particularity and universality.
Hence, the distinct concept is always singular and therefore universal
and particular. And the universal concept would be abstract if it were
not altogether particular and singular. In every concept there is the con-
cept as a whole and thus all other concepts, yet it is that determinate
concept just the same. Beauty is spirit (universality), for example, theo-
retical spirit (particularity), and intuitive spirit (singularity), or rather
it is all of spirit as intuition. As a result of the distinction into universal,
particular, and singular, it is self-evident that inclusion and extension
stand in inverse proportion, as they say, because this just repeats in a dif-
ferent form that the universal is universal, the particular particular, and
the singular singular. The distinction of universality, particularity, and
singularity is interesting because the doctrine of definition is based on it:
we cannot define, or think, the concept except by thinking its singularity
(originality or peculiarity), nor can this be done except by determining
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Croce, Logic
its particularity (relation with other distinct concepts) and universality

(relation with the whole). Conversely, it is not possible to think univer-
sality without determining its particularity and singularity; otherwise, it
would be empty universality. Distinct concepts are defined by means of
the one concept, and the one by means of those that are distinct; when
understood in this way, this doctrine of definition also reduces to that of
the nature of the concept.
But the theory of distinct concepts and their unity still seems to pro-
duce something irrational. If it is true that distinct concepts constitute
an ideal history or series of levels, it is also true that there is a first and a
last in this history or series; there is a concept a to open the series, and
to close it let us posit the concept d. Now because the concept is unity
in distinction and can be compared to an organism, it is necessary that
it should have no other beginning but itself and that no one of its dis-
tinct terms should be an absolute beginning. In the organism, in fact, no
member has priority over the others, and each one is reciprocally first
and last. But it is true that the symbol of the linear series is inadequate
to the concept, for which the circle works better, a and d functioning at
various times as first and as last. As ideal eternal history, distinct concepts
are an eternal cycle and recurrence, where a, b, c, d arises from d with no
possibility of a halt or rest, and where each one – whether a or b or c or
d – can be designated first or last at various times even though it cannot
change function and position.8 By way of example, in the Philosophy of
the Spirit one can say – and be equally right or wrong – that the Spirit’s
final end or terminus is knowing or doing, art or philosophy, because
in reality none of these forms in particular is the end, only the totality
of them, or rather only the Spirit is the end of the Spirit. We thereby
remove the reasonable difficulty that might still arise in this area.
The difficulty is removed even more effectively, and the whole doc-
trine of the distinction and definition of pure concepts developed here
is clarified, standing out in sharper outline, when we observe the altera-
tion (which I will not call inversion or perversion) of this doctrine as
reflected in the doctrine of pseudo-concepts.
This doctrine has its own legitimacy and use for certain distinctions
that the doctrine of pure concepts rejects as contrary to logic or with-
out importance. For example, we understand how and why discussion of
identical concepts will proceed there, enabling us, in the domain of will,
to define one and the same thing, or one and the same non-thing, in a
different way, thus giving rise to two or more concepts, which, in virtue
of the identity of their content, are identical. The concepts of a figure
521
that has three angles and of a figure that has three sides are identical
concepts, both referring to the triangle; the concept of 3 x 4 and that
of 6 x 2 are identical, both being definitions of the number 12; the con-
cept of a domestic feline animal and that of a domestic animal that eats
mice are identical, both being definitions of the cat. This also explains
how and why that doctrine will talk about primary and derived, simple
and composite concepts. By shaping certain concepts and using them
to shape others, judgment comes to posit the first as simple and primi-
tive with regard to the second, which are then considered composite or
secondary.
We have already shown that the arbitrary concept, as distinct from
the pure concept, necessarily duplicates itself into the arbitrary doublet
of the empirical and the vacuous, giving rise to formations of two dif-
ferent types, empirical concepts and abstract concepts. Empirical con-
cepts have this feature, that in them unity is outside of distinction and
distinction outside of unity. If this were not so, and the two determina-
tions interpenetrated, those concepts would certainly be not arbitrary
but necessary and true, as already shown. When the distinction has been
located outside of unity, any division posited for it is arbitrary, just like
concepts of the same kind. And any enumeration is arbitrary because
such concepts can be multiplied to infinity. In place of distinctions of
pure concepts, which are rationally determined and completely unified,
pseudo-concepts present manifold groupings, formed arbitrarily, and
sometimes also unified in a single group that embraces the knowable as
a whole, but in a way that does not exclude other infinite modes.
In these groupings, empirical concepts simulate the organization of
pure concepts by reducing the particular to the universal – locating a
certain number of concepts under another one. But we can by no means
think of these subordinate concepts as actualizations of the basic con-
cept, developing out of one another and returning into themselves.
Thus we are forced to leave them juxtaposed to one another in simple
coordination. The schema of subordination and coordination with its
associated spatial symbol (the symbol of classification) – a straight line
intersected in the centre and from above by another straight line per-
pendicular to it, with other perpendiculars descending from it and thus
in parallel – provides, by contrasting with the circle, the clearest and
most visual demonstration of the deep difference between the two ways
of proceeding. It will always be impossible to arrange a nexus of pure
concepts in that classificatory schema without falsifying them. And by
analogy, it will always be impossible to transform empirical concepts into
a series of levels without destroying them.
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Croce, Logic
As a consequence of that schema of classification, definition – which

in pure concepts has the three moments of universality, particularity, and
singularity – has only the two called genus and species in empirical con-
cepts, and, as the little rule commands, we make the definition through
a proximate genus and the specific difference.9 Actually, the purpose is
to record and surely not to think and understand a determinate empiri-
cal formation; this is the consequence of locating it by indicating what
stands above and what stands alongside it. Hence, the ‘five terms’ used
since antiquity to better determine the object by defining it – genus, spe-
cies, difference, property, and accident – are just arbitrary notions added
to one another or subtleties and stupidities on which words should not
be wasted.10 Just as it would be barbaric to apply the classificatory sche-
ma to pure concepts, it would also be barbaric in the opposite way to
define pure concepts by way of features – by mechanical aggregates of
properties.
So if we forget what the real purpose of empirical concepts is, and if
we are captured by the desire to develop them rationally and overcome
the atomism of the classificatory schema and the extrinsic definition, we
are led to refine them into abstract concepts in which that schema and
that mode of definition are really overcome, so that the classification
becomes a series (a numerical series, a series of geometrical forms, and
so on) and the definition becomes genetic. And yet this improvement
not only dissolves empirical concepts, and thus is a death (like the death
that they meet in real knowledge, when we turn away from them and
ascend to pure thinking) and no kind of improvement, it also substi-
tutes emptiness for empiricism. The series and the genetic definition no
doubt respond to needs of the practical spirit, but they provide no truth
at all, as we know, not even the truth that may lie at the bottom of an
empirical concept – or a mutilated and falsified representation.
Here as elsewhere, then, empirical concepts and abstract concepts
disclose their clashing one-sidedness and help us understand the value
of the unity that they shatter; the value of the distinction that is not clas-
sification but a circle and a unity; the value of the definition that is not
a mechanical aggregate of data from intuition; the value of the series
that is a complete series; the value of the genesis that is not an abstract
genesis but rather an ideal one.
6. Opposition and Principles of Logic
If the character of distinct concepts – namely, unity in distinction and

distinction in unity – seems to have been determined satisfactorily by
523
what I have said above, and if I have removed the doubts about the unity
that the concept affirms – not in spite of distinction but by way of it –
then a new difficulty arises when we consider that set of concepts called
opposites or contraries.
That opposites are not distincts or simply reducible to them is clearly
seen as soon as we recall examples of both. In the system of the Spirit,
practical activity will be distinct in relation to the theoretical, and utilitar-
ian as well as ethical activities will be sub-distinctions of practical activity.
But the contrary of practical life is practical inactivity, the contrary of
utility is harm, and the contrary of morality is immorality. Beauty, truth,
utility, and the morally good will be distinct concepts, but we quickly real-
ize that ugliness, falsity, uselessness, and wickedness cannot be added or
inserted among them. And that is not all. Looking still more closely, we
perceive that the reason why the second series cannot be added to the
first, or mixed in with it, is that each contrary term already inheres in
its own contrary and accompanies it, as darkness goes along with light.
Beauty is what it is because it negates ugliness, good because it negates
evil, and so on. The opposite is not positive but negative, and, as such, it
goes along with the positive.
This different nature of opposites in relation to distincts is also
reflected in the logic of the empirical, in the theory of pseudo-concepts,
because this logic, even though it reduces distinct concepts to species,
nonetheless refuses to treat opposites in the same way. Hence, this log-
ic will never say that the genus dog divides into species of living dogs
and dead dogs, nor that the genus moral person is divided into species of
moral and immoral persons. When divisions of this sort occur, a mistake
has been made, and it is an error even within the compass of this logic
because the species can never be a negation of the genus. Therefore,
even empirical logic seems to confirm, in its own way, that opposite con-
cepts are different from distinct concepts. Yet it is equally clear that we
cannot be content to list opposite concepts alongside distinct concepts,
since in this way we would be applying unphilosophical procedures in
the field of philosophy, and we would fall into bad logic or empiricism
in the philosophical theory of our Logic. If the unity of the concept
is simultaneously its own self-distinction, how can that same unity ever
have another type of division or self-distinction – which is self-opposition
– parallel to it? If it is not conceivable to merge one into the other and
make opposite concepts distinct or distinct concepts opposite, it is no
less inconceivable to leave the distinct and the opposite concepts, unme-
diated and unjustified, within the unity of the concept.
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Croce, Logic
To solve this problem, it helps to start by digging deeper into the dif-
ference between the two orders of concepts. Distinct concepts are dis-
tinguishable in unity: reality is their unity and likewise their distinction.
The human person is thinking and action, indivisible but distinguishable
forms, such that insofar as we think, action is negated, and insofar as we
act, thinking is negated. But opposites are not distinguishable in this way.
The person who commits an evil action, if he really is doing something,
surely does not commit an evil action but performs an action useful to
him. The person who thinks a false thought, if he is accomplishing any-
thing real, does not think the false thought – indeed, does not think at
all – but rather goes on living and looking after his own convenience, or
generally some benefit that he cares about at that instant. Thus we see
that opposites, when taken as distinct moments, are no longer opposed
but now distinct. And in that case they keep their negative labels only met-
aphorically, whereas strictly they deserve to be called positive. Because
the inattentive eye does not see the treatment of opposition turning into
the treatment of distinction, we must not mistake opposition for a dis-
tinction at the heart of the concept; in other words, we must resist any
distinguishing of the opposition, declaring it merely abstract.
So true is this that once opposite terms are taken as distinct, the one
becomes the other and both evaporate into nothing. In that regard, dis-
putes brought about by the opposition between being and non-being,
and the unity of them both in becoming, are celebrated.11 It is known
that being, thought of as pure being, has been recognized to be the
same as non-being or nothing; and then that nothing, thought of as
pure nothing, is the same as pure being. Accordingly, the truth has been
found in neither of them but in the becoming where both exist – but
as opposites and therefore indistinguishable. Becoming is being itself,
which has non-being within itself and thus is also non-being. We cannot
think of being in relation to non-being as we think about the form of the
Spirit or of reality in relation to another form. In the latter case, there
is unity in the distinction, in the former a restored or rectified unity, re-
asserted against emptiness – against the empty unity of mere being and
mere non-being, or against the mere sum of being and non-being.
The two moments must certainly be synthesized when our polemic
turns against the abstract thinking that divides them. Taken in them-
selves, however, they are not two moments joined in a third, but only
one moment, the third (and even in this case the number is a symbol),
which is the indistinguishability of the moments. Thus it happens (let
me say in passing) that Hegel, to whom we owe the polemic against emp-
525
ty being, was not satisfied in this encounter either with the words, ‘unity’
and ‘identity,’ nor with ‘synthesis’ nor the other term, ‘triad,’ and he
was happier to indicate opposition in unity as the objective ‘dialectic’ of
the real.12 Still, no matter what word we prefer to use, the thing is what
we have called it: the opposite is not the distinct of its opposite but is an
abstraction from true reality.
If this is how it is, the duality and parallelism of distinct concepts and
opposite concepts no longer survive. Opposites are the concept itself –
and thus the distincts themselves – each of them in itself insofar as it is
a determination of the concept and insofar as it is conceived in its true
reality. The reality whose concept is worked out by logical thinking is
not immobile being or pure being but opposition; the forms of reality
that the concept thinks in order to think reality in its full measure are
in themselves opposed. Otherwise, they would not be forms of reality
or would not exist at all. ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’: beauty is what it is
because it has ugliness in it, the true because it has the false in it, and the
good it because it has evil in it: the way forward (as Jean Paul used to say)
is a ‘continual decline.’13 If we take the negative term away, as is custom-
ary when proceeding abstractly, the positive also vanishes, but this is just
because we have removed the positive itself along with the negative.
When we talk about negative terms, or about non-values and therefore
non-beings, as entities, in reality we are talking about entities by adding
to the assertion of a fact the expression of a desire – namely, the desire
for another existence to arise beyond that existence. ‘You are dishon-
est,’ meaning to say, ‘you are a person who sees to his pleasure’ (a theo-
retical judgment) ‘but you need to be (no longer a judgment, but the
expression of desire) something more and bend yourself to the universal
ends of reality.’ Consider this example, ‘You have written an ugly verse,’
as meaning that ‘you have seen to doing this quickly and taking a rest,
meaning that you have performed an economical action’ (theoretical
judgment), ‘but you also need to perform an aesthetic act’ (judgment
no longer, but expression of desire). And so on with other examples. But
each person has evil in him because he has good in him. Satan is not a
creature extraneous to God, nor is Satan even God’s minister, but rather
God himself. If God did not have Satan in him, he would be food with-
out salt, an abstract ideal, a mere ought-to-be that is not, hence impo-
tent and useless. It was not without profound meaning that the Italian
poet who sang of Satan as ‘rebellion’ and ‘the avenging force of reason’
ended by exalting God as ‘the highest vision to which people ascend in
the strength of their youth,’ and as ‘the sun of lofty minds and passionate
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Croce, Logic
hearts.’14 He corrected and integrated one abstraction by the other and

thus unconsciously achieved truth in its fullness.
Thinking, inasmuch as it is life as well (the life that is thinking and
thus the life of life), and also reality (the reality that is thinking and
thus the reality of reality), has opposition in it, and for this reason it is
affirmation and negation at the same time. It affirms only by negating
and negates only by affirming. But it affirms and negates only by distin-
guishing because thinking is distinction, and we can distinguish (truly
distinguish, not make a rough separation as we usually do with pseudo-
concepts) only by unifying. Anyone who thinks about his own nexus of
affirmation/negation and his own nexus of unity/distinction has before
him the problem of the nature of thinking – indeed, the nature of real-
ity. And he ends up seeing that the two are not parallel or dissimilar
but that they are unified by turns in unity/distinction, understood not
as simple abstract possibility or desire or an ought-to-be but as effective
reality.
Now if we want to posit that thinking is of this nature in that it is effec-
tive reality under the form of law (a form that we know to be entirely one
with the form of the concept, even though we often prefer to use it for
pseudo-concepts), we could only say that the law of thinking is a law of
unity and distinction, and therefore that it is expressed in this double
formula, that A is A (unity) and A is not B (distinction). This double for-
mula is precisely what we call the law or principle of identity and contradic-
tion. It is quite wrong or rather quite misleading, mainly because it lets
us suppose that the law or principle stands outside or above thinking as
a control and guide, whereas the guide is thinking itself. Moreover, it has
the additional defect of not being very clear about the unity of identity
and distinction. But these faults may not be too great, either because
misunderstandings can be clarified or for the different reason (which we
will not tire of repeating) that all formulas – all words, in fact – provide
some scope for misunderstanding.
The fault is much more grievous when the principle of identity and
contradiction is formulated and understood not to mean that A is not
B but to mean that A is A alone and definitely not not-A, its opposite, as well.
Understood in this way, it leads directly to placing the negative moment
outside the positive, non-being outside of or confronting being, and
then to the absurd conception of reality as immobile and empty being.
Against this perversion of the principle of identity and contradiction,
people have devised and enforced a different law or principle whose
formula is A is at the same time not-A, or rather everything is contradicted
527
in itself. This is a necessary and prudent reaction against the one-sided

manner of interpreting the foregoing principle. But this in turn carries
the defect of all reactions because it seems to rise up against the first law
as an irreconcilable rival, destined to usurp its place. In the first formula
is a duality of principles, which, as I have said, is logically insupportable.
In the second is a flaw of the opposite kind, the total loss of the crite-
rion of distinction. The consequence of the false extension of the princi-
ple of identity and contradiction is the false extension of the dialectical
principle.
To tell the truth, this false extension has also been manifest in a way that
might be called arbitrary twice over – namely, in that we have engaged
in giving dialectical treatment to empirical and abstract concepts where
the dialectic is inapplicable because the anti-dialectical and the static
are their very reason for being. This is why people have played the game
of making a dialectic out of the vegetable negating the mineral, society
negating the family, or even Rome negating Greece and Germany negat-
ing Rome, or the surface negating the line, time negating space, and
the number two negating the number one. But this mistake is part of
another, more general mistake that I shall deal with in its place when I
discuss philosophism.15
At this point, it is important for us to mark only that false extension
of the dialectic that tends to absorb distinct concepts into itself and thus
destroy them by treating them as opposites. Distinct concepts, as such,
are distinct and not opposite, and they cannot be opposites because they
already take opposition into themselves. Aesthetic imagination has its
opposite in itself, imaginative passivity, and it is the ugly; hence, it is not
the opposite of thinking, which, in turn, has in itself its own opposite,
logical passivity, anti-thinking, the false. As has been noted, to the extent
that anyone who does not produce the beautiful does anything (and it is
impossible for anyone not to do something), it is certain that he actually
produces a different value – the useful, for example. And when someone
who does not think does something, he too produces a different value,
something imaginary, for example, by creating a work of art.
But in this way we escape from those determinations considered in
themselves, from the opposition that is in them, and that is those same
determinations. And from considering actual opposition we pass on to
considering distinction. When it is conceived as real, the opposite can
only be the distinct. But the opposite is exactly the unreal in the real and
definitely not a form or level of reality. Unless one distinct is opposed to
another distinct, we shall say that we do not see how there is any pass-
528
Croce, Logic
ing from one to the other. But this is a confusion between concept and
fact, between ideal moments – eternal moments of the real, therefore –
and existential manifestations of reality. Existentially, the poet does not
become a philosopher except when something contradicting his poetry
takes shape in his spirit, specifically when he feels dissatisfied with the
particular and with the particular intuition. But he does not pass over
into philosophy at that moment; he is already a philosopher because
the passing, the actual being, and the coming-to-be are synonyms. In the
same way, the poet does not pass from one intuition to another, from one
work of art to another, unless a contradiction takes shape inside him,
making the earlier work no longer satisfying for him. Then he passes on,
or becomes a different poet and really is a different one. This passing-
over is the law of all life, and therefore it exists in all the existential and
contingent determinations of each of life’s forms. From one verse of a
poem we pass on to another because the first verse is both satisfying and
not satisfying. Ideal moments, by contrast, do not pass into one another
because they are in one another eternally, each one distinct and united
with the other.
On the other hand, the violent extension of the dialectic to the dis-
tincts and the unlawful perversion of them into opposites, motivated by
a lofty but misguided yearning for unity, has been punished at the scene
of the crime because the desired unity has not been attained. The nexus
of the distincts is circular, and thus it is true unity. Extending the oppo-
sites to the forms of the Spirit and reality, however, would not produce
the circle that is true infinity, but the progressus in infinitum that is false
or bad infinity.16 In fact, if opposition determines the passage from one
ideal level to another, from one form to another, if this is the sole char-
acter and supreme law of the real, by what right may we set down an ulti-
mate form where that passage would no longer take place? The Spirit,
to choose an example, moves from an impression or emotion and passes
on dialectically to intuition, and, by a new dialectical passage, to logical
thinking: by what right should it find rest in this at last? Why (following
the lead of such philosophies) should the thinking of the Absolute or
the Idea provide the terminus of life? In obedience to the eternal law of
opposition, which is poorly placed among forms of the Spirit, it would
be necessary for the thinking that negates the intuition to be negated
in turn, and for the negation to be negated again, and so on to infin-
ity. Actually, this infinite negating goes on, and it is life itself, viewed in
representation. But precisely for this reason we do not escape from this
bad infinity of representation except by the true infinity that posits the
529
eternal at every instant, the first in the last and the last in the first – posit-
ing at every instant the unity that is distinction, in other words.
It must be acknowledged that the false extension of the dialectic has
produced per accidens the excellent result of showing that the manifold of
defectively distinguished concepts is unstable, just as there is profit to be
had from the devastation and disorder that this extension has wrought
on age-old prejudices.17 But that mistaken dialectic has also promoted
the habit of imprecision, negligence, and conceptual clumsiness, some-
times encouraging the fakery of the lightweight minds who have reduced
philosophy to a dance and counter-dance of empty abstractions – even
though this is per accidens in relation to the vigorous initial instinct of the
polemic about dialectic.
The form of the law given to the concept of the concept – an incor-
rect form wholly corrupted by the use made of it by proceeding empiri-
cally – has contributed to producing such a conclusion. When the law
of identity and contradiction is posited, and when the law of opposition
or dialectic is posited alongside it, a duality inevitably appears, since we
do not notice that the two laws are nothing more than one-sided forms
of an expression of the unique nature of the concept. We could see the
real character of the concept expressed instead in a different law or prin-
ciple, in the principle of sufficient reason, which ordinarily used to be
referred to the concept of cause or to pseudo-concepts. However, both
because of its inner tendency and also because of its historical origin, it is
correct to refer it to the concept of an end or a reason. And it asserts that
things cannot be called known by alleging just any cause whatever for
them, that what must be produced instead is exactly that cause which is
also the end and which is therefore the sufficient reason. And yet to seek
out the sufficient reason of things, what else would one mean except to
think them in their truth, conceive them in their universality, and posit
the concept? In this lies logical thinking itself, as distinct from the repre-
sentation or intuition that presents things but not reasons, the individual
but not the universal.
There is no point in dealing with other so-called principles of logic
because either they are already in play implicitly or they are trivial and
of no interest.
NOTES
1 We have used Croce (1920), the fourth edition of the Logic, whose original
form in Croce (1905) was quite different; Croce (1917b), an older English
530
Croce, Logic
translation by Douglas Ainslee, is based on the third edition of 1916; the

new national edition by Cristina Farnetti is based on the seventh edition of
1947.
2 [e] Croce (1920): 12−25, introduces some of the terminology used in these
chapters: ‘The concept, then, is not a representation or a practical mixture
or condensation of representations. It arises from representations as some-
thing implicit in them that must be made explicit, as a need or a problem
whose premises are posited by representations, but the need is one that
representations are not in a position to satisfy and cannot even formulate …
The proven futility of attempts to do so confirms the need for the science
of logic, whose object or problem is precisely that form of the Spirit, that
aspect of the real, which is called the concept … Distinguishing the concept
from representations has recognized what is legitimate in representation,
however, and has assigned it the place of an elementary form of cognition,
antecedent to logical form, in the system of the Spirit. Distinguishing the
concept from states of mind, from movements of will, and from actions
also means recognizing the legitimacy of the practical form of cognition …
But by distinguishing the concept from fictions, it seems that these latter
have not been recognized as legitimate … A true and proper concept, just
because it is not a representation, cannot have a single element of repre-
sentation as its content, nor can it refer to one particular representation or
another, or to this or that group of representations … Completely differ-
ent are fictive concepts or conceptual fictions because in them either the
content is furnished by a group of representations, and even by a single
representation, and therefore they are not super-representational, or else
they actually have no representable content, and therefore they are not
omni-representational … Now thinking that does not have anything real as
its object is not thinking, and therefore those concepts are not concepts but
conceptual fictions … ‘Conceptual fictions’ is a way of speaking, and no one
wants to do battle over ways of speaking. For reasons of brevity as well, how-
ever, I will call them pseudo-concepts, and, to assure greater clarity, I will call
true and proper concepts pure concepts … Pseudo-concepts, even though the
term concept is part of their name, are not concepts and do not constitute a
species of concepts.’
3 [e] Spinoza, Ethics 1, prop. 17, schol.
4 [e]medium quid: something in between; ulterius: something farther on.
5 [e]progressus in infinitum: infinite regress, but inverted.
6 [e]Spinoza, Ethics, 1, def. 6, prop. 9, schol.
7 [e] For ideal eternal history, see Fiorentino’s account of Vico in his first let-
ter to Florenzi Waddington.
8 [e] Like ideal eternal history, ‘eternal cycle and recurrence (corso e ricorso)’
531
also comes from Croce’s reading of Vico, about whom he wrote a formative
book, while compiling and updating a large bibliography; he saw Vico’s New
Science as an avatar of his own Philosophy of the Spirit, of which the Logic is
the second part: Croce (1911a), (1911b).
9 [e] For moment as a term of art in Hegel and in Croce, see sections 1 and 4
of ‘What Is Living.’
10 [e] The ‘five terms’ or quinque voces that Croce lists are the topic of Por-
phyry’s Introduction, which was one of the first texts to be mastered by
students of Aristotelian logic; the Introduction presents a scheme of classifica-
tion whereby two species within the same genus are made distinct from one
another by a difference, so that the difference rational makes humans distinct
from other species within the genus animal.
11 [e] For being and non-being in Hegel, see section 1 of Croce’s ‘What Is Liv-
ing.’
12 [e] Again, on Hegel’s terminology, see especially section 1 of Croce’s ‘What
Is Living.’
13 [e] Shakespeare, Macbeth, I.i.11; Richter (1903), 1.2.11. Johann Paul
Richter (1763−1825), who became famous as Jean Paul, one of the great
romantic novelists, first published Levana, or the Doctrine of Education in
1807; Richter (1814) is the second edition.
14 [e] Carducci, ‘Inno a Satana,’ ll.156, 195−6; (1881): 127−37; (1894): 3.
15 [e] Croce (1920): 271−2: ‘The concept is a logical synthesis a priori, a unity
of subject and predicate, a unity in distinction and a distinction in unity …
Representation without the concept is blind, pure representation, robbed of
the light of logic, and it is not the subject of judgment; without representa-
tion, the concept is empty. In the act that is called error, where propositions
expressing the truth are combined not at all according to their theoretical
nexus but by the arbitrary choice of the person who does the combining,
that unity can be broken up in a practical way. The first thing that happens,
then, is that there is an empty concept: deprived of any internal rule, it fills
up with a content that does not belong to it and can be had only by joining
with the representation, and it gives itself a false subject … Because it abuses
the logical component, we can call this type of error logicism or panlogism or
even philosophism, since abuse of the logical element is identical to abuse of
the philosophical element.’
16 [e] On Hegel’s bad infinity see section 3 of Croce’s ‘What Is Living.’
17 [e] per accidens: accidentally, in the technical sense of ‘accident,’ so ‘not
substantially’ or ‘not essentially.’
532
17
Benedetto Croce
What Is Living and What Is Dead in the

Philosophy of Hegel
A Critical Study Followed by an Essay on Hegelian Bibliography1
Notice
This little volume appears together with my translation of Hegel’s Ency-

clopedia of Philosophical Sciences made for the series Classics of Modern Phi-
losophy, published by the same press and edited by me and my friend,
Professor Giovanni Gentile.
According to the plan of that series, the introductions to each text are
of a purely philological nature, excluding any discussion of a critical-
philosophical kind. But I have been unable to resist my desire to put into
writing the critical-philosophical introduction to Hegel’s work that has
taken shape in my mind – my views on the merits and demerits of Hegel’s
philosophy. Naturally, since I had not the least intention of breaking my
own rule, I am now publishing this text of mine not as an introduction
but as a book standing on its own.
This suffices to clarify the purpose, character, and limits of this
work.
In hopes that the translation of the Encyclopedia, along with these criti-
cal inquiries of mine, might help reawaken in Italy the study of a phil-
osophical giant like Hegel, I have added to my text a bibliography of
Hegel’s works and studies dealing with them. This grew out of a series of
notes made originally for my own use, and it is certainly less than a com-
plete bibliography of Hegel would require, though it is still something
more than the bibliographical lists available up to now.
Naples
6 March 1906
1. The Dialectic or the Synthesis of Opposites
Hegel is one of those philosophers who took philosophy itself, not just
unmediated reality, as the object of his thought, thereby contributing
to the establishment of a logic of philosophy. To me, in fact, it seems
that the logic of philosophy (with the many results that come from it for
solving particular problems and for thinking about life) was the mark at
which he aimed his greatest mental effort. In this he found – or brought
to completion and made effective – principles of great importance that
had been unknown to previous philosophers or were scarcely mentioned
by them and can therefore be considered real discoveries of his.
This concept of a logic of philosophy is simple enough and should be
accepted as incontrovertibly evident, yet it encounters a strange resist-
ance – resistance to philosophy’s proceeding by its own method, in other
words, with a theory that must be investigated and formulated. No one
doubts that mathematics has a method of its own, studied in the logic
of mathematics; that the natural sciences have their method, the source
of the logic of observation, experiment, and abstraction; that there is
a method of writing history and thus a logic of historical method; that
for poetry and for art in general there is a logic of poetry and art, or
aesthetics; that there is a method inherent in economic activity which
appears later in reflective form in the science of economics; and, finally,
that moral activity has its own method, presented in reflective form as
ethics (or a logic of will, as it has sometimes been called). But then,
moving on to philosophy, a great many people resist what follows: that
philosophy too, once it exists, must have a method of its own, which must
be defined. On the other hand, very few are surprised when treatises on
logic, which give a great deal of space to discussions of mathematical,
naturalistic, and historical disciplines, usually pay no special attention to
the philosophical disciplines and often move right past them in silence.
It is perfectly natural that anyone who rejects philosophy in gener-
al, whether from thoughtlessness or mental confusion or eccentricity,
should reject a logic of philosophy since one cannot claim to accept the
theory of something whose reality has been disallowed. There exists no
philosophy, so there exists no logic of philosophy, and that’s the end of
it; if this is good enough, enjoy it.
But why have I just been talking about a strange spectacle? The reason
is that philosophers themselves – or philosophizers, perhaps – too often
seem to show themselves lacking any awareness of this ineluctable neces-
sity. One of them asserts that philosophy must follow the abstract-deduc-
534
Croce, The Philosophy of Hegel
tive method of mathematics; and another sees no way to save it except

to stick firmly with the experimental method, dreaming and boasting of
a philosophy studied in laboratories and clinics, an empirical metaphys-
ics, and so forth. Finally (and this fashion is the most recent – newly on
offer, if not new), the custom now is to recommend an individual and
imaginary philosophy produced like art. Hence, all methods (from the
compass to the scalpel and eventually the guitar!) seem good for philoso-
phy – except the philosophical.
To counter such views, one observation should suffice: namely, that if
philosophy is to produce understanding and somehow be the reflective
consciousness of art and history, of mathematics and inquiry into nature,
of practical and moral activity, it is not clear how it could do so by con-
forming to the method of one of those particular topics. Looking at a
poem, anyone who limits himself to applying the method of poetry will
feel within himself the poet’s creation, one determinate work of art or
another, but by this route he will not reach a philosophical understand-
ing of poetry. Given a mathematical theory, anyone who limits himself to
doing mathematics will be the disciple, the critic, the improver of that
theory, but he will not have attained understanding of the nature of math-
ematical work. If philosophy’s object is not to produce or reproduce art
and mathematics and various other human activities but to comprehend
(understand) them all, this comprehending itself is an activity with its
own method, ingrained or implied, and it is important to make it explicit.
However that may be, there is no hope of being able to understand and
evaluate Hegel’s work unless one always keeps firmly in mind the prob-
lem that I have identified as his chief problem and great problem – the
problem central to the Phenomenology of Spirit and the new presentations
of this work in the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sci-
ences. A complete account of Hegel’s thought, a deep and critical account,
cannot be like almost all histories of philosophy or even the specialized
monographs that deal with Hegel – the recent and very extensive treat-
ment by Kuno Fischer, for example.2 It cannot be a summary repetition of
the content of his books, awkwardly faithful down to section and chapter
divisions. It should be devoted primarily and mainly to his position on
the nature of philosophical inquiry and on the differences between such
inquiry and other theoretical and non-theoretical forms.
Above all, this account should clarify the threefold character assumed by
philosophical thinking, according to Hegel, in relation to the three mental
modes or attitudes with which it is usually most readily confused. Philo-
sophical thinking for Hegel is (1) concept; (2) universal; and (3) concrete.
535
Concept – meaning that it is not feeling or rapture or transcendental

intuition or any such psychic state, non-logical and non-demonstrable.
This establishes the difference between philosophy and doctrines of
mysticism and direct perception. At best, these doctrines have negative
value in that they recognize the impossibility of basing philosophy on
the method of the empirical and natural sciences, sciences of the finite.
They are profound, if you like, but theirs is an ‘empty profundity,’ and
they certainly have no positive value. Against mysticism, mania, melan-
choly, eyes raised to heaven, necks bent, and hands wrung; against swoon-
ing, gnomic prophecy, and mystical initiatory formulas, Hegel becomes
fiercely satirical, always insisting that philosophy must have a reasoned
and intelligible form, that it must be ‘not esoteric but exoteric,’ not the
property of a sect but of humanity.3
The philosophical concept is universal, certainly not a mere general-
ity and not to be confused with general representations such as ‘house,’
‘horse,’ or ‘blue.’ By a usage that Hegel terms ‘barbarous,’ however, these
are ordinarily called concepts.4 This establishes the difference between
philosophy and the empirical and natural sciences, which are satisfied
with types, representative generalities, and aggregates of them.
Finally, the philosophical universal is concrete, meaning that it does not
consist of arbitrary abstractions; it is not a skeleton of reality but a grasp-
ing of it in all its fullness and richness. Philosophical abstractions are
necessary, and therefore they are adequate to the real, not mutilating
or falsifying it. This establishes the difference between philosophy and
the mathematical disciplines. These do not justify their starting points
but ‘command them.’ Hence, as Hegel says, one must obey the rule for
drawing these lines or those lines correctly, while knowing nothing else
except to have faith that this will be something ‘appropriate’ to the proc-
ess of demonstration. The object of philosophy, by contrast, is what really
is, and it must justify itself fully, with no assumption allowed inside itself
or left outside itself.5
To elucidate this threefold difference whereby the true concept – the
philosophical concept – appears to be logical, universal, and concrete,
and to give a full account of it, one would need to pursue lesser issues
connected with the first and fundamental problem. Some of these are of
the greatest importance,
such as reviving the ontological argument (defending St Anselm

against Kant), the thesis that in the philosophical concept essence
implies existence and is not detached from it as in representations
of the particular;6
536
such as a doctrine of judgment, which, when treated as the link

between subject and predicate, is based on an unanalysed substrate
and is thus recognized as unsuited to philosophy, whose true form is
that of the syllogism, understood as the complete logical form that
reconnects with itself;
such as criticizing the theory that posits the concept as a complex
of ‘features’ (which Hegel calls the true ‘feature’ of superficiality in
ordinary logic);7
such as criticizing divisions by species and classes;
such as proving the worthlessness (in our day this may be imme-
diately therapeutic) of every ‘logical calculus’;
and other doctrines, no less important.

But my purpose in these pages is not to give a complete account of
Hegel’s system, not even just his logical teaching. Instead, I shall con-
centrate all my attention on that part of his thought which is most char-
acteristic, on new features of truth revealed by him, and thus also on
errors that he could not eliminate and in which he was complicit, to
some extent. Thus, leaving aside the various issues that I have just briefly
noted (rebelling against them seems to me impossible, even granted that
one must promote education by treating such problems as the philo-
sophical alphabet, now often not learned), I come straight to the point
that sparks all the debates and at which the sharp objections of oppo-
nents are aimed – Hegel’s treatment of the problem of opposites.
If we want to understand the full seriousness and difficulty of this
problem, we must have a clear sense of its terms. The philosophical con-
cept – which is a concrete universal, as we have noted – as such, and
inasmuch as it concretizes, does not exclude but actually includes dis-
tinctions in itself: the concept is the universal, distinct in itself, and it
results from those distinctions. As empirical concepts are divided into
classes and subclasses, in the same way this philosophical concept has its
own particular forms. But rather than being the mechanical aggregate
of them, it is the organism in which every form joins closely with oth-
ers and with the whole. Imagination and understanding are particular
philosophical concepts, for example, related to the concept of Spirit or
spiritual activity. But they are not outside or beneath Spirit; in fact, they
are the Spirit itself in those particular forms.8 One is not separate from
the other, then, like two entities, each closed within itself and external
to the other; instead, the one passes within the other. Hence, as people
commonly say, imagination is the basis of understanding and indispensa-
ble to it inasmuch as it is distinct from understanding.
537
Yet when our thinking investigates what is real, it faces not only dis-
tinct concepts but also opposed concepts that cannot simply be identi-
fied with the former nor treated as special cases of them, as a type of the
distinct.9 The logical category of distinction is one thing, that of opposi-
tion another. Two distinct concepts are connected to one another, as
has been said, even in being distinct, while two opposed concepts seem
to exclude one another: where one appears, the other totally vanishes.
A distinct concept is assumed and lives in the other that follows it in the
order of ideas. An opposed concept is destroyed by its opposite: the say-
ing that applies to it is ‘mors tua, vita mea.’10 Examples of distinct con-
cepts are those of imagination and understanding, already mentioned,
as well as others that could be added – law, morality, and so on. But
examples of opposed concepts come from the many pairs of words that
abound in our language, and they are certainly not happy, loving cou-
ples. They are antitheses of true and false, good and evil, beautiful and
ugly, valued and unvalued, joy and sorrow, activity and passivity, positive
and negative, life and death, being and nothing, and on and on. It is not
possible to confuse the two series, the distinct and the opposite, which
are so strikingly different.
Now if distinction does not exclude the concrete unity of the philo-
sophical concept but actually makes it possible, it seems that we cannot
think the same about opposition. Opposition gives rise to deep cleav-
ages in the core of the philosophical universal and of each of its particu-
lar forms, and to irresolvable dualisms as well. Instead of the concrete
universal – the organic reality that thinking seeks – it seems to come
up against two universals everywhere, one confronting the other, one
threatening the other. This prevents philosophy from achieving its goal,
and when an activity cannot achieve its goal, this shows that the goal set
for it is absurd, and philosophy itself – all philosophy – is threatened with
failure.
This reality of this need has caused the human mind to be always
troubled by the problem of opposites but without always giving a clear
account of its trouble. One solution to which people have constantly
clung over the centuries has been to exclude opposition from the phil-
osophical concept by claiming that the dangerous logical category of
opposites or contraries does not exist. The facts actually showed the
reverse, if truth were told, but facts met with denial, and only one of
the two terms was accepted while the other was declared an illusion – or
else one term was set apart from the other by an insensible and merely
numerical difference, which amounts to the same thing. The logical doc-
538
trine of opposites thus constituted is part of the philosophical systems

of sensism, empiricism, materialism, mechanism, and whatever else one
might call them. Depending on what one likes, thinking and truth have
thus become either a secretion from the brain or an effect of association
and habit, while virtue has become a mirage of egoism, beauty a distil-
late of sensuality, the ideal some vague dream of pleasure or caprice, and
more of the same.
Against this first logical doctrine another one has shown strength over
the centuries, setting up the category of opposition as fundamental. It is
the doctrine found in the various dualist systems that reassert the antith-
esis whisked away by the sleight of hand of those who advocate the first
system. These systems emphasize both terms, being and non-being, good
and evil, true and false, ideal and real, the terms of one series exactly
contrasted with those of the other. Against the first doctrine, the dualist
view undoubtedly has force, but only polemical force, for denying the
denial made by the other position. Intrinsically, the one offers as little
satisfaction as the other because where the first sacrifices opposition to
unity, the second sacrifices unity to opposition.
For thinking, both these sacrifices turn out to be so impossible that
proponents of one doctrine seem to keep being converted, more or less
consciously, into proponents of the other. Advocates of unity covertly
introduce the duality of opposites, calling it a duality of reality and illu-
sion, but an illusion they could dispense with no more than reality, so
they often end up saying that in the illusion lies the impulse to live. All
advocates of opposition accept some sort of identity or unity of oppo-
sites, inaccessible to the human mind because of its imperfection, but
needed to conceive of reality. In this way, both sides get tangled up in
contradictions and end up openly acknowledging that the problem they
set for themselves has not been solved and remains a problem.
The reason is that ‘necessary illusion’ and ‘necessary imperfection
of the human mind’ are just noises, no matter how hard we try to give
them meaning. Accidental and relative illusions, individual and relative
imperfections are all we know. A reality beyond reality, a mind beyond
the human mind is not conceivable and cannot be a term of compari-
son. Both reality and mind show us unity as well as opposition. When
advocates of unity accept one and advocates of opposition accept the
other, they are right in what they accept and wrong in what they deny – as
Leibniz said about philosophical systems.11 Hegel never wearied of mar-
velling at the manly perseverance of every type of materialist, sensist, and
monist in asserting the unity of the real. In the dualist types, given the
539
historical circumstances in which his thought developed, Hegel found

less to marvel at; in fact, he never passed up a chance to register his dis-
like of them. He never forgot, however, that consciousness of opposition
is just as invincible and justified as consciousness of unity.
The situation seems hopeless, then, but hopelessness is also hopeless,
one might say, since the decision to call the problem insoluble would cause
us to think whether, by thinking it, we had already resolved the problem
on the side of thinking, which is the side of hope. A neutral observer who
looks at the history of philosophy sees that a restoration of dualism follows
every acceptance of monism, and vice versa. Each lacks the power to stifle
the other, but each has enough power to keep the other compliant tem-
porarily. It almost appears that when people have had enough monist uni-
formity, they divert themselves with dualist variety, and when they tire of
dualism, they plunge back into monism, as the two alternating processes
balance each other in a healthy way. With every epidemic of materialism,
the neutral observer smiles and says, ‘Wait! Spiritualism will be here any
moment now.’ And while spiritualism is celebrating its greatest triumphs,
the observer smiles in the same way and says, ‘Wait! Materialism will be
right back.’ But the observer’s smile is forced and fleeting because his situ-
ation is not really a happy one. Tossed from one extreme to the other as if
a higher and irresistible force were acting on him, he gets no rest.
And yet, amidst the difficulties that I have tried to illuminate, in all
their harshness, deep in our hearts there is a constant conviction that
this irresistible dualism, and this unsolvable dilemma may, in the end, be
resisted and solved, that the thinking of unity is not incompatible with
that of opposition, and that opposition can and must be thought in the
form of the concept, which is the highest unity. Naive thinking – which
is usually called non-philosophical and might better be called summarily or
incipiently philosophical – is not perplexed by difficulty. It thinks unity and
opposition at the same time. The saying that applies to it is definitely not
‘mors tua, vita mea,’ but ‘concordia discors.’12 It recognizes that life is
struggle but also harmony; that virtue is a battle against ourselves but is
also ourselves; that once an opposition has been overcome, a new oppo-
sition arises from the very core of unity, and then a new overcoming fol-
lowed by a new opposition, and so on, which is just how life works. Naive
thinking does not recognize exclusive systems. Proverbial wisdom runs
with the hare and hunts with the hounds, admonishing us with optimis-
tic and pessimistic remarks denied and then affirmed in turn.
What is missing from naive thinking, from incipient philosophy?
Nothing, apparently. Therefore, amidst the smoke and dust of learned
540
combat, we always long for good sense, for the truth that all of us can
find in ourselves directly, without the exertions, subtleties and exaggera-
tions of professional philosophers. But our longing is sterile. The bat-
tle has been joined, and without victory there is no returning to peace.
Naive thinking (this is its defect) is in no position to justify its own claims.
At every objection, it wavers, falls into confusion, and contradicts itself.
Its truths are not complete truths because they are placed next to one
another but not connected, and the juxtaposition is not systematic. Con-
tradictions, doubts, and a painful awareness of antitheses are welcome.
War is welcome if it is needed to acquire the truth that is complete and
sure of itself. This truth, though its level of elaboration is very different
from what comes out of ordinary naive thinking, cannot really be unlike
it in substance. And when a philosophy stands in contrast to naive con-
sciousness, it is a sure sign of trouble. Indeed, when people see plain
and conclusive statements of philosophical truth resulting from centu-
ries of effort, this is the very reason why we often see them shrugging
their shoulders and remarking that the vaunted discovery is something
quite easy that everybody knows. Exactly the same thing happens with
the most inspired works of art, which develop so simply and naturally
that everyone has the illusion of having made such things or being able
to make them.
If naive thinking gives us hope and a sign of compatibility between
unity and opposition, another fact is right in front of us, offering a rough
model of these benefits. Alongside the philosopher stands the poet. The
poet also seeks the truth; the poet also thirsts for the real. Like the phi-
losopher, he too rejects arbitrary abstractions while reaching for the liv-
ing and concrete. He too abhors the muffled delusions of mystics and
sentimentalists because he says what he feels and makes it ring in our
ears, clear and silvery, in words of beauty. But the poet is not doomed
to failure. He contemplates the reality that is torn apart by oppositions
and makes it vibrant with opposition, yet one and undivided. Can the
philosopher not do the same? Is philosophy not a way of contemplating,
like poetry? Since the philosophical concept is completely analogous to
aesthetic expression, why must it lack the perfection that belongs to the
aesthetic, the power to resolve and represent unity in opposition? Philos-
ophy is contemplating the universal, obviously, and hence it is thinking,
while poetry is contemplating the individual, and hence it is intuition
and imagination. But why can the philosophical universal not be both
different and the same, discord and concord, discrete and continuous,
precise and fluid all at once, like aesthetic expression? When the mind
541
makes its leap from contemplating the singular to contemplating the All,
why should reality have to lose its own character? Does the One not live
in us like the singular?
And at this point Hegel shouts his joyous cry, his cry of discovery –
Eureka! – his principle that resolves the problem of opposites, a very
simple principle, seeming so obvious that it deserves to be put with the
others symbolized by the egg of Columbus. Opposites are not an illusion,
and unity is not an illusion. Opposites are opposed to one another, but
they are not opposed to unity because true and concrete unity is just the
unity or synthesis of opposites: it is not immobility, it is movement; it is
not stasis, it is development. The philosophical concept is a concrete uni-
versal, and therefore it is a thinking of reality as both united and divided
at once. Only in this way does philosophical truth correspond to poetic
truth, and the pulse of thinking to the pulse in things.
This is the only possible solution, in fact, and as such it does not reject
the two that came before it, those that I have called monism and dualism
of opposites. Instead, it justifies both by treating them as truths that are
one-sided, fragments of truth that need to be integrated in a third truth,
where the first, the second, and also the third fade away as all three are
fused in the sole truth. And this alone is true: that unity does not con-
front opposition but contains it in itself, that without opposition reality
would not be reality because it would not be development and life. Unity
is positive, opposition negative, but the negative is also positive – positive
in being negative – and, if that were not so, we would not grasp the full-
ness of the positive. If the analogy between poetry and philosophy has
been unsatisfactory, if the concrete concept, corresponding to intuition
as the logical form of development – as its poetic form – has seemed not
clear enough, now that we take our comparisons and metaphors more
freely from the natural sciences, one might say (sacrificing exact analogy
for apt comparison) that the concrete universal, along with its synthesis
of opposites, gets at life and not at life’s cadaver. It offers a physiology of
the real, not an anatomy.
Hegel calls his doctrine of opposites the dialectic, rejecting other formu-
las of unity and coincidence of opposites as likely to cause confusion because
they emphasize unity but not opposition along with it. The two abstract
components, or rather the opposites taken by themselves, in their apart-
ness, he calls moments, taking the image from moments of the lever. The
third term, synthesis, is also sometimes called a moment. He uses the word
‘resolve’ or ‘overcome’ (aufheben) to express the relation of the first two
moments to the third. Hegel notes the implication that the two moments
542
are negated insofar as they are taken as separate, while in synthesis they
are preserved. In relation to the first term, the second takes the form of
negation, and in relation to the second, the third is a negation of the nega-
tion, or absolute negativity that then becomes absolute affirmation.
If for the sake of exposition we apply numerical symbols to this logical
relation, the dialectic can be called a triad or trinity because it turns out
to be composed of three terms. But Hegel never stops warning about the
external and arbitrary character of this numerical symbolism, which is
quite unfit to express the theoretical truth. Strictly speaking, in the dia-
lectical triad it is not really three concepts that are thought but only one,
the concrete universal, in its deep structure. Moreover, since we must
first of all posit opposition of terms in order to achieve this synthesis, if
we call the activity that posits opposition understanding, and reason the
activity that provides the synthesis, it is clear that understanding is neces-
sary to reason, that it is a moment of reason and external to it. And this
is actually how Hegel sometimes treats it.
Anyone who does not rise to the way of thinking the opposites that I
have just described can make no philosophical claim that does not con-
tradict itself and change to its contrary, as I noted in reviewing the antith-
eses of monism and dualism. We can see this in the first triad of Hegel’s
Logic – the triad that has all the others in it and which, as we know, is
made up of the terms being, nothing, and becoming. Without nothing, what
is being? What is pure being, indeterminate, unqualified, indistinct,
unutterable, being as universal, and not this or that particular being?
How does it differ from nothing? On the other hand, what is nothing
without being, nothing conceived in itself, with no determination or
qualification, nothing in general, not the non-being of this or that par-
ticular thing? How does it differ from being?
When someone uses one of these two terms by itself, the result is like
using the other by itself, since the one has meaning only in or through the
other. Someone who uses the true without the false, then, makes the true
into something not thought – since thinking is struggling against the false
– and therefore something not true. Likewise, for someone who uses good
without evil, the good becomes something not willed – because willing the
good is rejecting evil – and therefore something not good. Outside of syn-
thesis, the two terms used abstractly become confused with one another as
they trade roles. There is truth only in the third term – for the first triad, in
becoming. This, as Hegel said, is ‘the first concrete concept.’13
And yet this mistake, which comes of using the opposites outside of
synthesis, keeps recurring. We must always respond to it with the objec-
543
tion that shows – as we did just now – that the opposites cannot be
thought outside of synthesis. This objection is the dialectic that might
be called subjective or negative. But it must not be confused with the true
and proper content of this theory, with the objective or positive dialectic
that could also be identified as the logical theory of development. In the
negative dialectic, the outcome is not synthesis but the annihilation of
two opposed terms, one as a result of the other. Therefore, like the word
‘dialectic’ itself, the terminology that we described above also acquires
a somewhat different meaning. The sense of understanding is meant
to be derogatory and pejorative, since it is no longer a moment intrin-
sic to reason and inseparable from it but rather an affirmation of sepa-
rate opposites that claims to stand on its own as the final truth. This is
abstract understanding, the eternal enemy of philosophical theorizing
– basically, reason itself failing in its own work. ‘Understanding is not to
blame if we go no farther; it is a subjective powerlessness of reason that
lets that determination stand in that way.’14 The triad itself surrenders
its place to a quartet of terms, two affirmations and two negations. Rea-
son steps in as negative reason and brings confusion into the abode of
understanding. Although it clears the way for the positive theory by this
negation and makes it necessary, it does not produce and posit it.
Confusion between the merely negative side of Hegel’s dialectic and
its positive content has given rise to an objection against the Hegelian
theory of opposites, and this is a warhorse often mounted by Hegel’s
enemies. Goldbridle and Bayard are rather old and worn out, and I fail
to see how anyone can still stay in the saddle.15 They ask: if being and
nothing are identical (as Hegel proves or thinks he proves), how can
they constitute becoming, which (on Hegel’s theory) must be a synthesis
of opposites, certainly not of items that are identical and thus unpro-
ductive of synthesis? A = A remains A and does not become B. And the
answer is: being is identical with nothing only when being and nothing
are badly thought, or, indeed, when they are not thought; only then does
it happen that one is the same as the other, not as A = A but as 0 = 0. In
thinking that thinks being and nothing truly, they are not identical but
decisively opposed, brawling with one another. And this brawl (which is
also a bonding because the two wrestlers have to put their arms around
one another in order to wrestle) is becoming. This is certainly not a con-
cept added to or derived from the two prior ones as if they were apart
from it. It is a unique concept that has two abstractions outside it, two
unreal wraiths – being and nothing as separate and hence as united not
by conflict but by their shared emptiness.
544
Another objection, seemingly triumphant again, is the observation

that the concrete universal, with its synthesis of opposites sealing its con-
crete character, is not a purely logical concept because it implicitly intro-
duces a sensible or intuitive component when it represents movement or
development.16 Sensible or intuitive? In philosophical terms, that would
mean singular, individual, historical. Please, what is the singular, individ-
ual, historical component that we can either point out, or take away, in
Hegel’s concept of the universal, in the way that we can either locate, or
take away, the singular, individual, historical component in the empiri-
cal concept of the oak, the whale, or feudal government? Movement or
development is nothing singular and contingent; it is a universal. It is
nothing sensible; it is a thought, a concept, and precisely the true con-
cept of the reality. And the logical theory of this concept is the concrete
universal, a synthesis of opposites.
But what if one wished to apply the indicated criticism to the character
that the concept has in Hegel’s logic, to its not being something empty
and indifferent, not just a receptacle ready to receive any content at all,
but rather the ideal form of reality itself? What if the meaning of ‘logi-
cal’ were only an abstraction that cannot be conceived, the abstraction
that works ‘on command,’ as in mathematics? And what if the meaning
of ‘intuitive’ were the speculative concept? Then the objection would
not demonstrate Hegel’s mistake but celebrate his glory – his glory hav-
ing been to destroy that false conception of logical form as arbitrary
abstraction and to give the logical concept a character of concreteness
that can also be called ‘intuitive’ to signify (as I have done above) that
Philosophy springs from the heart of godlike Poetry, ‘matre pulchra filia
pulchrior.’17
Philosophy, thus seen as poetry’s friend and relative, enters the state
now usually called ‘Dionysian,’ following Nietzsche’s fashionable phras-
ing, and this is enough to scare off the faint-hearted.18 Without realizing
it, however, even these thinkers are in the same condition as long as they
keep philosophizing. Thus, when faced with the dialectic of being and
non-being, our Rosmini exclaimed in horror: ‘Even if it were as true as it
is false that being can negate itself, this question would always come back
into play: what is it to have moved to self-negation? What reason could
we find for this whim whereby being would negate itself, not recognize
itself, and make this mad attempt to annihilate itself, in short? Hegel’s
system does nothing less than make being go mad, introducing mad-
ness into each and every thing. In this way he claims to give things their
life, movement, process, and becoming. But I have never heard of such
545
an enterprise anywhere, whose effect is to make everything, even being

itself, go mad.’19
Rosmini probably did not recall that Hegel himself (with more style,
to tell the truth) gave the very same account in the Phenomenology. After
describing the movement of reality, the rise and fall that is never itself
born and never dies, these were his concluding words: ‘Truth is a Bacchic
frenzy, and there is no part of it that is not intoxicated. Likewise, since
each part immediately dissolves when it withdraws from the others, this
frenzy is also rest, simple and limpid.’20 Reality seems mad because it is
life, and philosophy seems mad because it shatters abstractions and lives
that life by thinking. This madness is the highest wisdom, then. The real
and non-metaphorical madmen are those crazed by the empty words of
semi-philosophy. They confuse constructs with reality and fail to rise to
that heaven whence their effort might be revealed to them for what it
really is. In fact, seeing heaven high above them and out of reach, they
are ready to call it a madhouse.
Another manifestation of the same irrational fear is the outcry that
Hegel’s view about logic deprives mankind of the very basis or rule of
thinking, the principle of identity and contradiction. The evidence is
Hegel’s frequent outbursts against that principle, as well as his declara-
tion that it must be replaced by the contrary principle, that everything
contradicts itself. But this is not exactly how things really are. Hegel does
not deny the principle of identity. Otherwise, he would have to admit
that his theory of logic is both true and not true, for example, both true
and false, and that being and nothing can be thought in the synthe-
sis and also outside of synthesis, each by itself. His whole argument, his
whole philosophy would then no longer have meaning; it would lack a
serious basis, though it takes little for us to see that it is very serious.
Rather than destroying the principle of identity, Hegel gives it new
strength, gives it power, makes it what it really ought to be and what it
is not in ordinary thinking. Ordinary thinking, semi-philosophy, leaves
reality divided into two pieces, as we have seen. Now it is one of them,
now the other, and when it is one, it is not the other. And yet, in this
effort to exclude, the one passes into the other and together they are
reduced to nothing. We claim to justify these contradictions, which actu-
ally cannot be thought, and dress them up by adducing the principle of
identity. If we examine only Hegel’s words, we can say that he distrusts
the principle of identity. But if we look deeper, we notice that what he
distrusts is just the false application of the principle of identity, the appli-
cation made of it by the purveyors of abstraction who preserve unity by
eliminating opposition or preserve opposition by eliminating unity.
546
As Hegel says, this is the principle of identity as ‘the law of the abstract
understanding.’21 The false application occurs because we do not want
to acknowledge that opposition or contradiction is no defect, no blem-
ish, no disease in things that can be removed from them – nor is it our
own subjective error. Rather, it is the true being of things: all things in
themselves are contradictory, and thinking is the thinking of contradic-
tion. This discovery serves to put the principle of identity on a real, solid
basis, triumphing over opposition by thinking it, grasping it in its unity.
Opposition thought is opposition overcome, overcome precisely in virtue
of the principle of identity. Opposition disregarded or unity disregarded
is what seems to be obedience to that principle but is actually its real
contradiction.
The difference between Hegel’s way of thinking and the ordinary kind
is the same that distinguishes a person who confronts and conquers an
enemy from someone who closes his eyes to avoid seeing the enemy: this
person believes he eliminates the enemy, and then he is eliminated by
him. ‘Speculative thinking is thought establishing what thinking does,
opposition, and, in opposition, thinking itself; it is definitely not what
happens in representative thinking, in letting oneself be dominated by
opposition and thereby having one’s own determinations resolved only
in other determinations or in none.’22 Reality is a nexus of opposites,
and it does not come apart and dissipate by reason of opposition; in fact,
reality originates eternally in and from opposition. And thinking, as the
supreme reality, the reality of reality, does not come apart and dissipate
but grasps unity in opposition and synthesizes it logically.
Like all assertions of truth, Hegel’s dialectic does not come to dethrone
the old truths but to enrich and consolidate them. The concrete univer-
sal – unity in distinction and opposition – is the true and complete prin-
ciple of identity. It does not allow the principle of older systems to exist
apart from it, either as ally or as rival, having absorbed that principle and
transformed it into its own life’s blood.
2. Clarifications about the History of the Dialectic
Some historians of philosophy have had the view that the problem of
opposites is the whole problem of philosophy, and so at times the his-
tory of the various attempts to solve it has been taken as the entire his-
tory of philosophy: the former story has been told to tell the latter. But
the dialectic is not even all of logic, much less all philosophy. It is a very
important part of logic, however, and perhaps its crowning achievement.
The reason for the confusion may already be apparent from what I
547
have said above: it is the inner bond that lies between the logical prob-
lem of opposites and the great debates between monists and dualists,
materialists and spiritualists. This makes up most of the content of stud-
ies of philosophy and histories of philosophy, even though such debates
do not represent philosophy’s primary and basic task, which is better
expressed by ‘Know thyself.’ But that deceptive appearance will also
vanish when we reflect that it is one thing to think logically, another to
construct the theory of logic logically, one thing to think dialectically,
another to have a logical conception of dialectical thought. If this were
not so, the Hegelian solution would already be perfectly clear in the
many philosophers who have, in fact, thought dialectically about real-
ity, or at least in all cases where they have thought about it in this way.
Every problem of philosophy refers to all the others, no doubt, and all
the others can be found implicit in each one. Solutions true or false for
one contain solutions true or false for all. But if it is impossible to keep
histories of particular philosophical problems completely isolated from
one another, it is still true that these problems are distinct, and we must
not put the different parts of the organism together helter-skelter if we
are not to lose any idea of the organism itself.
Attention to this distinction is needed to set exact limits of inquiry into
the historical development of the dialectical doctrine of opposites, and,
subsequently, into the special value and originality of Hegel’s thought.
This is research that may not yet have been done as it should have been,
within the exact limits set for it. Moreover, since students of philosophy,
on the whole, have not been convinced that the theory is important or
correct, the interest required to construct its history, as well as a guiding
criterion, have been lacking. The best that has been put together on the
subject is found in Hegel’s own books, especially his History of Philoso-
phy.23 It will be useful to offer a quick summary here of these scattered
references, with additions and comments as needed.
Was Hegel the first to formulate the logical principle of the dialec-
tic and of development? Or did he have predecessors, and who were
they? Through what forms and approaches did this principle pass before
reaching its final state in Hegel?
The doctrine of dialectic is a product of mature thinking, a result of
long philosophical incubation. We find the difficulties that arise from
the asserting of opposites first noted in ancient Greece, in Zeno of Elea’s
denial of the reality of movement. Movement is the same thing as devel-
opment but in a form more accessible to reflection. Zeno put great
emphasis on these difficulties and resolved the conflict by denying the
548
reality of movement (using arguments from the contradiction between

space and time, from the arrow, from Achilles and the tortoise, and oth-
ers). Movement is an illusion of the senses; being or reality is one and
unmoving.24
In opposition to Zeno, Heraclitus made movement or becoming into
the true reality. The depth of his feeling for reality as contrariety and
development shows in his sayings: ‘Being and non-being are the same’;
‘Everything is and also is not’; ‘Everything flows.’ It shows in his meta-
phors: Things are a river; Opposition within opposition is like sweet and
bitter in honey, like the bow and the lyre. It shows in his cosmological
notions about war and peace, discord and harmony.25 Hegel said that
Heraclitus made no claim that he did not incorporate into his own log-
ic.26 But notice that Hegel gave these claims a much more decidedly
logical meaning than they had by themselves, just by incorporating them
into his theory. As we have them handed down to us, their naive and
serene vision of the truth doubtlessly demands our admiration, but we
must not make too much of it, or else we run the risk of falsifying history
by turning a pre-Socratic into a post-Kantian.
The same must be said of Plato’s dialectic in the Parmenides, Sophist,
and Philebus, dialogues whose interpretation and placement in history
are quite controversial. Hegel thought of them as containing the essence
of Platonic philosophy – the effort to move from the still abstract univer-
sal to the concrete universal, to posit the speculative form of the concept
as unity in diversity. These dialogues raise questions about the One and
the many, identity and non-identity, rest and movement, birth and death,
being and non-being, finite and infinite, limited and unlimited. And the
Parmenides concludes that the One is and is not, is itself and the other,
and that all things, in regard to themselves and to others, are and are
not, are apparent and not apparent. All this shows Plato wrestling with
the problem but ends with a result of a negative kind. As Hegel warned,
in any case, we find the dialectic in Plato, but not full consciousness of
the nature of the dialectic.27 The power of Plato’s theoretical treatment
is greatly superior to the arguments of the Sophists or the later tropes of
the Sceptics, but it does not attain the level of a theory of logic.
As for Aristotle, his logical consciousness is in conflict with his theo-
retical consciousness. His logic is merely cerebral; his metaphysics, on
the other hand, investigates the categories.
In the teachings of Philo the Jew and the Gnostics, where true reality,
absolute being, is considered beyond the reach of thought, as the God
beyond description, the inscrutable, the abyss where everything is negat-
549
ed, there we find only the need, or rather the awareness of impotence
and evidence of what is lacking.28 The same in Plotinus, for whom all
predicates fall short of the Absolute because each expresses a determina-
tion. The idea of the trinity or triad, already mentioned by Plato, devel-
ops in Proclus.29 This idea, along with the conception of the Absolute
as Spirit, is the great step forward in philosophy implied by Christianity.
When the modern world began, Cusanus was the heir of Neoplatonic
and mystical traditions and the thinker who most vigorously expressed
the human spirit’s need to get away from dualisms and conflicts by ris-
ing to that simplicity where opposites coincide. Cusanus was the first
to notice that this coincidence of opposites is antithetical to the purely
abstract logic of Aristotle, who conceived of contrariety as complete dif-
ference.30 Aristotle did not accept that in unity there could be contraries,
and in each thing he saw the privation of its opposite. Against this view,
Cusanus maintained that unity comes before duality and that opposites
coincide before they divide. But he thinks of the nexus of opposites as a
simple coincidence that humans cannot grasp either by sense or by rea-
son or by intellect, which are the three forms of the human mind. The
nexus remains a mere limit. Of God, where all oppositions converge,
the only knowledge possible is an incomprehensible comprehension, a
learned ignorance.31
With Giordano Bruno, who declares himself a disciple of the ‘divine
Cusanus,’ that idea seems to acquire a more positive function.32 He too
celebrates the coincidence of opposites as the outstanding principle of
a philosophy that has been forgotten and needs to be revived. He pro-
vides an eloquent account of the unification of contraries, of the greatest
circle and the straight line, the acute angle and the obtuse, of heat and
cold, corruption and generation, love and hate, poison and antidote,
spherical and plane, concave and convex, anger and patience, humil-
ity and pride, greed and generosity. Echoing Cusanus, he writes these
memorable words:
Anyone who wants to know nature’s greatest secrets should look at the mini-
ma and maxima of contraries and opposites and think about them. There
is deep magic in knowing how to draw out the contrary after locating the
point of union. This is where poor Aristotle was heading with his notion of
positing privation, conjoined with a particular disposition, as the ancestor,
parent, and mother of form, but he could not reach his goal. He could
not get there because he planted his foot in the genus of opposition and
stayed stuck there in such a way that he did not move down to the species of
550
contrariety and could not succeed or even keep his eyes on the target. He
missed it every time, claiming that contraries could not really come togeth-
er in the same subject.
From Bruno’s naturalist perspective, the principle of the coincidence of

opposites becomes a sort of aesthetic principle of thought:
We delight in colour and especially one that includes all colours, not a sin-
gle colour defined in one way or another. We delight in sound but not in a
single sound, rather the inclusive sound that comes from the harmony of
many sounds. We delight in a sensible but especially the sensible that com-
prehends in itself all sensibles, the knowable that comprehends every know-
able, the apprehensible that embraces all that can be apprehended, the
one being that completes all, and, above all, the One that is itself the All.33
No longer a limitation, the principle has already become a power of the

human mind, yet still not a rigorously logical power. It lacks justification
in a theory of the concept.
The philosopher of Germany, Jakob Böhme, also strongly asserts the
unity of opposites.34 He sets up antitheses in a strict way, says Hegel, but
he does not let this strictness stop him, and he sets up a unity. ‘Yes’ makes
no sense to him without ‘No.’ God, the One, is unknowable in himself,
and in order for him to be known, a distinction is necessary, the Father
duplicated in the Son. Böhme sees the triad in all things and deepens
the understanding of the Christian Trinity. But he does not manage to
put his thoughts in a form appropriate for thinking.35
The philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, having
developed under the influence of the mathematical science of nature,
was in no position to put the problem into this form appropriate to
thinking. For Descartes, thought and extension are united in God in
a way that we cannot comprehend. For Spinoza, this happens in sub-
stance: the ‘mode,’ the third term after substance and attribute, does
not contribute to a dialectical synthesis. Leibniz founders on the prob-
lem of evil and achieves a feeble philosophical optimism. The popular
philosophy of the eighteenth century resolves all antitheses in God, who
thus becomes a complex of contradictions, the problem of problems.
Only in a loner do we find hints and seeds of the dialectical solution.
This is the philosopher of Italy, Giambattista Vico.36 He not only thinks
de facto about life and history in a dialectical way, he is also driven by an
aversion for Aristotelian logic and for the logic of Cartesian mathematics
551
and physics. On the one hand, he establishes a logic of imagination (a

poetic logic) and of history (a logic of authority); on the other, he grants
the importance of the inductive logic of observation and experience as
the prelude to a more concrete logic.
Another loner, close to Vico in many ways, was Johann Georg Hamann,
a person who combined all extremes at a high level, according to Jacobi.
As a young man, he showed himself to be unsatisfied with the principles
of identity and reason and attracted by the coincidence of opposites.
Hamann had encountered this principle in Bruno’s On the Threefold Mini-
mum and Measure, and he kept it ‘for years in his brain without being able
to forget or to understand it.’ And yet it seemed to him ‘the only reason
that accounts for all contradictions and shows the right way to sort them
out and resolve them,’ which should have put an end to all the quar-
rels of the advocates of abstraction.37 News of this principle passed from
Hamann to Jacobi, who uncovered the passages related to it in Bruno’s
works. But Jacobi’s theory of direct knowledge put him in an impossible
situation, and even though he was aware of the gap, he was unable to fill
it with logical thinking. To put the problem of opposites in a genuinely
logical position and avoid the mystical and agnostic solution (which was
no solution at all), what he needed was for the Kantian revolution to be
completed. But Hamann regarded Kant’s whole Critique of Pure Reason as
much less important than Bruno’s single statement about the principle
of the coincidence of opposites. Yet it was precisely in this Critique that
Kant became the true author of the new coincidence of opposites, the
new dialectic – the logical theory of the dialectic.
Granted, even Kant lived under the rule of intellectualism and the ide-
al of a mathematical science of nature – like his immediate predecessors,
from Descartes to Leibniz and Hume. From this came his agnosticism,
the phantom of the thing-in-itself, the abstraction of the categorical
imperative, and the servility towards traditional logic. At the same time,
however, he maintains the distinction between understanding and rea-
son and makes it more effective. In the Critique of Judgment, he heralds a
way of thinking reality that is no longer merely mechanical nor even the
external finality found in the eighteenth century but rather an internal
finality. He catches a glimpse of the idea beyond the abstract concept.
Even better, Kant puts the problem of opposites on a new course with
his antinomies. True, they appear to be insoluble, but in such a way that
the human mind’s entanglement in them is necessary. And what is most
important – Kant’s true glory – is his discovery of the synthetic a priori.
But what is this if not ‘a primordial synthesis of opposites,’ as Hegel not-
552
ed?38 In Kant this synthesis does not attain its full meaning, its develop-
ment in the triad of the dialectic. Once made public, however, it could
not be long before synthesis revealed all the riches contained in it. A
priori synthesis causes transcendental logic to emerge alongside the old
logic, at first paralleling the latter but in the end forcing its dissolution.
The form of the threefold is also a major issue for Kant, who still treats it
as something extrinsic yet uses it persistently, as if by some presentiment
of its imminent and better destiny.
What philosophy’s mission had to be after Kant now seems clear to us:
developing the a priori synthesis, creating the new philosophical logic,
and solving the problem of opposites by eliminating the dualisms that
Kant left intact or actually made more powerful. In Fichte there is little
more than there was in Kant, but he certainly makes it all simpler and
more transparent. The thing in itself is rejected, while, at the same time,
Fichte’s I still keeps its subjective sense and does not achieve a true unity
of subject and object, so that Fichte does not succeed in justifying nature
against Spirit, and, like Kant, ends up with faith and moral abstractions.
The idea of a new logic works out better because philosophy is conceived
as a theory of science. The form of the threefold acquires a fundamental
position and is characterized as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
Schelling takes another step forward when he becomes convinced
that we can philosophize only by using the principle of the identity of
opposites, and he conceives of the Absolute as that identity of opposites.
But for Schelling the Absolute is something neutral between subject and
object with merely quantitative differences. It is not yet subject and Spir-
it. And his gnoseology lacks a logic because for him aesthetic contempla-
tion is the instrument of philosophy.39 This is the failing that Schelling
could never overcome, and the consequences for him were so serious
that they caused what has been called his second phase, the metaphysics
of the irrational.
As we know, Hegel came before the world of philosophy later than
Schelling, his younger contemporary – and we can call Hegel his disci-
ple. But where Schelling’s journey ended was for Hegel part of the voy-
age, and Schelling’s last period, where the decay began, was a juvenile
phase for Hegel. For some time, even Hegel recognized no other instru-
ment for philosophy than aesthetic contemplation: the only intuition
was intellectual intuition, and the only philosophical system was the work
of art. In the first sketch of his system that survives, he too put religion,
not philosophy, at the apex of spiritual development.40
But Hegel’s deeply logical mind eventually led him to see that phi-
553
losophy can have no other form than thinking, as specifically different

from imagination and intuition. This thinking was obviously not the
old logico-naturalist kind; after Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, that was no
longer acceptable. The intellectualism of the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries had been fatally wounded. There had to be a form of
logic to preserve and strengthen philosophy’s recent victories, a form
of logic that would be the form of the wholly real. Everything was push-
ing Hegel’s inquiry in this direction: his admiration for the harmony of
the Greek world; his participation in the Romantic movement, so rich
in antitheses; his theological studies, whereby the Christian idea of the
Trinity, worn out or made vacuous by Protestant rationalism, seemed to
him compelled to find its refuge and true meaning in the new philoso-
phy; his theoretical studies on synthesis and Kant’s antinomies.
In the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), he distanced himself from the
philosophical movements to which he had belonged until then, and he
published his principle for solving the problem of opposites. It is no
longer simply their coinciding in some third term, unknown or unthink-
able; no longer immobile unity; no longer Schelling’s intuition, but uni-
ty and diversity together, movement and dialectic. The preface to the
Phenomenology has been described as ‘Hegel’s farewell to Romanticism.’41
But the truth is that Romanticism was saved for philosophy only by way
of that distancing. Only a Romantic who had in some sense overcome
Romanticism could harvest its philosophical fruit.42
The logic of the dialectic is therefore an original discovery by Hegel,
as compared not only to those who came long before him, but also those
who were close to him. If proof of this were wanted, look how Hegel
conducted himself with these later figures. Having rejected Fichte, Kant
would also have rejected Hegel, and more emphatically, because his phi-
losophy did not contain the conditions needed to understand Hegel and
thus really criticize him. But Hegel, who had the resolve to battle the
false tendencies and features of Kant’s philosophy, along with all the
old rubbish scattered behind it, was also the one who showed all of what
Kant had to offer that was truly new and productive – so much so that it
could be said that no one except Hegel has understood Kant.43
Schelling always remained deaf and hostile to his former friend’s
conception. During the half-century that he had still to live, he stub-
bornly opposed his own system, outdated and gone from bad to worse,
to Hegel’s. Sometimes (as in the famous preface to Cousin’s Fragments),
while violently rejecting Hegel’s philosophy, Schelling also complains
that he was robbed, though he never managed to state clearly what the
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other person robbed him of, nor even where his opponent had gone
wrong.44 Hegel, on the other hand, continued to honour Schelling as
the ‘father of the new philosophy,’ recognizing that glimmer of the dia-
lectic that he had in him and always lucidly describing his strengths and
weaknesses.45
If a point of view shows itself more advanced by including views that
are less advanced, if evidence of a theory’s truth comes from its abil-
ity to provide both justification for truths discovered by others and an
account of their mistakes, such evidence was also not lacking in Hegel’s
theory. Kant, who did not fully understand himself, fell into the hands of
neo-Kantians who turned away from his transcendental logic to a purely
naturalist logic. Schelling, who did not fully understand himself, ended
up ingloriously as the second Schelling. But through Hegel, in that great
mind of his, both ended up with him as their spiritual son – a nobler end
than providing exercises for schoolchildren or living on alone in their
misunderstanding of themselves.
3. The Dialectic and the Conception of Reality
To think dialectically and to think about the logical theory of the dia-
lectic are therefore two distinct mental acts. Nonetheless, it is evident
that the second thinking reinforces the first, giving it consciousness of
itself and clearing from its path the obstacles that arise from false ideas
about the nature of philosophical truth. This is exactly what happens
in Hegel, who was not only the great theorist of that dialectical form of
thinking but also the most effective dialectical thinker to appear on the
stage of history. Treated dialectically by Hegel, the ordinary conception
of reality is modified in several ways and totally changes its appearance.
All dualities, all splits, all gaps – all those gashes and wounds that make
reality appear to be torn, so to speak, by the activity of the abstract intel-
lect – all these are filled, closed, and healed, and the whole of reality
becomes unified, a compact unity (gediegene Einheit).46 The coherence
of the organism reasserts itself; blood and life circulate again within it.
We must notice the disappearance, first of all, of a series of dualisms
that are not truly of opposites and not even of distincts. They are false
opposites and false distincts – terms that can be thought neither as con-
stituent components of the concept as universal nor as its particular
forms, the simple reason being that they do not exist as thus formulated.
Hegel (who, while criticizing them, still now and then mentions this dif-
ference that separates them from the others) gives an excellent defini-
555
tion of their origin, which is in the bizarre dream-scenes of abstraction.

They are dualities of terms that emerge from the empirical sciences, from
perceptual and nomothetic consciousness, and from the sciences of the
phenomenon. Precisely because these sciences turn on the phenome-
non, when they strive to rise to the universal they are forced to break
reality up into appearance and essence, external and internal, accident
and substance, manifestation and force, finite and infinite, many and
one, sensible and suprasensible, matter and Spirit, and other such terms.
If these terms were truly distinct (or even if they denoted true distincts),
they would give rise to the problem of the connection of distincts in the
concrete concept.47 If they were true opposites, really opposites (or if
they denoted true and real opposites), they would give rise to the prob-
lem of the synthesis of opposites. Since this is not what they are, howev-
er, they take on the appearance of distincts and opposites only through
the arbitrary abstraction of empiricists, naturalists, and mathematicians.
Criticizing them, then, which results from a negative dialectic, is done
on a principle different from the one that governs the positive dialectic.
In fact, these terms cannot be thought. And every attempt to resolve
the duality by seizing on one or the other of two terms distinguished in
this way turns into the contrary of that term. Materialism preserves the
phenomenon, the matter, the finite, the sensible, the external, and so
on. But since by its nature each term is constituted in a way that calls
up its other, in that finite term we see the infinite rising up again and
taking on the form of a quantitative infinite – of something finite from
which arises something finite, then another finite, and yet another, on
to infinity. This is what Hegel calls false or ‘bad infinity.’48 Supernatural-
ism preserves the second term as the sole reality. But essence apart from
appearance, internal apart from external, infinite apart from finite turn
into something inscrutable and unknowable. And next we get the thing
in itself, which would better be called vacuity in itself – the great mys-
tery which (says Hegel) is the easiest thing to know because the thing
in itself, rather than being apart from thinking, is a product of thinking
itself, of that thinking that has been forced into pure abstraction and
that makes empty self-identity its object. The thing in itself, by reason of
its nothingness, leaves only the phenomenon, the finite, and the exter-
nal as real and thinkable – and it really is finite and external in being a
phenomenon.
The positive correction is provided by the concrete concept, by the
feature that belongs properly to the Hegelian concept and that differen-
tiates it from naturalist and mathematical abstractions. The real is nei-
556
ther the one nor the other of those terms and is not their sum. The real
is the concrete concept that fills the void of the thing in itself and cancels
the distance that used to separate this thing from the phenomenon. It is
the Absolute, which is no longer a parallelism of attributes or a neutral-
ity towards them but a new prominence and significance given to one of
the terms, which, by dint of this new significance, absorbs the other into
itself and merges with it. Substance thus becomes subject; the Absolute
determines itself as Spirit and Idea; and materialism is overcome. Moreo-
ver, reality is no longer something internal in relation to the external. In
keeping with Goethe’s remark, which Hegel accepts and makes his own,
nature has no kernel or shell; it is all one piece.49 The One is not beyond
the many; it is the many. The Spirit is not beyond body; it is the body.
And supernaturalism is overcome.50
This destruction of the falsely distinct and opposite, all of which can be
summed up and represented by the duality of essence and appearance,
is accompanied by the properly dialectical treatment (positive dialectic)
of true opposites, which can all be represented and summarized in the
duality and antithesis of being and non-being. The dualism is based on
real opposition because it would never enter anyone’s mind to deny the
reality of the evil, the false, the ugly, the irrational, and death, along with
the antithesis between all these terms and the good, the true, the beauti-
ful, the rational, and life. Nor does Hegel deny it. Because of his logi-
cal theory, however, which turns the thinking of opposites into the very
conception of reality as development, he cannot treat the negative term,
the side of not-being, as something that stands confronting the other
and detached from it. If there were no negative term, there would be no
development. Reality, and the positive term along with it, would go away.
The negative is the mainspring of development; opposition is the very
soul of the real. The lack of any contact with error is not thinking and
is not truth but is really the absence of thinking and therefore of truth.
Innocence is a feature not of acting but of not acting. Whoever makes
anything makes mistakes. Whoever does anything comes to grips with
evil. True happiness – human or rather manly happiness – is not bliss
without feeling any pain, the bliss approximated only by stupidity and
foolishness. Conditions for bliss of this kind do not exist in the history
of the world, which (says Hegel) ‘shows us blank pages’ where conflict
is lacking.51
If this is true (as doubtless it is, in keeping with deep and widespread
human opinion expressed in the many aphorisms which at times seem
to be Hegel’s phrases), the connection between the ideal and the real,
557
between the rational and the real, cannot be understood as those words
are meant in the philosophy of the schools: namely, as conflict between
a rational that is not real and a real that is not rational. ‘What is real is
rational, and what is rational is real.’52 Idea and fact are the same. In the
domain of scientific thought, for example, what do we call ‘rational’?
Thinking itself. An irrational thought is not thought; as thought, it is
unreal. What do we call rational in the domain of products of art? The
work of art itself. An effect of art, if it is ugly, is not an effect of art. It is
certainly not a reality of art that then acquires the feature of ugliness. It
is artistic unreality. What is called ‘irrational,’ then, is the unreal, and
cannot be considered a species or class of real objects. The unreal also
has its reality, no doubt, but this is the reality of unreality – the reality of
non-being in the dialectical triad, the reality of the nothing that is not
real but is the goad of the real, the mainspring of development.
Standing on the aforesaid teaching that identifies the rational and the
real, those who have spoken of an optimism in Hegel’s conception of
reality and life have grossly misunderstood him. Hegel eliminates nei-
ther the evil nor the ugly nor the false nor the useless. Nothing would
be more alien to his dramatic, and, in a certain sense, tragic conception
of reality. He wants instead to understand the function of evil and error.
And to understand this function is certainly not to deny it as evil and
error but rather to affirm it as such, not closing one’s eyes to the sad
spectacle or distorting it with childish teleological justifications (of exter-
nal finality), as used to be done in the eighteenth century (as Bernardin
de St Pierre used do, for example).53 But the correct point at the bottom
of this claim for Hegel’s supposed optimism is that he cannot be called
pessimistic either, because pessimism is the negation of the positive term
in the dyad of opposites, as optimism is the negation of the negative. And
besides, have there ever been consistent pessimists or optimists, or can
there ever be? No more than there have been consistent monists and
dualists. Every optimist always has a pessimistic side, while every pessimist
proposes a procedure for liberation from evil and error, meaning that he
also has his optimist side.
Good and evil are opposite and correlative terms; asserting one does
not deny the other.54 Hegel, who denies both, preserves both in the dia-
lectical synthesis. He truly stands on high, beyond pessimism and beyond
optimism, on that philosophical Olympus where there is no weeping and
no laughing because laughter and weeping have become objects before
the Spirit, and their agitation is overcome in the serenity of thinking.
The fact – reality – is always rational and ideal, always truth, always wis-
558
dom and moral goodness. The proviso is that the fact be truly fact, the
reality truly reality. What is illogical, stupid, ugly, shameful, or fanciful is
not a fact but the absence of the fact, the void, non-being – at most it is
the need to be true, the goad to reality, certainly not reality. Hegel never
dreamt of accepting what is mistaken and distorted and justifying it as
fact. Is this perhaps a justification for treating it, as he treats it, as some-
thing unreal and vacuous? According to the old saying, nature abhors
a vacuum. But surely the one that abhors the vacuum is the human
because the vacuum is the death of his activity, of his being human.
But if the justification of evil is not to be found in Hegel’s philosophy,
which justifies only the function of evil, it is nonetheless true that Hegel
warned against the glibness and superficiality that typically despairs of
what actually was and is as irrational, even though, precisely because of
its actuality, it cannot be considered irrational. Hegel is the great enemy
of life’s discontents, of sensitive souls, perpetual declaimers, and agita-
tors in the name of reason and virtue, and (to be historically specific
and give an example) the enemy of the Faustian attitude that proclaims
theory to be grey and the tree of life green, rebelling against the laws of
custom and existence, scorning truth and science, and, instead of being
possessed by the heavenly Spirit, falling into the power of the earthly.
Hegel is the enemy of the Encyclopedic humanitarianism and Jacobin-
ism that sets its own delicate heart above hard reality, seeing tyrannies
everywhere, and swindles by despots and priests. He is the enemy of Kan-
tian abstraction, of a duty that keeps itself beyond human feeling.
Hegel hates that virtue which is always in conflict with the world’s move-
ment, which digs up stones to collide with, which never knows exactly
what it wants, but, yes, has a big brain – swollen big – and, if it is seriously
involved with anything, it is to admire itself for its own incomparable
and affecting perfection. Hegel hates the Sollen, the Ought-to-be, the
impotence of the ideal that always ought to be and is not, never finding
any reality adequate since all reality is adequate to the ideal instead. The
destiny of this Ought-to-be is to become tedious, as all the finest words
(Justice, Virtue, Morality, Liberty, and so on) become tedious when they
remain mere words, ringing out thunderously and sterile where others
act and do not fear to stain the purity of the Idea by betraying it in the
deed.
In the conflict between this Ought-to-be, this vainglorious virtue, and
the movement of the world, the world’s movement always wins. Here is
the reason.
Either the movement of the world does not change, and the claims
559
of virtue are revealed to be arbitrary and absurd, meaning that they are
not really virtuous; they remain, at best, good intentions, excellent inten-
tions, and yet ‘the laurels of good intentions are dry leaves that have
never turned green.’55 Or else virtue attains its end and becomes part
of the world’s movement, in which case it is certainly not the movement
of the world that perishes but virtue – virtue detached from the deed,
unless it might wish to keep on living in order to hold a grudge against
its ideal, because it is guilty of becoming real! The illusion arises from
the conflict, which is certainly real, but certainly not a conflict of the
individual with the world – rather a conflict of the world with itself, the
world that makes itself. ‘Everyone wants to be better than his own world,
and believes himself to be so; but whoever is better only shows that his
own world is better than other worlds.’56
So what is this aversion for fact felt by messengers of the Ideal, felt
by devotees of the universal against individuality? Individuality is noth-
ing but the vehicle of universality, its actualization. Nothing can be real-
ized unless it becomes a human passion: nothing great is done without
passion.57 And passion is human activity directed to particular interests
and purposes. Particular interest is so much the vehicle of the universal
that people realize the universal by pursuing their own purposes. They
make a slave of another person, for example, and in each of them, out
of the conflict between slave and master, arises the true idea of liberty
and humanity. With their activity they overcome their conscious inten-
tions and follow immanent intentions, intentions of reason, which takes
advantage of them: this is the ‘cunning of reason’ (die List der Vernunft).58
We must not understand this in a transcendental way. The ‘cunning of
reason’ is the fanciful phrase that denotes the rationality of everything
that humans actually do (any human act at all), with or without reflec-
tive consciousness. In this way, the artist creates the work of art but gives
no account of the labour completed. Although no account is given, the
artist’s labour is not therefore irrational, obedient as it is to the supreme
rationality of genius.
Thus, the good and naively heroic soul believes that it simply follows the
impulse of its own individual feeling. It has no consciousness of its action,
such as the observer and the historian have, but this makes it no less good
or heroic. Great men make their individual passion into their particular
interest, actually willing reason – what is of substance in the needs of their
time and people. They are the ‘business agents’ of the World Spirit.59 And,
just for this reason, those who judge them superficially end up perceiving
only shabby motives in them. They stop at the individual side of their activ-
560
ity, as needful as it is: for the saying is correct, that ‘no one is a hero to his
valet.’ As Hegel observes (and Goethe enjoys repeating the witty phrase),
it works out this way not because the great man is not a great man, but
because the valet is a valet.60 For the same reason, what great men ordinar-
ily get from their contemporaries is not praise and thanks, nor do they
find satisfaction in the public opinion of posterity. What they get is not
praise but immortal glory, by living in the Spirit of the very people who
fight them and yet are completely full of them.
This Hegelian way of looking at life, expressed in terms of current
politics, has been judged to belong to the conservative spirit. It is called
this because, just as Rousseau was the philosopher of the French revolu-
tion, Hegel likewise was the philosopher of the Restoration – in particu-
lar, the Prussian Restoration – the philosopher of the governing Privy
Council and the ruling state bureaucracy.61 Without starting to investi-
gate whether there is more or less factual truth in these claims, however,
it is useful to observe that one must not confuse this Hegel, the historical
individual, who acted in certain given circumstances related to social and
political problems of his time and people – the Hegel who is within the
competence of the biographer and the political historian – with Hegel
the philosopher, who alone is of concern to the historian of philosophy.
If one can extract a political attitude from this and define it historically,
it shows that this is not pure philosophical truth. Philosophy (as Hegel
again observes) should not be mixed with things that do not concern it.
Plato therefore might well spare himself the trouble of giving advice to
nurses on how to hold babies in their arms, and Fichte too might forbear
‘designing’ the model of a police passport so that, according to him, it
ought to be supplied with a picture of the bearer and not just his distin-
guishing features.62
So philosophical was Hegel’s conception of life that conservatism,
revolution, and reaction each finds its justification in it, depending on
events. On this point both Engels the socialist and Treitschke the con-
servative historian are in agreement.63 Both recognize that the formula
identifying the rational with the real could be invoked, at one time or
another, by all political parties and points of view, which thus differ not at
all in the formula that they share but in deciding what is the real rational
and what is irrational and unreal. Every time a political party has readied
itself for war against some institution or social class, it has declared the
enemy irrational, not endowed with real, solid existence, and this has
put the party in line with Hegelian philosophy!
In the revolutions of the nineteenth century, and especially in 1848,
561
all the factions of the Hegelian school participated in various ways; it

was even two Hegelians who wrote the mighty Communist Manifesto in
that year.64 But the formula that they all shared was no empty label. The
meaning it stood for was that the Jacobinism and simpliste attitude of
the Age of Enlightenment were now finished, and that all people, all
parties, had learned from Hegel what the true direction of politics was.
The same Hegel, from his early days, examined conditions in Germany
and defined it as an ‘abstract state’ (ein Gedankenstaat), causing one critic
to recall the Secretary of Florence with his profound analysis of actual
conditions in Italy during the Renaissance.65 Both Cavour and Bismarck
seemed to appear as splendid examples of Hegelian theory – men in
whom the rational and the real were always conjoined and merged, not
alienated from one another in the painful and infertile disagreement
that marks the minds of ideologues and dreamers.66
The result to which this mediation of opposites led, when combined
with the destruction of the distincts and opposites, was the exaltation of
history. History, the life of the human race, facts that develop in time:
these cease to be conceived as something separate and extraneous in
relation to the essence of things, to the idea, or – worse yet – as a dimi-
nution and defilement of the idea. That was how history appeared in
the various dualist systems, not to speak of materialism, which, in deny-
ing every value, could not even accept the value of history. And deep
disagreement arose between historians and philosophers, a reciprocal
failure of understanding. This is not the place to review the oldest forms
of this disagreement, like the philosophy of Descartes, the ultimate anti-
historicism, and Spinozism (Oriental pantheism, as Hegel called it, add-
ing that it was wrong to treat it as atheism and would better be called
acosmism), and all the sensism and intellectualism of the eighteenth cen-
tury.67 And yet history has no place among Hegel’s own contemporaries
– Herbart’s system, for example, which is absolutely devoid of the idea
of development. Nor is there a place for history in the system of Scho-
penhauer, for whom the life of the human race presents no problems
of progress, nor again in the positivist systems of Comte and Spencer.68
In Hegel’s system, by contrast, where infinite and finite merge into one,
where good and evil constitute a single process, history is the very reality
of the Idea, and apart from historical development the Spirit is nothing.
In this system, then, every fact, just because it is fact, is a fact of the Idea
and belongs to the concrete organism of the Idea. For Hegel, all history
becomes sacred history.
One can also speak of general agreement on this point because the
562
great works of history that we owe to Hegel’s influence have always been
emphasized and made objects of admiration: histories of religions, of
languages, of literature, of law, of economics, and of philosophy. A too
simple conception of the matter, however, has caused Hegel’s effect on
the study of history to be treated almost as an accident, owing simply to
the personality of the master, who pursued historical knowledge ardently
and was firmly in command of it. Moreover, this effect seemed to be a
strict consequence neither of the greatly contested dialectical principle
that resolved the opposites and false opposites nor of Hegelian logic in
its most characteristic form. While the promotion of historical studies
was accepted as a great benefit, its true cause was rejected: while the
consequence was accepted, its premise was denied – the sole premise on
which it could be and was based.
The sacred character that history acquires is one aspect of the feature
of immanence that belongs to Hegelian thought, one aspect of its denial
of all transcendence. It was a mistake, certainly, to blame or praise it for
naturalism and materialism. If a philosophy, a philosophy of activity, a
philosophy whose principle is the Spirit and the Idea, uncovers the gen-
esis of those illusions, how could it ever be naturalist or materialist? But if
these words of blame or praise were meant to underline an anti-religious
character, there was something correct in the observation. Hegel’s is a
philosophy (the only philosophy, I would say) that is radically irreligious
because it is not content to set itself against religion or set itself to one
side; it absorbs religion within itself and takes its place. Also, and for
the same reason but from a different perspective, Hegel’s can be called
the only supremely religious philosophy because its aim is to satisfy the
need for religion, which is the highest human need, in a rational way.
It leaves nothing outside of reason, nothing left over: ‘The questions to
which philosophy does not respond have their answer in the fact that
they should not be asked.’69
In the logical doctrine of this philosophy, then, and in the actual think-
ing that conforms to it, lies the unbeatable strength, unexhausted fertil-
ity, and perpetual youthfulness of Hegelian philosophy – the strength,
fertility, and youthfulness that spring back all the livelier in our day, with
the new exuberance of neurotic mysticism and insincere religiosity in
which we participate; with the new anti-historical barbarism presented to
us by positivism; and with the new Jacobinism that often results from this.
Whoever is conscious of human dignity, the dignity of thinking, cannot
be satisfied with any solution to these conflicts and dualisms other than
the dialectical solution, achieved by the genius of Hegel.
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In this respect, the philosopher who can be set alongside Hegel better
than any other is Giambattista Vico. I have already mentioned him as a
precursor of the concrete theory of logic, working like Hegel at aesthet-
ics, a pre-Romantic where Hegel was a Romantic, and resembling Hegel
more closely in his actual dialectical thinking.70 Vico’s attitude to reli-
gion is certainly less radical than Hegel’s. Although from a biographical
point of view Hegel was a rather dubious Christian and not very explicit
in clarifying his position towards the Church, Vico, seen through his
biography, was a completely sincere Catholic who had no doubts. All
of Vico’s thinking, however, is not only anti-Catholic but anti-religious.
The reason is his naturalist explanation for the formation of myths and
religions. And if his refusal to use this principle when facing Hebrew
history and religion was subjectively the timidity of a believer, objectively
it acquires the value of unconscious irony, like Machiavelli’s knowing
irony, when he refused to investigate how states so badly governed by the
Pope might be maintained, because (he said) ‘they are ruled by higher
causes, where the human mind cannot reach.’71
Vico shows that the true is convertible with the made, and that only
the person who has made a thing can really understand it. He therefore
credits humans with full understanding of the human world, because it
is their product, and he refers understanding of the remaining natural
world to God because He only is the one who made it and has knowl-
edge of it. The latter is also a limitation that unfortunately creates an
obstacle to the revolutionary principle announced by Vico, which, once
established for the human world, should necessarily extend to the whole
of reality. So deeply irreligious was the whole gnoseology of this devout
Catholic that, immediately after his death, stories were told that he had
to hide part of his thinking in his books because of restrictions received
from churchmen. In Vico rationalists saw their master, while zealous
Catholics criticized him as the first source of the whole anti-religious
movement of the period after his own time.72
But when we set this religious issue aside, the similarities between Vico
and Hegel are much more obvious. Just as Hegel opposed the anti-his-
toricism of Enlightenment encyclopedists and fought against it, so Vico
opposed the anti-historicism of Descartes and his school. He showed that
philosophers and philologists both had missed half the point, the former
because they did not certify their reasons with the authority of philol-
ogists, the latter because they did not take the trouble to verify their
authority with the reasons of philosophers. As Hegel opposed utopians,
preachers of abstraction, and advocates of sentiment and enjoyment, so
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Vico rejected Stoics and Epicureans alike, accepting only those whom he
called ‘political philosophers.’73 Vico scorned those sages who forgot the
struggles and pains of real life and dictated ‘guides for living that were
as impossible or dangerous for the human condition as it was to regulate
the duties of life by the pleasure of the senses,’ people who established
laws and founded republics ‘resting in the shade,’ states that ‘existed
nowhere but in the minds of the learned.’74 He certainly understood that
‘governments must conform to the nature of the people governed,’ and
that ‘native customs, especially those of natural liberty, do not change all
at once but by degree and over a long time.’75
No less than Hegel, Vico had the concept of the cunning of reason,
and he called it Divine Providence, ‘which from the passions of people
entirely concerned with what is useful to them privately, passions that
would cause them to live like wild animals in the wilderness, has made
the civil orders by which they live in human society.’76 What difference
does it make that people are not conscious of their doing this? The fact is
not thereby less rational. ‘Homo non intelligendo fit omnia … because, when
he understands, man explains his intention and understands things, but,
when he does not understand, he makes these things out of himself and
then he becomes what he turns himself into.’77
‘And should we not say,’ Vico exclaims elsewhere,
that this is the counsel of a superhuman wisdom, which, without force

of law … but by making use of the same human customs whose use is as
free of all force as the freedom whereby humans celebrate their nature …
rules and guides that nature divinely? Humans themselves have made this
world of nations … but it is beyond doubt that this world has arisen from
an intent that often differs from, at times completely opposes, and is always
higher than the particular ends that people have aimed at. In order to pre-
serve human life on this earth, that higher intent has always made use of
these narrow ends and turned them into means that serve broader ends.
Accordingly, humans wish to exercise their animal lust and abandon their
offspring, and out of this they make chaste marriages, whence families
arise. Fathers wish to exercise paternal power over their dependents with-
out restraint, whence cities arise. Ruling orders of nobles wish to abuse the
liberty of lordship that they have over the people, and they become servants
of laws that make popular liberty. Free people wish to be released from the
control of their laws, and they become subjects of monarchs. Monarchs
wish to secure themselves by debasing their subjects with every dissolute
vice, and they dispose them to put up with enslavement to stronger nations.
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Nations wish to destroy themselves, and they make the journeys into the wil-
derness that save them from this, the wilderness from which they rise again,
like the Phoenix. What made all this happen, since it was with intelligence
that people acted as they did, was Mind; since they acted by choice, it was
not Fate; since they acted with constancy, it was not Accident. By acting in
this way, they always get to the same results.78
The concepts – often the same metaphors, images and turns of phrase
– are Hegel’s, which is all the more remarkable in that the German phi-
losopher (it least in the period when he was thinking his philosophy
through and writing The Phenomenology of Spirit) seems not to have known
the other phenomenology that had been thought through a century ear-
lier in Naples under the title of the New Science. It almost seems that the
soul of the Italian Catholic philosopher had migrated into the German
to reappear, more mature and conscious, a century later.
4. The Nexus of Distincts and the False Application of the

Dialectical Form
Now how did it ever happen that this philosophical thinking, so deeply
grounded in logic, so rich in irresistible truth, so harmonized and in
sympathy with the concrete, with passion, with imagination and history,
how did it happen that this thinking seemed instead to be, and hence
has been condemned as, abstract, intellectualist, full of caprices and
devices, in contradiction to history, nature, and poetry – in short, actu-
ally the opposite of what it wanted to be?
How can one explain the violent reaction against it – a successful and
decisive reaction, evidently – since explaining all of this only by adven-
titious motives, by ignorance and lack of intelligence, would be not
thoughtful (and not very Hegelian)? And why, on the other hand, was
this philosophical thinking ever invoked to support trends of the most
different kind, precisely those that Hegel had meant to combat and over-
come – materialism and theism? Why is it that I, for example (allow me
a personal recollection that may not involve a merely personal issue), I
who am writing and have just now interpreted Hegel’s doctrine of the
synthesis of opposites and the resulting conception of reality as both one
and various, commenting on this in such a strong spirit of agreement,
why, during several years of my intellectual life, did I feel strong revul-
sion for Hegel’s system, especially as presented in the Encyclopedia, with
its three-part division of logic, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of
566
Spirit, and as I saw it interpreted and recommended by Hegelians? Why

even now, reading those works again, do I feel the old Adam, the old
repugnance, rising up in me now and then?
We must look for the deep cause of all this, which is to say that
after identifying the healthy part of the system, we must uncover the
unhealthy part; that after explaining what is living in Hegel’s system, we
must expose what is dead in it, the unburied bones that encumber the
very life of what is living.
We must not be too kind-hearted or content with a concession often
made by Hegelians of the strict observance, which consists in admit-
ting that Hegel could have made mistakes and that he was mistaken in
many claims about historical, scientific, and mathematical matters, both
because of the state of knowledge in his day and also because of the
limitations of his own education: hence, this whole part of the system
is certainly to be revised and corrected, even remade from top to bot-
tom, by taking account of the progress that has occurred in those special
branches of learning. Only the historical and scientific Hegel would be
defective and superseded, in other words, meaning that the philosopher,
who never bases his own true findings on empirical data, would remain
untouched. Opponents, quite correctly, cannot be satisfied with this
concession. What excites aversion for Hegel’s system is certainly not the
quality or quantity of learning contained in it (highly admirable learn-
ing, even with its deficiencies and obsolete content), but precisely the
philosophy. I refused earlier to treat the influence of Hegel’s thought
on the study of history as something independent and separate from the
actual principles of the system. Now, for the same reason, I cannot bring
myself to treat the cause of his errors as independent of his philosophi-
cal principles. What have seemed to be his historical and scientific errors
are at bottom, or for the most part, philosophical errors because they
were shaped by a thought that he had, by his way of conceiving of history
and natural science. Hegel is all one piece, and it is to his credit that his
errors, taken together, cannot be explained as an accidental series of
inconsistencies and inadvertencies.
The problem, then, is to discover what might have been the philosoph-
ical error or errors (or the basic mistake and others derived from it) that
combined and blended in Hegel’s thinking with his immortal discovery.
This may give us the reason for the reaction against the Hegelian system,
inasmuch as that reaction was not the usual resistance encountered by
all original truths but clearly had a rational character. And since, in keep-
ing with what we have already noted, the logic of philosophy formed the
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special field of Hegel’s intellectual activity, the presumption is that the

cause of error is to be found in that area – namely, in an error of logical
theory.
As far as method is concerned, anti-Hegelian criticism has therefore
been correct in generally ignoring the system’s particulars and details,
attacking the principle of the synthesis of opposites itself and trying to
prove it wrong either because the two primary terms are not opposite or
because their synthesis is not logical or because it destroys the principle
of identity and contradiction and so on. But in substance, as we have
seen, none of those objections is well founded. And any other objection
that happens to be devised shows itself to be unfounded, for the princi-
ple triumphantly resists and will resist all revision and every assault. The
upshot is that Hegel’s mistake is indeed to be found in his logic, but, as
far as I can see, in a different part of his logic. Starting with a quick look
at Hegel’s various teachings, I barely mentioned the problem of distincts
– or what naturalistic logic would call the theory of classification – because
it was important to get straight to the problem of dialectic.79 It is appro-
priate now to deal with this issue more closely. Here, in my firm opinion,
is the location of the logical mistake, pregnant with consequences, that
Hegel made.
Just as the philosophical concept, the universal-concrete or Idea, is a
synthesis of opposites, so is it also a synthesis of distincts. We talk about
the Spirit, for example, or about spiritual activity in general, but we
also constantly talk about particular forms of this spiritual activity. And
while treating them all as constitutive of humanity (a gap in any of them
offends us and makes us seek a remedy, and its total or near absence hor-
rifies us as absurd or monstrous), we are also watchful and jealous lest
one form be confused with another.
This is why we disapprove of anyone who judges art by moral criteria
or morality by artistic criteria or science by utilitarian criteria, and so on.
Should the distinction be entirely forgotten, a glance at life would surely
remind us of it – life, which shows us the spheres of economic, scientific,
ethical, and artistic activity as somehow distinct even on the surface, and
makes a single person appear specified now as a poet, now as a business-
man, now as a statesman, now as a philosopher. And philosophy itself
would remind us of this since philosophy can explain itself only as speci-
fied in aesthetics, logic, ethics, and the like. All are philosophy, but each
of them is still a philosophy distinct from another philosophy.
These distincts, of which we have given examples and which are unity
and distinction together, constitute a nexus or a rhythm that would be
568
poorly expressed in the ordinary theory of classification.80 Hegel saw

this quite clearly, and he never stopped fighting against the schema of
empirical classification, with its concepts conceived as subordinate and
coordinate, when it was transposed into philosophy. A concept stands at
the base of ordinary classification; then another concept, extraneous to
the first, is introduced, and this is taken to be the basis of division, like
a knife cutting a cake (the first concept) into a number of pieces that
remain separate from one another. Use a procedure that gives a result
like this, and goodbye to the unity of the universal. Reality breaks into
various components, extraneous and indifferent to one another. This
makes philosophy, the thinking of unity, impossible.
Hegel’s abhorrence of this classifying method, in fact, caused him to
discard the notion of faculties of the soul, which Kant still held on to
– and to discard it before Herbart, who was wrongly celebrated as the
inventor of this criticism.81 In the words of a work written in 1802, Hegel
rejected as false the psychology ‘that represents the Spirit as a sack full of
faculties.’ This view he repeats in different forms and on different occa-
sions, as in the Encyclopedia (¶379, cf. 445), and in all his other books:
‘the sense we have of the Spirit’s living unity is opposed in itself to the
fragmenting of the Spirit into various forces, faculties or activities, what-
ever they may be, conceived independently of one another.’82
Notice that Hegel, always ‘sollicitus servandi unitatem spiritus,’ could
make this criticism with far more justice and far more consistency than
Herbart, who never managed to harmonize his refutation of the faculties
of the soul with his atomist metaphysics or with an ethics and aesthet-
ics consisting of catalogues of ideas, each divided from the others, each
unrelated to the others.83 But so it goes: according to authors of psychol-
ogy textbooks and histories of philosophy, Herbart passes for a revolu-
tionary in dealing with the mind, while Hegel is essentially a reactionary
who would have preserved the scholastic divisions.
If distinct concepts cannot be posited separately and must be posited
as unified in their distinctiveness, the logical theory of distincts will not
be the theory of classification but the theory of implication. The concept
will not be cut into pieces by an extraneous force but will divide on its
own by internal movement, and in these self-distinctions it will be pre-
served as one. One distinct will stand in relation to another distinct not
as something neutral but as a lower level stands in relation to a higher, or
the reverse. The classification of reality must be replaced by the notion
of levels of the Spirit, or, in general, of reality. The theory of classification
must be replaced by the theory of levels.84 On this path Hegel’s thinking
569
began its journey, the only path suited to the principle from which it
moved, the concrete universal. The theory of levels runs through all his
books, although there is no place where he argues and explains it fully
and explicitly.
In this theory he also had forerunners whom we should investigate.
Here too the philosopher perhaps closest to him is Vico, who never made
distinctions about the Spirit, languages, governments, laws, customs, and
religions except as a sequence of levels. Spirit is ‘sense,’ ‘imagination,’
and ‘mind’; languages are ‘divine mental language,’ ‘heroic’ language,
and the language of ‘articulate speech’; governments are ‘theocratic,’
‘aristocratic,’ and ‘democratic’; laws are ‘divine’ law established by the
gods, ‘heroic’ established by force, and ‘human’ established by fully
developed human reason; and so on. Therefore Vico also conceived of
philosophy not as a series of separate compartments but as ‘ideal eternal
history, whereupon particular histories run their course in time.’85
Though Hegel may not have known Vico, there were other influences
pushing him towards the solution at which he always aimed. Despite the
poverty of its categories and assumptions, even the sensism of the eight-
eenth century, especially Condillac’s doctrine, certainly seemed valuable
to him inasmuch as it included the attempt to make intelligible, by dem-
onstrating their genesis, the variety of activities in the Spirit’s unity.86
He criticizes Kant, who had simply enumerated faculties and categories
by making tables, and follows this with high praise for Fichte, who had
confirmed the need for the ‘deduction’ of the categories. But Hegel’s
real and authentic precedent was Schelling’s system of identity, with its
method of potentializing whereby reality developed as a series of poten-
cies or levels.87 ‘The subject-object,’ – in his retort to Hegel, Schelling
himself recollected his own youthful notion in this way – ‘in virtue of
its nature, objectifies itself, but it returns victorious from all objectivity
and shows itself at a higher power of subjectivity every time until, having
exhausted all its virtuality, it appears as subject, triumphant over all.’88
What does the theory of levels mean? What are its terms? How do they
relate? What is the difference between this theory and that of opposites
in regard to terms and relations? In the theory of levels, every concept –
let it be concept a – is distinct and at the same time united with concept
b at the next higher level. Hence, even though a is posited without b, b
cannot be posited without a.
Choosing for the relation of two concepts an example that I have stud-
ied at length elsewhere, that of art and philosophy (or, as others like to
put it, poetry and prose, language and logic, intuition and concept, and
570
so on), one sees how an impenetrable enigma and a headache for empir-
ical and classificatory logic is easily resolved in speculative logic thanks
to the theory of levels.89 It is not possible to posit art and philosophy as
two distinct and coordinate species of one genus – cognitive form, for
example – to which both are subordinate in such a way that the presence
of one excludes the other, as happens with parts of the same order. Proof
of this are the many distinctions that have been given, and continue to
be given, between poetry and prose, all of them completely empty, based
on arbitrary features.
But the knot is untied when the relation is understood as one of dis-
tinction and unity together. Poetry can exist without prose, but does
not exclude it, while prose can never exist without poetry. Art does not
exclude philosophy, but philosophy absolutely includes art. In fact, no
philosophy exists except in the words, images, metaphors, figures of
speech, and symbols that are its artistic side. So real and indispensable
are they that, where they are absent, philosophy itself would be absent
since philosophy unexpressed is not conceivable. A person thinks by
speaking. The same demonstration can be made by taking other dyads
of philosophical concepts: the passage from law to morality, for example,
or the passage from perceptual consciousness to nomothetic conscious-
ness. The real, which is one, divides within itself, grows upon itself, if we
talk like Aristotle, or, if we talk like Vico, reality runs the course of its
ideal history.90 At the final level, which combines all prior levels in itself,
reality joins up with itself, entirely developed or wholly unfolded.
Should we move now from the relation between levels a and b (art and
philosophy in the example chosen) to the relation between opposites
in the synthesis, a, b, and g (being, non-being, and becoming in the
example), we will be able to see the logical difference between the two
relations: a and b are two concepts, the second of which would be arbi-
trary and abstract without the first, although, in its nexus with the first,
the second is as real and concrete as the first; a and b apart from g, by
contrast, are not two concepts but two abstractions: the only concrete
concept is g, becoming.
If we apply arithmetic symbols to each nexus, in the first we have a
dyad, in the second a unity – or, if we prefer, a triad that is a triunity. If
we want to say that the synthesis of opposites and the nexus of levels are
both (objective) dialectic, we must then not lose sight of the fact that one
dialectic works differently than the other. If our wish is to apply Hege-
lian designations of moments and overcoming – abolishing and preserving at
the same time – to one nexus as well as the other, we will need to notice
571
that these designations take on a different meaning in each nexus. In

the theory of levels, in fact, the two moments are both concrete, as has
been noted. In the synthesis of opposites, both are abstract – pure being
and non-being. In the nexus of levels, a is overcome in b, abolished as
independent but preserved as dependent. The Spirit, passing from art to
philosophy, negates art and at the same time preserves it as an expressive
form of philosophy. In the nexus of opposites objectively considered,
both a and b, which are distinct from one another, are abolished and
preserved, but only metaphorically, because they never exist distinctly
as a and b.
These are deep differences that make it impermissible to treat each
nexus in the same way. The true is not in the same relation to the false
as it is to the good. The beautiful is not in the same relation to the ugly
as it is to philosophical truth. Life without death and death without life
are two opposed falsities whose corresponding truth is life, which is the
nexus of life and death, of itself and its opposite. But truth without good-
ness and goodness without truth are not two falsities that are annulled
in a third term. They are false conceptions that are resolved in a nexus
of levels wherein truth and goodness are distinct and united at the same
time. Goodness without truth is impossible in that it is impossible to will
the good without thinking. Truth without goodness is possible only in
the sense that it coincides with the philosophical thesis of the prece-
dence of the theoretical spirit over the practical, with the theorems of
the autonomy of art and the autonomy of science.
Since it is a concrete concept, or rather since it presents the concrete
concept in one of its particularizations, a is doubtless also a synthesis of
affirmation and negation, of being and non-being. Thus, always com-
ing back to the same example, artistic imagination lives as imagination,
and therefore it is concrete. It is activity affirming itself against passivity,
beauty affirming itself against ugliness. And, as a consequence, being
and non-being are particularized as truth and falsity, beauty and ugli-
ness, goodness and wickedness, and so on. But this conflict does not take
place at one level in relation to another since those levels, considered
in their distinctiveness, are the concept of the Spirit in its determina-
tions, certainly not the universal concept of the Spirit considered in its
deep structure as the synthesis of opposites. The organism is the struggle
of life against death. But parts of the organism do not thereby struggle
against one another, hand against foot or eye against hand! The Spirit
is development; the Spirit is history; and thus it is being and non-being
together – becoming. But the Spirit sub specie aeterni, which philosophy
572
deals with, is ideal eternal history and extra-temporal.91 It is the series

of eternal forms of that being-born and dying, which, as Hegel said, is
never itself born and never dies.92 This point is essential. If it is ignored,
misunderstanding occurs, as the witty Lotze once noted: When the serv-
ant removes the master’s boots, it does not follow that the concept of the
servant removes boots for the concept of the master!93
As soon as we state that Spirit is not content with art, and that, because
of this discontent, it is driven to raise itself to philosophy, the statement
is correct, except that we must not let ourselves be misled by metaphors.
The Spirit that is no longer content with artistic contemplation is no
longer the spirit of art, which has already been left behind to become
incipient philosophical spirit. In the same way, the Spirit that feels itself
not content with philosophical universality and thirsts for insight and life
is already philosophical spirit no longer but aesthetic spirit, a given aes-
thetic spirit that begins to fall in love with various visions and a particular
insight. As in the second case, likewise in the first: the antithesis does
not arise in the heart of the level left behind. Just as philosophy does not
contradict itself as philosophy, so art does not contradict itself as art. And
everyone knows the complete contentment, the deep and untroubled
pleasure, that the work of art causes us to enjoy. The individual spirit
passes from art to philosophy and then back again from philosophy to
art in the same way that it passes from one form of art to another or from
one problem of philosophy to another: namely, not through contradic-
tions intrinsic to each of these forms in its distinctiveness, but through
the contradiction which itself is inherent in the real, which is becoming.
Universal Spirit passes from a to b and from b to a through no necessity
other than that of its own eternal nature, which is to be art and philoso-
phy together, or theory and praxis, or as otherwise determined.
So true is this that if the ideal passage had been caused by a contradic-
tion that would be revealed to be intrinsic to a particular level, it would
no longer be possible to return to that level, once it was recognized as
contradictory: to return there would be a degeneration or a regression.
And who would ever dare treat reading or writing poetry – immersing
oneself, after doing philosophy, in the aesthetic contemplation of a
painting or a piece of music – as degenerate or regressive? Who would
ever judge one or the other of the essential forms of the human spirit
to be mistaken and contradictory? That passing of ideal history is not a
passing, or, better, it is an eternal passing, which, under the optic of eter-
nity, is a being.
Hegel did not make the most important distinction between the the-
573
ory of opposites and the theory of distincts, which I have attempted to

clarify. He conceived the nexus of levels dialectically, in the manner of
the dialectic of opposites. And he applied to this nexus the triadic form
that belongs to the synthesis of opposites. The theory of distincts and
the theory of opposites became one and the same for him. Moreover,
it was almost inevitable that this should happen because of the peculiar
psychological state in which a person finds himself when he has discov-
ered a great and deep truth (in this case, the synthesis of opposites). He
is so tyrannized by his own discovery, so drunk on the new wine of that
truth, that he sees it right in front of him everywhere, and he is drawn
to conceive everything according to the new form. The relations, which
are both strict and subtle, that connect the theory of distincts with that
of opposites and connect both with the theory of the universal concrete
and the Idea, also made it almost inevitable that this would happen. Just
as in the theory of opposites, so also in the theory of levels – as we have
seen – there are different moments that are overcome or eliminated,
and, at the same time, preserved. There is also unity and distinction in
the theory of levels, just as there is in the theory of opposites. Making out
these differences was reserved for a later historical era, by which time the
new wine was seasoned and aged.94
At every step in Hegel’s system, where the relation of distinct concepts
is always presented as a relation of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, we
find proofs, so to speak, of the distinction that was not made, or rather of
the muddle that was made.95 Thus, there is natural soul (thesis), sensitive
soul (antithesis), and real soul (synthesis) in his anthropology; theoreti-
cal spirit (thesis), practical spirit (antithesis), and free spirit (synthesis)
in his psychology, and also intuition (thesis), representation (antithesis),
and ethics (synthesis); or, likewise, in this last area, family (thesis), civil
society (antithesis), and state (synthesis);96 in the sphere of absolute
Spirit, art (thesis), religion (antithesis), and philosophy (synthesis); or
concept (thesis), judgment (antithesis), and syllogism (synthesis) in the
sphere of subjective logic; and in the logic of the Idea, life (thesis), cog-
nition (antithesis), and absolute Idea (synthesis). And so on.
This is the first case of that abuse of the triadic form in Hegel’s system
that has so greatly offended and still offends people, and it was fair to
call it out as an abuse. For who will ever be persuaded that religion is
the non-being of art and that art and religion are two abstractions that
possess truth only in philosophy, the synthesis of both? Why suppose that
practical spirit is the negation of the theoretical and that representation
is the negation of intuition, with civil society negating the family and
574
morality negating right? Why conclude that each of these concepts is

unthinkable apart from their synthesis – free spirit, thinking, ethics, and
the state – in the same way as being and non-being, which are untrue
except in becoming?
Sometimes Hegel does not keep faith with triadic form, of course; in
certain propositions written when he was young, he had already stated
that ‘quadratum est lex naturae, triangulum mentis.’97 But more often,
in the midst of particular developments, he mitigated the mistakes of
the triadic form, though there is no particular determination that could
eliminate the basic assumption of division. At other times, the triadic
form almost seems to be a way of using an image to explain thoughts
that do not get their rich truth from that form. But accepting that inter-
pretation would amount to discrediting the logical value of the triadic
form, which is just the value that it preserves most fully in the dialectic
or synthesis of opposites. And besides, to undertake a defense of Hegel’s
claims with external arguments would be behaving like a lawyer who
wants to win by cleverness rather than truth, or, worse, like a swindler
who puts good gold coins in front of us in order to slip bad metal in
amidst the confusion.
The mistake is not one that might be corrected along the way, nor
is it a mistake in wording. It is a substantial mistake, which, as minor it
might seem in the summary version that I have given (namely, a con-
fusion between the theory of distincts and the theory of opposites),
produces the most serious consequences – those being (unless I have
misunderstood) that it is the source of everything philosophically wrong
in Hegel’s system. It will be useful now to examine it piece by piece.
5. The Metamorphosis of Mistakes into Particular Concepts and

Levels of Truth (The Structure of the Logic)
Since Hegel’s thought is vigorous and systematic, of course, applying the

dialectic of opposites to the relation of distincts was a process carried out
with all logical rigour, as one might expect. The results should have been
two, as indeed they were. On the one hand, items that are philosophi-
cal mistakes came to acquire the value of partial or particular concepts,
of distinct concepts. On the other hand, those that really are distinct
concepts were devalued as mere attempts at the truth, incomplete and
imperfect truths, meaning that they took on the appearance of philo-
sophical mistakes. The first of these results determined the structure of
the logic, which exists more than embryonically in The Phenomenology
575
of Spirit and is then set forth systematically in the great Science of Logic
(1812−1816) and in the small Logic of the Encyclopedia (1817, 1827,
1830).98 The second result determined the character of Hegel’s aesthet-
ics and gave rise to the two philosophical sciences of history and nature.
What these three sciences are can be seen mainly in the Encyclopedia and
in the posthumously published courses of lectures.
To start with the first point, when opposites and distincts are con-
fused, abstract moments of the concept (a synthesis of opposites, in
its concreteness and truth) are naturally treated as taking on the same
functions that lower distinct concepts have in relation to the higher. In
relation to becoming, for example, being and nothing are two abstrac-
tions, but by analogy they become two levels, like levels in a series of
distincts – intuition, thinking, and practical activity, for example, where
the two concepts of intuition and thinking have this relation to the third
level of practical activity. But when each of those two abstractions, being
and nothing, is taken separately by itself, what are they except two falsi-
ties or mistakes?
According to Hegel, in fact, the first corresponds to the view of the
Eleatics or similar philosophical movements that treat the Absolute sim-
ply as being and God as nothing other than the whole of all reality, the
Most Real. The second abstraction corresponds to the Buddhist view that
treats Nothing as the foundation of things, as the true Absolute. These
are two opposing philosophical mistakes, therefore, and yet they are also
alike since both profess to think of supreme reality as the indeterminate
and abstract. And what are intuition and thinking, on the other hand, if
not two truths? The first term includes all of mankind’s imaginative activ-
ity, and, in its theoretical guise, this gives rise to a particular philosophi-
cal science, to aesthetics. The second stands at the head of all human
scientific activity, and, in its theoretical guise, this gives rise to the science
of science, to logic. These two are not unreal abstractions, then, but two
real and concrete concepts.
On that assumption, the result is clear. By confusing the dialectic of
opposites with the nexus of distincts, by making the opposites, taken
abstractly, fulfill the same functions as distinct concepts, those mistakes
are turned into truths – particular truths, truths of lower levels of the
Spirit, but still functions or categories that are needed. And when these
mistakes have been baptized as truths of a certain type, there is no longer
any impediment to treating all mistakes – error in general – as special
cases of truth. In that way, the phenomenology of error takes on the
appearance of an ideal history of truth. This baptism, this transfigura-
576
tion, has appeared, and to many will still appear, as the recognition of a
deep and important truth. Do we not often speak, even in ordinary lan-
guage, of productive mistakes, of mistakes that open the way to truth? Do
we not say that the human race has learned more from various mistakes
than from many truths?
The Eleatics were wrong to conceive of the Absolute simply as being,
but that mistake of theirs also confirms a completely solid, yet partial,
truth: that even the Absolute is being. Descartes and Spinoza were wrong
to claim a parallelism of spirit and body, of thought and extension. But if,
by means of that mistake, the distinction between the two terms had not
been fixed and emphasized, how would it have been possible to conceive
of their concrete unity? Kant was mistaken in presenting the antinomies
as insoluble, but that led him to recognize the need for the antinomies,
the bases of the dialectic. Schelling was mistaken in conceiving of the
Absolute as mere identity, but that mistake of his was the bridge needed
to pass over to a conception of the Absolute as unity in opposition and
distinction. Without the Platonic transcendence of ideas, how would the
merely logical concept of Socrates have changed into the Aristotelian
composite? Without Hume’s sceptical denial, how would Kant’s synthetic
a priori ever have emerged?
Whoever claims that truth is born without error, claims there is a child
without a father. Whoever despises error, despises truth itself, which is
incomprehensible without those previous mistakes, which therefore per-
sist as eternal aspects of truth.
Here too, however, my advice is to analyse the real issue and not let
ourselves be misled by metaphors. If there is something in a mistake that
gives rise to its being designated a productive mistake, a fertile mistake,
and the like, then it is a not a mistake, but a truth. Dealing with some
doctrine globally, we declare it to be mistaken, but when we deal with it
in more detail, it comes apart into a series of assertions of which some
are true and others false. Productivity and fertility lie in the true claims,
surely not in the false, which cannot even be called assertions.
In the Eleatic doctrine, then, the assertion that the Absolute is being is
true, but the assertion that it is only being is false. Even in the supreme
realization of its truth, that ‘the Absolute is the Spirit,’ the Absolute is
being, even though it is no longer mere being.99 Likewise, the distinc-
tion between spirit and body and between thought and extension in the
Cartesian and Spinozan parallelism is correct, at least in a certain sense,
but how this distinction is produced remains to be explained. The false
explanation is the hasty metaphysical theorizing that explains those two
577
terms by making them into two manifestations of God or two attributes

of substance, thereby converting the problem into a solution. Likewise
again, the truth in Platonic transcendentalism is the value given to the
Idea as something no longer merely subjective but real as well. The fal-
sity is the detaching of ideas from real things, putting them in a world
that we cannot succeed in thinking about, and, by that act of imagining,
confusing them once again with real and finite things.
What is false in each of these doctrines is what stimulates progress,
assuredly. It is non-being, a necessary moment of development. Without
doubt, without contradiction, without perplexity and dissatisfaction, we
would not go forward. Man would not win the truth because he would
cease thinking – he would cease to be altogether, in fact. By now the
issue is well known to us. It is the principle of the synthesis of opposites,
which was explained above and fully accepted. But that principle, while
it asserts the synthesis of being and non-being, does not thereby get the
power to change non-being into being, darkness into light, a stimulus
to progress into progress, error into partial truth or a level of truth. The
error that is preserved in truth as a level or a particular aspect of it is
that aspect of truth contained in the doctrines that we designate as mis-
taken. This great measure of truth is the real subject of the history of the
sciences, while error as error is the hemisphere of darkness which the
light of truth has not yet illuminated. We produce the history of progres-
sive enlightenment, not of the darkness, which has no history because it
accompanies all history. Therefore, the transmutation of mistakes into
truths (the prime consequence of the application, that Hegel let himself
fall into, of the dialectic of opposites to the nexus of distincts) is false, as
the application from which it results is false.
If these clarifications that I have offered, these canons of judgment that
I have settled on, are correct, we are now in a position to give an account
of the problem and the structure of Hegel’s Logic – not, of course, an
account of the principle behind Hegel’s logical teachings (the concrete
concept) and its various particular points (the theory of opposites, of
distinct, and so on) that have already been discussed in the preceding
chapters. Our account is of the particular thought that moved Hegel to
conceive a basic science that he named Logic or a Science of Logic, develop-
ing it in three sections: a logic of Being, a logic of Essence, and a logic of
the Concept. It is a science which, not without reason, has seemed strange
and obscure, rigorous in appearance but actually arbitrary at every step,
something incomprehensible because it provides no sure point of pur-
chase or support.
578
The problem of Hegel’s Logic (as it follows from the main body of that
book) is to examine the various definitions of the Absolute, to make a
critique of all forms of philosophy in order to demonstrate, by way of
their difficulties and contradictions, the truth of that philosophy which
treats the Absolute as Spirit or Idea. At the same time, this critique shows
that aspects of truth revealed by various philosophies find their justifica-
tion in this position, and that this philosophy is therefore the product of
all the efforts of human thought, just as it was what those efforts aspired
to. In the Logic, then, all these pass before us, indicated sometimes by
name, sometimes by allusions and references: Oriental emanationism,
Buddhism, Pythagoreanism, Eleaticism, Heracliteanism, Democritean
atomism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, the doctrines of pantheists, scep-
tics, and Gnostics, of Christianity, St Anselm, and scholasticism, and then
the doctrines of Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, Hume, Kant,
Fichte, Schelling, Jacobi, Herder, and other philosophical points of view.
In the words of an English writer, who means something rather differ-
ent from what I intend, this is the ‘pathology of thinking.’100 This is the
polemic through which every philosophy, disagreeing to some extent
with other philosophies and hostile to them, asserts and maintains its
life against them.
This polemic, if we have a correct view of it, can proceed in two dif-
ferent ways, one of which assumes the other as its basis. The various
philosophies with their partially mistaken viewpoints can be studied in
their individuality, in the particular form adopted by them in different
thinkers at different times, in chronological order: the result is the his-
tory of philosophy, which, like any real history, is history and critique
at the same time. Or else the objects of study are the general possibili-
ties of philosophical error and the persistent sources of those mistakes
that arise from confusing philosophy with various other activities of the
human spirit.101 In the latter case, the polemic against error is philoso-
phy itself, the whole system, since the reasons behind mistakes become
clear only when the system as a whole has been developed. While for rea-
sons of presentation a polemic against error can be located sometimes at
the beginning, sometimes in the middle, and sometimes at the end of a
philosophical theory, the polemic is logically inseparable from the phi-
losophy itself: as Bacon said, just as the straight line measures both itself
and the curve, so is ‘verum index sui et falsi.’102 Or, as we commonly say,
every assertion is at the same time a negation. This critique, which is the
system as a whole, is then the real basis of the other critique that is the
history of philosophy.
579
With the affirmative propositions of his own philosophy, Hegel did a

magnificent job of criticizing philosophical mistakes. This is certainly
true within the limits of his system, at least up to the point where the
errors of the system itself prevented him from seeing farther into the
mistakes of others. In any case, he did this with a grandeur and rich-
ness beyond the scope of any other philosopher except Aristotle. For the
earlier development of Greek thought, Aristotle stands just where Hegel
stands for all the philosophy that arose since the Greek era, and also
since the Oriental era, up to his own time. This is why Hegel’s Logic has
often been compared to Aristotle’s Metaphysics and placed alongside it.103
This is also why Hegel reached heights in his History of Philosophy never
before attained and rarely since – so much that he is considered the true
founder of the history of philosophy, no longer understood as literary
history or as a collection of learned information but as internal history,
as the account that philosophy itself gives of its own origin in time, as the
grand autobiography of philosophical thinking.
However, by reason of the confusion created between the dialectic and
the nexus of distincts, along with the resulting concept of mistakes as
particular truths, Hegel was not happy with the two types of polemic
mentioned above. He attempted a third way, which is the one made con-
crete in the structure of the Logic. Mistakes are treated there as distinct
concepts, as categories, and the project is to deduce or develop mistakes
in the way that categories, or distinct concepts, are deduced and devel-
oped. In this logic the method that belongs to truth is applied to non-
truth. In this desperate effort, this forced and spasmodic attempt at the
impossible, what was bound to happen? ‘S’il est difficile, c’est fait; s’il est
impossible, on le fera,’ said a courtier-minister of the ancien régime. And
by an act of will he did the impossible, leading the state into ruin and
provoking the Revolution.104 In a similar way, the will reigns supreme in
the structure of the logic that Hegel constructed.
He starts with the starting point. Hegel always gave himself great trou-
ble about this problem of the starting point, likewise the problem of how
to provide an introduction to philosophy (the dispute about the place of
the Phenomenology in his system is well known – a meaningless dispute).
And yet he himself recognizes full well that philosophy is a ‘circle,’ and
by that statement he implicitly declares that an obligatory point of depar-
ture is impossible. We enter the circle at any point, and philosophy also
at any point.105 Either we start with the concept of the Spirit in general
and then proceed by determinations: starting with the simplest concept,
and proceeding by sequential complications; or with the most complex
580
concept, proceeding by decomposition; or with some intermediate con-

cept, going back and forth. Or else we start with some philosophical
problem or inquiry or critique of mistakes, moving up from those issues
to a complete system.
And thus everyone starts to philosophize, and this is the reality: each
one has his own first, tÕ prîton prÕj ¹m©j, and as far as learning is con-
cerned there is no prîton fÚsei.106 Choosing one starting point rather
than another is, at most, a question of pedagogical convenience. On the
other hand, if the problem of the starting point has no meaning for phi-
losophy, it is still true that philosophy, objectively considered, has its own
first, its own prîton fÚsei – a first that is also last, the first that is a circle,
and, for example, in Hegel’s philosophy, is the Spirit or the Idea. But in
the Logic, inasmuch as it is an inquiry into a series of mistakes, how can
we ever conceive of a first that is first by necessity, prîton fÚsei? Hegel
started with pure being, with an inquiry into philosophical systems that
define the Absolute as simple being, and he tried repeatedly to justify
this starting point, but in vain. It was a starting point like any other, as
justified as any other, but unjustifiable when it claims to be justified as
the only starting point.
Why not start with philosophies that locate the root of things in one or
another of the cosmic elements, in the water of Thales or the air of Anax-
imenes? Why not begin with sensist philosophies for which the Absolute
is the relative and reality is the phenomenon? Or make it pure being: but
an inquiry starting there has a ‘commanded’ first principle like the one
posited in mathematical disciplines.107 Otherwise, the route followed has
a purely biographical, autobiographical, or aesthetic meaning. In fact,
the Phenomenology, starting with the certitude of the senses, and the Logic,
starting with pure being, take a route that here and there reminds us of
a philosophical novel of some sort – Émile or the voyage of the Irishman
searching for the best religion.108 When the starting point is arbitrary,
the rest is arbitrary. Without resorting to the remedy of learning Hegel’s
Logic by rote, keeping it in mind is not easy. It lacks parts that generate
one another necessarily. Triads follow on triads, but does one triad con-
nect with another triadically, as the method would suggest? It seems not.
After the first triad of being, non-being, and becoming comes the cat-
egory of determinate being (Daseyn). But because the connection was
there, determinate being should arise as the antithesis of becoming, as
the not-becoming of becoming. But Hegel said instead that determinate
being corresponds to the pure being of the preceding sphere.109 Accord-
ingly, one critic has interpreted the series of triads in Hegel’s logic not
581
as a great unbroken chain but as a single fundamental triad into which

other triads are inserted, and still others could be inserted, in addition
to those that Hegel listed, those that he stopped with as if he were giving
examples.
On that interpretation, however, the necessary ascent by levels from
pure being to Idea (which was the design of the Logic) is declared to be
an illusion. In other words, that book is treated as a miscellany of criti-
cisms aimed at assertions of abstract terms that are resolved in dialecti-
cal syntheses. And one must add that the criticisms concern not only
abstract opposites but also false opposites. Hence, it was not altogether
wrong to note a certain alteration of method in the Logic as it moves up
from the first categories to the last. The content of the critique clearly
changes as it passes from errors concerning being to those that refer to
essence and the concept. Thus, Hegel himself says that ‘in being, there
is another and a passing-over into another; in essence, the appearing in
the opposite; and in the concept, the distinction of the singular from
universality, which continues as such in what is distinct from it and is also
in a relation of identity with the distinct.’110
While there is no necessary connection among the parts of Hegel’s
Logic, it does nonetheless show the effects of tendencies befitting the
thought-content that has been forced into those schemata as if they were
the bed of Procrustes. That content, as I have already said, could be
developed only in the form of an exposition of a complete philosophical
system (in this case, as a philosophy of Spirit) or in the form of a history
of philosophy. The treatment in the Logic approximates one type in some
places, the other type in other places.
There is an attempt at a history of philosophy, for example, in the
order of the first categories, where Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Dem-
ocritus appear in succession. And then Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant
appear in other sections. The first part of the doctrine of the concept
contains the critique of the Aristotelian analytic, and the second part
contains the critique of Leibniz’s monadology. A stronger tendency is
for the Logic to turn itself into a philosophy (theoretical, not empirical)
of the Spirit, of various cognitive and practical forms in their necessary
linkage. Thus, the gnoseology of the arithmetic process appears in the
doctrine of being (the section on quantity), and the gnoseology of the
natural sciences in the doctrine of essence. The concepts of the mechan-
ical and chemical are clarified in one part of the sections that deal with
objectivity. In the doctrine of the concept (first part) is the logic of the
concept, of judgment, and of the syllogism; and then (in the third part)
582
comes the more properly philosophical logic. And in sections dealing

with teleology and life there is a sketch of a philosophy of nature. Practi-
cal philosophy comes into view in sections on the will (the section on
the Idea). Finally, ethics is not entirely excluded. In the compendium of
logic found in the Propaedeutic of 1808−1812, the category of the Beauti-
ful is connected with the category of Life.111
Accordingly, keeping the various parts of Hegel’s system distinct from
one another is a hopeless enterprise: the Logic anticipates the Philosophy
of Spirit, which takes up the themes of the Logic; the Philosophy of Nature
develops the doctrines of being and essence; the parts of the Logic relat-
ed to mechanics, chemistry, and life anticipate the Philosophy of Nature;
and the Phenomenology of the Spirit contains an early sketch of the whole
system (if we do not take account of the System of Ethical Life that Hegel
did not publish and which was the earliest sketch).112 Concrete content
taken from the history of philosophy and to a greater extent from the
philosophy of Spirit, along with a forced, arbitrary ordering imposed by
the false notion of an a priori deduction of mistakes: this is what Hegel’s
Logic looks like to me. The ordering spoils the content. In saying this and
thereby reconfirming the condemnation of the Hegelian claim embod-
ied in the Logic, my intent is not to condemn to death and to oblivion
that richest of all books that carry this title but rather to provide favour-
able conditions for it to live and to exercise its deep influence on our
minds.
Anyone who picks up Hegel’s Logic with the intention of understand-
ing what ties it together, and, above all, the reason behind its opening,
will soon be forced to put the book down with no hope of understanding
it, convinced that what lies before him is a heap of meaningless abstrac-
tions. But if, like the dog in Rabelais, a ‘philosophy beast,’ this person
does not leave the bone alone but bites into it, in this place or that,
grinding, chewing, and sucking on it, he will eventually be feeding on a
large piece of marrow.113
Hegel – and Hegel scholars, following his lead – have persistently
pointed to the doorway that leads into the Logic: pure being, from which
we must pass eventually through the vestibules and up the stairways of
nothing, becoming, determinate being, something, limit, change, being
per se, and so on and so forth, in order to reach the inner sanctum of
the Goddess or the Idea. But anyone who knocks stubbornly at this door,
believing the false directions which say that there must be no other door
and no other stairway, will find no way to gain entrance to the palace.
When that door is said to be the only one, it is a closed door – a fake
583
door, in fact. Take the palace by assault from all sides. Only in that way
will you get inside, penetrating to the sanctuary of the Goddess. And it
may be that by doing so you will see the bright face of the Goddess with
a kindly smile, gazing at the saintly simplicity of her many worshipers.114
6. The Metamorphosis of Particular Concepts into

Philosophical Mistakes, 1: Art and Language (Aesthetics)
The second result, the other repercussion of confusing the synthesis of

opposites with the relation between distincts, was no less serious. Because
of this confusion, Hegel deprived himself of any way to recognize the
autonomy of various forms of the Spirit and to accord them their own
fair value. Once Hegel had confused the mistake with the particular
truth, once philosophical mistakes had become particular truths, par-
ticular truths also had to be made equivalent to mistakes and to become
philosophical mistakes, losing all their intrinsic worth, held up to the
norm of theoretical truth, and treated as nothing but incomplete forms
of philosophy. Hegel therefore did not succeed in recognizing the true
character either of the aesthetic function or the historiographical or
natural-scientific function – neither that of art nor of history nor of the
physical and natural sciences, in other words.
There is no doubt that Hegel’s pages on aesthetics are enlivened by
great artistic feeling. The tendency to make art a highly important ele-
ment of human life, a way of knowing and spiritual ascent, dominates all
his writing about it. These pages carry us far above and beyond the vulgar
view that makes art a superfluous accident of real life – fun, amusement,
a pastime, or else a mere pedagogical device, empirical and subsidiary.
Because of the constant contact with taste and with works of art involved
in Hegel’s aesthetic theorizing, and because of the new dignity that it
recognizes in artistic activity, this theory powerfully influenced public
opinion and gave a strong stimulus to the study of aesthetic problems.
And this is an advantage that it shares in part with all the aesthetic theo-
ries of the Romantic period (the great period of ferment and renewal
for the philosophy of art and for literary and artistic criticism and histo-
riography), though in part the advantage is peculiar to it because of the
abundance of ideas, judgments, and problems that it offers.
But the elements of truth plentifully scattered throughout Hegel’s aes-
thetics are either too general or merely incidental, diverging internally
from the basic concept of art that Hegel accepts and which is mistaken.
It is mistaken for this reason: Hegel was stuck on his notion that every
584
form of the Spirit (except the final and supreme form) is only a pro-
visional and contradictory way of grasping the Absolute; therefore, he
could not find that primal and natural theoretical form which is the lyric
poetry or music of the Spirit, the form in which there is nothing philo-
sophically contradictory because the philosophical problem simply does
not arise there, where only the condition of that problem is present. This
is the territory of intuition, of pure fantasy, of language in its essential
character as picture, music, or song – the true territory of art.
When Hegel starts his meditation on the phases of the Spirit, he finds
himself already at the point where he has left that territory behind with-
out realizing that he has passed beyond it. The Phenomenology takes its
start from the certainty of the senses, the simplest form of all for Hegel,
the form in which, he says, our stance towards reality is direct or recep-
tive, without changing anything in reality and holding off on any employ-
ment of concepts. It is not hard for Hegel to show that contemplation of
this kind, which seems the richest and truest, is actually the poorest and
most abstract. The thing exists now, and a moment later it is no more.
This thing is here, and right away there is something else here. The
only thing left is the abstract this, here, now; the rest disappears. But the
certainty of the senses of which Hegel speaks is not the first theoretical
form. It is not genuine sensible certainty, a‡sqhsij pure and simple.115 It
is not, as Hegel believes, direct cognition. It is already mixed with intel-
lectual reflection. It already contains the question about what is truly
real. The first reflection on sensible cognition has been substituted for
genuine certainty of the senses (which exists in aesthetic contemplation,
where there is no subject/object distinction, no comparing one thing
with another, no placement in the spatio-temporal series), and naturally
this first reflection seems imperfect and must be overcome.
Hegel says many times that ‘the subject without predicate is what is,
in the phenomenon, the thing without property, the thing-in-itself, a
base that is empty and undetermined. It is the concept in itself, which
acquires difference and determination only by way of the predicate.’116
But art is precisely subject-without-predicate, and it is entirely different
from the nullity and emptiness of the thing-in-itself and the thing-with-
out-property. Art is intuition and there are no intellectual referents. It is
the tremor that a poem communicates to us, through which the vision
of a reality opens to us. We can never put it in intellectual terms, and we
possess it only by singing or reciting it.
Since Hegel does not reach the territory of aesthetic activity and does
not get from there to the truly primordial theoretical form, he does not
585
succeed in accounting for language, which, in his eyes, also becomes an

organized contradiction. For Hegel language is actually an act of the
memory that he calls ‘reproductive’ because it produces ‘signs.’ And the
sign is defined explicitly as a direct intuition that represents a content
‘completely different from its own content.’117 By the mediation of lan-
guage, the understanding makes its representation manifest in an exter-
nal element, and so the form of language is intellectual. It is the product
of logical instinct that is then theorized in grammar. Language wants to
express the individual through this logical form that it has, but it can-
not do so: ‘You want to say this piece of paper on which I am writing,
or, rather, have written, this one, but you do not say it. What you say is a
universal, the this.’ According to Hegel, language thus contradicts itself:
believing that it expresses the individual, it always expresses the univer-
sal instead.118 In making this point, Hegel seems to repeat the scholastic
‘omne individuum ineffabile,’ but we must substitute the opposite claim
– ‘solum individuum effabile’ (or we must correct the first maxim with
an addition, ‘logicis modis ineffabile’).119
How could anyone ever really suppose that a human activity like lan-
guage does not attain its end, that it aims for an absurd goal, living in
delusion and unable to escape? Language at its root is poetry and art.
Through language, through artistic expression, humans grasp individual
reality, that particular shading intuited by the spirit and obviously not
rendered in terms of concepts, but rather as sounds, tones, colours, lines,
and so on. Language, understood in its true nature and in its true and
full extension, is therefore adequate to reality. The illusion of inadequa-
cy arises as soon as we say that language is a fragment of itself, abstracted
from the whole. Thus, the page – this page of which I am speaking –
is certainly not just what the words ‘this page’ express if the words are
ripped out of context and made abstract. Rather, this page is what lies
before my eyes – or better, my spirit as a whole. And, to the extent that
the mind represents it, the mind can also render it, even externally, by
sound, by colour, and so on. If I say ‘this exact page,’ it is because I have
it in front of me and show it to others. The words that come out of my
mouth get their full meaning from the whole psychological situation in
which I find myself, and thus from the attitude, intonation, and gesture
with which I pronounce them.
If we abstract the words from that particular situation, they will cer-
tainly seem inadequate to that particular, but they will be inadequate
because we have made them so, by mutilating them. But Hegel (who did
not have a precise idea of the aesthetic state as a primitive state of the
spirit) could not fully comprehend language and was bound to treat it in
586
this mutilated and intellectualized way, therefore declaring it contradic-

tory. In the Aesthetics, when he leaves the language of prose to deal with
poetic language, he falls back into the old rhetoric again, having made
some effort to escape from it. Even poetic language remains for him
a mere ‘sign’ and is essentially different from the lines and colours of
sculpture and painting and the tones of music.120
His mistaken logical theory about distinct concepts therefore blinds
Hegel to the true place of aesthetic activity, suggesting to him a philoso-
phy of language that leads necessarily to treating language as a mistake.
But it is not only language that gets treated this way. Art, not located in
its true place, presses on Hegel’s mind. Not knowing what to make of it,
he moves it to a place where it does not belong, where – like language,
already arbitrarily detached from the aesthetic function with which it
essentially coincides – art too ends up seeming just incomplete and mis-
taken. Hegel could not let this pass in silence or ascribe little importance
to it – as many naturalist and positivist philosophers have done. His era
would not permit this – nor the particular disposition of his mind where
artistic interests played so large a part.
The position that he took was basically that of his era. Aesthetic activity
– which Kant studied in the third Critique, along with teleological judg-
ment, as one of the modes of representing nature when the mechanical
conception of the exact sciences has been superseded; which Schiller
pointed to as the territory of reconciliation in the conflict between
necessity and freedom; which Schelling made a true organ of the Abso-
lute; which Schopenhauer later had to treat in the same way as liberation
of the Will and contemplation of the Ideas – this activity that the whole
Romantic period sometimes put in place of religion and philosophy,
sometimes putting it above them, and sometimes below, this activity also
became for Hegel a mode of apprehending the Absolute. In the Phenom-
enology, he makes aesthetics into a form of religion higher than the mere-
ly natural religion that worships material objects, fetishes, and so on,
precisely because it is a way of worshipping the Spirit as subject. In the
Encyclopedia, in a somewhat different way, he makes it into the religion
of beauty, a first level in relation to the revealed religion and inferior to
it, just as the religion of beauty itself is in turn inferior to philosophy.
Accordingly, in the lectures on Aesthetics, the history of poetry and art
poses as a history of philosophy, religion, and mankind’s moral life – a
history of human ideals in which the individuality of artists, or aesthetic
form proper, becomes second class and gets only incidental attention.
If the notion of art working on the same problem addressed by religion
and philosophy is common to Hegel’s time, what is peculiar to Hegel is
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the relation that he establishes among those three forms, the distinctive
character that he assigns to art vis-à-vis religion and philosophy. Unlike
others, Hegel could not make aesthetic activity a complement of philo-
sophical activity, something that has its own way of solving problems left
unsolved by philosophy – much less make it an activity higher than phi-
losophy. The logic that he took for granted was bound to lead him to
the usual dialectical solution, applied to distinct concepts: artistic activ-
ity is distinct from philosophy only by being incomplete, only because it
grasps the Absolute in a direct and sensible form, whereas philosophy
grasps it in the pure element of thought. Logically this means that art is
not at all distinct, and that, for Hegel, it is basically reduced to a philo-
sophical mistake, to bad philosophy. Philosophy, by tackling the same
problem addressed by that other effort and handling it in a complete
way, is the true art.
That this is what Hegel really thinks is confirmed by the fact that he
does not repudiate the ultimate consequence of this theory: when phi-
losophy is fully developed, art must disappear because it is superfluous.
Art must die; indeed, it is quite dead already. It may be a mistake, but
the mistake is not necessary and eternal. The story of art as told by Hegel
aims to show the gradual dissolution of the form of art which, in modern
times, is no longer part of our true and paramount interest. It is the past
or a survival of the past. This grandiose paradox sheds light on Hegel’s
aesthetic mistake in all its contours. Better than any other example, per-
haps, it clarifies the mistake in his actual logical assumption. Some have
said in Hegel’s defence that the death of art that he describes is that
eternal dying which is an eternal rebirth, which we see in the human
spirit whenever it passes from poetry to philosophy, rising from intuition
to the universal as the world of intuitions fades before our eyes. Against
this mitigating interpretation, however, stands the fact that Hegel speaks
of a death of art that is definitely not a perpetual renewal but an event
that really happens and has happened – a death of art in the world of his-
tory. Hence, this is entirely in keeping with his treating levels of reality as
if they were a series of opposites, crudely abstracted and set apart. Once
he had applied dialectic in this way, Hegel had no choice: either he had
to suppress art by means of that grandiose paradox or preserve it by a no
less grandiose inconsistency.
This explains why it is not wrong to perceive Hegel’s system (whose
principle of the concrete concept, as well as the dialectic annexed to
it, are plainly aesthetic in their inspiration) as a cold intellectualism,
incompatible with artistic consciousness. And the negation of art makes
itself felt when the system does no good for all those philosophical prob-
588
lems where the concept of art comes in as a given that is more strictly
necessary.
Hegel is usually considered an enemy of formal Aristotelian logic. To
be more precise, however, one should say that he was the enemy of clas-
sificatory and naturalist logic, or, better yet, that he limited himself to
revealing that classificatory and naturalist logic is not enough to make
the logic of philosophy work. I have already recognized his achievement
in doing this, which was all that he could have meant by stating polemi-
cally that ‘Aristotle is the author of the intellectual logic [of the abstract
intellect] whose forms deal only with the relation that finite things have
to one another, so that the truth cannot be conceived in these forms.’121
But the method of classifying is not what is truly characteristic of the
logic of Aristotle and the schools. The tendency to classify is also found
in Baconian or inductive logic. The characteristic of Aristotelian logic
is its syllogistic, or rather its verbalism – the confusion between logical
thinking and speech that it comes up against, and the pretense of estab-
lishing logical forms by maintaining verbal forms.
Hegel did not and could not criticize this mistake because he lacked
the very tool of criticism that only a good philosophy of language can
provide. He tries to distinguish between a proposition and a logical
judgment, of course, but he does not manage to produce good reasons
for this distinction. He says that a proposition (‘It’s hot,’ for example)
becomes a judgment only when it responds to the doubt that can arise
about the truth of the claim. The precise distinction was not accessible
to him, the one that consists in recognizing that the simple proposition
is just speech itself, language as a pure aesthetic act, exempt from logic,
even though it is a vehicle that logical thought needs. As a result, he
not only preserves the three-part division of concept, logical judgment,
and syllogism; he also does his best to distinguish and define new cat-
egories of judgments and syllogisms. Traces of old treatises on formalist
logic, including the division between a theory of elementary forms and
a theory of methods, definition, division, demonstration, and proof, are
preserved everywhere in his logic.122

Philosophical Mistakes, 2: History (The Idea of a
Philosophy of History)
One might say that Hegel’s failure to understand the autonomy of art
also prevented him from understanding the autonomy of history (of his-
toriography).123 But the truth is that Hegel could not do justice to this
589
second function for the same reason he could not do so for the first:
namely, because of the aforesaid metamorphosis that he brought about,
turning particular concepts into philosophical mistakes. From a logical
point of view, the two mistakes have the same source. Psychologically, it
is likely that the first smoothed the way for the second, as it is also psy-
chologically likely that Hegel’s notion of religion contributed something
to producing the first mistake. Thinking of religion as an imaginary and
more or less incomplete form of philosophy was bound to lead him to
assign art an analogous position in relation to philosophy.
Unlike art, history assumes philosophical thinking as its condition.
But like art, history has its proper content in the intuitive component.
History therefore is always narrative, never theory and system, although
it has theory and system at its foundation. This is why historians train
themselves, on the one hand, to study documents scrupulously, and,
on the other, to form clear ideas about reality and life, especially those
aspects of life that they want to treat historically. This is why it has seemed
that history can do no less than science and yet always remains a work
of art.124
If all works of history are reduced to their simplest expression, which
is the historical judgment or proposition asserting that ‘something hap-
pened’ (Caesar was killed, for example, or Alaric destroyed Rome, Dante
wrote the Comedy, and so on), one sees by analysing these statements that
each is made up of intuitive components functioning as subjects and
logical components functioning as predicates. The first will be Caesar,
Rome, Dante, the Comedy, and so on, and the second will be the concepts
of killing, destroying, artistic composition, and other such things. The
result of the gnoseology of history that this suggests is that any progress
in philosophical thinking translates into progress in historical knowl-
edge.125 We certainly get a much more precise understanding of the his-
torical facts about Dante’s producing his poem, for example, once we
have a better sense of what poetry and artistic creation are. But another
result is a foolish pretense: wishing to reduce those historical assertions
to philosophical assertions by absorbing the fact, in its wholeness and
integrity, into a mere condition of the fact.126
History can give rise to conceptual science of an empirical kind, as
when we pass from history to a sociology that proceeds by types and
classes. But for this very reason, history is not absorbed into that concep-
tual science, of which it continues to be the basis and presupposition.
Conversely, history can give rise to a philosophy whenever we pass from
the historical treatment of the particular to theoretical issues that lie at
590
the base of that treatment. But for this very reason, it is not absorbed
into that philosophy, which is its basis and presupposition. A philosophy
of history, understood not as a return to that pure philosophy but as a
history at the second level – as a history that is philosophy while con-
tinuing to be history, a system while continuing to be an application of
the system, universal and logical while dealing with the individual and
intuitive – is a contradiction in terms.127 What does it mean to posit this
notion of a philosophy of history, this history at the second level? Noth-
ing more nor less than the annihilation of history. This second level, this
putative philosophical treatment of historical narrative, this philosophi-
cal history, would then be the real history in relation to which the history
of historians would be revealed as mistaken because it is constructed by
a method that does not lead to the truth, or – amounting to the same
thing – does not lead to the whole truth. When the second form appears,
the first would dissolve; or rather, it would dissolve just because it would
no longer be a form but something formless.
The notion of a philosophy of history is the denial of autonomy to
historiography for the good of pure philosophy. Every time someone
makes this demand, we seem to hear bells tolling the death knell of the
history of historians. These historians are usually docile when notified of
progress in science or philosophy that might clarify some part of their
narrative work. But they rise up in violence whenever anyone talks to
them about a philosophy of history, some vaguely speculative method of
understanding history, whenever anyone tries to persuade them to turn
over the work to which they have devoted themselves entirely, whose
every line and shadow is dear to them, to put it into the hands of phi-
losophers for revision and completion. And the rebellion is reasonable.
It would be like telling a painter or a musician who had finished a paint-
ing or a partita to turn it over to philosophers in order to raise it to the
second power by inserting philosophical brushstrokes and philosophical
chords.
Hegel had to posit, and he did posit, the notion of a philosophy of
history, and he had to negate, as he did negate, the history of histo-
rians. This was required by his logical presupposition. He divided phi-
losophy into the pure or formal (which should have been logic and was
metaphysics as well) and the applied and concrete. This constituted the
two philosophies of Nature and Spirit, and a philosophy of history reap-
peared in the second of these. The three together made up the Encyclope-
dia of Philosophical Sciences.128 In that way, Hegel took over the traditional
scholastic division of philosophy into rational and real philosophy – and
591
definitely not as a mere phrase or external schema since it also implies

the need for philosophical treatment of contingent facts of nature and
human history. Given the clarifications that I have offered above, every
history, in some sense, might be termed concrete philosophy or applied
philosophy. But the meaning of these words was not as innocent for
Hegel as for us. For him they implied sharply distinguishing the history
included in the philosophical encyclopedia from all the other histories
that constitute the work of historians. In his lectures on the philosophy
of history, he makes the distinction with the utmost clarity: on one side
are primary historiography and reflective historiography (the second
divided into general, pragmatic, critical, and conceptual); on the other
side are philosophical historiography and philosophy of history.
There can be no doubt that this philosophical historiography must
have a method of its own, different from the method of ordinary histori-
ography, because Hegel restores the feature of a priori construction to it.
It is true that by doing so he does not seem to be pointing to a distinctive
feature, only the need for a better developed a priori. And then he imme-
diately notes that ordinary historians also make a priori histories, starting
with certain representations and thoughts of theirs that are clearly defec-
tive and arbitrary and yet are a priori nonetheless. In that case, however,
the a priori that Hegel introduces is not the logical element, an interpre-
tation of intuitive data that he has already recognized as indispensable
for any historical effort. Instead, it is history good and proper, needing
only to be dressed up with names and dates. ‘As it approaches history,
the only thought that philosophy brings with it,’ writes Hegel, ‘is the
simple thought of reason, that reason rules the world, and that therefore
there is also rational movement in world-history.’129
But the issue is larger than that, or rather, these words acquire their
meaning when we see him sketching, a priori, reason’s necessary move-
ment in the world of history. ‘The history of the world is progress in the
consciousness of liberty.’130 Its various moments and levels are the dif-
ferent national spirits (Volksgeister), the different peoples, each destined
to represent a single level and play a single part in the total activity.131
Before investigating the facts that are given, Hegel already knows what
they must be. He knows them in advance, as philosophical truths are
known, truths that the Spirit finds in its universal being and does not
infer from contingent facts as if they were a summary of them. In what
is perhaps his greatest historical work, the History of Philosophy, he knows
a priori that the history of philosophy and the system of philosophy are
identical. History deals with the same development represented in the
592
system as ‘pure in the element of thought, free from historical externali-

ties.’132 And in history the system gets the supplement of those externali-
ties (names and dates). The first phases of Greek thought are the first
categories of metaphysics, and they follow the same order that they have
in metaphysics.
Against my interpretation of Hegel’s theory of the philosophy of his-
tory, one might cite several statements that the same author makes about
the great respect that we owe to factual data. But then we must see what
weight can be given to those statements. ‘That there is rational move-
ment in world-history,’ he says, ‘means that it results from the considera-
tion of history itself: … this must be a result; one must take history as it is,
proceeding historically and empirically.’133 The accidental is extraneous
to philosophy, and elsewhere he says that history ‘must bring the uni-
versal down into empirical individuality and actual reality … The Idea
is its own essence, but the appearing of the Idea is in the accidental and
the sphere of the will.’134 Good. But if the accidental and individual are
really extraneous to philosophy, if it is not possible to know them except
empirically, one cannot make philosophy out of history – only history
and precisely that. And if one makes a philosophy of history, then the
accidental and individual, the historical and empirical method, are disal-
lowed and rejected. There is no way out of the dilemma.
To recommend taking account of the facts or even to recognize that
the study of documents is the indispensable starting point for history –
these are just words if, through the principles that have been taken on,
we do not know what use to make of those facts and those documents.
Hegel’s students, thinking that they could keep both the goat and the
cabbages by preserving the speculative method in history along with the
philological method, have saved neither the one nor the other. Since the
method is intrinsic to the function, it is childish to claim that the same
function works by two different methods: doubling the method means
doubling the function. It is worse than childish to make the two methods
alternate and support one another by turns, as if they were two persons,
two friends, or partners in business.
At one moment, Hegel seems to understand his a priori schema as
nothing more than a crude anticipation of what actual history produces.
‘We can believe that in the levels of the Idea philosophy must have a
different ordering than the order that belongs to those concepts that
are products in time,’ he writes in the History of Philosophy, ‘but in the
whole (im Ganzen) the ordering is the same.’135 At another moment,
Hegel tempers his assertion so that almost nothing is left of it. Thus,
593
in asserting the identity of the philosophical system with the history of

philosophy, he notes that ‘the philosophy that comes last in time is also
the result of all that precedes it and must contain the principles of it
all. Therefore – provided that it really is a philosophy – it is the best
developed, the richest and the most concrete.’136 Since a philosophical
system that constitutes a regression can appear last in time, the inserted
proviso ends up asserting tautologically that the best developed, richest,
and most concrete philosophy is obviously not the last in time but what
is really philosophy.
What to conclude from all that? That Hegel had never thought of an
a priori philosophy of history whose idea is still closely connected with
his dialectical treatment of distincts? No: but that the mistake is a con-
tradiction, and that Hegel’s mistaken thesis of a philosophy of history
(an ideal history, not eternal but in time) is also shown to be wrong by
the unintended contradictions that Hegel ends up in. Surely we cannot
conclude that his confessions suffice to cleanse the mistaken thesis of its
defects and turn it into a true one.
It is not just a logical inference, strict and inescapable, that a philoso-
phy of history thus conceived cannot tolerate the company of history,
properly so-called, and negates it; we also see this clearly enough from
several of Hegel’s observations. Certainly the very fact that he defines
the philosophy of history as ‘the thoughtful contemplation of history’
(noting right away that thinking alone distinguishes the human from the
animal) confirms that history as such either is not thinking or is incom-
plete thinking.137 And the attitude of hostility and contempt that he has
for professional historians is also significant, almost as if a philosopher of
art were fighting with professional poets and painters!
But notice especially what he says about the factual material that the
historian must develop. According to Hegel, only those facts that repre-
sent the movement of the Spirit, the history of the State, have value for
history. The particular facts left over
are a superfluous mass, and the result of collecting them faithfully is to

submerge and obscure the objects worthy of history. The essential character
of the Spirit and its time is always contained in great events. Therefore, it
was good judgment that led us to consign similar representations of the
particular to novels (like the famous works of Walter Scott and others). It is
good taste that makes us connect depictions of particular and unessential
life with the equally unessential material that the novel takes from private
actions and subjective passions. In the interest of so-called truth, to mix
594
the individual small change of the period and its persons into the repre-
sentation of general interests is not only counter to judgment and taste but
counter to the concept of objective truth, whereby only what is substantial
is true for the Spirit – certainly not the emptiness of external existence and
incident. It makes no difference at all whether such insignificant matters
are formally documented or whether, as in the novel, they are invented in
a characteristic way and attributed to one person or another and to one
circumstance or another.138
Anyone who thinks about these words will find there the straightfor-
ward and pernicious distinction between facts and facts – historical facts
and unhistorical facts, essential facts and unessential facts – that we have
often seen reappearing among Hegel’s students. Start with Eduard Gans,
who, in the very act of publishing the lectures by his teacher on the phi-
losophy of history, repeated that this discipline would lose dignity if it
had to busy itself with the micro-study of facts. Hence, it has to show the
need not for all facts but only for the great epochs of history and great
groups of people, leaving the remainder to merely narrative history.139
Move on from Gans to that Italian Hegelian who had to maintain some
years ago, in a well-known polemic, that documents were needed to
identify the prisons in which Tommaso Campanella stayed or how many
days and hours he suffered torture, but not to determine the histori-
cal meaning of his thinking and activity. This second finding would be
deduced a priori from the idea of the Renaissance, the Catholic Church,
the Lutheran Reformation, and the Council of Trent!140
By such distinctions, even when used to save one class of facts as nec-
essary for real history, all the facts, and the very notion of fact, are dis-
carded as useless. For what other reason might facts a, b, c, d, and e be
unessential and superfluous except that they are individual and contin-
gent? And are not facts f, g, h, i, k, and l equally contingent and individu-
al, facts that these people want to declare essential and indispensable? If
it is a contingent fact that Napoleon suffered from stomach cancer, will
not 18 Brumaire and the Battle of Waterloo also be contingent?141 Will
the whole Age of Revolution and Empire not be contingent? Proceeding
in this way (since individuality and contingency extend to all the facts),
the whole history of the world will be contingent. By the same token, if
the French Revolution, 18 Brumaire, and the Battle of Waterloo were
necessary facts, it is not clear how to deny necessity to the Bonaparte
who was an actor in the drama, or to the Bonaparte who actually existed
in reality, with his mental and physical strengths and weaknesses, with
595
his youthful resistance to fatigue that enabled him to stay on a horse for
whole days and seated at his desk for whole nights – and with his stomach
disease when he was older.
Since reality has neither kernel nor shell and is of one piece, since
the internal and the external are a single whole (and it is Hegel who
taught us this), thus the mass of facts is a solid mass, not split between an
essential nucleus and a non-essential shell, between inwardly necessary
facts and superfluous externalities.142 When these distinctions are used
in ordinary language, we always take them to refer to particular histori-
cal representations. In relation to their meaning, and only in relation to
that particular meaning, certain masses of facts seem superfluous. The
distinction is so plainly relative that, by changing points of view, we pass
from one meaning to another: what was superfluous before becomes
necessary, and what was necessary before becomes superfluous.
In the passage cited, however, it is also notable that Hegel refers those
facts that seem to him unhistorical (which we say are all the facts) to
the novel – an art form. And since art for him was a mere phenomenon
that philosophy dissolves and displaces, this is another way to reveal the
negation that Hegelian philosophy makes out of history. A strange fate!
That very philosophy which, by the force of one of its logical doctrines,
had so effectively vindicated the value of history, of res gestae, that same
philosophy, as the result of another of its logical teachings, then found it
impossible to recognize the value of historia rerum gestarum and hence of
the same res gestae.143 Starved for history, fed by history, Hegel’s philoso-
phy then produced propaganda for fasting, but gave no good account of
this. And the contradiction was obvious in the light of day, in the sight of
everyone, because from Hegel’s school came a series of great writers of
history, and then from the same school came the most brash and comical
belittlers of history and facts that the world has ever seen.

Philosophical Mistakes, 3: Nature (The Idea of a
Philosophy of Nature)
To understand the real limits, the real character, of the natural and
mathematical sciences was certainly a harder job. From the Renaissance
onward, there had been a continuing enlargement of what has been
called experimental and mathematical science, the exact science of nature that
became more and more dominant in thought and life. Philosophical
theorizing bowed before exact science or felt its imprint in one way or
596
another, as we see in many parts of the systems of Descartes, Spinoza, and

Leibniz. The philosophical sensism and materialism of the eighteenth
century were the final result of this domination by the naturalist ideal.
True, when Hegel’s mind was developing, a movement of reaction
and doubt had already begun. Leaving Vico aside – though he must be
mentioned here again – all across Germany it was being made clear that
the exact science of nature is inadequate for getting at true reality, the
foundation of things. Philosophers like Kant, fully equipped with math-
ematics and empirical information, analysed the methods of the exact
sciences and drew their conclusions, proclaiming that scientific knowl-
edge is limited and referring essential problems to practical reason and
to aesthetic and theological intuition. Other philosophers, like Jacobi,
studied Spinoza’s philosophy, the most remarkable monument to exact
science as applied to theoretical problems, and they showed that the
method of the finite sciences provides no way out of the finite. Such phi-
losophers therefore declared that God, the infinite, and morality are the
province of sentiment and direct perception.144 Poets, artists, and writers
in the period of Sturm und Drang felt the cold emptiness of Enlighten-
ment intellectualism, and, like Goethe, they aspired to a vision of nature
fully ensouled but revealed only to those who had contemplated it with
a sympathetic heart.145
Hegel too welcomed this critical heritage and brought it to its fullest
expression by establishing that philosophical method is different from
that of the mathematical and natural-scientific disciplines – as I have
already mentioned. Even though this whole movement seems so hostile
to the ideal of the exact sciences, that same ideal still makes itself felt
everywhere, showing its strength and bringing its weight to bear. If Kant
denies that it is possible for exact science to solve the essential problems,
for example, it is also clear to him that the only science that humans can
attain is just this exact science. And the solutions that he proposes by
using another method have no cognitive or intellectual value for him,
meaning that they have no real value. If Jacobi criticizes the method of
the finite sciences as far as knowing God is concerned, it is no less certain
that the only form of knowledge for him is that of the finite sciences:
nothing else is knowledge because it does not translate into a form of
thinking. It is sentiment.
In Hegel and in Schelling, Hegel’s immediate predecessor, the situ-
ation would seem to be different because both took real knowledge
to come from intellectual intuition and the Idea. Looking farther into
this, however, we find in them the same preconception (which might be
597
called the modern preconception par excellence) in favour of the exact

sciences, except that in Schelling and Hegel this prejudice appears in a
new form. Instead of excluding the exact sciences from philosophy and
treating philosophy as incapable of scientific precision, they treat the
exact sciences as not scientific enough and include them in philosophy,
by means of which the exact science of nature is supposed to become
truly just that. Kant and Jacobi, each in his own way, had made the exact
sciences into a non-philosophy and philosophy into a non-science.
Schelling and Hegel make the exact sciences a semi-philosophy and
make philosophy the real science. These are two different solutions to
the same problem, and they take the same things as given, chief among
them the conviction that the exact sciences have theoretical value or that
their concepts are more or less complete logical constructs.
Now to reach a definitive settlement of the conflict between exact sci-
ence and philosophy, to establish the rights of each party definitively, a
completely different procedure had to be followed. As long as naturalist
method and philosophical method were considered two approaches to
scientific truth, fighting was inevitable for the reason already mentioned
– that a particular function has only one method in it, its own, and there is
only one method of scientific truth. Hence, once science was taken to be
the primary method, the secondary method was invalidated and had to
go. Philosophy had to be excluded. Conversely, once the only approach
to truth was taken to be theoretical, the other remained a mere attempt,
crude and contradictory, at the primary method, and the other had to
fall before the fully developed theoretical method. The mathematical
and natural-scientific disciplines had to be replaced by philosophy, once
it was established that they were a mediocre philosophy that could not
prevail alongside the right kind.
Kant’s way out, and Jacobi’s, on the other hand – relegating philoso-
phy to practical reason or sentiment, to the non-theoretical – was fore-
closed from then on, once it was shown that thinking had the capacity
to solve the problems of reality and once philosophical logic was dis-
covered. The only way left open then was to relegate exact science, the
mathematical and scientific disciplines, to the non-theoretical or practi-
cal. This approach has been tried up to our own time, and it seems to
me that it would always have to seem not only the more productive but
also necessary.146
It cannot be said that Hegel had no sense of the practical nature of
the scientific and mathematical disciplines. His books are full of analyses
and observations that could be transplanted without revision into books
598
on the most up-to-date gnoseologies of those fields. Read his pages on

the concept of law in the empirical sciences. Such a law, he says, is just
the stable image of an unstable appearance. And in passing from more
particular laws to the more general, in reducing them to unity, we run
into tautologies by which the intellect does not express the reality of
things, only its own necessity.
The postulate that velocities in uniformly accelerated motion are
proportional to time: what is this but simply the definition of that same
uniformly accelerated motion? And what are all those excogitations by
physicists but claims that correspond neither to empirical reality nor to
the philosophical concept – like the pores that they talk about but do
not show up in experience, for instance?147 Speaking of centrifugal and
centripetal forces, Hegel observes that they are a metaphysical monster
that is simply assumed while any intellectual examination of them is for-
bidden, whence it happens that these forces wax and wane in mysteri-
ous ways as each loses or gains the upper hand.148 What is unthinkable,
because it is false, they call thinkable in the exact sciences. ‘It is certainly
“thinkable,” as they say, that motion uniformly increasing and decreas-
ing goes in circles, but this “thinkability” is only an abstract capacity for
representation that neglects the determinate character of its object and
therefore is not just superficial but false.’149 In the same way, the only
thing that they call irrational in mathematics is the real and the rational
that enters into it.
Beyond these and many other similar observations that are abundant-
ly present in the Phenomenology, the Logic, and the Philosophy of Nature, the
terms intellectual fictions (Verstandesfiktionen) and arbitrary (willkürlich) con-
ceptions come up frequently in Hegel’s writings to designate constructs of
the abstract intellect and of the scientific and mathematical disciplines.150
Both the fictional and the arbitrary refer specifically to voluntary and
practical activity. And since those arbitrary items have a history in time
and are products of the noblest efforts, and since they are surrounded
by esteem and indeed by enthusiasm for the usefulness of the results
achieved, it must have been clear that one could not have been talking
about the arbitrary in a pejorative sense or about practical deeds done in
the service of whims and evil passions, but rather about the arbitrary that
is justified by reason, meaning legitimate practical actions.
There is a case, however, in which Hegel shows explicitly that he recog-
nizes the non-scientific and yet legitimate character of those constructs,
as they are and as they must remain. This happens when he raises the
question – which he answers in the negative – of the possibility of a philo-
599
sophical mathematics: ‘a science that knows through concepts what ordi-

nary mathematical science deduces from presumptive determinations
by the method of understanding.’ ‘Mathematics,’ he says, ‘is the science
of finite determinations of magnitude; it must stay within finitude and
operate there without going farther. Hence, it is essentially a science of
the understanding. Since it has the capacity to be that in a complete way,
it is best to preserve the advantage that it has over other sciences of the
same sort rather than upsetting things by mixing in empirical aims or the
concept, which is heterogeneous to it’ (Encyclopedia ¶259).151
In the previous edition, he wrote that ‘if we wanted to provide a phil-
osophical treatment of configurations of space or unity, those things
would lose their meaning and their particular form. A philosophy of
such things would become something logical, or something belonging
to some other concrete philosophical science wherein a more concrete
meaning was attributed to concepts.’152 Moreover, Hegel understood
that ‘arithmetic does not contemplate numbers and their figures but oper-
ates (operiert) with them because number is an inert and neutral deter-
mination that must be set in motion and put into a relation from the
outside.’153 Once granted a form of activity that operates with what is
given by thinking but does not think it, it should not have been hard
to extend the observation and find a correct theory of the true charac-
ter of the sciences by connecting this notion with findings scattered in
various places about the non-theoretical procedure of the natural and
mathematical disciplines.
Hegel also had quite clearly in mind a non-metaphysical, purely gnose-
ological concept of nature, or rather of naturalist method – a method
that applies not only to the lower manifestations of reality so-called (to
the three kingdoms) but to all others as well (to the globus intellectualis).154
Thus, he treated the theory of the external right of States proposed by
Hugo Grotius as something analogous to Newton’s natural philosophy.155
Aristotelian logic seemed to him nothing more than a naturalist science
of thinking in which forms were described and arranged side by side as
one does in natural history with the unicorn, the mammoth, beetles, and
mollusks. In ethics, the doctrine of virtues (Tugendlehre) suggested the
same connection to him.156 Here too he should have managed to see that
the content of the so-called natural sciences is surely not part of reality
but a way of dealing with reality as whole – a way that emerges and per-
sists alongside the philosophical way precisely because, when kept within
its own limits, it causes philosophy no competition.
Another observation characteristic of Hegel, which would lead to the
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same result, is his quite insistent claim that nature, unlike mankind, has
no history. But if all reality is movement and development, how could
we ever conceive of a part of reality that is not in the process of becom-
ing, along with everything else? The truth, however, is that what has no
history is nature in the naturalist sense – namely, nature stiff and mum-
mified in abstract schemata and concepts – another reason that must
lead to regarding those schemata and concepts as not destined to get at
the real reality. An English critic has noted appropriately that – in the
Philosophy of Spirit – the philosophy of history, or the account of universal
political history, corresponds to the section on objective spirit, just as the
histories of art, religion, and philosophy, also given special treatment
by Hegel, correspond to the section on Absolute Spirit, which includes
the three spheres of art, religion, and philosophy. In that philosophy of
Spirit, then, only the section on subjective spirit – on psychology – has no
historical discussion corresponding to it. Man, when treated psychologi-
cally, has no history.157 But why? Just because psychology is a naturalist
science and is afflicted with the same historical sterility recognized in
nature generally.
Despite all these suggestions, however, despite these favourable con-
ditions, despite these partial and more or less conscious confessions,
Hegel did not come to the conclusion that seems right to me. He did not
proclaim the philosophical neutrality of the scientific and mathemati-
cal disciplines and their full autonomy. Instead, he turned to the solu-
tion already adopted by Schelling when he had planned a philosophy of
nature. The reason is clear enough. He was pushed to that conclusion
by his logical presupposition. Since – in his mind – art and history were
cast as philosophical mistakes, one to be corrected by pure philosophy,
the other by the planned philosophy of history, then, by analogy, the
scientific and mathematical disciplines could not remain independent
as practical schematizations of the data of experience. They had to be
treated as attempts at philosophy and partial mistakes, to be corrected
by a philosophy of nature.
‘This antithesis of physics and the philosophy of nature,’ he says,
is surely not between a not-thinking about nature and a thinking about it.
Philosophy of nature simply means a thoughtful contemplation of nature.
Ordinary physics also does this because its determinations of forces, laws,
and so on are thoughts, except that in physics those thoughts are formal
and intellectual.
The only point of the philosophy of nature is to posit, in place of the cat-
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egories of the understanding, relations of the theoretical concept, and by

means of these relations to comprehend and define experience.158
Not only must philosophy harmonize with natural experience, but the
emergence and formation of philosophical science takes empirical physics
as an assumption and condition.159
Hegel certainly sees that there are purely artificial classifications in the
natural sciences aimed only at providing clear and simple information
by way of subjective cognition. But he believes that they can be replaced
by ‘natural’ classifications. And a start on such classifications seems to
emerge for him from research on comparative anatomy, on the division
of animals into vertebrates and invertebrates, of plants into mono- and
dicotyledons, and so on.160 He often talks about an ‘instinct of reason,’
supposedly manifest in the theories of physicists and scientists, that
should somehow anticipate the theoretical concept.161 Against Locke’s
naturalist and mathematical nominalism, he uses this to defend the real
existence of natural kinds and mathematical concepts. He also uses it to
preserve an unshaken faith in the ‘eternal laws of nature.’162
One remark suffices to show that this amphibian position is unten-
able. A person who wishes to apply philosophy to historical facts has no
choice but to narrate history, which, in order to be history, must still be
illuminated in some way by philosophy. Then, should desire for a philo-
sophical system seize that person while engaged in history, all he can do
is abandon the history and return to pure philosophy. In the same way,
anyone troubled by the need for philosophy when engaged in natural
science has only two ways to satisfy it, depending on what the need is,
whether for an applied philosophy or for a pure philosophy. In the first
case, he must pass from the scientific and mathematical disciplines, and
from their abstract and arbitrary concepts, to the historical view of things
natural and human. In the second case, he must turn to philosophy,
pure and simple. But a philosophy of nature, a philosophy that should
have the natural sciences as its basis, is another contradiction in terms, as
the philosophy of history is in a different sense. The reason is that a phi-
losophy of nature implies philosophical thinking about those arbitrary
concepts that philosophy itself does not recognize, and, as a result, has
no grip on them, whether to affirm or deny them.
Hegel repeatedly called attention to the difference between his philos-
ophy of nature and Schelling’s, criticizing the latter as based on the anal-
ogy between organic and inorganic, on the comparison of one natural
sphere with another, and as developed by applying a schema established
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in advance. But Hegel’s philosophy of nature also can develop only by

way of analogy, except that the analogy is supplied in it by forms of the
concept – meaning judgment, the syllogism, dialectical opposites, and
the like. Hence, the discrepancy between the two philosophies, between
mother and daughter, seems of little moment to me. Nor do I think it
fitting to have praised Hegel’s natural philosophy as foreshadowing Dar-
win’s discoveries because of its concept of becoming and evolution.163 In
Hegel’s philosophy of nature, the evolution and dialectic of concepts is
purely ideal, leaving natural species untouched and actually confirming
that they are fixed.
In the old philosophy of nature and also in the new, it was an improper
representation to treat progress and the passage from one natural form or
sphere to a higher one as a product supplied by external reality – as a prod-
uct which, however, in order to be made more luminous, has been pushed
into the darkness of the past. The externality by which nature allows differ-
ences to be separate from one another and to appear as neutral states of
affairs belongs precisely to nature. But the dialectical concept that directs
progress through its levels works within them. Representations that are
cloudy, and, in the end, derived from the senses – like plants and animals
emerging from the water and animal organisms better developed from low-
er organisms and so on – must be completely excluded from philosophical
consideration.164
This is straightforward anti-Darwinism, as we might have expected from

Hegel since he recognizes no historicity in nature.
In describing the false idea of a philosophy of nature and condemning
the account of it that Hegel proposes to give, there is certainly no need
to implicate in our verdict the whole book that bears that title. The devil,
then, is not as ugly as advertised. That book by Hegel (usually in the
comments that follow its sections, which are the bulk of it) also contains
a host of quite correct criticisms, which, at first glance, seem to be aimed
at mathematicians, physicists, and scientists. In fact, those criticisms are
aimed at the metaphysics that those scientists mix into their subjects or
incorrectly extract from them. In other words, the criticisms are aimed at
the ‘ineffable metaphysics’ (as Hegel calls it) that transforms naturalist
and mathematical abstractions – forces, pores, atoms, and so on – into
reality.165 In this whole game, Hegel has good cards to play, and we can
only grant him our lively agreement.
This polemic is also the only just part of Hegel’s violent invectives
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against Newton, or rather against the pernicious metaphysics that New-

ton (despite his having warned physics to ‘beware of metaphysics!’)
introduced or suggested.166 Otherwise, Hegel’s invectives document the
hostility towards scientists and mathematicians that the notion of a phi-
losophy of nature carried with it, just as the notion of a philosophy of
history already implied a certain hostility towards professional historians.
As I have said, the hostility did not grow out of contempt for those dis-
ciplines – indeed, it was too much affection, too much of the lofty and
philosophical in Hegel’s views about them that made him a harsh judge
of the experts in those fields.
But his bête noire still had to be the greatest representative of modern
exact science. From his dissertation On the Orbits of the Planets through
the final edition of the Encyclopedia, Hegel aims criticisms, accusations,
and sarcastic remarks at Newton. In the dissertation, he deplores ‘illam
autem quae a Newtone incepta est, mathematices et physices confusionem.’ Refer-
ring to the tale of the apple, he remarks jokingly that this fruit was fatal
to the human race three times, causing Adam’s fall, Troy’s destruction,
and, finally, by dropping upon Newton’s head, the ruination of natural
philosophy.167
Newton did the most (he says this in a summary in the History of Phi-
losophy) to introduce reflective determinations of forces into science,
substituting laws of force for laws of phenomena. In physics and optics
he made bad observations and even worse arguments. He moved from
experience to general points of view, which he then took as foundational
and constructed each of his facts with them. That is the nature of New-
ton’s theories. In the use of concepts, he was a barbarian, and he never
realized that he was applying determinations of thinking. He handled
concepts as one handles stones and pieces of wood. The experiments
and arguments in the Optics, held up as the most exalted example of
such activities in the study of nature, should serve instead as an example
of how one should not experiment or reason. Nature stands in contrast
to those fictitious experiences, and nature is far superior to the feeble
idea of her that would be produced by anyone who put confidence in
them.168
Outbursts of this kind against Newton went as far as to charge bad
faith: Newton was supposed to have knowingly altered the results of
certain experiments. This kept causing great scandal and has been very
harshly criticized. Suppose the ingredient of passion played some small
part in this. And suppose we refuse to excuse Hegel by recalling that he
was at one with certain distinguished contemporaries – Goethe most of
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all – in making these criticisms and even in the violence of his language.
Still, when one evaluates the substance of it, both the part of the polemic
that is just and the part that is unjust and exaggerated, it is clear that it is
simply a logical consequence of Hegel’s philosophical position.
In the philosophy of nature, as in the philosophy of history, Hegel
also never dared commit himself to declaring the empirical and posi-
tive method completely mistaken and fully replaceable by the theoretical
method. For him, when empirical sciences construct their laws and con-
cepts, they come up against (entgegenarbeiten) the labour of the philoso-
pher, offering material that is ready-made and half-developed.169 And
Hegel urged an accord between physics and philosophy, as we have seen.
Declarations of the same sort have been repeated by students of Hegel
– Michelet, Rosenkranz, and Vera. The last of these compares physicists
to day labourers and the philosopher to the architect, saying that ‘la
physique rassemble et prépare les matériaux que la philosophie vient
ensuite marquer de sa forme.’170 These are just phrases aimed at the
physicists, however, – rash and passionate, but devoid of any content.
The choices, in fact, are two. In one case, we suppose that the empiri-
cal method is in a position to posit certain laws, certain types, and certain
concepts – certain truths, in short – and then we can never manage to
understand why other laws, types, truths, and concepts, along with the
whole system of them, should not follow from the same method. For the
same activity that posits the first naturalist concept thereby shows the
capacity to posit the others and the whole, just as the poetic activity that
shapes the first verse is the same one that completes the whole poem.
In the other case, we suppose that the empirical method is incapable of
any truth, however minimal. And in that event the theoretical method
not only has no need of the other but cannot derive any benefit from it.
Paying lip service to physics and the empirical method is not serious,
and rightly this has satisfied no one. By treating the exact sciences as a
semi-philosophy, Hegel completely rejected them and absorbed them
into philosophy, which thus took on all their rights and all their duties.
Having thereby put so big a burden on philosophy’s shoulders, he could
not then legitimately lighten it by trying to turn part of it over again to
the empirical sciences, which for him were eliminated and nonexistent
forevermore. All rights and all duties: from then on it was up to phi-
losophy and not empirical science to prove and justify the existence of
this or that particular fact of nature. It was up to philosophy to discover
stars, physical forces, chemical structures, physiological elements, and
unknown species of animals and plants.
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Now it seems we would have to agree that Krug – the poor devil – was a
simple messenger of common sense when he demanded that Schelling’s
natural philosophy should deduce the moon and its various features,
or a rose, a horse, or a dog, or even just the quill with which he, Krug,
was writing at that moment.171 From his first writings to his last, Hegel
mocked him, presenting him as a figure of fun, and perhaps that is what
he was. But that does not deny that Hegel’s reply to Krug’s objection is,
beneath its seeming nonchalance, clumsy and ambiguous. In one sense,
Hegel seemed to be saying that things of that kind, individual facts (and
all facts are individual), have nothing to do with philosophy. In anoth-
er sense, however, he was saying that the deduction is quite possible,
though science now has tasks far more urgent than the deduction of
Herr Krug’s writing quill.172 Salvatore Tommasi, the famous Neapolitan
physiologist and physician, showed how right Krug was when he replied,
with some annoyance, to De Meis the Hegelian, who kept insisting on
some unknown theory of physiology and pathology. Tommasi said that
he would be ready to pay attention to the method recommended to him
when a medical discovery had been made by using it – an immediate
cure for pneumonia, for example.173
Therefore, the attempt to hang on to the coattails of the empirical
sciences after having turned them loose only means that we have new
proof that Hegel’s thesis is false, as we said above in the case of history
(and the basis of the natural sciences is historical). The point is certainly
not to cleanse the thesis of its falsity and render it true. But the analogy
does not stop there. Because Hegel had no hope of ever being able to
rationalize all of history, as required by his notion of a philosophy of
history, he ended up by arbitrarily excising one part of the historical
facts that he found more perplexing than others and consigning them
to the novel. He did the same for the natural sciences when faced with
so many classes and species of natural facts, with reality’s infinite appear-
ances, with things that are called rare cases, exceptions, extraordinary
entities. What he discovered is delicious – ‘the impotence of nature’ (die
Ohnmacht der Natur): nature is weak, she swoons, she faints away from the
harsh task of actualizing the rationality of the concept.174
However, just as we did not let ourselves be persuaded to throw away
one part of the facts in the field of history, having learned from Hegel
himself that the fact is sacred, so also, having learned from him that
there is reason in the world, it will not behoove us to believe that a part
of reality is in rebellion or inert in the face of reason. What is called here
‘the impotence of nature’ is clearly nothing but the impotence of the
606
philosophy of nature devised by Schelling and Hegel to keep faith with

their own project.
9. The Construction of False Sciences and the Application of

the Dialectic to the Individual and the Empirical
Hegel might have just proposed the idea of a philosophy of history and a
philosophy of nature, admiring them, promoting them, and defending
them but doing nothing else. A person can announce a project and still
lack the commitment to carry it out. This often happens, especially when
the project is risky. Systems and books that go no farther than introduc-
tions and preliminaries are not hard to find, even in contemporary lit-
erature and among those announced with the greatest fanfare. It would
be almost worth the trouble to make a cautionary catalogue. But Hegel
did not leave the philosophy of history and the philosophy of nature as
ideas in the air. He made a real product of each of them. In the process
of getting it done, he had to force himself to treat individual facts and
empirical concepts as particular philosophical concepts. And since he
had already applied the dialectic to these items, treating individual facts
and empirical concepts dialectically had to be his procedure.
This is the second great abuse of his dialectical discovery that Hegel
committed.175 To get to this point and put ourselves in a position to give
the correct formulation and origin of this second abuse, it was indispen-
sable for us to have gone through the first one and to have run though
its multiple consequences. Some of them – namely, denying autonomy
to history and the positive sciences – lead in turn to the second abuse.
Without following that path through all its twists and turns, we would not
comprehend how Hegel could ever have arrived at so strange a thought.
By following that path, while acquiring full knowledge of the facts, we
also somehow develop a feeling of admiration for the ingenuity that
exists in that tight knot of error – for the method in that madness, as
Polonius would have said.176 The second abuse is the more commonly
known, and it has done more than anything else to give Hegelian philos-
ophy a bad reputation. If the first abuse caused damage to certain parts
of philosophy, the second struck or threatened historical studies and the
positive sciences. Both reacted vigorously in self-defense.
But we must not neglect certain observations about this matter. As
people gained awareness of the error in the method that Hegel champi-
oned and tried to apply, this caused a general condemnation and impli-
cated all his books on the history of civilization and art, on philosophy
607
and religion, and on various scientific disciplines. If the method is wrong

(says a simple-minded argument), what good can there be in the results?
What guarantee? From start to finish, those books will be a science and
history of sophisms. The result is not just that experts on scientific issues
never ask about the Philosophy of Nature or look at it, interest being so
small that we have even seen translators leave it out of their versions
of the Encyclopedia.177 What is more, Hegel’s discussions of an historical
nature are viewed with distrust, almost a fear of contagious contamina-
tion. But like all books, these need to be examined as finished products
and in detail because in his writing Hegel was able to operate – and on
many occasions actually did operate – contrary to his program or inde-
pendently of it. Goethe’s case is similar. Competent critics say that in his
optics he decided to employ methods completely alien to physics, and
these attracted the unanimous disapproval of experts on the topic. But
in other areas of natural science – anatomy and botany, for example – he
made real, proper discoveries.178
In general, the value of books about the philosophy of nature by Schell-
ing, Hegel, and their students increases as we go from more abstract top-
ics to the more concrete, from physics to physiology, from the so-called
inorganic world to the organic. The reason is clear: the usefulness of
mathematical method decreases for more concrete topics. In any case,
in the positive part of his writing about nature Hegel apparently did
not achieve important results or make original observations (like those
found in the works of Treviranus, Oken, and others), and perhaps the
best he has to offer is always about psychology and anthropology, sub-
jects that he knew better personally.179 As a writer of history, however, he
is on a par with the greatest historians of the nineteenth century, which
– thanks in part to Hegel – turned out to be the Age of History. The his-
tory of philosophy, as already mentioned, can be thought of almost as
his own creation.
He gave original and completely accurate characterizations of the Pre-
Socratics (notably Parmenides, Heraclitus, and the Sophists), Socrates
himself, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Sceptics, the Neoplatonists and
Christianity, and, in modern times, English empirical philosophy, the
critical-theoretical period from Kant to Schelling, and Jacobi along with
the sentimentalists and mystics. In his study of ancient philosophy, he
gave a correct account of the profound difference between antiquity and
modernity in the way that they pose problems and understand them.
And he saw the error of extracting propositions from history in terms of
current philosophy, as Brucker and Tiedemann were wont to do.180 His
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political history offers ample and illuminating views of the character of

the great historical eras and the connections between them – Greece,
Rome, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and the French Revolution.
The history of literature and the arts mixed in with his lectures on aes-
thetics contains views and judgments that have all become popular: on
the Homeric epic, ancient tragedy, Shakespearean theatre, Italian paint-
ing in the Renaissance, and Dutch painting, for example.
Truly, anyone who makes a special study of the historical ideas that
developed in the course of the nineteenth century and entered into our
cultural heritage would be amazed at how many go back to Hegel as the
original source or took their definitive form from Hegel, even though
the writers who popularized them (Taine, for example) have often
repeated these ideas without any understanding of their source or with
poor understanding.181
Moreover, it would be shabby criticism to accuse Hegel of historical
mistakes by using research and discoveries that came after him, which
has often been done. (Sometimes objections have been based on dubi-
ous discoveries, as when a complaint was lodged against him for not tak-
ing account of ‘matriarchy’ or for not divining sociological theories on
the origin of art from labour economics and industrial design!) No histo-
rian, however great, would pass that test – not Thucydides or Polybius or
Machiavelli, not even a Niebuhr or a Mommsen.182 It would also be petty
to make too heavy and personal a charge against him of certain political
and national prejudices that appear in his historical compositions, no
more nor less than in those of so many other historians, philosophers,
and journalists, from Gioberti’s Italian ‘primacy’ to the contemporary
Germanic lunacies of Mr. Chamberlain and Herr Woltmann.183
Even within the confines of historical mistakes that were consequenc-
es of philosophical mistakes, we have to distinguish those that grow out
of incorrect philosophical concepts that Hegel often shares with other
philosophers and with the philosophy of his time (for example, deal-
ing with the history of poetry and art on the basis of a concept of art,
which, in substance, is religion or philosophy, and also, generally, the
claim to construct or reconstruct the course of history theoretically)
from those related to his dialectic, the only mistakes of interest for our
current inquiry. Given these reservations, it is nonetheless clear that we
encounter examples of a dialectical treatment of the individual and the
empirical in Hegel’s books, and this suffices to explain and partly justify
the violent reaction of historians and scientists against the dialectic itself.
In the historical writings we encounter fewer such examples, for rea-
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sons already given; in fact, the history of philosophy can be considered

almost entirely free of them. But the universal history developed by
Hegel is conceived triadically as the Oriental world, the Classical world,
and the Germanic world: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which, for bet-
ter or worse, are made concrete in this formula – that the Oriental world
knew and knows that only one person is free; the Graeco-Roman world
that some are free; and the Germanic world that all are free. Hence,
the characteristic of the first is despotism, of the second democracy and
aristocracy, and of the third monarchy.184 To set this triad up, Hegel is
forced to suppress a great deal in the history about space and time. As for
space, he simply eliminates a fifth of the world. Australia and the other
islands between Asia and America seem to him still afflicted by ‘physi-
cal immaturity.’ He sees America itself as only an appendage to Euro-
pean civilization, and he refuses to take the very ancient civilizations of
Mexico and Peru into consideration because, based on the information
we have about them, it seems that ‘they were absolutely natural and had
to perish with the approach of the Spirit.’185 And as for time, he holds
that history starts only when there are historians, whence the German
word Geschichte or the Italian storia correctly signify both history a parte
subjecti and history a parte objecti. It is possible for peoples to live a long
time without a State, but that life, which is their prehistory, has nothing
to do with history.186
Referring to such limitations of space and time, in the last years of his
life Hegel wrote in his notebook that ‘the same division holds in univer-
sal history that was in use among the Greeks – Greeks and barbarians.’187
In that way, he sought to adapt to his dialectic the universal history por-
trayed in books by historians. And he deceived himself that in the indi-
vidual he had found a starting point that had the precision of the first
term of the dialectical triad: this would be the spiritual Orient, where the
sun of history rises. But the triad won so laboriously totters with every
specific development, as Hegel keeps on trying. If we stop at what first
meets the eye, the fundamental triad itself expands into a tetrad of the
Oriental world, the Greek world, the Roman world, and the Germanic
world. And in the Orient, China and India are immediately sacrificed to
Persia, which for Hegel is the first truly historical nation. Likewise, the
history of art gives rise to a triad of Oriental or Symbolic art, Greek or
Classical art, and Christian or Romantic art – not a very solid triad even
in its formulation, derived from the disequilibrium between content and
form whose synthesis would then surely lie not in the third term but in
the second. Hegel seems also to accept a fourth artistic period after the
610
Romantic, which here again would transmute the triad into a tetrad,
unless we want to say that the last phase is art’s cessation in philosophy.188
The history of religions is organized in three phases: natural religion;
the religion of consciousness divided against itself; and the religion of
transition to the religion of liberty. The two last phases are also deter-
mined triadically: the religion of division becomes religions of measure
(Chinese), fantasy (Indian), and internality (Buddhist); the religion of
transition becomes religions of nature, spiritual liberty, and absoluteness
or absolute religion. These are subdivided into new triads: the religion
of nature into those of light (Persian), pain (Syrian), and mystery (Egyp-
tian); the religion of spiritual liberty into those of the sublime (Jewish),
beauty (Greek), and intellect or finality (Roman). The absolute religion
would then be Christianity.
But the three parts of the world give us one of the strangest examples
of the dialectical construction of the individual. As mentioned, Hegel
got rid of the other two parts that did not seem mature to him, either
physically or spiritually. The ‘new world’ shows an incompletely devel-
oped division between a northern and a southern part, in the manner
of a magnet. But in the old world the division into three parts was com-
plete. The first of these, Africa (the region of metal, the lunar element,
hardened by heat, where man is compressed within himself and dull) is
the mute spirit that does not attain knowledge. Asia, the second, is come-
tary Bacchic dissipation, the land of formless and indeterminate breed-
ing that cannot master itself. Europe, the third, represents consciousness
and constitutes the rational part of the earth, with its equilibrium of riv-
ers, valleys, and mountains – and the centre of Europe is Germany!189
Dialectical construction is rampant in the Philosophy of Nature, or rath-
er in the field of empirical concepts. In its positive part, that book is basi-
cally just a compendium of scientific and mathematical subjects, divided
into three sections: (1) geometry and mechanics; (2) astronomy, physics,
and chemistry; (3) mineralogy, botany, zoology, geology, and physiology.
This compendium of varied information is organized as the fundamen-
tal triad of mechanics, physics, and organic physics, and the whole thing
is subdivided into smaller triads. Never mind that in universal history
the point of convergence and the final result is the Germanic spirit, just
as in Hegel’s conception of cosmology Earth is the centre of the uni-
verse (which must then be Germany, at least according to the words cited
above).190 This only shows yet again how a lofty philosophical mind can
succumb here and there to sentiment and prejudice.
Look instead at some examples of the dialectic of the geometer and
611
the physicist. In addition to three dimensions of space, Hegel posits three

dimensions of time – past, present, and future. But while he observes
that the three dimensions of time are not differentiated in nature exis-
tentially, he seems to admit that the three dimensions of space are dif-
ferentiated existentially. These three would be based on the nature of
the concept, in any case, even though (he says) the determinations of
the concept, in that first form of externality – abstract quantity – are
only superficial and give rise to completely empty differences. They are
superficial; they are empty; they are arbitrary. And yet Hegel nonetheless
deduces them dialectically. The point is the negation of space, but it is
an essentially spatial negation and so it is a line. And the negation of the
negation is the surface!191
The deduction of the celestial bodies proceeds. The central body is
the thesis; the Moon and the comets are bodies of the antithesis; the syn-
thesis, the body of the concrete totality, is the planet.192 Magnetism is the
proof ad oculos of the dialectical concept in nature, of the complete syl-
logism.193 The poles are the sensibly existent extremities of a real line; as
poles, however, they have no sensible and mechanical reality, only ideal
reality, and they are completely inseparable. The neutral point in which
they have their substance is the unity wherein they exist as determina-
tions of the concept, such that they get meaning and existence only in
that unity, and polarity is only the relation of those moments. Through
the necessity of the dialectical form, Hegel combats the identification of
magnetism, electricity, and chemistry that physical science seeks to pro-
duce. He wants the three facts to be one and distinct at the same time.194
He would be equally opposed to the physiologists who abolish the
clear distinction between the animal cell and the plant cell or who treat
life as sown all around us. The three ‘kingdoms of nature’ correspond
too well to his triadism for him not to feel obliged to preserve them by
treating them dialectically as geological, vegetable and animal nature. In
the first, life posits its own condition for itself; in the second, the indi-
vidual is still external to its parts, which are themselves individuals; in the
third, parts exist essentially as parts of the individual, which therefore
is a subject.195 The dialectic continues through each of these forms of
nature. In the plant the process divides into three syllogisms – the proc-
ess of formation, the process of opposition to inorganic nature, and the
process of reproduction, unifying the two first processes.196
The dialectical construction of the five senses is more laborious
because they are five and not three. But Hegel is not stymied. For him
the senses are five, and still they are three. The first is that of the mechan-
612
ical sphere, of weight, cohesion, and their transformation – the sense of

touch. The second is … two senses in the antithesis: one is particularized
airiness; and one includes both the concrete neutrality of water and its
antithesis, the resolution of concrete neutrality – smell and taste. The
third is the sense of ideality, which is also double: a sense of ideality as
manifestation of the external through the external, of light in general,
and, more precisely, of light that becomes determinate in the concrete
externality of colour; also a sense of the manifestation of internality,
made known as such in its externalization, which is tone; which is to say
– sight and hearing!197
Other examples of this dialectic of the empirical are found abun-
dantly in what for us is also a philosophy of nature (in a gnoseological
sense), a philosophy of the empirical – scattered through the aesthetics,
the logic, and the philosophy of Spirit. In the aesthetics, the system of
the arts is developed triadically: architecture, the first of them, sets up
the temple of God; sculpture, the second, sets up God himself; the third
expresses the sentiments of the faithful with colours, tones, and words,
and subdivides into painting, music, and poetry. The labour of condens-
ing into three what is empirically determined by another number (five
arts into three, five senses into three) is spared him in the field of poetry
by rhetoric, from which Hegel is happy to take the threefold division of
lyric, epic, and dramatic poetry – as he had taken the three kingdoms of
nature from empirical science.
In logic, the classification of judgments, using a new terminology,
is roughly like Kant’s, whose basis is a tetrad: the judgment of quality
becomes that of existence; the judgment of quantity that of reflection;
the judgment of relation that of necessity; and the judgment of modal-
ity that of the concept, and their triadic subdivisions are preserved. The
syllogism (which is synthesis in relation to judgment as antithesis, or the
restoration of the concept in judgment and thus the unity and truth of
both) is also developed triadically as a syllogism of determinate being, a
syllogism of reflection, and a syllogism of necessity.
In the philosophy of Spirit, Hegel knows full well that psychology can-
not serve as a basis for philosophy, but he still treats it dialectically. Subjec-
tive spirit develops as the three levels of anthropology, phenomenology
of the Spirit and psychology. The first includes the natural, the sentient,
and the real soul; the second includes consciousness, self-consciousness,
and reason; and the third includes the theoretical, the practical, and the
free spirit. Objective spirit has three moments of law, morality, and eth-
ics. The moments of law are property, contract, and right against wrong.
613
Ethics divides into family, civil society, and state. Finally, the state divides
into internal law, external law, and (by an odd leap) universal history.
Hegelian dialectic has been caricatured many times. But no carica-
ture could equal what the author himself did unconsciously when he
tried to think of Africa, Asia, and Europe, or the hand, nose, and ear,
or family patrimony, paternal power, and testament in the same rhythm
of thought that he used for being, nothing, and becoming. It seems at
times that Hegel was not yet in full possession of his thought, so much
did he need help from mythology – just as Plato (on an apt reading from
Hegel himself), when he was unsuccessful in using thought to master
certain difficult problems which in his day were still not ripe, substituted
an imagined solution for one that was thought out, the myth for the
concept.
10. Dualism Not Overcome
The panlogicism that has already been identified in Hegel’s system is

just the complex of mistakes that arise from the false application of the
dialectic – mistakes that I have described above and analysed piece by
piece.198 Panlogicism is the substitution of philosophical thinking for all
other processes of the Spirit, which must all take on logical (philosophi-
cal) form and vanish. But it was a mistake to treat panlogicism as the
basic feature of the system when it was actually only the diseased growth
that came out of it.
Furthermore, one must not take even Hegel’s identification of logic
with metaphysics to be proof of panlogicism, seeing that logic is also
metaphysics for him. What Hegel called logic has nothing in common
with the logic of the schools (nor, generally speaking, with a science of
logic as a particular philosophical science). It was the doctrine of the
categories of which logic in the strict sense was only one category or
only one group. And those categories included the whole of the Spirit
and the whole of reality. Hence, it is clear that the identification of logic
and metaphysics, of logic and philosophy, amounted basically to identify-
ing metaphysics with metaphysics, philosophy with philosophy. True, this
metaphysics and philosophy of his develops panlogistically, in part. But
that is a separate issue. The mistake applies just to the use of the princi-
ple, not the principle in itself.
A dualism more or less disguised – the other charge still lodged
against Hegel’s system – would seem to be incompatible with the accu-
sation of panlogicism. But it is not incompatible. Since error can never
614
be asserted with the full coherence of truth, the panlogical mistake con-
verts to its contrary, and this is dualism. The locus of this conversion is
the philosophy of nature, where, as has been shown, the old concept of
nature, as provided by the physical and natural sciences, appears to be
completely solid and sustained. This was the concept on which Hegel
conferred philosophical value, by making it the thinking of a reality that
stands facing, or stands behind, the concept of the reality of the Spirit.
The critical point of the conversion – the revelation of the dualism
that emerges at the very moment when we seek to disguise it – is the
famous passage from Idea to Nature on which Hegel expressed himself
so briefly and obscurely, and on which his disciples spent so many words
but shed no light:
The Idea that is for itself, treated in this way as unity with itself, is intuit-
ing. But, as intuition, the Idea is posited in the one-sided determination
of immediacy or negation by means of extrinsic reflection. The absolute
freedom of the Idea, however, is that it does not just pass over into life, nor
allow life to appear in it just as finite cognition, but that, in its own absolute
truth, it resolves to release freely out of itself the moment of its particularity
or its initial determination or being-other – the immediate Idea as its reflec-
tion, as Nature.199
That conversion and that passage are so dangerous that many inter-
pretations of Hegelian thought have been proposed (and others might
be proposed) to avoid the danger, to remove the dualism, and preserve
the system’s original theme, which is absolute idealism, the substance as
subject. But none of those interpretations seems to conform to the phi-
losopher’s genuine thinking.
Thus, it might be convenient to claim that the passage from Idea to
Nature is nothing more for Hegel than the passage from philosophy to
experience, from philosophy to natural science, whose existence and
independence alongside philosophy Hegel would never have thought
to deny. In that way, Hegel’s system would become a philosophy of mind
or Spirit in general, external to experience but not unfriendly to it – not
to observation and research into natural and historical particulars. But
this hermeneutic clashes with the simple realization that Hegel does not
pass from philosophy to the (empirical) science of nature but from logic
or philosophy in general to the philosophy of nature. Hence, he under-
stands nature not as the empirical in relation to the theoretical, but as a
theoretical concept with rights equal to any other.
615
Another interpretation encounters the same problem: the one that

decrees that there is no passage, either logical or temporal, between
Idea and Nature because the Idea, already being Nature, does not become
Nature. The individual is the universal, and the universal is the individ-
ual. This would be a way to avoid dualism, no doubt, because in philoso-
phy we take nothing into consideration but the universal. The individual
(which, philosophically speaking, is the universal itself) as individual is
developed by intuition, a sphere of the Spirit that precedes the sphere of
philosophy and is its condition. But Hegel had no intention of abandon-
ing the individual to the poets and historians. He made philosophy out
of the individual when he engaged in philosophy of nature and history.
To interpret him in the way proposed, we would need to cut not just a
few incidental and irrelevant pages out of the system but to amputate
whole parts and entire books, which to the author, at least, seemed to be
vital organs.
One could devise a third interpretation by basing it on one meaning
of the word ‘nature,’ of which there are also traces in Hegel – nature
understood as the negative moment of the Spirit, passivity in contrast
to activity, the mechanical in contrast to the teleological, the non-being
that is opposed to being. In that case, Spirit and Nature would be not
two distinct concepts – concepts of two realities or of two forms of reality
– but a single concept of the single reality that is the synthesis of oppo-
sites, dialectic and development. Unity would be saved. The Idea, which
is alienated from itself as Nature, by turning to itself in the Spirit would
be the Spirit itself, understood in its concreteness, which includes the
negative moment. Our Spaventa came close to this interpretation when
he wrote that
‘the Logos in itself is not reality, then, except insofar as it is logic, Spirit as
the thinking of thinking – pure thinking. Nature fixed as nature does not
suffice by itself, and so it not only presupposes the Logos ideally but also
has the Absolute Spirit as its real principle just because it has a real Absolute
as its end.’200
However, besides this meaning of the word ‘nature’ – equivalent to

negation and non-being – and besides its meaning as individual and as
the material of intuition, there is in Hegel a nature understood as reality,
as the other of Spirit, tÕ ›teron kaq¶aÙtÕ, the other in itself.201 Were this
not so, in fact, Hegel would never have been able to think of construct-
ing a philosophy of the negative, of non-being, of pure abstraction. And
616
yet he actually does construct a philosophy of nature whose object is

then understood as something positive.
Finally, there has been an effort to interpret Hegel’s three-part divi-
sion of Logos, Nature and Spirit as if Nature and Spirit were just con-
crete Spirit itself, divided into two parts only empirically. And the Logos
would serve to signify the true reality that is in both, their identity in
apparent division, the Spirit in its universality, which is not the one
that appears only in the world called social or human when that world is
empirically detached from the rest. But it would be impossible to elimi-
nate the deep distinction that Hegel posits between Nature and Spirit
and which is affirmed by the distinction between an unconscious and
a conscious logical form. Panpsychism was far from Hegel’s intentions:
for him, thinking was proper to the human and alien to the animal. In
Nature there is no thinking, only determinations of thinking, which is a
different matter. Yes, there is an intelligence, but – as Schelling said and
Hegel agreed – it is petrified. Therefore, Hegel also maintained that in
Nature the forms of the Spirit are not already resolved into one another
as they are in conscious spirit; they have the standing of separate exist-
ences. Matter and motion, for example, exist in the solar system as facts;
the determinations of the senses exist as qualities of bodies and also, in a
more separate sense, as elements, and so on (Enc. ¶380). The dialectical
nature of the concept exists as a natural fact in the positive and negative
poles of the magnet.202
It might be a correct thought to make Nature and Spirit into a single
series as two things only roughly distinct, as the civilized human is dis-
tinct from the savage, but this is completely foreign to Hegel’s intent. His
distinction between Nature and Spirit is qualitative, whatever may be said
to the contrary – assuming that the difference between unconscious and
conscious beings, between things and thinkers, is qualitative. In Hegel’s
genuine thought as derived from his philosophy of nature, Spirit and
Nature are two realities, then, one confronting the other, one ground-
ing the other, but, in any case, one distinct from the other. Therefore,
he resorted to a third term, to the Logos: the need to overcome dualism
forced him to try to overcome it with the triadic form that had done
him such superb service in overcoming the dualism of opposites.203 Since
Nature and Spirit are not opposites in his thinking, however, they are
not two abstractions but two concrete realities, and the triadic form was
inapplicable.
Also not applicable was the form of critique that he had used, again
with wonderful results, for concepts of reflection in the doctrine of
617
essence. As he understood them, Nature and Spirit were not concepts

of reflection, poorly distinguished, but two clearly distinct concepts of
determinate character. The Logos, the third term, comes first in his tri-
ad, as the thesis. But in the second term, the antithesis, we know what
the content is, since it is just the ensemble of mathematical, physical, and
scientific theories. And the content of the third term, the synthesis, is
psychology, on the one hand, and, on the other, the philosophies of law,
art, religion, and the Absolute Spirit or Idea. But the first term or thesis,
the Logos, does not have a content of its own, so it borrows one from the
other two, especially from the latter, while blending this into a polemic
against inadequate philosophies.
For anyone who actually separates it from Nature and Spirit and looks
it in the face, that Logos reveals itself as nothing but the dark bottom of
the old metaphysics: God, in whom the two substances of Descartes were
joined; the substantia sive Deus that supported Spinoza’s two attributes
of thinking and extension; and later still Schelling’s Absolute, the indif-
ference of Nature and Spirit; or the blind (but not too blind) Will of
Schopenhauer, from which nature and consciousness arise; or else the
unconscious of Eduard von Hartmann, which also, quite logically, gives
rise to consciousness.204 Hegel had rebuked Schelling for conceiving of
the Absolute as substance and not subject. But then his Logos is a subject
that cannot be thought as subject or rather cannot be thought at all. It
is, as Hegel himself says, ‘God in his eternal essence before the creation
of nature and the finite spirit.’205 And we can certainly think of God in
Nature and in the finite spirit, Deus in nobis et nos, but certainly not God
beyond or before Nature and man.206 The expedient of the triad and the
term Logos to which Hegel resorted show that he was always in the grip of
dualism, which he always valiantly battles but never escapes.
In this dualism that was not overcome, that entangles Hegel’s absolute
idealism because of the serious logical mistake that he made, in this lies
the reason for the division of the Hegelian school into a Right and a
Left, the latter finally being pushed to the extreme Left. The Right Wing
interpreted Hegel theistically. Hegel’s subject, the Logos, became the
personal God. And Hegelian philosophy’s relation to Christianity did
not stop with recognizing the large component of philosophy includ-
ed in Christian theology but also acknowledged substantial agreement
in other respects. The Left Wing opposed any transcendence and any
concept of a personal God. Emphasizing the system’s feature of imma-
nence, the Left went so far as to sympathize with philosophical mate-
rialism because even that philosophy, in its way, has an immanent and
618
non-transcendent character. It would not be possible to decide which of

the two interpretations was more faithful to Hegel’s thinking since both
were based on Hegelian teachings, and they were opposed and hostile to
one another just because those doctrines themselves were contradictory.
11. The Criticism and Continuation of Hegel’s Thought:

Conclusion
With the interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy that I have given in this

essay, I have also set out the task which, in my view, should devolve on the
critics and continuators who confront it. It has been necessary
to preserve the living part of the philosophy, meaning the new con-
cept of the concept, the concrete universal, along with the dialectic
of opposites and the theory of levels of reality;
to reject, on the basis of that new concept and its development, all
panlogicism and any speculative construction of the individual and
empirical, of history and nature;
to recognize the autonomy of the various forms of the Spirit, even in
their necessary connection and unity;
and finally, to reduce all philosophy to a pure philosophy of the
Spirit (or a metaphysical logic, if one preferred to give it that name).
It has been necessary to pull Hegelian thought ‘out of the sheath of its
limbs’ – fake limbs clumsily stuck on to it – permitting it to grow limbs of
its own in response to the nature of the primitive seed.207 Hegel’s school
totally failed in this task. As indicated, it was divided into Right and Left
and subdivided into secondary factions on the question of what empha-
sis to give to tendencies in the system towards transcendence or imma-
nence. But the school was completely united in preserving and enlarging
the system’s dialectical muddle, the confusion between a dialectic of
opposites and a dialectic of distincts, a dialectic of the Absolute and a
dialectic of the contingent.
Michelet, for example, as editor of the Philosophy of Nature, played at
correcting some details dialectically – such as the place that belongs to a
fifth of the world in the dialectic of geography mentioned above, suppos-
ing, as he did, that the islands of Oceania represent the ultimate future of
the human race, the final development of democratic ‘self-government.’
And to those whose vision of dialectical modes of reasoning was unclear,
Michelet replied that the dialectical method, like artistic creation, makes
619
no claims on universal acceptance but must remain ‘a special talent of

the favourite of the gods.’208 This really paid small honour to the master,
who had maintained, quite insistently and with a deep sense of human-
ity, that philosophy must be not esoteric but exoteric.209
Rosenkranz was another great representative of the Right. His Aesthetic
of the Ugly construed all the terms of the crudest and most vulgar psychol-
ogy in a way that I shall limit myself to calling ‘bizarre.’210 He also pro-
posed reorganizations and corrections for the philosophy of nature: the
place of the fixed stars, for example, which Hegel had lowered in favour
of the planets and the Earth; the division between physics and astrono-
my, which Hegel had wrongly mixed up; or the transfer of the process of
crystallization from the physical to the organic, and so on. On the other
hand, he never abandoned the Hegelian assumption of a philosophy of
nature. Indeed, where Hegel had perhaps got a glimmer of the truth by
declaring a dialectical construction of mathematics impossible, Rosenk-
ranz was ready to overrule him, exclaiming that ‘this cannot be allowed.
If the dialectic is the universal method, why does mathematics need to
stay excluded from it?’ Vera, an Italian champion of these orthodox
Hegelians, kept up their acts of prowess against Newton, insisting that
natural science is done by three methods – experimental, mathemati-
cal, and theoretical, the last being the crown. Among other things, he
wrote that ‘nous disons qu’il y a un air, une lumière, et même un temps
et un espace apparents et qui sont sentis, et un air, une lumière, etc., qui
n’apparaissent point et qui sont simplement pensés.’211
Moving from extreme Right to extreme Left, let us linger a moment
with Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s friend and collaborator and a writ-
er who even in Italy has become very popular and much discussed in
recent times. We can see how he liquidated philosophy by reducing it
to the positive sciences, salvaging only its ‘doctrine of thought and some
of its laws, formal logic (!), and the dialectic.’ This dialectic, which was
‘just the science of the general laws of the movement and development
of human societies and thought,’ Engels illustrated with the following
examples. A barley grain, planted in the ground, sprouts, and by becom-
ing a plant it is negated; but other seeds come from the plant – a nega-
tion of the negation. The egg is negated when the butterfly emerges
from it, but the butterfly produces the egg all over again – a negation of
the negation. In arithmetic, a is negated by -a, but by negating the nega-
tion we get -a x -a = a2 – the first a raised to the next power. In history,
civilization begins with common ownership of the land. Private property
negates primitive communism. And socialism will cause the negation of
620
the negation by reproducing primitive communism, but raised to a high-

er power. In the history of philosophy, the first moment is the original
materialism, negated by idealism, which in dialectical materialism then
undergoes the negation of negation. The fact that we can negate a grain
of barley by eating it or an insect by trampling it, or the positive quantity
a by cancelling it, Engels added, is no objection because the negation
must be such as to render the negation of negation possible: otherwise,
he says innocently, there would be no dialectical process!212
Who will tell the sad story of the dialectical method among Hegel’s
students, where there is an abundance of savoury detail? One student
made dialectic out of Spirit as the male principle, Nature as the female
principle, and History as their nuptial union.213 Another located the cat-
egory of being in the Oriental world, the category of essence in the Clas-
sical world, and the category of the concept in the Modern world. For
yet another student, antiquity was the realm of art, the modern world
of philosophy and the future would belong to morality. In antiquity,
moreover, Athens was made to correspond to dynamic electricity, Sparta
to static electricity, Macedonia to electromagnetism, Persia to light, and
Rome to expanding and absorbent heat.214 In books by viri, both illustres
and obscuri, we encounter a profusion of such stupidities, which does not
mean that the obscure men are the least significant.215
The best of Hegel’s school were those who did not feel themselves in
a position to surpass Hegel, or did not think the times ripe for such a
thing, and limited themselves to preserving the teachings of the master
as a sacred trust, emphasizing the deep passages of truth in them, and, as
if they had an instinct for the truth, declining to push the thornier parts
(philosophy of nature, philosophy of history) without explicitly reject-
ing them. They also demonstrated their cautious and critical temper by
reconnecting Hegel in a certain way with his Kantian foundations and by
making the need for a transition from Kant to Hegel the constant object
of their scrutiny. Such scholars were Kuno Fischer in Germany, to whom
we owe a lucid restatement of Hegelian logic;216 Bertrando Spaventa in
Italy; Stirling in great Britain;217 and a few students educated in those
three countries. Spaventa did not surpass or transform Hegel, but he
clearly foresaw that this needed to be done and had to happen. On this
point, he noted that ‘in philosophers, in real philosophers, there is always
something underneath, something more than themselves of which they
are not aware. And this is the seed of a new life. To repeat philosophers
mechanically is to smother this seed, preventing it from developing and
becoming a new and more complete system.’218
621
As far as Hegel’s opponents are concerned, they too never did their
duty. Clearly, if they had done it, they would have been not opponents
but disciples and continuators of his thinking. While his followers kept
the dialectic completely intact to the bitter end, with all its confusions
and false applications, the opponents rejected the whole thing. There-
fore they fell into an opposite, yet similar, error. We may leave the bizarre
Schopenhauer aside; he spewed insults at Hegel but talked hearsay with-
out understanding anything precisely.219 What he spits out never really
goes beyond the generic or anecdotal. Herbart was more balanced and
at least recognized in Hegel ‘one of those rare people born to theorize.’
He concluded that Hegelian philosophy, because of its great emphasis
on the contradictions of which reality shows itself to be full when it is
present to thought, made the best introduction to metaphysics!220 But
whoever reads the refutations of Hegelian dialectic by Trendelenburg in
Germany, Rosmini in Italy, and Janet in France (naming only the most
important) cannot help feeling struck by a sense of distrust.221 For when
we perceive that a critic is doing his job too easily, it emerges from his
own words of scorn and condemnation that there is something much
deeper in the question that the critic could not get at.
Those clever debunkers have brought difficulties to light, no doubt
– sometimes even mistakes. But they do not show the mistakes in their
real origin, as deriving from the exaggeration of a great and novel
truth. ‘Refuting a philosophy,’ to use Hegel’s exact words, ‘only means
overcoming its limits and diminishing its determinate principle until it
becomes an ideal moment.’222
Hegel’s philosophical opponents were soon followed, however, by bar-
barian opponents in the new generations that came of age after 1848.
What they loathed in Hegel was just philosophy itself, which he repre-
sented in all its majestic harshness: philosophy, heartless and without
pity for the weak-minded and careless; philosophy, not appeased by
treats of sentiment and fantasy nor by quick meals of semi-science. For
those people, Hegel was the unavenged ghost of the theoretical need in
the human spirit, and here was a ghost apparently ready to undertake its
own vendettas at any given moment. Hence the fierce hatred of Hegel,
a hatred blended of remorse and fear, and certainly not motivated by
awareness of mistakes in the system.
Hegel had observed that philosophy after Fichte became too refined
and could no longer mean anything to polite society and the educated
public, as it did in the eighteenth century before Kant.223 But positivist
decadence reduced thinkers to so low a level that they no longer distin-
622
guished between the concept and sensation, between theory and expe-
rience. Given this loss of the most elementary distinctions, and given
Hegel’s assumption that elementary philosophical problems are identi-
fied and solved, how could anyone ever have discussed him, with his
thought turning on advanced and more subtle problems, living and
breathing on the highest peaks? For his critics to look at Hegel in such
conditions was the same as uncovering the sad consciousness of power-
lessness, with its agitations and irritations, and with fierce condemna-
tions of the joys that they were not allowed to taste.
In our day, fortunately, intellectual attitudes have changed for the
better. Things are now more favourable to philosophy in general, more
favourable to Hegel himself. We are now at the point of possessing a
philosophy of art and language, a theory of history, and a gnoseology of
the mathematical and scientific disciplines that make it impossible for
the mistakes that entangled Hegel to emerge again. In particular, the old
concept of nature, inherited from the science and philosophy of the sev-
enteenth century, is in disarray. Every day it becomes clearer that nature,
in its concept, is a product of human praxis. Only when people forget
how they got here do they find something facing them from outside that
somehow frightens them because it looks like an impenetrable mystery.
On the other hand, a kind of philosophical Romanticism that is being
reborn everywhere is a condition (though nothing more than a condi-
tion) for a clear understanding of Hegel and all the philosophers of his
period. And people are sighing once again for mysticism and direct per-
ception in the manner of Jacobi. Once again they are positing Schelling’s
old ideal of an aesthetic contemplation that gives what (natural) science
cannot give to the Spirit that thirsts for truth and concreteness. Bergson,
one of the writers who belong to this movement, thus advocates an intui-
tive knowledge ‘qui s’installe dans le mouvement et adopte la vie même
des choses’ as a metaphysics of the Absolute.224 Was this not precisely
Hegel’s demand? Was this not his point of departure – finding a mental
form that would be as mobile as movement, that would share in the life of
things, that would feel ‘the pulse of reality’ and mentally reproduce the
rhythm of development without shattering, rigidifying, or falsifying it?225
For Hegel this view was only a point of departure, however, certainly
not a conclusion, as it was for the writer just mentioned and for others
of his inclination. It would have been futile to ask Hegel to renounce
thinking. His supreme achievement, his deathless discovery, is having
demonstrated that the need for concrete knowledge is satisfied in the
form of thinking. Hence the need to study Hegel critically, to isolate the
623
living and vital components from the dead. Modern consciousness can
neither wholly accept Hegel nor wholly reject him, as used to be done
fifty years ago. As far as Hegel is concerned, modern thought finds itself
in the position of the Roman poet towards his lady: nec tecum vivere possum
nec sine te.226
It seems that this critical revision of Hegel cannot now be had from
his native Germany. So much has she forgotten her great son that his
works are no longer even reprinted, and judgments of him are frequent-
ly expressed that astonish us in this remote margin of Italy – we who have
never managed to forget him completely and have to some extent made
him one of us, reconnecting him with Bruno of Nola and Vico of Naples
as our brother. Rather more important for Hegel studies than German
efforts are those that have been going on for more than thirty years in
England, where Stirling’s work has proved fertile and where Hegel is
clearly explained, truthfully interpreted and criticized with respect and
intellectual freedom. In return, the mighty spirit of George Hegel has
awakened English thinkers to the life of theory for the first time – they
who have been the world’s suppliers of empirical philosophy for centu-
ries, seemingly unable even in the nineteenth century to produce any
philosophers better than Stuart Mill and Spencer.227
If anyone were to ask me now, after all that I have said, whether one
ought to be ‘Hegelian’ or not, whether I am ‘Hegelian,’ I might excuse
myself from answering. However, I wish to add the desired response here,
as a kind of corollary. I am, and I believe one ought to be, Hegelian, but
in the same sense whereby anyone in our day who has a philosophical
mind and education also is – and feels – Eleatic, Heraclitean, Socratic,
Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Sceptic, Neoplatonic, Christian, Buddhist,
Cartesian, Spinozist, Leibnizian, Viconian, Kantian, and so on. This is
the sense in which no thinker and no historical movement of thought
can have passed by without bearing fruit, without providing some com-
ponent of truth that becomes part, consciously or not, of living modern
thought.
No prudent person will want to be Hegelian if it means being a slav-
ishly literal disciple who professes to accept the master’s every word, or
else a religious cultist who thinks it sinful to disagree – nor will I. In
short, Hegel too found his piece of the truth, and one must recognize
and validate this piece. And that’s all. If this does not happen now, never
mind. ‘The Idea is in no hurry,’ as Hegel used to say.228 We will have to
arrive at the same truth, at one time or another, by a different route. And
without having help directly from Hegel, but looking back on the history
624
of thought, we will then be obliged to proclaim him, with many exclama-

tions of wonder, our precursor.
Although I may feel too pressed to mention something that one would
be happy to take for granted, nonetheless, in order to decide whether
to accept or reject the doctrines that Hegel proposes, the first condition
is to read his books, thereby ending the spectacle, somewhere between
comical and revolting, of indicting and insulting a philosopher whom
we do not know, stupidly battling a silly scarecrow fashioned by our own
imagination under the utterly ignoble rule of mental laziness.
NOTES
1 We have used the first edition, Croce (1907), but see also Croce (2006),
the new Edizio nazionale by Alessandro Savorelli and Claudio Cesa, based on
the 1948 edition but with variants from the 1907, 1913, and 1927 versions;
another recent edition by Giuseppe Gembillo in Croce (1995) also reflects
the many stylistic and some substantive changes that Croce made after
1907. The bibliography that Croce mentions is omitted here.
2 The prolific Kuno Fischer (1824−1907), who taught philosophy and its
history at Heidelberg, Berlin, and Jena, was still a major figure when Croce
was writing this essay. Fischer (1849) addressed Croce’s special interest of
aesthetics, but he was best known for his history of modern philosophy and
his interpretations of Kant and Hegel. For Hegel, see Fischer (1901), and
for logic and metaphysics, Fischer (1852) and its second edition (1865).
3 Hegel (1986a), 3.20; (1977):7−8; Croce used Hegel (1832−45); see his
‘Saggio di una bibliografia hegeliana,’ in Croce (1907): 215−20. Although
his habits were too mandarin to bother with references for quotations from
Hegel or other sources, we will identify them when we can – along with
some other passages without quotation-marks. Our references will usually be
keyed to an accessible English version as well as the Suhrkamp Werke, and we
have greatly benefited from the notes in Croce (2006).
4 Hegel (1986a), 6.291−3, 342−3; (1969): 614−15, 656−7.
5 [a] See especially the introduction to the Phenomenology and the preliminar-
ies to the Encyclopedia; [e] Hegel (1986a), 3.43−4; 8.311−15; (1977): 25;
(1991): 239−42.
6 In his Proslogion, Anselm argued that God’s existence is proved simply by
understanding the proposition that ‘God is that than which nothing greater
can be thought,’ but many other philosophers have rejected Anselm’s onto-
logical proof – including Kant in the first Critique.
625
7 Hegel (1986a), 6. 288−92; 8.315−16; (1969): 612−15; (1991): 242−3.

8 ‘Spirit’ is the usual English translation of Hegel’s Geist, though the German
word means ‘mind’ as well, one of many senses of the term that enters Hegel’s
use of it. These senses are not meant to be distinct: each is understood as a
determination (Bestimmung), qualification or fulfillment of Spirit, which in
itself is just pure, undetermined activity that develops by reflecting on itself
and hence has an irreducibly mental character. The God that has these prop-
erties is Absolute Spirit. In this essay, Croce uses spirito or Spirito most often
in a Hegelian sense, but sometimes he means just ‘mind.’ We will sometimes
capitalize Spirit, especially when Croce seems to have in mind Hegel’s unde-
termined or Absolute Spirit. On this and other points of Hegelian terminol-
ogy, see Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
9 The distinction between opposito and distinto is the crux of Croce’s essay.
Both words often appear as substantives, often in the plural, but only the
former comes naturally into English as a plural: ‘opposites,’ yes; ‘distincts,’
no. Nonetheless, we have usually avoided devices like ‘the distinct’ for
distinti, translating it as ‘distincts.’ An opposite (Gegensatz) for Hegel (a) is
opposed only to one thing; (b) is bound to that single opposite; and (c)
becomes that opposite – relatively, for example: when I stand at your left
but you stand at my right, the left/right opposition can change if you circle
around counterclockwise to my left, thus putting me at your right. The
dialectic is the process whereby opposites unify in mutual negation, but not
everything should operate dialectically if being an opposite is a criterion for
entering that process. Since whatever does not fall under identity (Identität)
falls under distinction (Unterschied), which is any quantitative or qualitative
difference, most distinct items will not be opposites, in the strict sense. The
continuous and comprehensive character of the dialectic also muddies the
waters. Croce’s main point, echoed by other critics, is that Hegel abuses the
dialectic by applying it to what is merely distinct and not opposite.
10 Your death is my life.
11 Leibniz (1887): 607.
12 ‘Unharmonious harmony,’ as in Horace, Epistles 1.12.19; Lucan, Civil War
1.98; in the next chapter Croce discusses Nicholas of Cusa (1401−64), or
Cusanus, who was a famous proponent of the ‘coincidence of opposites,’
another kind of concordia discors. See also the note above for ‘mors tua, vita
mea.’
13 Hegel (1986a), 8.192; (1991): 144, where Hegel has Gedanke (‘thought’)
rather than Begriff (‘concept’): ‘Becoming is the first concrete thought and
hence the first concept, whereas being and nothing, in contrast, are empty
abstractions.’
626
14 [a] Wissenschaft der Logik, II, 48; [e] Hegel (1986a), 6.287; (1969): 611.
15 Brigliadoro and Baiardo are warhorses ridden by the knights of Ariosto’s
Orlando furioso.
16 Trendelenburg (1840), chap. 3.
17 ‘From a fair mother a daughter fairer still,’ Horace, Odes, 1.16.1.
18 The Dionysian and Apollonian are opposing forces in Nietzsche (1872).
19 [a] Saggio storico-critico sulle categorie e la dialettica, opera postuma (Torino:
1883): 371; [e] the second half of this large work is an attack on Hegel.
20 [a] Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Werke (1832), II, 36−7; [e] Hegel
(1986a), 3.46−7; (1977): 27−8.
21 Hegel (1986a), 8.237; (1991): 180.
22 [a] Wissenschaft der Logik, II, 67−8; [e] Hegel (1986a), 6.76; (1969): 440−1.
23 [a] See also the historical introduction to Kuno Fischer, Logik und Meta-
physik (2d ed., 1865) and Bertrando Spaventa, Prolusione e introduzione alle
lezioni di filosofia (Naples: 1862). For the immediate antecedents of Hegel’s
dialectic and the various phases of its development, see especially Aloys
Schmid, Entwicklungsgeschichte der Hegelschen Logik (Regensburg: 1858); [e]
Fischer (1865); Spaventa (1862); Schmid (1858); Hegel (1986a): 18−20.
24 Hegel (1986a), 18.305−19; (1995), I, 267−78.
25 For the fragments and testimonia mentioned here (none of them now
securely attributed to Heraclitus, not even the famous ‘everything flows’),
see Hegel (1986a), 18.323−36; (1995), I, 282−93.
26 Hegel (1986a), 18.320; (1995), I, 279.
27 Hegel (1986a), 19.62, 79−82; (1995), II, 49−50, 56−60; Plato, Parmenides
166C.
28 Philo Judaeus (fl. c. 40 CE) wrote allegorical philosophy based on Biblical
themes; like their early Christian contemporaries, the Gnostics focused on
the problem of salvation, describing the process of the fall and redemption
in an exuberant mythology.
29 The ancient Neoplatonic tradition began with Plotinus in the third century
CE; Proclus, his greatest successor, lived in the fifth century.
30 [a] ¹ ™nantiÒthj ™stˆ diafor¦ tšleioj; Arist. Meta. 1055b16: [e] ‘contra-
riety is complete difference’; on Cusanus, see the note in chap. 1.
31 [a] On Cusanus, see Fiorentino, Il risorgimento filosofico nel Quattrocento
(Naples: 1885), chap. 2; [e] learned ignorance was another paradoxical
theme of great interest to Cusanus.
32 Bruno, De la causa, principio e uno, in Bruno (1907), I, 252. A learned and
creative Dominican, Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600. He was the first
great philosopher to write extensively in the Italian vernacular. For Spaventa
and other Italian Hegelians, Bruno was a major inspiration, and his persecu-
627
tion by the Church was a lively item in Italian politics when Croce was grow-
ing up.
33 [a] Bruno, De la causa, principio e uno, dialogue 5, near the end; Dialoghi
metafisici, ed. Gentile (Bari: Laterza, 1907): 255−7; [e] Bruno (1907).
34 The German mystic, Jakob Böhme (1575−1625), had great influence in the
seventeenth century, especially because of his Trinitarian theology; Hegel
considered him a pivotal figure in the history of German thought.
35 Hegel (1986a) 20.96−8, 113−19; Hegel (1995), III, 194−5, 211−16.
36 For Vico see the Introduction, section 13, and Fiorentino’s letters to
Florenzi Waddington.
37 [a] For Hamann see Hegel, Vermischte Schriften, II, 36−7, 87−8, and what I
have said about him in La Critica, 4 (1906): 67-84. [e] For Hamann see the
note in Fiorentino’s second letter to Florenzi Waddington; an idiosyncratic
critic of such Enlightenment heroes as Lessing and Kant, he fascinated the
Romantics of Hegel’s generation. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743−1819)
began as an admirer of Kant but changed his mind in reaction to the first
Critique. His views on Spinoza, publicized in the debate about pantheism
that also involved Lessing and Mendelssohn, were particularly controversial.
[e] Hegel (1986a), 11.328−9, where the reference is to ‘Brunos Schrift De
Uno,’ which would seem to be De la causa, principio et uno, the text cited
above.
38 Hegel (1986a), 6.260−1; (1969): 588−9, where Hegel, speaking about
Kant’s ‘synthetic judgments a priori,’ says that such a judgment is an
‘original synthesis of apperception.’ Hegel did not use the thesis/antith-
esis/synthesis relation to describe his own dialectic, but he did apply it to
Kant: Inwood (1992): 12, 81−2. In later versions of this essay, Croce often
replaces ‘antithesis’ with ‘antinomy,’ ‘conflict,’ and other words.
39 Gnoseology is epistemology, more or less: in Croce’s context it is the part of
philosophy that addresses the Erkenntnisproblem, the problem of cognition or
knowledge.
40 Rosenkranz (1844): 94−9.
41 Haym (1857): 215.
42 [a] See my note on ‘Definitions of Romanticism’ in La Critica, 4 (1906):
241−5.
43 [a] ‘For my part, I have to declare that, so far as it has been given me to see,
I have no evidence that any man has thoroughly understood Kant except
Hegel, or that this latter himself remains aught else than a problem whose
solution has been arrogated, but never effected,’ in James H. Stirling, The
Secret of Hegel (London: 1865), I, 14. [e] Against the advice of J.S. Mill, Stir-
ling won the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh in 1868, three years
628
after publishing his Secret of Hegel, which finally transported post-Kantian

idealism across the Channel. Despite the priority of Stirling’s book and
Croce’s high opinion of him (see below, chapter 11), T.H. Green, Bernard
Bosanquet, F.H. Bradley, J.M.E McTaggart, and other neo-Hegelian idealists
of his period are now more prominent in the Anglo-American canon.
44 Hegel knew Schelling since 1790, when they and Hölderlin were seminary
students at Tübingen. Their paths often crossed, eventually as lifelong rivals.
Hegel’s first book, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philos-
ophy (1801), is only one indication of Schelling’s early influence on Hegel.
Their friendship ended in 1807, however, when Hegel called Schelling’s
version of the Absolute ‘the night in which all cows are black’ in the preface
to the Phenomenology. Later, after Hegel died in 1831 and Schelling replaced
him in Berlin ten years afterward, Schelling’s official duty was to ‘stamp out
the dragon seed of Hegelian philosophy.’ Meanwhile, the philosophical
impresario Victor Cousin (1792−1867) had opened an important channel
to France and the rest of Latin Europe for post-Kantian German philoso-
phy. He met Hegel, and eventually Schelling, on his first trip to Germany in
1817, but his interest in German thought endangered his career in France,
even before his arrest in 1824 on another trip to Germany. His Fragments
philosophiques first appeared in 1826: Hegel (1986a), 3.21; Cousin (1834);
Pinkard (2000): 21−2, 57, 98, 256−8, 381−3, 524−7.
45 Hegel (1986a), 20.424: ‘Schelling in neueren Zeiten der Urheber der
Naturphilosophie geworden ist.’
46 Hegel (1986a), 5.227; (1969): 199.
47 [a] This and other such qualifications are made advisable by the large
number of meanings that these words have had in philosophical language.
48 Hegel (1986a), 5.276; (1991): 239.
49 Hegel (1986a) 8.274−9; (1991): 209−13, citing Goethe (1817−23),
1.3.204; see also the lyrics translated in Goethe (1883): 254−5.
50 [a] For the critique of these concepts, see especially the doctrine of essence
that constitutes the second section of the Logic; [e] Hegel (1986a), 8.231-
306; (1991): 175−235.
51 Hegel, Philosophy of History, pp. 26-7 (Werke, 12.42).
52 [a] Preface to The Philosophy of Right; cf. Encyclopedia, ¶6 [e] Hegel (1986a),
7.24, 8.47−9; (1896): xxvii; (1991): 28−30.
53 Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737−1814) was a naturalist, mor-
alist, and, most famously, a novelist, whose Paul et Virginie (1771) reflected
Rousseau’s ideas about an uncorrupted nature: see Bernardin de Saint-
Pierre (1784), (1788), (1840): 42 ff.
54 In later editions, ‘the affirmation of one affirms the other.’
629
55 Hegel (1986a),7.236; (1896): 120.

56 [a] In the ‘Aphorisms’ found in the appendix to Johann Carl Friedrich
Rosenkranz, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Leben: Supplement zu Hegel’s Werken
(Berlin, 1844): 550; for the satire on Sollen, see especially the Phenomenology,
the section on reason, B, and the introduction to the Philosophy of History.
[e] Hegel (1986a) 2.555; 3.191−2, 314; 12.20, 50-1; (1956): 9-10, 34-5;
(1977): 151, 255-6.
57 Hegel (1986a), 12.37; (1956): 23.
58 Hegel (1986a), 12.48; (1956): 32−3.
59 Hegel (1986a), 12.45; (1956): 31: ‘die Geschäftsführer des Weltgeistes.’
60 Hegel (1986a),12.46−7; (1956): 31−2; Goethe (1872): 202; Fischer (1901):
410−11
61 Like the early Romantics with whom he spent his youth, Hegel was dazzled
by the French Revolution and by its prophets, especially Rousseau. From
early in his career, however, critics saw Hegel as a willing tool of the Prussian
establishment, and, later, the Restoration. Although the criticism was too
simple, it was not baseless. In the new Prussian University of Berlin, Hegel
himself became a state institution. Moreover, the most accessible part of his
thought was a philosophy of history grounded in the proposition that the
real is the rational – an easy mark for cynics. For the story of Hegel’s involve-
ment in German politics, see especially Pinkard (2000).
62 Hegel (1986a), 7.24−5; (1896): xxviii; Plato, Republic, 460C-D.
63 [a] H. Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (1885), III,
720−1; Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen
Philosophie (Stuttgart: 1888). [e] Heinrich von Treitschke (1834−96) was the
official and partisan voice of Prussian history when Croce was a young man;
his nationalism was extreme and anti-Semitic; for Engels in Italy see section
14 of the Introduction.
64 Marx and Engels (1848).
65 [a] cf. Kuno Fischer, Hegels Leben und Werke, p. 59; [e] Hegel (1986a)
1.507−8, 554−7; Rosenkranz (1844): 242−3; Pinkard (2000), Hegel, pp.
145−53: ‘the Secretary of Florence’ to whom Croce alludes was Machiavelli,
also discussed by Hegel in the early work cited here. Croce has ‘Rinascimen-
to’ here for ‘Renaissance.’
66 Camillo Benso di Cavour (1810−61) was the primary architect of Italy’s
unification, just as Otto von Bismarck (1815−98) was Germany’s first
chancellor and the founder of her modern empire. Bismarck became prime
minister of Prussia in 1862, the year after Cavour died.
67 Hegel (1986a), 8.296; (1991): 226.
68 For Comte, Spencer, and Herbart, see the Introduction, sections 11, 13−15.
630
69 [a] In the ‘Aphorisms’ cited above, p. 543; [e] Hegel (1986a), 2.546.
70 [a] For Vico’s historical position and its relation to German philosophy, see
B. Spaventa, op. cit., part 6, pp. 83−102, and also the historical section of
my Aesthetic, chap. 5; [e] Croce (1956): 155−474; Spaventa (1862).
71 Machiavelli (1990): 129.
72 [a] See my ‘Bibliografia vichiana’ (Naples: 1904): 91−5.
73 Vico (1977): 176.
74 Vico (1835-7), V, 235.
75 Vico (1977): 206.
76 Vico (1977): 176−7.
77 Vico (1977): 284−5: ‘Man becomes all things by not understanding.’
78 [a] The passages from Vico are in his Opere, ed. Ferrari, V, 96−8, 117, 136,
143, 146−7, 183, 571−2; VI, 235; [e] Vico (1977): 705−6; Vico (1835−7).
79 Later versions have ‘I am talking about what is theoretically distinct, and
certainly not about naturalist classifications.’
80 Later versions have ‘the theory of classification, whether we call it naturalist
or intellectualist.’
81 For Herbart see section 14 of the Introduction.
82 [a] Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie, in Werke, XVI, 130; [e] Hegel
(1986a), 2.271; 10.13, 241-2; (1971): 4−5, 188−90.
83 Ephes. 4:3: ‘anxious to preserve the unity of the spirit.’
84 Later versions have ‘The classificatory schema must be replaced by the
schema of levels.’
85 Vico (1977): 91, 169, 179, 206, 219, 245, 275; (1975): 169.
86 For Condillac see section 2 of the Introduction.
87 Hegel (1986a), 20.437−49; (1995), III, 528−40: Croce’s ‘levels’ (gradi) are
derived from Hegel’s criticisms of Schelling’s view of nature as a hierarchy
of levels (Stufen) or potencies (Potenzen); see also Inwood (1992): 194−5.
88 [a] In the preface to Cousin’s Fragments; [e] Cousin (1834): xviii.
89 [a] In my Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, cited above;
[e] Croce (1956).
90 Arist. De anima 417b.
91 Spinoza, Ethics 2, prop. 44, corr; 5, prop. 29, schol.; prop. 30, 36: ‘under the
aspect of the eternal.’
92 Hegel (1986a), 3.46−7; (1977): 27−8
93 Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817−1881), who taught mainly at Leipzig and
Göttingen, was an idealist philosopher who tried to accommodate the
findings of the natural sciences; later versions add that Lotze was ‘perhaps
remembering a passage of the Parmenides.’
94 Croce in later editions adds this note: ‘In my Logic (1.1.5−6), I have shown
631
how the two distinct series of the distinct and the opposite are unified at a
higher level so that opposition is produced as an aspect of distinction itself
and of its dialectic; but for the criticism developed here, the distinction
between the two series is enough.’ See Croce (1920): 46−67.
95 While Croce’s criticism may be fair to some Hegelians, it is less just to
Hegel himself, who was more cautious about the thesis/antithesis/synthe-
sis relation.
96 Later versions have ‘and also intuition (thesis), representation (antith-
esis), and thought (synthesis); right (thesis), morality (antithesis), and
ethics (synthesis) in his practical philosophy, or also in same area family
(thesis), civil society (antithesis), and state (synthesis).’
97 Hegel (1986a) 2.532: ‘The square is nature’s law; the triangle is the
mind’s’; see also Rosenkranz (1844): 158.
98 The Phenomenology was published in 1807; for the chronology of Hegel’s
life and works, see Pinkard (2000): 745−9.
99 Hegel (1986a), 10.29; (1971): 18.
100 Croce may be thinking of Maudsley (1890), whose author was an impor-
tant psychiatrist, but another possibility is the closing lines of The Way of All
Flesh by Samuel Butler, which appeared four years before Croce finished
this essay, though Butler’s phrase is ‘College of Spiritual Pathology’: see
Butler (1903): 423−4.
101 [a] For a discussion of this issue, see my Lineamenti di logica, chapter 7,
‘The Theory of Error’; [e] Croce (1905); see also the third part, pp.
251−322, of Croce (1920), titled ‘Forms of Error and the Search for
Truth.’
102 ‘Truth is the index of itself and of the false’ comes not from Bacon but
from a letter by Spinoza (76.7), cited by Jacobi (2004): 33, and then by
Hegel (1986a), 16.62.
103 [a] ‘It is the only metaphysics that exists, along with Aristotle’s’: H. Taine,
in a letter of 1851, for which see Sa vie et sa correspondance (Paris: Hachette,
1902), I, 162−3, cf. 145. [e] Having started with Spinoza and Hegel, the
polycephalous Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine (1828−93) eventually became
famous as a philosophical positivist, not to mention his great Origines de la
France contemporaine (1876−93).
104 Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, finance minister under Louis XVI just
before the French Revolution, made this improvident remark to Marie-
Antoinette as she was about to buy another castle, according to Michelet
(1847), I, cvi.
105 Hegel (1986a), 8.60.
106 ‘First for us’ and ‘first by nature: Arist. Post. An. 71b29−72a1.
632
107 See chapter 1 on ‘commanded’ first principles in mathematical demon-

stration.
108 Rousseau’s Émile, depicting his ideal of natural education, appeared in
1762. Thomas Moore (1779−1852) was an enormously popular Irish poet,
songwriter, and social critic whose Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a
Religion seeks but does not find grounds for converting from the Catholic
to the Protestant faith – even though Moore’s personal commitment to
Catholicism was less than consistent. Moore’s Travels were translated into
several languages, including Italian: see Moore (1833), (1850); Rousseau
(1762).
109 Hegel (1986a), 5.117; (1969): 110.
110 Hegel (1986a), 8.391; (1991): 306.
111 [a] Philosophische Propädeutik, ed. Rosenkranz, 2.10 in Werke, XVIII, 120;
[e] Hegel (1986a), 4.288.
112 The Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit are the second and third
parts of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences in Outline, following the
Logic (Hegel [1986]: 8−10). The purpose of the Encyclopedia was mainly
pedagogic, to provide an outline for students who would hear Hegel’s
lectures. For English versions, see Hegel (1970), (1971), (1991), all of
which contain both the numbered sections of the Encyclopedia and the
additional Anmerkungen and posthumous Zusätze; for an English version of
the original 1817 text of the whole Encyclopedia without these additions,
see Hegel (1990); and Pinkard (2000): 169−80, 745−9 for the chronology
of the works and the unpublished System of Ethical Life.
113 François Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Seuil, 1973): 39; Plato, Republic,
376A-C.
114 For sancta simplicitas, see Jerome, Letter 57 (Migne, Patrologia latina,
22.579), where the phrase is used positively, as it was later in the hagiogra-
phy of St Francis of Assisi and his followers. Croce may have known it from
the opening of a prayer ascribed to Francis: ‘Hail, Queen Wisdom, may
the Lord save you and your little sister, saintly and pure Simplicity’: see
Papini (1825): 86. Always the ironist, however, he also probably knew the
story about John Hus, the executed heretic, who was said to have used the
same words when he saw an old peasant coming to put wood on the pyre
under his feet.
115 a‡sqhsij here means ‘sensation.’
116 Hegel (1986a), 6.306; (1969): 628.
117 Hegel (1986a), 10.270−83; (1971): 212−23.
118 Hegel (1986a), 3.90−1; (1977): 65−6.
119 ‘Every individual cannot be spoken about,’ ‘only an individual can be
633
spoken about’ ‘… cannot be spoken about by using logical methods’: for

the usual form of the maxim, omne individuum est incommunicabile, whose
point is more metaphysical than linguistic, see Aquinas, Summa theologica
1.13.9, but Croce may have known it from Goethe, who used ‘individ-
uum est ineffabile’ in a letter to the Swiss poet, Johann Kaspar Lavater
(1741−1801), whose ideas about physiognomy were very influential: see
Goethe (1962−7), I, 325.
120 Hegel (1986a), 15.222−37; (1975): 961−70.
121 [a] Geschichte der Philosophie2, II, 365-8; [e] Hegel (1986a), 19.241; (1995),
II, 223.
122 Later editions: ‘As a result, he not only preserves the three-part division
of concept, logical judgment, and syllogism, and the division between
elementary forms and methodology, between definition, division, demon-
stration, and proof; he also makes an effort to distinguish and define new
classes of judgments and syllogisms.’
123 For various senses of ‘history’ and ‘historiography’ (storia, storiografia), see
sections 14 and 17 of the Introduction.
124 See Croce’s conclusion in his ‘Concept of Art.’
125 [a] Developed at length in my Lineamenti di logica, chap. 4, ‘The Concept
and Historical Representation’; [e] see also Croce (1920), part 2, chaps.
3, 4.
126 Later editions: ‘But it also follows that it would be a silly pretense to
reduce those historical claims to abstract philosophical claims by absorb-
ing the act in its totality into a mere condition.’
127 Later editions: ‘A philosophy of history, understood not as the elaboration
of this abstract philosophy but as a history at the second level, a history
derived from that abstract philosophy, is a contradiction in terms.’
128 On the Encyclopedia, see n112 above.
129 Hegel (1986a), 12.20; (1956): 9.
130 Hegel (1986a), 12.32: ‘Die Weltgeschichte ist der Fortschritt im Bewußt-
sein der Freiheit’; (1956): 19.
131 Hegel (1986a), 12.73; (1956): 53.
132 Hegel (1986a), 18.49; (1995), I, 30.
133 Hegel (1986a), 12.21−2; (1956): 10.
134 Hegel (1986a), 8.61−2; (1991): 40
135 Hegel (1986a), 18.59; cf. (1995), I, 39−40.
136 Hegel (1986a), 8.58−9; (1991): 37−8
137 Hegel (1986a), 12.19−20; (1956): 8.
138 Hegel (1986a), 10.350−1; (1971): 279−80.
139 Eduard Gans (1798−1839), who prepared the first edition of Hegel’s
634
lectures on the philosophy of history in 1837, was a lawyer excluded from

the Berlin law faculty by royal edict in 1822 because he was a Jew. In 1825
Gans converted and was admitted, having meanwhile convinced Hegel to
launch the Jahrbücher für wissentschaftliche Kritik: see Hegel (1848): v−xx;
Pinkard (2000): 530−41.
140 Croce alludes to the long-running polemic that began in 1872 when
Spaventa attacked a book about Bruno by Domenico Berti as positivist:
‘Berti seems very learned, with a great store of facts and citations. But
he lacks Spirit, and if that word is too risky, let me just say understanding
of Bruno’s era.’ The controversy eventually involved Fiorentino, Angelo
Camillo De Meis, Felice Tocco, Augusto Vera, Luigi Amabile, and many
others, including Raffaele Mariano, a student of Vera who attacked Ama-
bile’s studies of Campanella’s imprisonment and trial; see Berti (1868);
Spaventa (1972a), II, 72−105; Mariano (1889); Malusa (1977): 86,
99−106, 160−5, 204−12, 247−69, 329−62; Tessitore (1997): 225−7.
141 9 November 1799, in the reformed calendar of the French Revolution was
18 Brumaire, the day on which Napoleon ended the government of the
Directory and began his rule as consul; the date of Napoleon’s final defeat
at the Battle of Waterloo was 18 June 1815. Napoleon, in Hegel’s view, was
one of those exceptional ‘world-historical’ people who can see where the
Spirit is heading.
142 Hegel (1986a) 8.274−9; (1991): 209−13, citing Goethe (1817−23),
1.3.204, as in n49 above.
143 The Latin phrases mean ‘deeds done’ and ‘history of deeds done’: Hegel
(1986a), 12.83; (1956): 61.
144 Jacobi (2004): 89−91.
145 ‘Storm and Stress’ is the name of a German literary and cultural move-
ment of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when Herder, Goethe,
Schiller, and other admirers of Rousseau rejected current literary conven-
tions in favour of his idealization of nature.
146 [a] I have clarified the relation of the pure concept of philosophy to the
practical concept or the pseudo-concept of the natural and mathematical
sciences in the Lineamenti di logica cited above, chapter 5, ‘The Concept
and the Natural and Mathematical Disciplines’; please forgive these cita-
tions of my own work, which are needed to explain the brevity of certain
expositions and the meaning of various references. [e] See also Croce
(1920): 214−50.
147 Hegel (1986a), 9.159−60; (1970): 159−60: in discussing specific gravity,
Hegel says that physicists assume the existence of pores to explain how
different volumes of matter can have the same weight.
635
148 Hegel (1986a), 9.90−91; (1970): 69−70.

149 Hegel (1986a), 9.91−2; (1970): 70.
150 Hegel (1986a), 3.41, 48, 5.71−2, 9.90−1; (1969): 72; (1970): 69; (1977):
23−4.
151 Hegel (1986a), 9.52−3; (1970): 38.
152 Hegel (1986a), 9.55; (1970): 40.
153 Hegel (1986a), 5.235; (1969): 205.
154 Hegel (1986a), 9.340; (1970): 275: Hegel’s three kingdoms are the
mineral, vegetable, and animal, leading up to the sphere of the intellect
discussed in the third part of the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of Spirit. The
phrase ‘globus intellectualis’ comes from Bacon, but Croce could also
have known it from Kuno Fischer and other contemporary sources: see
Bacon (1960): 81; Fischer (1857): 46.
155 Hegel (1986a), 8.49−51; (1991): 31−2: Grotius (see the notes to Fioren-
tino’s first letter to Florenzi Waddington) was the architect of modern
international law, which he derived from natural law; Hegel’s point is that
his legal theory should be called ‘philosophy’ only in the secondary sense
applicable to Newton’s physics.
156 Hegel (1986a), 19.241−2, 276−80; cf. (1995), II, 223, 257−60.
157 [a] MacKintosh, Hegel and Hegelianism, p. 236; [e] MacKintosh (1903).
158 Hegel (1986a), 20. 444; cf. (1995), III, 535−6.
159 Hegel (1986a), 9.15; (1970): 6.
160 Hegel (1986a), 9.500−2; (1970): 415−17.
161 Hegel (1986a), 3.187−98; (1977): 147−57
162 Hegel (1986a) 9.27−8; (1970): 17−18.
163 The evolution or development (Entwicklung) of the Spirit is so central to
Hegel’s philosophy that it was natural for Marx and others to see him as
a forerunner of Darwin, a role better suited to Schelling and Goethe. In
the broadest sense, however, Hegel shared the Romantic fascination with
organic development, and Darwin himself saw the Romantics in the back-
ground of his own ideas: Richards (2002): 210−11.
164 Hegel (1986a), 9.31−2; (1970): 20.
165 Hegel (1986a), 9.88; (1970): 67.
166 Hegel (1986a), 9.68−71, 20.231; (1970): 52−3; (1995), III, 322−3.
167 [a] ‘… universae generis humani, deinde Trojae miseriae principiis
pomum adfuisse, malum etiam scientiis philosophicis omen,’ in Werke,
XVI, 17; [e] The story of the Judgment of Paris and the Apple of Discord
explains the start of the Trojan War; Hegel, (1986b): 114.
168 Hegel (1986a), 9.246−7, 20.231−2; (1970): 198−9; (1995), III, 323.
169 Hegel (1986a), 8.57−8; (1991): 37.
636
170 Karl-Ludwig Michelet (1801−93) took over Hegel’s lectures on the phi-
losophy of right in 1830, and in 1847 he edited the Philosophy of Nature;
Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz (1805−79), who taught philosophy
at Königsberg, was his teacher’s first biographer; Vera (see sections 10,
14−15 of the Introduction), who studied with Cousin, translated the Ency-
clopedia into French. Croce, who was Spaventa’s cousin, may have resented
Vera’s hostility towards this other Hegelian Neapolitan: see Hegel (1863),
I, vii; Pinkard (2000): 11, 652; Gentile (2003): 261−73.
171 Wilhelm Krug (1770−1842), Kant’s successor at Königsberg, also taught
philosophy at Leipzig: see Krug (1801): 31; Pinkard (2000): 613.
172 [a] See an article of 1802 in Werke, XVI, 57−9: [e] Hegel (1986a),
2.164−5, 188−207; 9.35; (1970): 23, where Hegel remarked that ‘it was in
this … quite naïve sense that Herr Krug once challenged the Philosophy
of Nature to perform the feat of deducing only his pen … giving him hope
that his pen would have the glory of being deduced, if ever philosophy
should advance so far.’
173 Tommasi (see section 11 of the Introduction) was a physician and biolo-
gist with a serious interest in philosophy; as a professor of medicine in
Naples, his positivism included criticism of De Meis, a colleague whose
idealism Tommasi had shared as a young man: see Tommasi (1868),
(1877); Gentile (1957): 29−52.
174 Hegel (1986a), 8.84−5, 9.34−6; (1970): 22−4; (1991): 58−9.
175 For the first abuse, see chapter 4 of Croce’s essay.
176 Hamlet, II, ii, 223−224.
177 Hegel (1874).
178 [a] See the two discussions by Helmholtz, Über Goethes naturwissenschaftliche
Arbeiten and Goethes Vorahnungen kommender naturwissenschaftlicher Ideen, in
Vorträge und Reden (Braunschweig: 1896), I, 1−24, 333−65. [e] Helmholtz
(1896): for a current re-evaluation of Goethe’s work in biology, see Rich-
ards (2002): 325−508, which points out that Helmholtz, at the peak of his
influence, praised Goethe not only for his biological achievement but also
for his criticism of Newton’s optics.
179 [a] Also relevant is a note by Engels in the Antidühring, 3d ed., pp. xv−xvi,
that emphasizes some of Hegel’s accomplishments in physics and natural
history. [e] Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (1776−1837) published six
volumes on Biologie, oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur beginning in 1802,
successfully promoting the term ‘biology’ after it had been in use for
several decades; Lorenz Oken (1799−1851) was a physician and anatomist
but also a follower of Fichte and Schelling; Goethe wrongly disputed his
priority in understanding the nature of the bones of the skull: Richards
637
(2002), p. 4, n8; pp. 491−502; Treviranus (1802−22); Oken (1805);

Engels (1894).
180 Johann Jacob Brucker (1696−1770) published his Historia critica philosophi-
ae, the first large and comprehensive work of its kind, in 1742−4; another
work on the same scale, Der Geist der speculativen Philosophie by Dieterich
Tiedemann (1748−1804), appeared in the 1790s, when its author was
attacking Kant. Both Brucker and Tiedemann were important sources for
Hegel, who thought of Brucker as a Wolffian and expressed contempt for
Tiedemann: see Brucker (1742−67); Tiedemann (1791−7).
181 For Taine see n103 above.
182 Barthold Niebuhr (1776−1831) was the first great expert on Rome
among the Berlin historians who first made the study of the past dynamic,
comprehensive, and therefore relevant not only to contemporary life but
also to Hegel’s theorizing; for Mommsen see Croce’s ‘Concept of Art’ and
Labriola’s ‘Materialism,’ with the notes to the latter; also Breisach (1994):
229−32, 237, 264.
183 The racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855−1927) was a serious
student of Goethe and Kant as well as an ardent Wagnerian. In Der histor-
ische Materialismus: Darstellung und Kritik der Marxistischen Weltanschauung
(Düsseldorf, 1900) and other works, the Neo-Kantian Ludwig Woltmann
(1871−1907) discussed racism along with Marxism. Hegel bears some
responsibility for these and later developments, having written of the
world-historical hero (Werke, 12.49), for example, that ‘so great a figure
must trample many a guiltless blossom, crushing many things that stand
in his path.’ For Hegel’s views on the exclusion of whole cultures from
history (and hence from genuine humanity) and on the Germanic Volk as
the culmination of history, see Croce’s exposition below: also Chamberlain
(1911); Woltmann (1900), (1903).
184 Hegel (1986a), 12.134; (1956): 104.
185 Hegel (1986a), 12.107−8; (1956): 81.
186 Hegel (1986a), 12.84−6; (1956): 61−3; the Latin phrases mean ‘on the
part of the subject’ and ‘on the part of the object,’ (objektiv, subjektiv).
187 [a] Aphorismen aus dem Berliner Periode, in Rosenkranz, p. 559; [e] Hegel
(1986a), 11.561.
188 Hegel (1986a) 13.106−14, 390−2; (1975): 75−81, 300−2.
189 [a] Naturphilosophie, 340; [e] Hegel (1986a), 9.343−51; (1970): 278−85.
190 For Germany as the centre, see n189 above.
191 Hegel (1986a), 9.44−56; (1970): 30−40.
192 Hegel (1986a), 9.126−33; (1970): 99−105.
193 ad oculos: ‘for the eyes.’
638
194 Hegel (1986a), 9.202−17; (1970): 162−75.

195 Hegel (1986a), 9.337−43, 380−93; (1970): 272−8, 322−36.
196 Hegel (1986a), 9.394−411; (1970): 322−36.
197 Hegel (1986a), 9. 465−8; (1970): 382−5.
198 Because of the work of Hermann Cohen, a prominent Neo-Kantian, pan-
logicism (panlogismo) was a prominent topic when Croce wrote this essay;
Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, one of three works meant to logicize
Kant’s three Critiques, appeared in 1902. Over the next three decades,
Cohen’s student, Ernst Cassirer, developed his teacher’s ideas in an effort
to extend logic to all human experience; in the spirit of Cohen’s books,
Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is a critique of culture. Meanwhile,
Bertrand Russell had responded to the work of Gottlob Frege with a differ-
ent logicist project – less familiar to Croce – that Rudolf Carnap eventually
reconnected with the Neo-Kantian debates. On this important moment in
the development of modern philosophy, see Friedman (2000); also Cohen
(1902).
199 This is the last paragraph (244) of the Encyclopedia Logic, meant to lead to
the second part of the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of Nature: Hegel (1986a),
8.393; (1991): 307.
200 [a] Principi di etica, pp. 53−4; [e] Spaventa (1972a), I, 666.
201 Literally, ‘the other according to itself’ or ‘per se’; cf. Arist. Top.
110b16−24.
202 Hegel (1986a), 8.81, 9.24−7, 10.16−17, 20.424−36; (1970): 13−17;
(1971): 7−8; (1991): 56; (1995), III, 516−27; Schelling (1907), II, 14−15.
203 For logical, metaphysical, and religious senses of Logos (Wort) in Hegel, see
Hegel (1986a), 3.559, 5.29−30, 17.234; (1969): 38−40; (1977): 465: if a
self-externalizing Logos is immanent in the God who creates the world, it
will be a bridge from Spirit to Nature.
204 Spinoza, Ethics, prop. 6 and 11; for Hartmann, see section 17 of the Intro-
duction and Croce’s ‘Concept of Art.’
205 Hegel (1986a), 5.44; (1969): 50.
206 ‘God [is] in us and is us’: cf. I John 4:16 (Vulgate).
207 Dante, Paradiso, 1.19−21:
Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue

sì come quando Marsïa traesti
de la vagina de le membra sue.
Enter my heart, and breathe there

as your breathed when you pulled Marsyas
out of the sheath of his limbs.
639
Praying for inspiration at the start of the Paradiso, Dante mentions Mars-
yas, flayed by Apollo when the arrogant mortal challenged the god to a
music contest and lost; his prayer is to sing as sweetly as Apollo sang in
defeating Marsyas. Croce’s point, as he opens the last chapter of his essay,
is not only to put himself in Dante’s company but also to claim that he has
been forced to strip Hegel’s philosophy of its false integuments.
208 Michelet (1859−60), (1861): for Karl Michelet see n170 above, and J.N.
Findlay in his ‘Foreword’ to Hegel (1970): v−ix.
209 Hegel (1986a), 3.20; (1977): 7−8; and chapter 1 above.
210 For Rosenkranz, see n170 above, and Croce (1956): 346−9, 359, on his
Aesthetic of the Ugly: Rosenkranz (1853).
211 Vera (1863−6), I, 30−1, 149.
212 [a] Antidühring, introduction, pp. 9−11, 137−46 on the negation of nega-
tion; an Italian version of this passage is also found in the appendix to
Labriola’s book, Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia (Rome: 1897: 169−78.
[e] Engels (1894); Labriola (1898).
213 Doergens (1872), (1878).
214 [a] These examples taken from C. Kapp, A. von Cieszkowski, and others
appear in Paul Barth, Die Geschichtsphilosophie Hegels und der Hegelianer, pp.
29, 62; for other characteristic examples, see the historical section of my
Estetica, chap. 13; [e] Cieskowski (1838); Barth (1890); Croce (1902).
215 The Letters of Obscure Men, written by Johannes Jäger and Ulrich von Hut-
ten to mock the enemies of Johannes Reuchlin, a Christian Hebraist, first
appeared anonymously in 1515; they are a savage satire against bigoted
pedantry. Illustres is the opposite of obscuri.
216 [a] See Fischer’s Logik und Metaphysik (1852), particularly the second edi-
tion of 1865; [e] Fischer (1865).
217 [a] J.H. Stirling, The Secret of Hegel (London, 1865), I, xi, 317: ‘That secret
may be indicated at shortest thus: as Aristotle – with considerable assist-
ance from Plato – made explicit the abstract universal that was implicit
in Socrates, so Hegel – with less considerable assistance from Fichte and
Schelling – made explicit the concrete universal that was implicit in Kant’;
for Stirling see n43 above.
218 [a] Prolusione e introduzione cited above, pp. 182−3; [e] Spaventa (1862).
219 [a] This is also the view of the anti-Hegelian R. Haym in his essay on Scho-
penhauer, reprinted in his Gesammelte Aufsätze (Berlin, 1903): 390−1.
220 [a] See the review of the Encyclopedia in his Werke, ed. Hartenstein, XII,
670, 685; [e] Herbart (1852).
221 Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802−72), who taught at Berlin, was
Cohen’s teacher and Fischer’s passionate opponent; Paul Janet (1823−99)
640
taught at the Sorbonne from 1864 until his death: Trendelenburg (1840);
Janet (1861); Rosmini (1883b).
222 [a] Encyclopedia, ¶ 86; [e] Hegel (1986a), 8.184−5; (1991): 138.
223 [a] Geschichte der Philosophie (2d. ed), III, 577−8; [e] Hegel (1986a),
20.414; (1995), III, 504−5.
224 [a] ‘Introduction à la métaphysique,’ Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 11,
29; [e] Bergson (1903).
225 Hegel (1986a) 18.47; (1995), I, 28; Michelet (1871): 129.
226 Martial, Epigrams, 12.46.
227 For Croce’s low opinion of Spencer, see his ‘Concept of Art.’
228 Hegel (1986a), 18.55: ‘Was die Langsamkeit des Weltgeistes betrifft, so ist
zu bedenken, daß er nicht pressiert ist, nicht zu eilen und Zeit genug hat’;
Hegel (1995), I, 36.
641
18
Giovanni Gentile
The Philosophy of Praxis1
1. The Philosophical Studies of Karl Marx
In the preface to his Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx remem-

bered waiting with Engels in Brussels in 1845 to take final action on their
plan to define the state of their views – especially in relation to the mate-
rialist conception of history, as Engels later noted – as against the ideo-
logical theories of classical German philosophy: to settle accounts, so to
speak, with previous philosophical thinking on ‘the form of a critique of
post-Hegelian philosophy.’2 The result of this would be a manuscript for
two large octavo volumes. Sent to a printer in Westphalia, it remained in
the shop until circumstances no longer prevented its publication. ‘We
abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice,’ Marx
concluded, ‘all the more willingly because we had already reached our
goal, which was to understand ourselves.’3 Friedrich Engels, referring to a
long review that he had written two years earlier on a study of Feuerbach,
mentioned in 1888 that he had picked up those old papers of 1845−6
and looked at them again. Engels said that ‘the section on Feuerbach in
the manuscript is not finished. The finished part is an exposition of the
materialist conception of history, which only shows how incomplete our
understanding of economic history was at the time.’4
This is valuable information on the studies that the two socialist writ-
ers were working on around 1845. In my opinion, it can give a reliable
answer to that quite unsettling question that has been debated with
much passion – though perhaps not as much accuracy – in the recent
literature on historical materialism, even in Italy: whether the vexed
materialist conception of history arose in the minds of Marx and his Met-
rodorus with all the hallmarks of a philosophical theory, internally coor-
Gentile, Praxis
dinated with a special new system of philosophy in the true and genuine
sense.5
It would be useful to publish this manuscript, because, more than any
other work by Marx, it would support historical reconstruction of the ori-
gin and development of his thought. From the testimony of one of the
two authors, we also know that – for better or for worse – the manuscript
expressed the new concept of history that then had to be perfected and
formulated in the Manifesto and advocated more thoughtfully again in
the Critique of Political Economy. This conception was expressed with the
aim of getting oriented among the various directions of contemporary
philosophy and thereby working out a nucleus of guiding principles that
would be a sort of skeleton for the new system. Marx tells us that this
work clarified his own philosophical thinking, and Engels adds that their
new historical insight was already stated there. Putting these two pieces
of testimony together, it seems there can be no doubt about the scope of
the notion of historical materialism already present in Marx’s thinking
in ’45.
Now I also agree with Croce that in dealing with Marx’s writings, more
than those of any other thinker, ‘the interpreter must proceed with
weights on his feet, working through them case by case, book by book,
proposition by proposition, relating these various productions to one
another, to be sure, but also taking account of the different times and cir-
cumstances in which they were produced, the fleeting impressions, the
mental and literary habits, requiring the interpreter to be resigned to
acknowledging uncertainty and incompleteness where these exist, while
resisting the temptation to correct and complete as he sees fit.’6
While gladly accepting these prudent warnings, I believe an irrefu-
table conclusion follows from the new information cited, and that this
must be the point of departure for our inquiry. For that purpose, it is
useful to state right away that at this time and in this case the task is not to
ask what may be critically acceptable in the end for historical materialism
– a question of great importance, but essentially a critical question and
therefore entirely extraneous to the history of Marx’s thinking, which, in
any event, that question must follow and not precede. Instead, the task
is to study how Marx really conceived of this theory that he put at the
service of a social doctrine of immense importance. And if both Marx
and Engels – referring to a work so voluminous, written as the theory
was emerging in their minds and maturing – if both stated explicitly that
it took shape as a philosophical system (indeed, out of their opposition
to systems then current), it would not then be shrewd and prudent for
643
a critical interpreter to cast doubt on the philosophical scope that the

authors themselves actually attributed to historical materialism from the
start. This is not a case of unconscious thinking, where one needs to
be wary about committing trust; we are dealing with deep mental effort
taking shape in a process of writing at length, enough to produce two
printed volumes.
I agree entirely with Labriola, then, when he supports Georges Sorel’s
notion of putting the general problem of philosophy back into play as
he worries that ‘historical materialism may seem to be feeding on air as
long as it stands opposed to other philosophies not in harmony with it,
yet has still not found a way to develop a philosophy of its own, one built
into its assumptions and immanent in its premises.’7 Therefore, Labriola
thinks he should work out the concept of this philosophy – in fact, the
concept of historical materialism in Marx’s own thought. In effect, this is
what he has tried to do in his letters to Sorel, attempting at the same time
to locate Marxism’s direction among today’s trends in philosophy. But
since there are many, even Iliacos intra muros, who believe that Labriola
has widened the circle of the materialist theory of history contrary to
Marx’s understanding and with no solid basis, it will help to bring for-
ward the evidence for what Marx himself really thought.8
2. Marx’s Critique of Feuerbach
Friedrich Engels, in an appendix to his study of Feuerbach, has pub-

lished eleven theses or fragments on that philosopher written in Janu-
ary 1845, by Marx in Brussels and found by Engels in an old notebook
belonging to his friend. ‘These are notes for a work in progress,’ he
writes, ‘certainly not meant for publication but priceless as the first docu-
ment in which the productive seed of the new view of the world (der
neuen Weltanschauung) was planted.’ These notes by Marx refer to Feuer-
bach’s Essence of Christianity.9 They show us how the disciple had evolved
in relation to the master, and therefore they also reveal the historical
relations between Marxism and the degenerate Hegelianism of the Left,
represented especially by Feuerbach. It will be useful, then, to review the
features of that philosophy briefly, using the work just cited.
Hegel thought that philosophy and faith can and must proceed in
harmony; they have the same content in different forms. It has often
been observed that in this way Hegel ended up contradicting one of the
basic principles of his logic, which is that form and content are always
perfectly parallel. The criticism is unjust because Hegel certainly did not
644
Gentile, Praxis
deny the transformation of content into different forms, nor, therefore,

did he hold that content and form in philosophy and content and form
in religion went hand in hand and were perfectly correlated. I maintain
that he did not deny the diversity of concrete contents as realized in
two different forms, but that he affirmed the identity of abstract content
when treated as transcendentally separate both from the philosophical
form and from the religious form.10 According to Hegel, moreover, ‘the
form of feeling (that belongs to religion) is the most inadequate form
for spiritual content. In its truth, that content, God himself, exists only
in thinking and as thinking.’11
In the Essence of Christianity (1841), in any case, Feuerbach opposes
his teacher’s view, maintaining that philosophy and religion are diamet-
rically opposed, like sickness and health, the one being a product of
thinking, the other of imagination or feeling. Faith and science cannot
agree to a friendly settlement, then. Hegel had said that man recognizes
himself in his God. One should say instead that God is recognized in
man. In other words, man certainly does not want to understand himself
in religion, not even to understand himself incompletely (by represent-
ing himself). He wishes instead to satisfy himself in his physical needs.
For man, what really is his own individual essence? It is the continuing
satisfaction of his own organic needs. And he wants to find this again in
God. The feeling of egotism, unsatisfied that real life is finite, pushes
man to exalt himself as an infinite power, which, in its divinity, has the
omnipotence that can satisfy all his needs. Through religion, then, man
does not recognize himself as spirit, as absolute, as universal in God.
What is absolute, spiritual, and universal must instead be recognized in
a particular individual, which, as a physical organism, lives through the
incessant satisfying of its physical needs. The truth of the individual is
not in the universal, then; the truth of the universal is in the individual.
Matter does not affirm itself in spirit, but spirit in matter: Hegelian ideal-
ism upside down.
And since the root of religion is to be sought in the human being
as a physical individual, theology is turned into anthropology, which is
essentially materialist. The needs that stimulate fantasies about the dei-
fication of human powers raised to infinity are physical needs, and the
very essence of man thus comes to be determined as purely physical and
organic. The critique of religion, therefore, is based on materialism. In
fact, in the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (Grundsätze der Philoso-
phie der Zukunft, 1843), Feuerbach teaches that true philosophy can only
be empirical, having sensible reality as its object.12 The deepest and most
645
important truths are learned only by way of the senses. Philosophy must
not treat man as thinking or reasoning but as what he is in reality, a
concrete, sensible, living being – a body. The I is just the body, exactly.
Philosophy itself, in that man is its object, turns out to be a physiological
anthropology. According to Feuerbach, then, religion – and like reli-
gion, all facts about human life and society treated as lofty and nobler
– is a product of man as an organic body that lives by the continuing
satisfaction of its needs.
The outcome of this philosophy is obvious.13 For all of history there
can be no explanation except the materialist one. Search out and study
the needs of the human body in its actual existence and you will have the
reason for all human actions, small or large, individual or social. This
means that one seeks the explanation of individual acts in the immediate
physical needs of the individual as such, while the explanation of social
acts must arise, on the other hand, from the analysis of the individual’s
needs as a member of society – of one particular society, in fact. And if
Feuerbach formulated his materialism in a typical concluding remark by
saying that man is no more or less than what he eats (der Mensch sei nur
das, was er esse), and if the explanation of man’s activity as a pure and
simple individual is thus to be provided only by the needs of his stomach,
the explanation of his historical actions can come from no other source
than his economic needs.14
This is how historical materialism emerged by clear and plain logic
from Feuerbach’s materialism. It would seem, then, that there is no
other philosophy but materialism that is immanent in the materialist
conception of history. But let us see what observations Marx made about
this philosophy as he was preparing to write about his own philosophical
orientation in 1845. For this purpose, let me provide the best transla-
tions I can of the fragments printed by Engels.15
1 The chief defect of all materialism in the past – including Feuer-

bach’s – is that the object (Gegenstand) of thought, reality, the sen-
sible, has been conceived only in the form of an object or of an
intuition, certainly not as a sensory human activity, as a praxis, and
subjectively. Thus it happened that out of opposition to materialism
idealism developed the aspect of activity– but only in the abstract,
because idealism naturally knows nothing about real sensory activity.
Feuerbach wanted sensible objects to be really distinct from the intel-
ligible but he did not conceive of human activity itself as objective
activity.16 Therefore, in the Essence of Christianity he treats only the
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Gentile, Praxis
theoretical content as clearly human, while praxis gets conceived and

established only in filthy Jewish forms. Therefore he does not under-
stand the meaning that the ‘revolutionaries’ give to practical-critical
activity.
2 The question that asks whether human thought attains objective
truth is not a theoretical question but a practical question. In praxis,
man can test the truth of his own thinking – its reality and power
(Macht), its objectivity (Diesseitigkeit). Isolated from praxis, any discus-
sion of the reality or unreality of thinking is a purely scholastic ques-
tion.
3 The materialist doctrine that humans are the product of environ-
ment and education, varying as environment and education vary, for-
gets that it is just humans who change the environment, and that the
teacher himself must be taught. Of necessity, then, this doctrine leads
to dividing society into two parts, one of them conceived as standing
above the other (in Robert Owen, for example). The convergence of
environmental variation with human activity can be conceived and
understood rationally only as praxis overthrown.17
4 From the fact of spontaneous religious projection (Selbstentfremdung),
Feuerbach arrives at a doubling of the world into a religious world
of representation and a real world. And this is his task: to reduce the
religious world to its substrate. It escapes him, however, that when
this task is complete, the main thing still remains to be done. Still to
be explained is the very fact that the substrate of this religious world
raises itself on high and sets itself up among peoples as an independ-
ent realm of its own, and this can be explained only by the doubling
that the substrate does to itself and also by the self-contradiction that
it gets into. It must therefore be understood first in its contradictory
character, and then by the resolution of this same contradiction it is
subverted in practice.18 Thus, for example, after the mystery of the
Holy Family is unveiled by the earthly family, the latter must be criti-
cized in theory and overthrown in practice.19
5 Not content with abstract thought, Feuerbach appeals to sensory in-
tuition, but he does not conceive of the sensory as a practical, hu-
man-sensory activity.
6 Feuerbach reduces the essence of religion to man’s own essence. But
there is no human essence as an abstraction inhering in the particu-
lar individual. In its reality, it is nothing but the totality of social rela-
tions. Never getting to the criticism of this real essence, Feuerbach
is therefore forced, in the first place, to abstract from the historical
647
process, set up religious feeling on its own, and present an individual

human to us as an abstract-isolate; meanwhile, in the second place,
the human essence for him can be understood only as a ‘species’
(Gattung), as a mute, unexplicated universal, which links the many
individuals together only naturally.
7 Feuerbach, therefore, does not see that ‘religious feeling’ is itself a
social product, and that the abstract individual that he analyses really
belongs to a particular social form.
8 Social life is essentially practical. All the mysteries that push theory
into mysticism find their rational explanation in human praxis and
in the understanding of this praxis.
9 The highest level attained by intuitionist materialism – the material-
ism that does not conceive of the sensory as practical activity – is the
intuition of particular individuals in bourgeois society.
10 The point of view of the old materialism is bourgeois society; the
point of view of the new materialism is human society or humanity as
a social grouping.
11 Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, but the
point to is to change it.20
In these thoughts, faithfully translated, it is not hard to discern the

plan for a whole new theoretical system with its history geared to a prior
philosophy and with clear hints of a practical program following from
it logically: the whole skeleton, in short, of that philosophy that is sup-
posed to be immanent and inherent in the materialist conception of
history – in the foundation of communist doctrine, in other words.
Along the general lines of these thoughts, I shall do my best to produce
a sketch of the new way of philosophizing from which Marx concluded
that he would overtake his teacher.
3. A Sketch of the Philosophy of Praxis
The keystone of this new philosophical construct is in the concept of

praxis. As Marx himself knew very well, the concept was new to material-
ism, but to idealism it was as old as idealism itself – actually born along
with it at the same time, certainly since Socrates and his subjectivism.
Socrates could not conceive of a truth that was already well formed and
transmittable by tradition or teaching. Instead, he thought that all truth
is the final outcome of an original labour of inquiry in which the master
can only be a companion or collaborator for the disciple who longs for
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Gentile, Praxis
the truth – hence the famous comparison of his art to the midwifery of
his mother, Phenarete. He was not the one who produced knowledge
in the minds of his disciples; he only helped them shape themselves to
make this knowledge – helped them in praxis, as Marx would say. Hence,
knowledge certainly implied productive activity for Socrates; it was a sub-
jective construct, an ongoing and progressive praxis. Nor did Plato let
this exceedingly important doctrine pass him by. He defined it better,
in fact, and developed it in his dialectic of ideas, all supplied by creative
energy and now brought back anew in the so-called idea-forces. And until
Hegel there was no idealist who did not understood knowledge, more or
less adequately, as the product and work of the human spirit – with the
exception of a few proponents of intellectual intuition.
Our Vico, customarily reputed to be the only founder of the philoso-
phy of history, had deep insight into this problem. The whole reason for
his implacable criticism of Descartes was in this concept of cognition as
praxis. The philosopher of Naples could not forgive Descartes for pos-
iting direct consciousness of thought (cogito ergo sum) as the point of
departure and foundation of science. When we do science, according to
Vico, we must justify the fact of consciousness itself by reconstructing its
emergence and development, not beginning with the mere fact, but, as
we now say, starting with the explanation of the fact itself and making it
again for ourselves. Verum et factum convertuntur, and truth thus reveals
itself when we make it. Since this is the result, not the given, of scientific
research, science cannot proceed by analysis, as Descartes claims – an
analysis that would assume that it had the concept of the truth present to
it to be analysed – but rather by synthesis, which is the productive activity
of the mind. Hence the inestimable value of the brilliant insights, the
happy intuitions that somehow create what can be known rather than
making what is so hard to attain.21 Making is the indispensable condition
of knowing, according to Vico. Hence the certainty of mathematics – on
this he agreed with Descartes – where the objects of our knowledge are
not given but constructed.
These principles, already expressed and developed in his work De anti-
quissima italorum sapientia (1710), then had to be admirably applied in his
New Science to construct his historical philosophy.22 And really, if what can
be known is one’s own work, Vico thinks that the natural world must be
entrusted to the knowledge possessed by God, who is its only maker. But
the historical world, a product of human activity, is the object of which
humans can acquire knowledge because they have made it. For Vico,
however, this human activity is an activity of the human mind, which is
649
the reason for his notion that history has to be explained entirely by con-
sidering and studying the modifications of the mind and thinking them
through. In Marx, the principle of activity changes – or so he thought:
instead of modifications of the mind, the needs of the individual as a
social being are the root of history. But the notion of praxis that Vico
invoked remains the same.
That notion admits no criticism or correction. Labriola puts it very
well when, referring to it, he writes that ‘to think is to produce. To learn
is to produce by reproducing. We understand well only what we ourselves
are capable of producing – by thinking, working, trying and trying again,
always in virtue of powers that are our own in the social context and
from the perspective in which we find ourselves.’23 Why do we establish
laboratories if not to remake nature (something that Vico did not attend
to, nor could he) and make progress in the science of nature? What is
an experiment but a redoing of what nature does, doing it over in condi-
tions that assist nature and that make observation reliable? Clearly, this
making or remaking is not always a material or causal making; more
often, in fact, it is simply making or remaking by thinking. But might the
material and causal making or remaking not also help us understand the
fact simply by its mechanism, or perhaps by our thinking through each
part of the mechanism, piece by piece?
The answer is easy for anyone who recognizes that the mind has no
eyes or hands or tools, except metaphorically, and that one can follow
the mechanics of external making only through a sequence of represen-
tations. This original activity that must be developed as a result of science
is quite evident, for example, in a calculation of arithmetic. You have the
factors, and you want the product. This product is not something that
you glimpse by intuition; it is the result of an operation that you must
perform. And what is said of this product of arithmetic is to be said of
every product of knowing, of all knowledge. It is not given but must be
attained by a laborious act of the mind. Knowledge given is not true
knowledge, if it is not understood, unless it is reconstructed, and then it
is no longer given but a product or a reproduction, which is the same.
Might science generally be had at one stroke, just by looking around
and taking everything in with a penetrating glance? Remaking is easier
than making, surely, and reading a scientific book is a much simpler
thing than writing one. But if our spirit wants to prosper, even in reading
it cannot remain inert and passive. In fact, it must stay with the author’s
spirit every step of the way and thereby develop an energy of its own – its
own making. Language already shows traces of this enormously impor-
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Gentile, Praxis
tant notion of the knowing or understanding that is a making. The Latin

word for ‘easy,’ facilis (which survives in all the romance languages),
comes from the verb facere, and therefore it would mean ‘what can be
done’ etymologically, whereas in Latin and all the romance languages
it also means ‘what can be known or understood.’ Hence, making an
action happen is do-able, but is also do-able to know a truth or understand
a theorem.24
This notion that knowledge goes along step-by-step with activity, with
praxis, is the heart of Froebel’s pedagogic method. ‘His point of depar-
ture was the making that precedes knowing, and knowledge is nothing
more than the genetic development of the same making.’25 Froebel did
not derive that principle from a materialist philosophy, however. It has
been noted, in fact, that ‘thun (making/doing), as well as the genetisch-
entwickelnd (genetic-developmental) method so much promoted by
Froebel, readily call to mind that doctrine (of Fichte’s) which attempted
to derive all our science from the primitive making of the I.’26
Marx wants to move this principle over from abstract idealism into
concrete materialism. In his judgment, the neglect of this principle until
his time was a most serious failure – indeed, the chief failure. And the
need asserted by him demonstrates the theoretical power, the philosoph-
ical acuity of his intellect. In the final analysis, what charge did he truly
bring against materialism regarding the theory of knowledge? This one:
believing the object, the sensible intuition, the external reality, to be
a given rather than a product, in such a way that thinking, the human
subject, while entering into a relation with it, would have to limit itself
just to looking – merely mirroring, in fact – and remaining in a state of
pure passivity. Briefly, then, Marx charged that the materialists, Feuer-
bach among them, conceived of the subject and object of knowledge in
an abstract and therefore a false situation.
In that situation, the object would have been opposed to the subject,
lacking any intrinsic relation with it – this thing that the subject encoun-
tered, saw and knew accidentally. Without its object, however, this sub-
ject is a subject of what? And of what is this object an object, lacking
its subject? Subject and object are two correlative terms, one following
necessarily after the other. Hence, subject and object are not independ-
ent of one another. They are inseparably bound to one another, in fact,
so that their actual reality comes from their mutual linkage within the
organism in which and through which they find the completion that
they need and outside of which they are just abstractions. The life of the
subject lies in its intrinsic relation with the object, and vice versa. Cut this
651
relation off, and you will no longer have life, only death, no longer two
real objects of making and knowing, but two abstract objects.
One must conceive of them, then, as they really are, in their mutu-
al relation. And what is this relation? Its nature is clarified by what has
been said about the activity that is proper to knowing. When the object
is known, it is made, it is constructed. And when an object is made or
constructed, it is known. This is to say that the object is a product of the
subject, and since there is no subject without an object, one must add
that the subject itself is made or constructed as the object is gradually
made or constructed, so that the moments of the subject’s progressive
formation correspond to various moments in the progressive formation
of the object. They say that someone who has not known much has not
developed his ideas or thinking very much. And as what he knows (the
object) gradually increases, there is a corresponding increase in the
power of his comprehension and understanding (the subject). Knowl-
edge, then, is a development that continues. Since in essence it is only a
relation between two correlative terms, it is equivalent to a progressive
development of these two terms in parallel. But the root, the enduring
cause of this development lies in the activity, in the making of the sub-
ject that shapes itself by shaping the object: crescit et concrescit; p…dosij
™f'aÙtw×Ä (Aristotle).27
But when materialism says that the Spirit is a tabula rasa on which
images of the external world are inscribed, one by one, by the instrumen-
tality of the senses, from one perspective one thinks of this table, per-
fectly blank, ready to receive images from the external world. From the
other perspective, one thinks of objects in this world, perfectly formed
and complete in themselves, such that, if their job is putting images on
that table, they put them there, but if not, they remain just as they are,
losing nothing of what they are, just as they would have gained nothing
by delivering the images. This is the abstract position of materialism,
which does not stand up to the most elementary criticism. Who inscribes
the images on the tabula rasa? Is it the subject that forms them or the
object? And if subject and object exist without these images – a product
of the relation that they can enter into – if they thus exist independently
of one another, what is a subject as pure subject, and what is an object as
pure object? There is no way for materialism to answer these questions
without contradicting its assumptions, since, as we know, an abstraction
can accept no determination unless it is conceived in conditions wherein
and whereby it is concrete – without ceasing to be and being negated as
an abstraction.
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Gentile, Praxis
In that position, nonetheless, there is a real legitimate need – the

so-called objectivity of knowledge that requires the object to be a pure
object, with no mixture of subjectivity. If knowledge acquires value from
the object that puts us in possession of knowledge, it no longer keeps this
value when the object is altered by the influence or contact of the sub-
ject, which must be the principle of knowing as opposed to the known.
From this comes the theory of intuitions, pure visions that make the sen-
sible image pass from external objects into our minds without the least
modification. For this reason, a pure object and intuition are features of
the objectivism – idealist or materialist – to which Marx wishes to oppose
his subjectivism. Until now, he says in Fragment 1, reality has been con-
ceived as object or intuition, not as human activity, not as praxis, not
subjectively.28 According to him, then, reality is a subjective product of
mankind, but a product of sensory activity (sinnliche Thätigkeit), not of
thinking, as Hegel and other idealists believed.
Turn back to Hegel from Feuerbach, then, for Hegel certainly under-
stood knowledge to be a continuous producing, a making that never
stops, a praxis that originates. But transfer this principle of his from an
abstract, idealist notion of the Spirit to real, concrete, sensory human
activity. Idealism certainly did not deny sensation, yet it did not recog-
nize it as such, only as a moment of the thinking that is not active or pro-
ductive as sensation but as thinking. Now what has Feuerbach done in
his Essence of Christianity? He has distinguished the filthy Jewish forms of
Christianity from its theoretical content.29 The former are a product of
praxis, the latter a pure product of human thinking – an absolute duality
between fact and theory, praxis and knowledge, though they are really
one and the same. In short, Feuerbach was not self-consistent: he gave a
materialist explanation for the practical part of the history of Christian-
ity, but he stopped short at the ideology, the theoretical part, the final
fortress of idealism that stood opposed to him and that he did not seize.
On this point, facing the same problem, Labriola makes the following
observation:
It is the difficulty of understanding how all ideologies arise from the mate-
rial ground of life that gives force to the arguments of those who deny the
possibility of a complete genetic (materialist) explanation of Christianity. In
general it is true that religious phenomenology or psychology – say what
one likes – raises large questions here and brings up some rather obscure
issues of its own … But is it possible that this psychological difficulty is a
privilege of Christian beliefs? Does this not happen in the formation of all
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mythical and religious beliefs and ideations? … These psychic products of

people of past centuries present special difficulties to our understanding.
We cannot easily reproduce in ourselves the conditions that then prevailed
in order to bring ourselves closer to the internal state of mind that corre-
sponded to those products … But Christianity (and here I mean the belief,
doctrine, myth, symbol, and legend, not just the association as an economy)
is rather simpler for us in that it is closer to us. We live in its midst, and we
must continually consider its consequences and effects in the literatures
and various philosophies that are familiar to us. Every day we can observe
the wholesale agreement of the masses with superstitions, both primitive
and recent, and their middling or scarcely rough acceptance of the more
general principle that unites all the confessions − fall and redemption. We
see the Christian organization at work, both in what it does and in the strug-
gles that it supports, and we are in a position to recover its past by analogical
associations that we rarely get to use in interpreting beliefs remote from us.
We assist again in the creation of new dogmas, new saints, new miracles,
new pilgrimages, and, as we rethink the past, we can say with good reason
tout comme chez nous!30
And every day do we still not see these cathedrals rising out of inter-
ests, out of material needs? These practical interests, these material
needs have as their object the sensible reality that they strive to capture
and make. But their object is not really distinct and separate from the
object of thinking – as Feuerbach believes and supposes it to be (sinnli-
che, von den Gedankenobiekten wirklich unterschiedene Obiekte) – because the
materialism, if things were like that, would not be able to explain all of
mankind’s activity.31 Such activity can appear to be double in nature,
practical and theoretical, to someone who has not grasped the notion
of knowing as making. But when the making is united with the knowing,
the objects that belong to knowing are also the objects of making, and
vice versa, so that finally there is just a single class of objects related to
praxis (which is making and knowing together) and produced just by it.
And if materialism is good enough to explain objects that are made, it
must also be good enough to explain objects that are known, which are
basically identical in nature with the former objects. Instead, Feuerbach
explains his doctrinal constructions by the abstract activity of the Spirit –
for him, the real human activity – and so he leaps back into the idealism
that he wished so firmly to deny.
Also according to Feuerbach, human activity is therefore not prop-
erly objective (gegenständliche Thätigkeit).32 It does not produce objects
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Gentile, Praxis
opposed to man, only objects that are, so to speak, subjective – cogni-

tions, not facts. And with respect to cognition, the true objects – sensible
reality – remain absolutely extraneous to thinking and independent of
it. Inconsistency is Feuerbach’s leading error, introducing a duality into
the very heart of materialism, which is essentially a monist philosophy,
when he was unable to recognize the productive character of the sensory
activity that shapes all reality.
Therefore, we need to complete the materialist intuition with the very
fertile concept of practical-critical energy, the energy that unfolds as it
produces and simultaneously knows what it produces– the new concept
of the ‘revolutionaries’ …33
9. A Critique of the Philosophy of Praxis
… We may define the philosophy of praxis sketched by Marx in the frag-

ments of 1845 as a materialist monism that differs from any system like
it in its concept of praxis applied to matter. But now the time has come
to look a little closer at this construct and, first of all, to see how solid its
foundations are.
How does Marx understand his matter? As praxis, he answers, which
leads to historical materialism, meaning a system that does not conceive
of matter as fixed and stable, but as being made continuously, continu-
ously in becoming. But where is the principle of activity? Praxis in Marx
is synonymous with human sensory activity (menschliche sinnliche Thätig-
keit).34 The activity of matter thus resides in man. Sensibility is just practi-
cal activity, human-sensory activity.35
Hegel used to say that the Idea, the Spirit, is hard-working, and that its
dialectical development is the reason behind the becoming of reality.36
Marx does nothing more than to substitute body for the Spirit, sense for
the Idea, and for the products of the Spirit that constitute true reality for
Hegel (and for Marx become ideologies) he substitutes the economic
facts that are the products of mankind’s sensory activity as it seeks to
satisfy all those material needs to which Feuerbach had reduced man’s
essence. But Marx preserves all the rest of Hegel’s conception. And the
substitution of body for the Spirit and sense for the Idea was natural and
necessary: Feuerbach had done the same. As soon as the first level of
phenomenology becomes sensible consciousness – or sense, if you like
– and then all the higher levels develop from it, sense becomes man’s
real activity. And to sense one must ascribe the rights usurped by abstract
thought.
655
From this, someone else could say that since the adult comes from
the infant, it is not the adult who works and wages war and does science
and so on, but the infant, in the final analysis. If this person were asked
to point the wonder-working infant out to us, he might find himself in
a real fix, but no worse than Marx’s in showing how sense might really
be the principle of reality, understood as he means it. Who can deny any
longer that the real and true Demiurge of sensible reality is our sensory
activity? It is not a vibration in the ether that appears to the eyes; it is
colour; and colour is therefore the sensible reality. But it is clear that
this reality is not given to the sense, since apart from us there is only
the vibration of the ether; the reality is produced by the sense. Just as
Plato’s Demiurge does not create ex nihilo, however, but has matter there
at hand and opposed to him, and then molds it in various sensible forms
in imitation of the eternal ideas, so also sense does not create colour but
transforms what is given externally (a vibration in the ether) into a visual
sensation. The only given is utterly unlike sensation, but the sensation is
impossible without the given.
So then, what supplies this given? The external world, replies the psy-
chologist, and for psychology this reply is good enough. But when Marx
opposes his sense, body, and matter to Hegel’s Idea and Spirit, it is no
longer a question of psychology or phenomenology but something dif-
ferent. In Hegel’s terminology, it is a question of logic – meaning met-
aphysics. In a psychological sense, one can also say that sense creates
sensation because psychologically there is nothing beyond the colour,
and the vibrations in the ether are a purely physical fact. But when we
move on from a particular treatment of psychic phenomena to a gen-
eral treatment of reality, we see immediately that before the colour and
beyond it there is the vibration in the ether. And who causes the vibra-
tion to be there? God, replies the spiritualist; matter, the materialist.
But given what has been said, it is obvious that this matter is some-
thing beyond human sensory activity; it would need to be fashioned, as
Marx would say, or constructed in its own way. The question is scholastic,
Marx will say. As such, vibrations in the ether are purely an abstraction,
something that does not exist (as far as humans are concerned). Vibra-
tions in the ether exist only as colours. But this answer brings us back to
phenomenology again, though it is Hegel’s logic that the author means
to oppose. It is metaphysical materialism that he believes he is rectifying
with his dynamic concept of matter. And in this domain, the relative
– the as far as we are concerned – must give way to the absolute, as the a
posteriori becomes a priori.
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Gentile, Praxis
In idealism, this progress from a posteriori to a priori is understood

– as far as universal reality and the absolute are concerned. Knowledge
is established by synthetic a priori judgments, said Kant, by experience
(synthesis) which is posited, fixed, and recognized as a priori. In order
for a concept to take shape, the given in sensible experience must be
presented to the category, a native function of my understanding. The
genesis of every concept is necessarily empirical, a posteriori. But once
a universal concept – a law – has been formed, this concept and this law
are a priori, and as such they govern reality. Now if we do not attain the
universality of the law, of the concept, if we remain in the particular of
sensible intuition, we clearly do not leave the a posteriori, the domain
where there exists only what is given by experience. But experience
always assumes a stimulus, and hence matter, as its unfailing antecedent.
Matter thus escapes the creative activity of sense and cannot be regulated
by it; in fact, matter influences sense and regulates it in certain ways.
(The varying velocity of vibrations in the ether produces variation in
colours, for example.)
Idealism observes that concepts or rational laws govern reality. There-
fore, there are no chemical substances that evade the mathematical
relations of the formulas that apply to them; nor is there any wolf or
horse that is not a quadruped or a mammal, with the required features
of the relevant concept; nor does water exist that falls to a certain tem-
perature without freezing, according to a law known experimentally.
Reality itself is to be thought of as constructed by reason, which reveals
itself there immanently, and reality is thus to be conceived as essentially
rational. Clearly, the reason to which reality conforms can certainly not
be Hegel’s, much less mine or Tom’s or Harry’s. Yet it is important to
note that all nature is written in mathematical characters; that the mind
can read these characters; and that these characters, being mathemati-
cal, are mental or intelligible by their nature, since mathematics is only a
construction of the intellect. The mathematics of nature is just its ration-
ality – the Reason or Idea, whichever you like, immanent in it and in
reality in general.
As the Reason that belongs to reality, the passage from a posteriori to a
priori is therefore understood in idealism, but in Marx’s materialism it is
absolutely inconceivable. The only way out would be to deny everything
that transcends sensible reality, and this would be the genuine character
of materialism. But the very assertion of this sensible reality as matter,
pure and simple, immediately transcends sense. Besides, if nothing is
real but the sensible and material, all the criticism that Marx directed
657
against earlier materialist conceptions of society is completely demol-

ished. As we have seen, he opposes the nominalist intuition that sees in
society only individuals who, even when they are able to agree, are always
essentially independent of one another, standing by themselves. Marx
correctly observes that this is an abstraction because society is what is
original, and so individuals are only parts of a single whole and organi-
cally connected.
But what sensible reality is there in society except individuals as such?
Society, their organism, is an ethical bond; it is mind and rationality.
With good reason, then, the consistent materialists – Epicurus, Hobbes,
and the French materialists of the previous century – denied that society
is a necessary and original fact. Organism and society imply a relation,
and that relation is nowhere to be touched, seen, or heard: sensibles
are only the terms of the relation. If you form a concept of the terms
together with their relation, you rise from sense to intellect, not by deny-
ing sense but by making an a priori – or necessary, if you like – synthesis
of sense and intellect.
Marx therefore had a reason not to isolate individuals and abstract
them from their relations. This reason, as we have shown, was in the
concept of praxis as immanent in sensible reality. Praxis means a relation
between subject and object – thus neither the individual subject nor the
individual object as such and simpliciter, but the one as necessarily related
to the other, and vice versa: thus, to put it another way, the identity of
opposites – once again. Not teachers on one side (as I have said) and on
the other side those who are taught, but teachers who are taught, and, as
teachers, those who are taught.37
As we have seen, Marx used the concept of praxis itself to reject natu-
ralism.38 And in the spirit of the master, our Labriola puts it nicely: ‘All
the people now living on the surface of the earth and all those who lived
here in the past make up a quite considerable object of observation, hav-
ing been here for a good stretch from the moment when life ceased to
be purely animal.’39 This denial of naturalism is another blow against the
materialist view that the only reality is the sensible. The purely animal
life is precisely the life of sense, lived amidst sensible things, and it ceases
only when one asserts that there is something more than mere sense. The
moment when it ceases, in fact, the moment to which Labriola himself
refers, is the moment of society’s origin, and hence, as we have already
said, of the asserting of the mental (by which sense is already overcome).
Materialism can see only the animal (naturalism) in mankind, but, by
his concept of praxis, Marx is forced to see something more than the
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Gentile, Praxis
purely animal in mankind, and precisely what he sees there is … man-

kind, meaning the animal, yes, but the animal that is by nature politi-
cal, according to Aristotle’s old dictum.40 What materialism is this, then?
Like any materialism, it wants to recognize as real only what is sensible,
but this sensible, which for any other materialism is static, is in this case
dynamic, in a perpetual becoming, which is why it is called historical mate-
rialism. But here we have a materialism which, if it is to be historical, is
forced to deny its own basis – that there is no other reality beyond the
sensible – in order to construct its theory. It thus rejects the essential fea-
tures of every materialist position, of the atomist conception of society
for example, and naturalism itself. In short, this is a materialism that to
be historical can no longer be materialism. A deep, internal, and incur-
able contradiction afflicts it.
And in truth, did Hegel not say that the Spirit is history?41 Spirit, not
matter? Can history be transported from the Spirit to matter, as Marx
claims? The materialism of the previous century, which was really the
sincere expression of the most anti-historical of all eras, did not think so
– and with good reason. The materialism of that period believed in mat-
ter as such, and matter as such is always self-identical: it never changes.
It takes different forms that change and vary continuously, but in all its
forms it remains the same constantly. Take a piece of clay and first make
a little bottle. Then you can reshape it and make a flask out of it. But
bottle or flask, the clay is always clay, and, as such, it cannot be said to
change. And where there is no change, there is no history. If you want
to look at the various forms, you no longer have clay, pure and simple,
in front of you, but clay and your hand that shapes it – clay and praxis.
In this way, if it is not the matter as such that you want to look at but its
ever-changing forms – its history – you will have both the matter and the
praxis that makes the matter exist in all its forms.
But if you accept praxis, you transcend sensible reality, as we have
seen. This is what materialists of the previous century did not wish to
transcend, and therefore they stayed content with matter as such, always
self-identical, without history. This is why they were convinced that the
world was and always will be the same, and that to have deep knowledge
of any entity one must study it not in its history but rather in its natu-
ral directness – hence also the return to nature that characterizes every
intellectual product of the previous century, including political econo-
my, according to the Physiocrats.42 When this notion is carried over into
law, one can understand how the special insight of the eighteenth-centu-
ry philosophers could have set up the explosion of the great Revolution.
659
A revolution is a really a negation of history, a denial of value to what

history has consecrated as human society’s natural movement and devel-
opment, reducing historical facts to accidental – and thus arbitrarily
changeable – modifications of a nature that is perpetually self-identical.
Historical materialism, by contrast, means to proclaim that history is
the only true mistress of all us humans and that we are as history lives us,
as Labriola says.43 Then the canon of a new philosophy claims that while
philosophers up to now have sought only to interpret the world, the
point is to change it (verändern) – change the history of which all reality
consists, in other words, according to the new materialists.44 This means
that this unique reality that is history, whose essence is determined by
dialectically necessary development, becomes unreal all at once by the
very fact that its own development must either stop or change paths.
How so, and why? Through the theories of philosophers – historical
materialists excepted! Those much-derided ideologies would all at once
become the mainspring of history! The truth is that philosophy is the
only means of changing the world that philosophers have at their dis-
posal. Have we not come back to Plato’s notion of ideas as movers and
creators of universal reality?
The root of the contradiction that comes up at every turn in Marx’s
materialism is the total lack of any critique bearing on the concept of
praxis as applied to sensible reality or to matter, which for him are equiv-
alent. Marx seems not at all concerned to see how praxis might be cou-
pled with matter as the sole reality, though the whole previous history of
philosophy ought to have warned him that the two principles cannot be
reconciled – that form (praxis) with that content (matter).
Matter of itself is inert and therefore always equal to itself. What is the
source of the energy that makes it come to be incessantly? One might say
there is a dynamis immanent in it, but this dynamis that transforms matter
step-by-step in a dialectical and determinate development of its nature
is a rational dynamis, and reason is the Spirit. Beyond matter, therefore,
the Spirit is always present as primitive, and the conclusion we reach is a
more or less Platonic dualism, not a materialist monism. Pure material-
ists contemporary with Marx himself – Büchner, for example – resorted
to the option of accepting force and matter as primitives, but they were
careful to keep force far removed from any views about teleology.45 In
fact, they adopted an almost relentless critique of any teleology as one of
idealism’s basic theories (now emphatically confirmed by the idealist –
or telistic, as they call it – trend in England and America).
Karl Marx, born an idealist, and, during the period when his think-
660
Gentile, Praxis
ing took shape, having become so deeply familiar with Fichte’s philoso-
phy first and then Hegel’s, did not approach Feuerbach’s materialism
by forgetting everything he had learned and was second nature to his
thinking. He could not forget that there is no object without a subject
that constructs it, nor could he forget that everything is in perpetual
becoming, that everything is history.46 Yes, he learned that this subject
is not the Spirit, an ideal activity, but sense, a material activity, and that
this Everything (which is always becoming) is not the Spirit, not the Idea,
but Matter. In this way, he thought that he was travelling along the road
that led from Kant and Fichte to Hegel, from idealist transcendence to
immanence, as it were, thus assuming that he was always moving farther
from the abstract and closer to the concrete.
But on the problem of the abstract and concrete, how could he not
take account of Hegel’s stunning critique of the abstract intellect? Yes to
matter, then, but matter along with praxis (the subjective object). Yes to
matter, but matter in continuous becoming. In this way, he came to grasp
‘the fairest flower’ of idealism and of materialism, the flower of concrete
reality and of concrete conceptions always replacing abstractions, both
Hegel’s and Feuerbach’s. Yes to materialism, but historical materialism.
Except that the irony of logic answered the best intentions of his realism
with a gross contradiction as the result, which I hope will be clear from
now on to attentive readers of these pages – a contradiction between
content and form, analogous to what we have already pointed out in
criticizing historical materialism as a simple philosophy of history.
To conclude, then, I will say that an eclecticism with contradictory
ingredients is the general character of this philosophy of Marx. And if
some of his current disciples do not know what to make of it, perhaps
they are not far wrong. At its basis there are many fertile ideas, and taken
separately they deserve careful consideration. But in isolation they do
not belong to Marx, as has been shown, and therefore they cannot justify
the term ‘Marxism’ that has been synonymous for some time with a phi-
losophy that is purely realistic. The truth is that science is not concerned
with names, and if any of the most important Hegelian ideas can pen-
etrate people’s thoughts if Marx’s name gets used as a charm, then good
luck to ‘Marxism’ too!
NOTES
1 The first edition is Gentile (1899b), which we have used here.
661
2 [a] L. Feuerbach, etc, preface, p. 3; [e] Engels (1888).

3 [a] Zur Kritik, p. 6; cf. A. Labriola, Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia, lettere a
Sorel (Rome: Loescher, 1898): 74 ff.; this volume with the addition of some
notes has also recently been published in French under the title Socialisme et
philosophie (Paris: Giard et Brière, 1899); [e] Marx (1897), (1977), preface;
Labriola (1898), (1899).
4 [a] Op. cit., p. iv; [e] Engels (1888).
5 Metrodorus of Lampsacus (331−278 BCE) was the most important follower
of Epicurus, and the earlier Metrodorus of Chios was a pupil of Democritus;
Marx wrote his dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus.
6 [a] ‘Per l’interpretazione e la critica di alcuni concetti del Marxismo:
Memoria letta all’Accademia Pontaniana della tornata del 21 novembre
1897,’ (Naples), translated in Devenir Social, 4 (1898): 22.
7 [a] Op cit., letter 5, p. 58 (p. 75 of the French translation); [e] Labriola
(1898).
8 Horace, Epistles, 1.2.16: Iliacos intra muros peccatur et extra; ‘There is wrongdo-
ing inside and outside the walls of Troy.’
9 [a] Op cit., p. iv; [e] Engels (1888); Feuerbach (1841).
10 [a] Hegel in fact writes that ‘the content of consciousness, whatever it may
be, must be determined as feeling, intuition, image, representation, pur-
pose, obligation, and so on, as a thought and a notion. Sentiment, notion,
image, and so on are, in this sense, different forms of one and the same con-
tent, which stays the same, whatever the feeling, intuition, representation,
wish … or thought … In one of these forms, or in a collection of several of
them, the content is the object of consciousness. But into that objectivity of
the content are added the determinabilities of those forms, whence it hap-
pens that some particular object appears according to each of those forms,
and the content, which in itself is the same, can appear to be differentiated.’
Logic, ¶ 3 of the introduction, which I cite in the translation of Vera (2d
ed.; Paris: Baillière, 1874), which is only one I have and does not suffer, as
far as I know, from errors of inaccuracy. [e] Hegel (1874b); (1986a), 8.44;
(1991): 26.
11 [a] Logic, ¶ 19, Zusatz 2; [e] Hegel (1986a), 8.70; (1991): 47.
12 Feuerbach (1843).
13 [a] See the Grundriss by Ueberweg and Heinze, 8th ed., part 3, vol. 2, pp.
148−51; cf. F.A. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus (3d ed., Iserlohn, 1876),
II, 73−80; [e] Ueberweg (1894−8); cf. Lange (2d ed., 1866).
14 ‘Man is only what he eats,’ cited in Ueberweg (1894−8), 3.2.150.
15 Although Marx wrote his famous Theses in 1845, they were not known until
662
Gentile, Praxis
more than four decades later as an appendix to the book that Engels pub-
lished on Feuerbach in 1888: Engels (1888), Appendix, pp. 59−62; Gentile
refers to the Theses as ‘Fragments.’
16 [a] Namely, as an activity that makes, posits and creates the sensible object
(gegenständliche Thätigkeit).
17 Where Marx has ‘revolutionary praxis (revolutionäre Praxis),’ Gentile has
‘praxis rovesciata’ in this and later editions: Turi (1998): 924.
18 Where Marx has ‘understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in
practice (praktisch revolutioniert),’ Gentile has ‘praticamente scalzato.’
19 [a] Showing, in other words, that the holy family is nothing but a duplication
and a hypostasis of the earthly family; [e] Gentile has ‘praticamente rovesciata’
again where Marx has ‘eliminated in practice (praktisch vernichtet).’
20 [a] See Engels, Feuerbach, Appendix, pp. 59−62; [e] Engels (1888).
21 Gentile alludes to Gioberti on creation: see section 8 of the Introduction.
22 [a] There are also hints of this in the inaugural oration published the year
before: De nostri temporis studiorum ratione. On this doctrine of Vico’s, see
two articles by Professor Tocco: ‘Descartes jugé par Vico,’ Revue de metaphy-
sique et de morale, (1896): 568−72; and ‘Rassegna filosofica,’ Rivista d’Italia,
(1898): 762−3; also the study, ‘Kant in Italien,’ by Karl Werner, Denkschrift
der philosophishe-historische Classe der königliche Akademie der Wissenschaftlehre
(Vienna, 1881), section VII, pp. 350 ff., which cites all earlier bibliography.
[e] Vico (1990).
23 [a] Op. cit. p. 43 (pp. 55−6 of the French translation); [e] Labriola (1898).
24 The verb facere, ‘to do,’ is cognate with the adjective facilis (facile in Italian),
‘easy.’
25 [a] F. Fiorentino, ‘F. Froebel,’ Giornale napoletano di filosofia e letteratura,
(1878): 220. [e] Friedrich Froebel (1782−1852) was a pioneer of modern
educational methods, especially for very young children.
26 [a] Ibid.
27 The Greek phrase, ‘growth within itself,’ does not occur in Aristotle; the
Latin means ‘increases and grows.’
28 By ‘Fragments’ Gentile means the Theses on Feuerbach.
29 ‘Filthy’ (schmutzig) is Marx’s word in the first Thesis on Feuerbach.
30 [a] Op. cit., pp. 123−5 (pp. 163−6 in the French translation). Note that in
the end Professor Labriola then reproduces the position for which Marx
had already criticized Feuerbach: he reduces the history of primitive Chris-
tianity to the history of two independent processes, each of them autono-
mous – the history of doctrine (an ideological process); and the history of
the church (an economic process, p. 127). He warns, however, that doctrine
663
is not ‘the most primitive formation’ but a transformation or a derivative in

new form of components pre-existing in Christianity. [e] Labriola (1898);
the French means ‘exactly as with us.’
31 See the first Thesis, above: ‘Feuerbach wanted sensible objects to be really
distinct from the intelligible.’
32 The first Thesis: ‘Feuerbach … did not conceive of human activity itself as
objective activity.’
33 The revolutionaries mentioned in the first thesis.
34 [a] See fragment 1.
35 [a] See fragment 5.
36 Hegel (1986a), 3.18: ‘Der Geist … ist er nie in Ruhe, sondern in immer
fortschreitender Bewegung begriffen’; (1977): 6.
37 See the third Thesis on Feuerbach.
38 [a] Cf. my Critique, above pp. 19 ff.; [e] the first part of the book that also
contains Gentile (1899b) is the ‘Critique of Historical Materialism’ that had
been Gentile’s secondary thesis at the Normale.
39 [a] Historical Materialism, p. 27; [e] Labriola (1976b): 546.
40 Aristotle, Politics, 1253a2.
41 Hegel (1986a), 12.96−7; (1956): 72.
42 The Physiocrats, a school of economists in Enlightenment France, taught
that wealth derives from labour, especially agricultural labour.
43 [a] L’Università e la libertà della scienza, Rome, 1897, p. 33. [e] The famous
phrase ‘vissuti dalla storia’ occurs in Labriola (1898): 5: ‘we are, as it were,
lived by history, and our personal contribution to history, however indis-
pensable it may be, is always a tiny item in the crossing of forces that are
combined, completed, and merged with one another’; see also Labriola
(1976c).
44 [a] See Marx’s last Fragment on Feuerbach.
45 Ludwig Büchner (1824−99) was a physician and philosopher whose rigor-
ous materialism caused his dismissal from the University of Tübingen.
46 For senza un oggetto, reading senza un soggetto, as in later editions.
664
19
Giovanni Gentile
The Rebirth of Idealism

Inaugural Lecture for an Open Course on Theoretical Philosophy
Read in the Royal University of Naples, 28 February 19031
Gentlemen: No one could begin teaching theoretical philosophy in this

university without thinking of the man who taught that course here, as a
regular professor, for more than two decades, from 23 November 1861
until 17 February 1883, which was the last day of his life. During that
period, when all our fields of study were reinvigorated and our whole
intellectual culture was reformed, he was the master of philosophical
learning not only in Naples but all over Italy. He attracted to his Chair
the best minds that were then developing, those that felt themselves
born to do philosophy. In their thinking he planted the fertile seed of
his own thought, spreading the light of knowledge around him, and kin-
dling great passion for investigating and understanding life’s greatest
problems.
In this Chair, then, my first thought turns back to Bertrando Spaventa,
the founder of true academic philosophy in contemporary Italy. But at
this moment, alongside his austere and inspiring image, also beside me
is the dear and kindly image of the person who first told me Spaventa’s
name, first opening my mind, which longed for the truth, to the think-
ing of the one who had so much truth to communicate. And as he spoke
to me – charmed as he was by the magic of that man, who bound to
his own spirit the spirit of anyone who could hear and follow him – he
also drew me into that charmed circle, making me part of the small but
privileged family of thinkers of which Spaventa was the honoured and
beloved chief. My thoughts today turn to those sweet years, still near
but seemingly far away already, sweet years that flew by me in joyous
freedom, when, day after day, Donato Jaja initiated me into the myster-
ies of the hard thinking that disdained anything easy – that had been
fully illuminated here in Spaventa’s school and then defended against
doctrines opposed to it. With his apostle’s enthusiasm, my teacher there

taught it to me.2 And it seemed to me that he had put a sacred torch into
my hands.
As I begin, then, please permit me to send greetings to my valiant
Pisan teacher. Please also permit me to tell you candidly that as I enter
this temple of science today, I feel emotion like that of a pilgrim, who,
having arrived before the Sepulcher by the faith that brought him there,
surely finds no tomb but rather the very beginning of what life is for him.
In the glorious halls of this academy, I see the spirit of the philosopher
living, the one I did not know but whose disciple used to speak to me.
And from his presence, I take the auspices of my teaching, and, I hope,
the strength to continue it.
I tell you what I believe, gentlemen, that such thinking can still be
auspicious and give no one cause to accuse us of taking a position that
has already been superseded and abandoned for some time. It is not
abandoned and has not been superseded, neither for some time nor for
a short time. This way of thinking is alive and well. The only criticism of
it has been based on utterly false interpretations or else has been aimed
at one of its less important and essential points. A doctrine is overcome
not by words but by reasons, and reasons capable of overcoming our doc-
trine have been announced many times – indeed, too many times – yet
they are nowhere in sight.
It is been said that our doctrine was dead and buried, but to me it
seems livelier after death than before. All around I see contemporary
consciousness – in art, politics, religious attitudes, the special sciences,
and philosophy – openly declaring itself dissatisfied with the forms that
always seemed to constitute the naturalism of the second half of the cen-
tury that just ended. In various ways, contemporary thought also suggests
the Spirit’s revenge – the revenge that necessarily had to come, sooner
or later, in reaction to the petty naturalist trend that brought so much
discomfort to the cultivated souls of our fathers. Already I hear people
enthusiastically proclaiming the rebirth of idealism. And given the dif-
ficulties that the new idealists are struggling against, battling among
themselves and against the better founded and less contestable notions
of naturalist doctrines, I can only take great comfort in reflecting on
the weighty words used by Spaventa, back in 1874, to close his critique
of Darwinian transformism: ‘And if what I say is true, it can be granted
that Hegelian metaphysics, far from being outdated from now on, is like
a prophecy – namely, the organism of the science of modern experience
and the expected rectification of it.’3
666
Gentile, Idealism
If idealism seemed to be superseded, this did not happen by a chance

mistake or an arbitrary error made by thinkers who did not want to
attend conscientiously to the data of the perennial problem. Like eve-
ry fact of history, this overcoming happened by an ideal necessity from
which individuals have not been exempted and which, in philosophy,
determines a perpetual alternating succession of general intuitions out
of which the history of human thinking is woven sequentially. This is
never a stable and fixed intuition of truth: it is a continuous process and
a development from one level to another, determined and regulated by
a law. It might have seemed that people’s minds had been worn out by
the strenuous and difficult intellectual effort actually spent on idealism
in the first half of the nineteenth century. But the truth is that once a
form of idealism was determined – since this always means reducing or
concentrating the world within the sphere of the ideal, with the spiritual
subject somehow withdrawing into itself – then, once this form was com-
plete and wholly withdrawn into itself, it was inevitable that the Spirit
again began to be alienated from itself and to turn towards the nature
that stands eternally before it, beguiling and enchanting it with enor-
mous charms and awful mysteries.
This was inevitable because it is the Spirit’s nature: to flow perpetually
beyond itself, into the object that is then destined to become part of it, or
rather to be transformed into a subject and in the end to generate anew
the craving for external reality. It is an eternal Tantalus, his hand reach-
ing eternally for the sweet apples of the real – not that he never gets
any, but that he never gets enough to satisfy his unsatisfiable need. That
would be the Spirit’s last day, if it ever attained the final object, and, after
that object too entered the subject’s closed circle and was immediately
assimilated into it, it made a desert of reality, making any further inquiry,
any new understanding, useless and impossible, and hence ending all
the Spirit’s activity and all its life. But the Spirit is immortal in its infinite
development and can never exhaust its inborn energy. Thus, once reality
has been shut within itself by an idealist view of the world, it soon comes
back to flow out again into external nature with the fury of a bacchant.4
And there it roams about, unmindful of itself, striving to identify and
confound itself, in fact, with that same nature, silent yet living.
Look at German materialism, which splits off from the Hegelian Left
and raises the banner of force and matter. Look at transformist natural-
ism, which, while declaring its wish to derive nature’s higher forms from
the lower, aims only to reduce the former to the latter. In lower forms as
such, even though they are leavings from the seed of higher forms – the
667
seed that might be the seed of a final cause – materialism seeks the root
of those higher forms.5 It levels everything to make it fit within a single
boundary, not by raising nature to the Spirit but by bringing the Spirit
down to nature, while also trying to avoid any aprioricity in accounting
for all of the Spirit’s deeds, even the highest.
And in the very heart of naturalism, look at the physiology that had its
glory days in the same period, by labouring to extract life – nature’s high-
est form – from physico-chemical forces, which are the lowest, or else
by a new and more miraculous alchemy, to get blood from the turnip,
amidst the general revulsion for the pestiferous Spirit that materialist
philosophy inspired. Look at psychology, at first reduced to mechanics
only metaphorically, and then, by every expedient, from the most clever
to the most naive, compelled by good sense to lie in the Procrustean bed
that was at first physiological and then physical as well, producing experi-
ments, measurements, and laboratories, and then the famous enigma of
psychology without a soul – a bitter joke, it seemed, up until the most
recent theory of feelings as bodily facts!
Look at historical, and, in general, philosophical positivism, with its
firm intent to see nothing in the Spirit but the fated reflex of the ambi-
ent physical fact. This reduces history to an intricate puppet-show, direct-
ed not by the Providence that Vico taught to us, which is Mind exulting
in time, but by the ineluctable influence of the physical nature around
us and by our own physiology or pathology. Positivism also reduces his-
tory to the piteous duty of gathering up, one by one, the minute facts
that the Spirit throws off here and there as it passes along the avenues
of time and space, without ever wondering or seeking to know who has
thrown them – sometimes actually declaring that asking would be use-
less, perhaps out of fear that the detested Spirit, with its Medusa’s face,
might be seen rising up before us again, in thought and in person, just
because we speak its name. In general, positivism also views the world
not as a hierarchical system of values but as a disorderly mass of phenom-
ena with no origin and no end, either thrown out helter-skelter or else
ordered by a determinism that makes them all the same by eliminating
differences of level and kind. The ethical is then explained by the useful,
right by force, cognition by the mechanics of representations, and these
by sensations as such. In their turn, sensations are understood as subjec-
tive appearances of the physical event, and art itself is reduced to the
play of physiology or just to pleasure. Religion comes down to fear, and
everything in the Spirit is explained as a derivative of nature.
And the experimental sciences? They are arrogant about the differenc-
668
Gentile, Idealism
es between them, scornful of a principle that might join them all in the
unity of the mind, and tolerant only of one philosophy that limits itself
to the modest and uncompensated employment of recording results
achieved by each of them in a file of numbered cards – or, even better,
to be made the boss of a communications office on the understanding
that everyone employed in this office should repeat what is transmitted
as faithfully as a phonograph or a typewriter, with never a mistake of
pronunciation or orthography. This is to stick to external appearances,
where only nature’s disconnected parts are in view, and not ever ending
up worried about the soul inside all those parts – which are not as discon-
nected as they seem – or about the Spirit that intus alit! 6
Art itself, having been made naturalist, verist, and realist over the
course of three decades, has seemed not to know that at nature’s head or
summit, in the truest part of the true and in the most real of the real – if
we may call it that – there was also the Spirit, of which only various decep-
tive appearances and some false and distorted manifestations had been
seen for a long time.7 And need I mention here the sympathies widely
encountered by Nietzsche’s egoist philosophy, intent on subjugating the
human world to that same law of the strongest that Darwin pointed out
in nature?8
And at last socialism, which in every era had been an idealist utopia
(just think of Plato’s Republic) carrying within it the light and heat of the
deepest idealist aspirations, has chosen in our day to set aside all moral
grounding and meaning. It has insisted on the thesis that the social ques-
tion is not a question of morality and hence depends not on human
will but on the ineluctable forces of social life that determine willing
itself. In the end, it is a natural problem, and once the data have been
set, the conditions and determinants of the solution have also been set.
Thus, even socialism has thought it best to take a seat at the banquet of
the sciences, accompanied by materialist philosophy, next to that famous
historical materialism which is a contradiction in terms.9
What a magnificent, mindless dance these fair bacchants have danced
through the crags and vales of measureless nature – and all of them
daughters of human thinking! An old Silenus spotted them from a hill,
gazing astonished in voluptuous delight of eye and mind.10 He alone was
concerned to warn them now and then to be careful not to break their
necks in their dizzy and dangerous dance: Neo-Kantianism, so-called,
that deferential – indeed, obsequious – devout and passive admirer of
all the experimental sciences, in its absolute inertia and impotence,
has done and could do nothing but preach that we should not forget
669
(as we continue with the only useful research, the experimental) the
problem of knowledge, which is the prior question, thus here and there
contradicting another of the mindless bacchants, who, for their part, do
not know what to make of the old Silenus and his stale warnings.11 The
party has continued without interruption, never beclouded by the least
shadow of melancholy nor by any inkling that at some point it might be
a good time to stop.
But one fine day, a few years ago, a bizarre and peevish spirit came
forth to shout at science’s failure, reproaching it with its very proud
promises of natural solutions to the great problems of mankind’s ori-
gin and destiny, to which religion offers a supernatural solution.12 He
shouted that the promises had never been kept and could never have
been kept, and that it was necessary to drop the pretense of a substitute
for religion, of knocking down the great human idealities (which cannot
be reduced to a mechanical explanation), and of staying within a mod-
est range of particular questions and theorizing about second causes. It
looked like a scandal. Advocates and admirers of the sciences rebelled
at the verdict, which was thought to be false or exaggerated: it was said
to be false that the sciences had solved none of the problems of origin,
and an exaggeration that the notion of evolution had produced nothing
about the origin of mankind. There was protest about the independence
of reason. Many fine things were said, and many truly stirring articles
were written for periodicals. But that bizarre and peevish spirit did not
go silent as a result. In fact, as if to take advantage of the moment, many
who had seemed weak because of their long silence took heart, whether
they were mystics – like the creator of the scandal – or of a different dis-
position. And they joined with him to extend the action to naturalism,
positivism, and historicism.
So it came to be sung in songs of every key that materialism, for reasons
quite unlike those of the Neo-Kantians, is real philosophical naïveté; that
naturalism does not provide an account of thinking and its attributes;
that positivism, with its levelling determinism, destroys all values, all dif-
ferences; and all of them strain their eyes to stay sightless. Physiologists
no longer hesitated to profess vitalism – just calling it neo-vitalism to make
it all new, as we think that a new collar freshens up an old overcoat.13
Psychologists began to be persuaded that experimental methods were
unproductive in their research specialty, and Neo-Kantians were moved
to assert the need for a metaphysics, at least for normative purposes. New
life almost stirred in that neo-critical thought, which, even though it had
survived in France for fifty years, went almost unnoticed up to now or was
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Gentile, Idealism
treated as negligible. And special attention was paid to an idealism called

critical or non-determinist because of its critical opposition to determinism.
Other forms of telistic idealism have come to us from America, with
a sense of modernity that has made them newsworthy and respectable.
The critical study of Hegel has also been renewed in England, producing
a sort of neo-Hegelianism.14 The concept of philosophy as an autono-
mous science of values, or of the Spirit, and no longer a compilation
or revision of corollaries of the special sciences, has started to spread in
Germany.15 In Italy, too, old convictions have been shaken. Thinkers are
no longer satisfied with minute explorations of the particulars of nature
and history. They are looking for truths of substance. People sense the
void at the bottom of every particular taken just as is. They see that if
nature is a monotonous and colourless succession of forms, even nature
is unlovable, and that history is miserable when reduced to a graveyard
through which art, science, virtue, and law roam like useless phantoms,
silent and ethereal.
What people are looking for and what they want is unity, the animating
idea of nature and history. They are looking for the fullness of life and
knowledge. They want to put God back into the deserted and desolate
temple. They look and they want, but their means do not match their
hopes. There is more negating than affirming, or else what is affirmed is
a need rather than a way of satisfying it. Eyes turn naturally to the past,
to times when the present torment was not felt, and trends revive that
show themselves unequal to the present test. The reason is that if they
existed in the past, the reason for their being superseded was also in the
past. So eyes also turn to the beyond. If reason seems impotent, a person
who has lost confidence in it takes refuge in faith, without noticing that
faith itself, as the terminus and conclusion of the critique of reason, is
itself a product of reason and can have no value higher than the one that
reason gives it.
Right here is the critical moment of contemporary consciousness. As
if to reproduce Pomponazzi’s position, it reaffirms the principle of dou-
ble truth and declares that the fundamental problems of thinking are
neutral for reason, turning away from it towards what is called ‘feeling’
or the ‘inspiration of feeling’ – which is then supposed to be religion’s
theoretical content.16 But this is a critical moment that contains the seed
of its own destruction. For the truth of religion is a truth only on the
condition that it is a truth of reason. And reason always works out the
truth contained in it, short of the point where what is called ‘religious’ is
elevated to the height of the nature of reason, since it does not measure
671
up to that nature. Seeing that this necessary process goes from the dual-
ity of reason and faith to the unity of reason already completes that proc-
ess and overcomes dualism. Therefore, if against naturalism we reaffirm
the long-denied rights of idealism, we are not rising up in the name of
mysticism but on behalf of that reason which is the origin of every truth
and every right. An abyss lies between our cause and that of those who
shout that science has been overthrown. Otherwise, I would not think it
right for me to ascend to this Chair, which is a chair of science.
I too agree with these people in saying that the science of naturalism
has failed at the problems that it set for itself, but I say that naturalist
science is not all of science. To tell the truth, what except reason itself,
which is exactly what science is, puts us in a position to state that this sci-
ence has failed? And since when are the judgments of science superior
to itself? Bruno’s pyre wreaked terrible destruction on his person but did
no harm to his philosophy, nor does the notorious decree of 1616, with
Galileo’s subsequent condemnation, prove that the heliocentric view is
false, revealing instead the resistance to the progress of natural science
exerted in the seventeenth century by a false Aristotelianism, and a still
false theology, through the force of inertia. Above science there is no
authority to act as judge. And when science itself assists at the coronation
of faith and thus of theology, it behaves like a father whose affection for
his little child sometimes makes him forget his own dignity: he kneels
down in front of the child, behaving like an infant and offering to heed
every command. But the child of Themistocles has only the power given
it by the parents.17
In the present resurgence of the ideal, then, it is good for our idealism
to be a party on its own. It sees no limits as it voyages through reality, and
so it sticks by that reality as absolute, opposing critical idealism or Neo-
Kantianism no less than naturalism, mysticism no less than materialism.
And we believe that only this idealism can rise again now by meeting
the needs left unmet by naturalism. Our idealism does not deny the real
progress made by the special sciences since it is their expected rectifica-
tion, as Spaventa said. Yet our idealism never denies the rights of the
Spirit asserted by Neo-Kantianism and by the trend towards mysticism,
though when they offer an agnostic justification of those rights, our ide-
alism rejects this as irrational. It also departs from naturalism by assert-
ing the reality of ideas. But it differs from Neo-Kantianism and mysticism
by aiming to clarify the intrinsic and unbreakable connection between
ideas and nature, to locate the point at which nature and the Spirit make
a unity, and to demonstrate this organic oneness of the real. Since both
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Gentile, Idealism
nature and the Spirit derive from the real, nature gains the same intel-
ligibility and transparency that belongs to the Spirit.
In truth, mistrust of the ideas that Plato called divine is an anachro-
nism in today’s philosophy. Ever since Aristotle, once ideas were treated
as outside the individual mind that ascends to them from sensory per-
ceptions, those ideas had looked like a useless and empty reduplication
of sensible reality. But if there were grounds for mistrust, out of opposi-
tion to the Platonic dualism that really was duplicating reality, for us that
same reality is unitary – in all the results of our thinking and at all its
levels. Hence, mistrust has been unjustified ever since idealism, as part
of modern philosophy, took advantage of that same Aristotelian critique
by discarding the caput mortuum that was the matter (ȣ/ȜȘ) of the Timaeus
and Philebus, or rather those ineliminable residues that we sometimes
hear mentioned even today.18
Right from the start of any philosophizing, ideal reality is beyond any
possible dispute because philosophizing entails asserting just such a real-
ity. If reality were just the object of sensory perception, as the object of
sensible perception, then, to pass beyond sensory perception – as phi-
losophy surely does, once it rises beyond bare description and simple
cataloging – would be to pass beyond reality and to be tossed about help-
lessly in an absolute void. But it is the case that philosophy overcomes
one reality by asserting another, by the same right that everyone, philoso-
pher or not, recognizes in sensory perception – to posit its own object.
But the special science itself asserts concepts, precisely because it is a
level of philosophy. Yet it is only to higher or philosophical reflection
that these concepts appear as not entirely stripped of every sensible and
representational element and thus as capable of a new purification and
of rising farther to the ideal. Within the sphere of reflection that belongs
to a special science, however, concepts are kinds, they are categories,
they are laws and they are principles; they are exact, meaning that they
are true; but how could they be all that without corresponding to a real-
ity? How could they be held as true if the very reflection that belongs to
the special science did not regard them as corresponding to a reality? Or
shall we say that kinds, categories, laws, and principles are sensible mat-
ter that can be plucked out of the soil as we go strolling down the lane?19
The reality that seems to grow distant from us, and from which, in
some sense, we are indeed distanced by an abstract process of know-
ing, is the reality that is seen and touched, mere sensible reality. But by
distancing ourselves from this reality and travelling the path of ideas,
we encounter a new reality that is just the reality of ideas. This reality,
673
far from being the degraded original, enfeebled in the better part of
its being, must surely have a higher value, if, for the sake of it, we all
depart from the original by a path that is arduous in itself and costs the
investigator sweat and sleepless nights! Otherwise, says Dante in the Con-
vivio (1.4), ‘the greater part of the human race lives by sense and not by
reason, like children, and as such they understand things just by their
outside, not seeing the goodness that is ordained for an obligatory end
because they have shut the eyes of reason that penetrate within and see
the goodness there.’20 And Vico says that ‘the human mind is naturally
inclined by the senses to see itself externalized, in the body, and finds it
very hard to understand itself by means of reflection.’ (Axiom 63)21
Given this natural inclination of the mind, the sensible always turns
out to be treated as the standard of reality, even though the perception
that represents sensible reality to us is just as subjective as the logical
procedure that confirms reality as rational. Reality means an object of
the Spirit – and the Spirit itself, insofar as it is its own object. Nor can
any reality be imagined, unless, through the very act of being imagined,
it is an object of the Spirit. And since the process of the Spirit’s develop-
ment has various levels, the levels of reality are equally various. Reality
has as many levels as that process has levels. Wanting to see and touch,
like St Thomas, in order to believe presumes that God reveals himself to
us by coming to pay us a visit, that he is led to us and introduced by his
priests.22 This is an obvious sign of that wretchedness of the human mind
‘immersed and buried in the body’ that Vico has put among the lumi-
nous definitions of the New Science; it is the sensory need that, when it
is satisfied, satisfies the sense, not the higher requirements of the Spirit,
which, for its part, can have doubts about the senses and refuse to trust
the object of sight and touch.23 But just as the sensible is not and must
not be the object of reason, so the rational is not and must not be an
object of sense. Using two weights and two measures is also illicit in the
phenomenology of the Spirit, and if there is anyone whose law turns
desire into a decree, so much the worse for him.
Surely, in order to see the alpine flora, we must exercise our legs and
climb mountains. If anyone standing on the plain were to deny that such
a flora exists because he does not see it on the plain, then who knows
what position he would be getting among the fauna? Still, for some time
now it has been annoying to keep on saying that when people talk about
ideas not as simple abstractions but as self-standing entities, it gives bod-
ies to ghosts and turns philosophy into a mythology. And yet if philoso-
phy is an elaboration of concepts from the special sciences or is said to
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Gentile, Idealism
be their systematization – as everyone is ready to admit, for better or

worse – such a philosophy will be a nice coherent mythology, whereas
the mythology of each special science can only be ugly and chaotic. Then
this mythology presses on your brain like a suit of chain armour, and
how do you get out of it? What do you match against it? Perception is no
less mythical since it too is produced by the activity of the Spirit. And so?
Ideal or rational reality unquestionably exists, and therefore the rights
of idealism are indefeasible.
The real question, the main problem of philosophy, is not the legiti-
macy of idealism, which is assumed by philosophy – is its first postulate,
in fact. The real problem is to understand idealism. A person who shrinks
from idealism when he wants to philosophize makes himself look crazy,
like someone who wanted to walk without moving. Would he really want
that? No one can be exempted from the iron necessity of logic. And
since unless we move, even though we say we are walking, we are not real-
ly walking, then likewise we can say we are theorizing without ideas, but
we are not theorizing at all. Without ideas we are still outside the temple,
and anyone who disdains ideas and dares to mouth philosophical ques-
tions can be treated, without so many scruples and so many courtesies,
like that cobbler who became so famous by wanting to climb ahead of
his shoes.
Once we have entered the temple, we need to see and recognize God
in order to worship him; idealism ut sic, and nothing more, is no phi-
losophy.24 We need to understand idealism, and understanding ideal-
ism means understanding the value of ideas. Here we encounter the
supreme difficulty: that ideas appear as directly contrary to nature and
irreconcilable with it – mors tua, vita mea.25 It looks as if ideas remove
nature from its nest, and that nature does the same to ideas. Thus, the
dominant character of the current idealism, rebelling against the natu-
ralist movement, is to negate nature and oppose it to the Spirit: either
idealist monism, which solves the problem by denying its existence; or
else dualism, which acknowledges the problem but declares itself power-
less to solve it. In neither case is there any real understanding of ideal-
ism. And since what is not understood is not in the Spirit, while idealism
can be nowhere else but in the Spirit, I claim that real idealism is miss-
ing in both cases. There is movement towards it, but it is not yet done.
As we have seen, it is not possible to negate ideas. Yet it is possible to
negate nature; but the roots of the Spirit are in nature, and negating it
is to shave the Spirit off from the soil where it gets its vital fluids. The
idea grows out of sense, and sense is given us by nature; sense itself is
675
nature, nature’s continuation, and it has no power except as knowledge

of nature – of what is called a datum of sense.
Negating nature is therefore the equivalent of rejecting sense, and
since the idea develops out of sense, it is also the equivalent of cutting
the idea off from its roots. The idealist can surely not remain content
with this. Or will he break every bond between the idea and the senses,
taking shelter yet again in the ancient tower of Platonic innatism? But
that tower has been demolished for more than a hundred years, reduced
to a shapeless pile of rubble. Kant demonstrated the emptiness of the
category abstracted from the intuitive content on which it works as an
immanent function of the intellect, and he had been prepared by mod-
ern empiricism of a post-Cartesian kind – also a post-Campanellan kind, I
would say, recalling the power of the notitiae abditae that the philosopher
of Stilo wanted.26 After Kant, later idealist philosophy and today’s empiri-
cal psychology have only confirmed the necessary connection between
idea and sense, between the Spirit’s highest levels and the lowest, to the
extent that such systems have brought this relation into the full light
of day. And since it is impossible to negate nature, it is no longer pos-
sible to withhold approval from determinism or insist any longer on any
notion of transcendence – for the same reasons. This is the problem:
to reconcile transcendence with immanence, mechanical determinism
with teleology, idea with sense, and once again to find the unity of the
contraries. Only on this condition can we understand idealism and save
Abel without causing the death of his brother and turning him into Cain.
Understanding a new concept is certainly not getting rid of earlier
concepts, which are themselves the actual essence of our empirical spirit,
but bringing the new concept into the organism of the previous con-
cepts, where the new one must appear as the organic and therefore nec-
essary integration of the old. Obviously, the new organ transforms the
organism, creating a new organism in which various concepts from one
time cannot help but acquire new value. And because they are negated
in some sense, they die as concepts of that one time. But such a death
constitutes the life of everything, and that dying of our concepts – or
rather of one phase of our empirical spirit – also constitutes the life of
the understanding.
Yes, then, idealists we are – but idealists who account for the value of
the ideas that they use to understand reality; and to give an account of
that value, such idealists establish the point where contraries coincide,
and the unity thereby established is not the unity of nature alone nor the
unity of the Spirit alone but the complete unity of the duality of nature
676
Gentile, Idealism
and the Spirit. Spinoza’s substance, to which many modern thinkers

have been returned by the notion of psycho-physical unity, is the expres-
sion of this basic problem of philosophy. But it is the expression, not the
solution. Once the problem has been posed, either we solve it and have
the right to philosophize, as is clear from what I have just told you, or
we do not solve it and no longer have the right to conduct philosophical
investigations.
Wearing ourselves out on problems that appear to be insoluble and
reaching for goals that cannot be attained is a sign of weak willpower,
and so it interrupts the enactment of man’s rational nature, which is the
first duty and the basis of every authentic duty. But declaring a solution
impossible is the equivalent of denying the issues that give rise to the
problem – at least that aspect of them that is the basis of the problem.
Declaring the impossibility of squaring the circle is already abandoning
that problem. Now might it be possible to declare that the solution of
the problem of the Spirit and nature is equally beyond our reach? Might
it be possible to deny as absurd that unity of contraries which causes the
unity of the Spirit and nature to encounter insurmountable obstacles as
they enter into ordinary understanding? But denial itself is a judgment.
Kant – Kant above all, in fact – also showed that judgment signifies syn-
thesis a priori, or just the unbreakable unity of subject and predicate:
identity in diversity, to be precise. So then, declaring this problem insolu-
ble is to not understand ideas. Hence, it is to understand nothing at all,
since ideas – I believe no one would want to deny this as well –since ideas
are the torch and the only torch that lights up and can light up the oth-
erwise shadowy world of the complete intelligible.
And will anyone claim to understand nothing at all – not even his
own understanding of nothing? Scepticism, as an absolute statement of
scepsis, makes a statement and thus is dogmatic; as a provisional state-
ment it is also a statement, and a double statement, in fact – of its own
content and of its own provisional character. Therefore, if no one can
claim to not understand ideas, no one can declare the problem of the
intelligibility of ideas – and then their intrinsic relation to nature – to be
insoluble. The argument is so simple that it would take a miracle to see it
ignored, or to see negligent and indolent experts on philosophy missing
its importance, had it not been proved so often that the simplest argu-
ments have the greatest difficulty in attracting enough attention to make
them intelligible, and were it not well-known that the simplest ideas are
the most abstract and thus the last to emerge in the phenomenological
process, though they come first, by contrast, in the logical process.
677
The problem is posited for speculative reflection as a question of its

living or dying, then. The pressure of the dilemma is inexorable: either
understand the unity of the Spirit and nature, or give up philosophy –
indeed, give up any genuine understanding whatever, and shut ourselves
up in the small sphere of the world of representations, which is the world
of the merely animal.
How can we and how must we understand – understand that unity in a
serious way and then build philosophy as a whole, not just sketch its main
outlines here in the dirt? We do not understand a book just by reading
its preface – even though the contrary pretense is one of the most wide-
spread forms of modern intellectual impertinence! We have to read the
whole book: science is authenticated by itself, but when it is itself, since
no one can defend himself if he is absent. Today I can only proclaim
the principle of the idealism that I have the honour to profess: it is the
concept of development understood as making intelligible the unity of
sense and the Idea, of nature and the Spirit. This is not news. But without
restating the melancholy maxim of Ecclesiastes, there is no doubt that
multa renascentur: though this seems the newest of news to those without
memory.27 So then, a principle of science is effective, when it is effective,
not because it is new but because it is true, and no one dreams of being
tired of the truth that to live one must eat, just because it is a truth older
than Methuselah himself.
The concept of development entails the movement of ideas, the nega-
tion of their separation, immutability, and fixity – as if they were stars
mounted in the firmament of logical thinking. Through that concept,
ideas emerge from one another in ceaseless disquiet, and ideas of ideas
are drawn out from ideas of nature. The artificial dike that separates the
continent of man and the Spirit from the billowing, iridescent ocean of
nature breaks apart. Nature floods back upon the Spirit, and the Spirit
abides in the depths of nature. The clearest evidence of this concept is
the naturalist transformism that used its abundant experimental obser-
vations and sound inductions to invade not only all the natural sciences
but also the sciences of the Spirit in the second half of the nineteenth
century. Since everyone knows that everything real, the Spirit included,
is a product of natural development, the concept of a single fixed form
of nature becomes absurd – even for transformism. However – and here
is the deep difference between our thinking and the naturalist kind –
development is not a process that goes from less to more, which is impos-
sible, because ex nihilo nihil; number does not come from unity as such,
nor the larger number from the smaller.28 Consciousness is not produced
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Gentile, Idealism
by the unconscious, nor the psychic fact from the physiological fact as
such, nor the physiological from the chemical, nor the chemical from
the mechanical – as naturalist transformism maintains. For one miracle
it substitutes any number of miracles more incomprehensible than the
old one, and more mysterious.
The truth is that the last in the order of time comes first in the order
of logic, as Aristotle noted. Thinking, which is the last to appear in the
world as the result of nature’s final development in the human soul,
must be the first starting point for anyone who wants to understand the
process of development. While it is true that determinism rules the proc-
ess of the real in everything, this is not mechanical determinism and
is not regulated by the principle of efficient causality. It is teleological
determinism, the domain of final causality. All objections made against
that concept derive from a false view: namely, from the notion that an
end implies a purpose, or a consciousness of the end, whereas purpose
and consciousness are consequent on the end and therefore different
from it. An end implies immanence in the real as pure ideal determina-
tion of its own outer form, which is the terminus of its activity. Nature
is not yet realized as consciousness, of course, and it cannot propose its
own end, as the human person does. But even in the human, the end
does not emerge from having a purpose, from abstract willing, which,
one would hope, is a point that psychology has passed beyond (so-called
free will); as has been observed, in fact, having a purpose emerges from
the end. And if the end precedes the purpose, the end must be disassoci-
ated from it, since none of us can walk hand in hand with an out-of-date
self, even if the out-of-date self is as different from the current one as two
separate persons are from one another.
We can certainly ask those who deny finality in nature whether the
concept of development is intelligible in any other way. Nemo dat quod
non habet: and if you negate reason in nature, it follows that you are also
negating it in the Spirit, or else you give up on the concept of develop-
ment – two hopeless choices, one more than the other.29
Gentlemen: This year, I hope to show the young students who would like
to join me that nature actually has what it gives, and to do this by look-
ing for the Spirit deep in nature’s belly, helping it be born and gradu-
ally take form through the main levels traversed by it in time. In this
inquiry, I shall note how much recent studies have added to the specu-
lative concept of the Spirit already worked out by absolute idealism by
verifying it positively and proving it rationally, and how far some doc-
679
trines have strayed from the path of true science – which, as such, is the
only science. This will be the best introduction I could give to the new
development of the idealism to which contemporary thought is return-
ing. If a philosophy of the Spirit is possible on the principles that I have
mentioned today, which remains to be seen, idealism’s rebirth will not
signal a retreat from naturalism’s real and solid victories but a comple-
tion of them and a genuine integration. So as of today, it can be said that
we present ourselves here not as followers of the old but as critics and
promoters of the new, and therefore as pioneers of philosophy’s future.
NOTES
1 We have used the first edition, Gentile (1903a).

2 ‘My teacher there’ is Donato Jaja (1839−1914), the ‘valiant Pisan teacher’
greeted below by Gentile, who taught him philosophy at the Scuola Nor-
male beginning in 1894; although Jaja had studied with Fiorentino, he was
very close to Spaventa from 1879 until 1883, while teaching in a liceo in
Naples.
3 [a] La legge del più forte, in Scritti filosofici, ed. Gentile (Naples: Morano,
1900): 352; [e] Spaventa (1972a), I, 544.
4 Hegel (1986a), 3.46−7; (1977): 27−8: but the bacchants represent the types
of naturalism below in Gentile’s speech.
5 By ‘naturalismo trasformistico’ Gentile means Darwinism or evolutionism
in the broadest sense, but by the 1870s trasformismo also became the name,
first, of a style of electoral politics based on vote-trading and meant to pre-
serve a progressive middle-class consensus, and, later, of the larger cultural
problem that the political practice reflected: see Musella (2003).
6 Vergil, Aeneid, 6.726: ‘spiritus intus alit,’ ‘the spirit within nourishes.’
7 For verismo see the notes to Croce’s ‘Concept of Art,’ and see also De Sanctis
on ‘Realism.’
8 Spaventa (1972a), I, 531−44, and n5 above.
9 [a] As I believe I have shown incontrovertibly in my critical studies on La
Filosofia di Marx (Pisa: Spoerri, 1899): 147 ff., for all that they have not been
noticed by the Marxists who in recent years have been awaiting that critical
revision of Marx’s basic ideas which has been called a crisis of Marxism. For
example, see Georges Sorel’s latest book: Saggi di critica del Marxismo, ed. V.
Racca (Palermo: Sandron, 1903): he can be called a real Marxist like a lucus
a non lucendo since he does not accept (in fact, he ferociously and often sar-
castically resists) any of Marx’s theories and judgments. But it seems he has
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Gentile, Idealism
understood none of my criticisms of his persecuted author (even though

he has certainly read my book), whom he sometimes reproaches with items
that I, by contrast, have shown to be illogical and baseless. He is a talented
man, of course, and many of his small-change observations against one
point of Marxism or another hit the target. But for criticizing a logical con-
struct like Marx’s, the philosophical dilettantism that satisfies Sorel is not
enough. [e] Since a lucus is a dark grove, linking it by etymology with lucere,
‘to give light,’ as some scholars did, seems to be ridiculous; see also Gentile
(1899b); Sorel (1903).
10 The old Silenus is Kant, revived by the Neo-Kantians.
11 [a] Stale for the experimental sciences, not in themselves: in fact, Kantian-
ism presupposes the fact of science based on experience.
12 For the peevish Ferdinand Brunetière, see the Introduction, section 22, and
Brunetière (1896).
13 [a] I am not unaware of the differences, on which the neo-vitalists insist,
between the old vitalism and the new, but I do not consider the differences
substantial.
14 [a] In his important monograph, La logique de Hegel (Paris: Alcan, 1897):
vii, while urging his own countrymen to study Hegel’s system, Georges Nöel
could say: ‘To put us on this path, we have the additional example of our
neighbors across the Channel whose philosophical situation shows so many
analogies with our own. In recent years, a genuine rebirth of Hegelianism
has been produced in England.’ He refers here to the second edition of
the English translation of the Logic made by Wallace (1892−4; two volumes,
one of which contains prolegomena to the study of Hegel); to the English
translation of the Philosophy of the Spirit by the same author (1894); and to
‘numerous works dealing with Hegelian philosophy or visibly inspired by it’:
especially notable among these are Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic (Cam-
bridge: 1896) by McTaggart, and now the book by J.B. Baillie, The Origin
and Significance of Hegel’s Logic: A General Introduction to Hegel’s system (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1901), which will be discussed in one of the next issues
of La Critica. [e] Hegel (1874a), (1894); McTaggart (1896); Nöel (1897);
Baillie (1901).
15 [a] See the article by Benedetto Croce in La Critica on Wundt’s Introduction
to Philosophy, p. 58 ; [e] Croce (1903).
16 [a] See what I have written on this topic in La Critica, the January 1903
issue, pp. 33−5; [e] Gentile (1903b): In his notorious account of the
immortality of the soul, Pomponazzi declared that doctrine a ‘neutral
problem’ for Aristotelian natural philosophy, the implication being that for
purposes of faith there might be a separate and (rationally) lesser truth.
681
17 Plutarch, On the Education of Children, 1.2: ‘They say that Cleophantus,

the son of Themistocles, often declared to many persons, that whatever
he desired was always agreed to by the Athenian people; for whatever he
wished his mother also wished; whatever his mother wished Themistocles
also wished; and whatever Themistocles wished all the Athenians wished.’
18 Caput mortuum: literally ‘dead head,’ the residue of a chemical or alchemical
process like distillation.
19 [a] After the witty Benjamin Jowett, Plato’s celebrated translator, called
Bain, Spencer, and the other positivists ‘appalling people who believe only
in what they can hold in their hands,’ Spencer – in one of his articles col-
lected in the volume Fatti e commenti, trans. Salvadori (Torino: Bocca, 1903):
104−5 – thought he had to protest, in the name of the agnosticism that he
had professed in the First Principles and Principles of Psychology, against the
accusation of materialism that he saw in Jowett’s definition; but he also said,
‘I shall not ask in what sense the law of evolution and various generaliza-
tions of an abstract character with which my name has been linked could be
held as separate objects in my hands!’ There is no point here in judging the
controversy between the critic and the person criticized, but it is worthwhile
to take note of the declaration made by one of the leaders of empiricism.
[e] Jowett (1899): 190.
20 Dante, Convivio, 1.4.
21 Vico (1977): 203.
22 For Doubting Thomas, see John 20:24−9.
23 Vico (1977): 232.
24 ut sic: ‘like this.’
25 ‘Your death is my life.’
26 notitiae abditae: ‘hidden knowledge,’ understood here as an anticipation by
Campanella of Kant’s synthetic a priori.
27 Eccles. 1:9: ‘There is nothing new under the sun’; Horace, Art of Poetry, 70 :
‘Multa renascentur quae iam cecidere’; ‘Many will be reborn that now have
fallen out.’
28 Ex nihilo nihil: ‘Nothing from nothing.’
29 Nemo dat quod non habet: ‘No one gives what he does not have.’
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20
Giovanni Gentile
The Act of Thinking as Pure Act1
1. Faith in Truth
There is no philosophical or scientific inquiry, there is no thinking of

any kind unless the thinking has faith in itself or in its own value, unless
there is spontaneous and unyielding conviction of thinking the truth.
The sceptic, who thinks he has cut this faith off at the root by suspending
judgment – as the only reasonable alternative left to his thinking – stops
with the unshaken certainty that his suspension is reasonable, and, since
he continues to think, faith in this stubborn and empty thought of his is
what he goes on.
The fact of thinking, and therefore of philosophy, whatever the solu-
tion at which it aims, presupposes this affirmation of the truth of think-
ing as it thinks what it actually thinks.2
2. Abstract Thinking and Concrete Thinking
The thinking whose truth is asserted by the foregoing consideration –

the only thinking whose truth can be asserted, since, in fact, it is the
only thinking that really is thinking – is not abstract thinking but con-
crete thinking. And the difficulty that ordinarily conceals from the
philosopher’s consciousness the obvious truth stated above consists in
looking for thinking in abstract thinking rather than in concrete think-
ing: for example, when we say that thinking is the thinking of another
or our own thinking already thought, or, in both cases, not real think-
ing in the proper sense but only the object of thinking in its abstract
objectivity.
3. The First Moment of Abstract Thinking
I said ‘abstract objectivity’ because I mean that the objectivity attributed

in that case to thinking as an object of our thinking is not, in its turn,
the concrete objectivity that in fact is conferred on thinking by asserting
it, by thinking it, in other words, but is an inadequate interpretation of
this objectivity through an effort of abstraction. Another’s thinking is not
something we can think, even by willing to think it as another’s, except
by thinking it as thinking, by meaning it, or by discerning and recogniz-
ing its value, and, in other, perhaps provisional, terms, by agreeing to it
and making it ours.
Our own thinking – once thought, however – is not thought again
except inasmuch as it comes back to life in actual thinking: in other
words, only inasmuch as it is not the thinking of one occasion, distinct
from present thinking, but actual thinking itself, at least provisionally.
Hence, to think a thought (or to posit thinking objectively) is to realize
it, or rather to negate it in its abstract objectivity by affirming it in a con-
crete objectivity that is not beyond the subject since it exists in virtue of
the act of this subject.
4. The Second Moment of Abstract Thinking
But this is a first moment of thinking another’s thinking, or thinking what

is our own and no longer our own (past). If this moment were never over-
come, the thinking of another would be (through us) only our own, and
past thinking would just be present. We would know only our own actual
thinking. Behind the first moment stands another, and we will soon (§18)
see why. Here it suffices to note that if this second moment, made possible
by the first, annuls the actuality of the other’s thinking, or of what is our
own and no longer our own, it is in a new act of thinking that the second
moment annuls it. Thereby realized as a function of the new thinking,
our own and actual, is the new objectivity (the true and effective objectiv-
ity) conferred on this thinking that our thinking expels from itself and
accordingly treats as objective. And this objectivity is an organic element
of the immanent unity of this thinking.
5. Thinking Absolutely Actual or Our Own
Therefore, what we call the thinking of another, or our own in the past,
is, in a first moment, our own actual thinking, and, in a second moment,
684
Gentile, The Act of Thinking
a part of our actual thinking, a part inseparable from the whole to which
it belongs, and therefore real in the unity of the whole itself. Hence, the
only concrete thinking is our own actual thinking. And since our non-
actual thinking is no longer our own, we may say that the only concrete
thinking is our own thinking absolutely (but see the meaning of this we
as the subject of our thinking in its context). Equally may one say that
only concrete thinking is absolutely actual thinking, since the thinking
that is not our own is not actual thinking.
6. Thinking as Nature
As a consequence of the preceding consideration, the passage from the

first to the second of the moments described above – by which one thinks
a thinking that is not our own actual thinking – implies the devaluation
of the thinking as thinking, or the assertion that what we have thought
(in the first moment) is not thinking, since it is not concrete thinking, is
not absolutely our own thinking; or else the assertion that what we have
thought is now not thinking but a negation of thinking – the extension of
the Cartesians, nature, the unthinkable, the limit of thinking, that which
thinking cannot penetrate because it has already penetrated it. (For
example, ‘the uncancelled days’ of Ermengarda, or Francesca’s memory
‘in misery of the happy time’: spiritual states turned to stone in the past,
ineluctable, inexorable, as harsh as the most painful laws of nature, more
painful because more deaf to the voice of the Spirit.)3
The passage from the first to the second moment is therefore the pas-
sage from thinking to nature. Nature, then, taken in its concrete reality,
is the thinking that thinking begins to think as other than itself, or think-
ing fixed in its abstractness.
Nature is abstract; only thinking is concrete (cf. §9).
7. Error
Thinking that is absolutely our own or absolutely actual is true precisely

because it is our own or actual. Error comes from the thinking that can-
not be thought, from what another thinks and we cannot think, or what
we have already thought but now can think no longer. What we think
actually, if we think it, we think as truth. (Or else we think error, as error,
but thinking that it is error and thus thinking the truth.)
And error is not an accidental attribute of another’s thinking or of
thinking no longer our own: indeed, it is necessary.
685
If we call this non-actual thinking ‘nature,’ in place of the naturalist

motto, Natura sive Deus, we must substitute the idealist motto, Natura sive
error.4 The reason why this thinking is not actual, as we have seen (§4), is
that it has been overcome, because having thought it, in other words, we
can no longer think it. And by continuing to live as thinking beings, we
must think otherwise. Now what can no longer be thought, after having
been thought, is exactly what error is.
Error is abstract, then; only the truth is concrete.
8. The Principle of Identity and the Dialectical Law
If error is the thinking that cannot be thought, the true is the thinking
that cannot not be thought: two necessities, which are only one necessity.
Verum norma sui et falsi.5 Thinking thinks itself inasmuch as it thinks itself
necessarily, which is to say, inasmuch as we think by not being able to
think otherwise. Every act of thinking is an exclusion of another act of
thinking (not of all the other possible acts, but of the one thought imme-
diately before). Omnis determinatio est negatio.6 And therefore only by my
becoming aware of an error and freeing myself from it do I know a truth
– and think, in other words. In this living bond that joins (concrete)
truth to (abstract) error is the root of thinking and the fundamental law
of logic. The necessity expressed by the old logic in the law of identity is
an abstract necessity, and likewise abstract was the thinking or the truth
at which that logic aimed, winding through a maze of contradictions.
The principle of identity (or of contradiction), A = A, declares a neces-
sity in regard to what has been called abstract thinking, in regard to
nature, in other words, which, by definition, is the negation of thinking
and thus cannot admit to itself any kind of logical law. A = A is the law of
error in its abstractness. Hence, whatever had been thought according
to such a law would for that very reason be error. There is no thinking,
in fact, that resolves itself into A = A.
Logical necessity is of the real or concrete process of thinking that
instead could be formulated schematically as A = non-A. In fact, every
act of thinking is a negation of an act of thinking, a present in which the
past dies, and thus a unity of these two moments. Take away the present,
and you will have the past blind (abstract nature); take away the past, and
you will have the present empty (abstract thinking or another nature).
Truth is not of the being that is but of the being that annuls itself, and,
by annulling itself, really is – an unthinkable proposition as long as think-
ing is taken to be abstract thinking, where being, having been fixed, can
only be; on the other hand, it is a proposition that cannot not be thought
686
when by thinking one means concrete thinking, absolutely actual think-

ing (so that the truth of the concept of becoming can be grasped only in
regard to that true becoming that is thinking – the dialectic).
The principle of identity should be replaced, therefore, not by the
equally abstract principle of becoming, pure and simple, but by the prin-
ciple of the dialectic or of the thinking as activity that posits itself by
negating itself.
This is the principle that is not the abolition of the principle of iden-
tity but rather its verification, since the dialectic denies not the truth of
truth but the fixity of truth and thus asserts that the truth is itself – but
in its movement.
9. The Freedom of Thinking
The dialectical necessity of thinking coincides with the freedom of think-

ing because all limits are produced by the same dialectic of thinking.
The limit of thinking cannot be a limit of thinking (§6) unless it starts by
being thinking itself, unless, as limit, it is in the sphere of thinking itself.
Nature – the only possible limit of thinking – is nature only abstractly; in
the concrete it is thinking in its internal mediation.
10. The Universality of Thinking
Absolutely actual thinking is universal by its very necessity.

The universality of Plato and of Aristotle (parallel to the identity of
every concept with itself), the kind desired by the realists and fought by
the nominalists, is abstract universality because it is the universality of
abstract thinking. One cannot speak of the universality of the concept
of man, of animal, of triangle, of number, because there are no such
concepts either in heaven or on earth; instead, there is the thinking that
thinks these concepts. And the thinking of these concepts cannot be
thinking in general, divine thinking (of a God who is other than us),
if the only concrete thinking is absolutely our own thinking. The only
thinkable universality, then, is that of our act of thinking. It is an act that
is universal in the sense that, inasmuch as it is necessary, it is posited as
the thinking not of a particular thinker from whom other thinkers, also
being particulars, may diverge, but rather as the thinking of one who
thinks through them all. When Galileo writes,
taking understanding intensive, inasmuch as this term implies understand-

ing some proposition intensively or perfectly, in other words,
687
he says
that the human intellect thus understands some of them
namely, all of them that it does understand
perfectly, and so of these it has as much absolute certainty as nature itself

has.
Notice this universality of actual thinking in its necessity. But Galileo

adds,
such are the pure mathematical sciences, geometry and arithmetic, of

which the divine intellect certainly knows infinitely more propositions
another’s thinking (§4, 6), which instead is the negation of thinking
because it knows them all, yet I believe that the knowledge of those few
that are understood by the human intellect equals the divine in objective
certainty since it comes to grasp the necessity beyond which, it seems, there
can be no greater assurance.
And one should say, on the contrary, that not only pure mathematics but
all our own thinking (even the most useless trifles) is real in the act that
thinks itself.7
11. The Empirical I and the Absolute I
If the thinking is our own inasmuch as it is universal, if there are other

cases of thinking, or one other case, only in terms of an abstraction, as
thinking is in its abstract objectivity, then the thinking does not arise
from our individuality. But our own individuality, if it is ours because it
is deep within us, or better because it is deep, present to itself, is univer-
sal – indeed, the universal concentrated and therefore made real in the
One of consciousness. The we as subject of our thinking is not the I that
has the not-I (another) or I-others (others) opposed to it, and hence it is
not the empirical I that is apparent, one among many, to psychological
observation. It is the absolute I, the One as I. It negates itself not only as
thinking about things and I-others (note: about others, not belonging
to I-others) but also as thinking about itself empirically conceived, as
688
one I among many or among things, since an I of this sort is a particular

among particulars and thus no longer that universal which is the true I.
That particular I in which the I negates itself (and must negate itself) is
nature, not thinking. True idealism cannot be solipsist, then, because it
has overcome the position of solipsism (a concept of the world closed
within the particular ipse).8
12. The Eternity of Thinking and Time
Thinking in its actuality, or as universal I, contains and therefore over-

comes not only the spatiality of pure nature but also the temporality of
pure natural happening. Thinking is eternal, beyond time. In fact, time
is a form of what we are thinking and therefore of thinking as having
been thought in its abstract objectivity. When, in the act of thinking it, we
attend to what we think, all points of time, distinct and successive, merge
and contract into a single and unmultipliable point.
To read a book, hours and hours will be needed; beyond the first will
come the second, beyond the second the third, and so on – and the
reverse. But anyone who gets to the end and does not think the whole
book together by holding all of it present does not understand, does
not think that book. And what belongs to the totality, once the temporal
series is used up, belongs to every part at the corresponding point of
time. Taking this into account, thinking – inasmuch as it is thinking – is
what is all at once, all present together in a single instant. Therefore, the
instant – the ™xa…fnhj – of thinking is not an instant among instants, is
not in time, has no before nor after, is eternal.9 And therefore every act
of thinking in all its absolute forms – philosophical system, poem, flash-
ing and fleeting intuition – realizes itself as something eternal whose
value was not born and will not die.
13. The Unity of Thinking and Number
Absolutely actual thinking, or the absolute I, since it is not subject to

time, is not subject to number. Incipis numerare, incipis errare.10 Number
is not on this account a simple auxilium imaginationis except inasmuch
as one aims to fix before the mind the process of the dialectic eternally
unravelling itself from its moments.11 Number is legitimate abstraction
where one refers to abstract reality (nature, or thinking in its pure objec-
tivity). Nature, because it is the negation of thinking, is the negation of
unity, and hence it is number. Thus it is the negation of freedom – mech-
689
anism, in other words. Multiplicity, abstractly considered as pure multi-

plicity, cannot be understood except mechanically. Accordingly, nature
is conceived deterministically as subject to the category of causality.
14. The Solution of the Antinomies
Nature, multiple and mechanical precisely because it is abstract, is a real-

ity, an object of an abstract science (a special science) not of the concrete
(philosophical) science. And the solution of all the antinomies of reason
pointed out by Kant is discovered just as soon as one notices the abstract-
ness of nature or of the world viewed in its pure objectivity. This world of
time and space is necessarily finite because it is necessarily particular. It
contains no simple element because its law is multiplicity. Since number
demands unity as its element, multiplicity would have no hope if unity
in the domain of the multiple had to be an absolute unity rather than a
provisional and therefore arbitrary unity, exactly as the determination of
the particular can be, deferring the problem to the concept of another
particular. Thus, even though the series of causes in a mechanical (non-
philosophical) system has a principle that makes determination possible,
this principle is not absolute because it is relative to a particular reality
that always has another one behind and alongside it. And in short there
is nothing necessary in the world because everything is particular and so
everything is conditioned. The force of logic that posits, counter to each
thesis, its antithesis overcomes the abstractness of the Kantian world and
will discover exactly that concrete reality to which it belongs as antithesis.
It passes from the world of facts, which are many and nothing other than
many (belonging to a multiplicity that contradicts itself as soon as one
wants to think it absolutely), to the world of the act that is one, as the
root of the many.
15. Thinking as Will
The act, if it is not to be converted into a fact, must be grasped in its

actual nature of pure act: all it can be is thinking. The fact is the negation
of thinking, from which thinking itself creates for itself its other.
Once having descended from the act to the fact, we are outside of
thought, in the world of nature. There are no spiritual facts, only acts;
indeed, there is nothing that is not the act of the Spirit, which in itself
undergoes no opposition of any sort. In contrast with thinking, will (emo-
tionality or practical activity) can only be other than thinking, other than
690
thinking itself, not as act but as fact – what has already been thought and
thus has become nature.
16. Absolute Immanence
If beyond this other-than-thinking that is past thinking (logically, not

chronologically past), more or less remote, another were posited as
opposed to thinking in its origin, it would eo ipso be stripped of all its
essential attributes, from unity up to truth, on and on, through all the
attributes already exhibited.12 And it would no longer be thinking. Cogi-
to, ergo sum. Sum substantia cogitans. Quatenus substantia, in me sum et per me
concipior: hoc est, mei conceptus non indiget conceptu alterius rei a quo formari
debeat.13 Nothing, in short, transcends thinking. Thinking is absolute
immanence.
17. Potency and the Principle of Sufficient Reason
Outside of actual thinking there is no altera res, neither actually nor

potentially: not actually because of the preceding consideration; not
potentially – in other words, as potency of the act that is absolutely
our thinking – because potency is a category that can have a meaning
through the world of facts, nature, generation, and corruption, not in
the world of the act that is eternal.14 As possibility – Leibniz is correct – it
needs to be completed by sufficient reason in order to pass into act. But
this sufficient reason is other than possible, and this otherness implies
multiplicity, which is the category of facts, of the universe. The principle
of sufficient reason is in its place in Leibnizian pluralism (which, like
all the old metaphysics, is just a conception of the world of facts or of
thinking in its abstract objectivity), but it has no meaning in an idealistic
monism of the absolute act or sub specie aeternitatis.15
The principle of sufficient reason, completing that of identity, sup-
poses the latter to be true, and hence it is on the same plane: it too is
false. From possibility to sufficient reason there is a leap that breaks the
lex continui at its roots.16 Virtuality is a compromise. The true act cannot
be transcended. And Leibnizian virtuality, when it becomes the Kantian
category or form, will be just pure act.
18. The Process of Thinking
The act of the I is consciousness in that it is self-consciousness: the object
691
of the I is the I itself. Every cognitive process is an act of self-conscious-

ness. This is not abstract identity and immobility but concrete act. If it
were something identical, inert, it would need another to be moved. But
that would annihilate its freedom. Its movement is not a posterius in rela-
tion to its being; it coincides with the being.17 Self-consciousness is move-
ment itself or process.
As originating or absolute process, it does not need to be made other.
It is otherness within: not being, but being that bends back on itself, thus
negating itself as being. A thing (abstractly considered, fixed by abstrac-
tion) is (always that), but precisely for that reason it is not thinking –
self-consciousness, in other words. No one has been given permission
to stop at that abstraction, as has been seen. As soon as the Spirit stops
or seems to stop, the voice of logic is quick to cry out, ‘What laziness,
what is this delay?’ It needs to move, to enter into the concrete, into the
eternal process of thinking. And here being moves in a circle, turning
back on itself and thus annihilating itself as being. Here is its life, its
becoming: thinking. It is not pure thesis nor pure antithesis, not being
and not non-being, but synthesis, that singular act that we are – Think-
ing. Being (thesis) in its abstraction is nothing, or rather nothing to do
with thinking (which is the true being). But this thinking that is eternal
is never preceded by a nothing of its own. In fact, this nothing is posited
by it, and, because it is a nothing of thinking, it is a thinking of nothing,
or rather thinking – everything, in other words. It is not the thesis that
makes the synthesis possible, but the reverse: the synthesis makes the
thesis possible, creating it along with its own antithesis or rather creating
itself. And therefore the pure act is self-creation.
19. Philosophy and History
The real, therefore, is self-creation because it is thinking. Thinking is the

first dawn of consciousness (every psychic fact in that it is consciousness,
in that it is act, in other words). Thinking is the whole of consciousness,
including philosophy. Hence, it has two essential moments: first, it is
reality, that reality which is thinking (by which all forms of scepticism
are annulled), reality itself enacting its own inwardness; second, it is con-
cept, thinking, consciousness of reality, and thus intrinsic overcoming of
the prior moment. It is being and the consciousness of being, life and
the mirror of life, and it is that in conformity with the essence of the pure
act (self-creation) in general – being in that it is consciousness of being.
And if the process of reality, that infinite and eternal dialectic which is
692
thinking, is history, then philosophy is history and is an overcoming of

history by thinking about it. It is history alive in the thinking of history
– thinking, please note, always as pure act, and therefore never to be
limited by the empirical determinations of history shattered in space and
time – our own thinking, but our own absolutely because it is absolutely
actual.
NOTES
1 Gentile first delivered this paper in 1911 in a meeting of his Philosophical

Library in Palermo (see section 23 of the Introduction): it was first printed
as Gentile (1912) and then included in Gentile (1913), the version used
here. Section 23 of the Introduction also cites later versions.
2 The word ‘thinking’ in the title translates the infinitive pensare, but in the
text that follows Gentile’s most frequent choice is the noun pensiero, almost
always rendered here as ‘thinking’; Gentile emphasizes the active force
of the word, meaning something less static than the English ‘thought,’
which in our translation sometimes represents pensato, the past participle of
pensare, indicating an act (atto) of thinking (pensiero) that has already been
thought (pensato) and is therefore past (passato) and not actual (attuale). For
this last distinction, it is important that attuale, unlike the English ‘actual,’
is more temporal than ontological; when attuale means ‘existing,’ the claim
for existence suggests current or present existence. On the other hand,
attuale is cognate with atto (‘act’ or ‘deed’) and with attuare (‘actualize,’
‘realize’). Finally, notice that in section 16 of this piece Gentile treats past
thinking as past in a logical, not a temporal, sense.
3 Dante meets Francesca da Rimini with the lustful in the second circle of
Hell; her betrothed killed her when he caught her with his younger brother,
Paolo. In reply to Dante’s pitying question about her fate, Francesca answers
that ‘there is no greater pain than in misery to remember the happy time’:
Inferno, 5.121−3. The other quotation, referring to Ermengarda in Alessan-
dro Manzoni’s tragedy Adelchi (1822), is from the chorus that closes the first
scene of the fourth act:
In the sleepless shadows

Through lonely cloisters
Amidst the chanting of the virgins
To the entreated altars,
The uncancelled days
Always return in thinking.
693
4 ‘Nature or God,’ in Spinoza’s notorious phrase, replaced here by ‘Nature or

error.’
5 ‘Verum index sui et falsi’: ‘Truth is the index of itself and of the false’ comes
from a letter by Spinoza (76.7), cited by Jacobi (2004): 33, and then by
Hegel (1986a), 16.62. Croce also cites it in chap. 5 of his ‘Philosophy of
Hegel,’ attributing it to Bacon.
6 In the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel attributes ‘every determination is a nega-
tion’ to Spinoza, but Spinoza’s words are not quite the same: see Spinoza,
Letter 50; Hegel (1986a), 8.196 ; (1991): 147
7 The Latin intensive means ‘intensively’ in contrast to ‘extensively’: Galileo’s
point is that intensive understanding is much greater in humans than exten-
sive understanding, but Gentile, glossing Galileo’s words, also puns on the
Italian intendere (to understand) and the Latin intensive: Galileo (2005), II,
135.
8 He himself.
9 ǲxa…fnhj: all of a sudden.
10 The Latin means ‘start to count and start to go wrong,’ a phrase that
Cusanus attributed to Augustine in his Apologia doctae ignorantiae; something
close occurs in Augustine’s Treatise on John’s Gospel (MPL 35:1683): ‘Ubi
cogitare coeperis, incipis numerare: ubi numeraveris, quid numeraveris non
potes respondere.’
11 ‘Aid to imagination,’ another phrase from Spinoza, which he used to
describe various ways of quantifying, including time.
12 Eo ipso: for this very reason.
13 The Latin seems to be Gentile’s: ‘I think, therefore I am. I am a thinking
substance. Inasmuch as I am substance, I am in myself, and I am conceived
through myself: that is, the concept of me does not need a concept of
another thing by which it should be formed.’
14 Altera res: other thing.
15 Under the form of eternity: another Spinozan phrase.
16 Law of the continuum.
17 Posterius: after.
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21
Giovanni Gentile
The Foundations of Actual Idealism1
1. Historically, actualist philosophy goes back to German philosophy from

Kant to Hegel, both directly and also through those Italians of the past
century who followed, explained, and criticized the German thinkers of
that era. But it also goes back to the Italian philosophy of the Renaissance
(Telesio, Bruno, Campanella), to the great Neapolitan philosopher,
Giambattista Vico, and to those who renewed Italian theoretical thinking
in the age of national Resurgence: Galluppi, Rosmini, and Gioberti.
The first writings to sketch actualist philosophy reach back to the last
years of the nineteenth century. In the first decades of the current cen-
tury, actualism continued to develop in parallel with Benedetto Croce’s
philosophy of the Spirit. Croce’s works circulate widely in the major Euro-
pean countries, and the Aesthetic – Croce’s most original work, translated
into many languages – is the Italian book about philosophy that is best
known outside Italy. My constant collaboration on the journal that Croce
founded in 1903, La Critica, which for many years conducted a tenacious
and victorious struggle in Italy against positivist, naturalist, and rationalist
directions of thought and culture, together with the fact that the ‘phi-
losophy of Spirit’ matured about a decade earlier and right from the start
attracted attention to itself everywhere, created the general appearance
of two philosophies much more alike than they had been from the begin-
ning. But differences naturally became ever more obvious as consequenc-
es unfolded from the principles of the two philosophies. And today – also
because of contingent circumstances that need not be mentioned here
– differences are much more apparent than likenesses and motives that
the two certainly have in common.
2. This philosophy is called actualist from the method that it advocates.

This might be defined as a ‘method of absolute immanence,’ profoundly

unlike the immanence spoken of in other philosophies – ancient, mod-
ern, and contemporary as well. Missing in all those philosophies is the
concept of the irreducible subjectivity of reality whereby the principle or
measure of reality itself becomes immanent. In comparison with Plato’s
abstract idealism, Aristotle is immanentist. Plato’s Idea becomes the form
of nature itself, a form indivisibly connected with matter in the synthe-
sis of the concrete individual, from which the idea, as its principle and
measure, can be separated only by abstraction. But for actualist philoso-
phy, the natural individual is itself something transcendent: as concrete,
it is inconceivable outside that relation in which it, the object of experi-
ence, is indissolubly conjoined with the subject of experience in the act of
thinking by means of which experience is realized. Before Kant’s critical
philosophy, all realism stays on the terrain of this transcendence. Even
if everything is reduced to experience, any philosophy that understands
this experience as something objective remains there as well because it
does not treat experience as the act of the thinking I as thinking, while
realizing the reality of the I itself – a reality outside of which no thinking is
given that is independent and stands on its own.
This is the fixed point to which actual idealism adheres. The only solid
reality given to me to assert, and with which any reality that I can think
must therefore be connected, is that very reality that thinks, that is real-
ized, and thus is a reality only in the act that thinks itself. Therefore, this
is the immanence of all that is thinkable for the act of thinking, or for the
act tout court, since, given what has been said, there is nothing that is actu-
al except thinking in act. And everything that can be thought to be differ-
ent from this act is actualized concretely to the extent that it is immanent
in the act itself. Hence, the act of which we speak in this philosophy is
not to be confused with the act (İ3ȞȑȡȖİȚĮ) of Aristotle and scholastic phi-
losophy. The Aristotelian act is also pure thinking, but it is a transcendent
thinking presupposed by our thinking. The act of actualist philosophy
coincides exactly with our thinking. And for this philosophy the Aristo-
telian act, in its transcendence, is simply an abstraction and not an act. It
is a logos, but it is an abstract logos whose concreteness lies solely in the
concrete logos which is the thinking that thinks itself actually.
Not only the Aristotelian act but also the Platonic Idea, and, in gen-
eral, any metaphysical or empirical reality presupposed in a realist way
for thinking, is, according to actualism, an abstract logos that has mean-
ing only in the actuality of the concrete logos. Even if it is represented
and correctly represented in this realism as independent of the subject,
696
Gentile, Actual Idealism
as standing on its own, as a thing in itself, as extraneous to thinking and

the condition of thinking, it is still always the abstract logos, whose deter-
minations are always a product of the originating activity of the I, and
which is actualized in thinking as the concrete logos. Every realism gets
something right, then, as long as it does not pretend to exhaust all the
conditions of thought. Indeed, there will always be something to add to
those conditions in order to overcome transcendence and reach the solid
ground of effective reality – the thinking activity that will be the funda-
mental condition of all that is thinkable.
But thinking activity, in order to support the infinite burden and infi-
nite responsibility of all thinkable reality – which is thinkable only insofar
as it is immanent in the spiritual world realized by that activity – must no
longer be conceived in a materialist way as located in time and in space.
Everything is in me inasmuch as I have space and time in me as structures
of everything that experience represents. Far from being contained in
space and time, then, I contain them. And far from my being included
in the nature that is the system of everything structured by space and
time – as commonly thought on the basis of faulty imagination – I include
nature within me. And within me it ceases to be the spatial and temporal
nature that is mechanical. Nature too is spiritualized and actualized in
the concrete life of thinking.
Because of this infinity that it has, in which everything is immanent, the
I is free. Being free, it can will and know and keep choosing between the
contradictory opposites that polarize the world of the Spirit, which has
value because it stands against its opposite. Freedom does not belong to
nature in its abstractness. Nor does it belong to any form of abstract logos,
not even logical truth or truth of fact or the law represented to the will by
the coercive necessity of a natural force. In short, it belongs to nothing,
which, by opposing itself in thinking to the subject that thinks its object,
defines and encloses it within definite boundaries, fixing it and depriving
it of the life that belongs to actual spiritual reality. Man is not free insofar
as he is treated and pictured as part of nature, a being who occupies a
certain space for a certain time, who was born and will die, limited in
every direction, surrounded in society itself by elements that are not in
his power but act upon him. Yet insofar as he moves in this structure of
ideas and stresses his own limitations, he diminishes and depletes his own
possibilities and comes to suspect that his own freedom is just an illusion,
that he can really do nothing to master the world nor even understand it.
Then, at the peak of despair, he will be able neither to rediscover nor to
reassert in his own depths the disclaimed freedom without which it would
697
be impossible for him to think as much as he thinks. Hoc unum scio, me

nihil scire.2
And yet, despite its limitations, knowing this implies the capacity to
know the truth, which would not be truth had it not been distinguished
from the false and had it not been conceived and apperceived in this dis-
tinction that it has, which is opposition. This would not be possible with-
out freedom – the infinity of the one who conceives and apperceives by
judging what is true and by proclaiming this judgment on the highest
authority, against which no appeal is permitted, an authority that plainly
could not belong to anyone closed within determinate limits.
Thus, within empirical humanity every person possesses a deep human-
ity that is at the base of his whole being and of every being that he can dis-
tinguish from himself. This is the humanity by which a person is conscious
of himself, thinking and speaking and willing. And by thinking he thinks
himself and everything else, so that bit by bit a world forms, growing ever
richer in determinations. He keeps trying to conceive it as a harmonic
whole, an organism made of parts that relate mutually to one another,
linked by an internal unity. But the person himself is always present to
this world, which he represents to himself and tries to make always more
adapted to his needs, to his desires, to his own nature. He faces not only
the world but himself, the one related to the other, and both are put in
this relation by him, craftsmen and custodian both, actor and spectator,
unwearied and wakeful.
Is it not this humanity that governs the particular individual but also
associates individuals in thinking – by which I mean feeling and think-
ing, poetry and action, the civilization that is the life of Spirit, by link-
ing different generations and races in one person alone, in a person who
recognizes obstacles only to overcome them, mysteries only to unveil
them, evils only to rectify them, bondage only to loose it, miseries only
to relieve them, pains only to heal them? This deep humanity is what at
first we do not detect in others or in ourselves. But it is also what makes it
still possible for one person to seek another, to speak to another, and to
offer a hand. When a truth lights up the mind or a feeling takes hold of
us, stirring and inspiring us, it is also this humanity. Our tongue, in the
words of the Italian poet, moves by itself.3 We cannot help talking. The
soul expands and speaks and sings. And even if no one is really there to
listen to us, we can say that there is an invisible crowd around us listening
– living, dead, unborn, a nameless crowd of judges who have no faces but
think and feel as we do. And in fact they are really in us; they really are us.
They listen to us because we are what we hear ourselves saying.
698
3. This humanity is no deus absconditus, no secret inaccessible I, which,

by speaking and making itself manifest, goes out of itself, objectifying
and denaturalizing itself, ceasing to be what it is in itself.4 It is inasmuch
as it is realized, and by being realized it is made manifest. And therefore
actual thinking is everything. Outside of actual thinking, the I itself is an
abstraction, to be stored away in the great warehouse of metaphysical
contraptions, those purely rational and non-existent entities. The I is not
soul-substance. It is not a thing, nor the noblest of things. It is everything
because it is not nothing. As long as there is anything, there is a deter-
minate spirit – a personality actualized in a world of its own: a poem, an
action, a word, a system of thinking. But this world is real insofar as the
poem gets written, the action completed, the word uttered, the thought
developed and made systematic. The poem was not and will not be; it is
always insofar as it is written or, by its being read, goes back to being writ-
ten. Left alone, it sinks into nothing. Its reality is a present that never
fades into the past and has no fear of the future. It is eternal, from that
absolute immanence of the spiritual act in which there are no successive
moments of time that are not mutually present and simultaneous.
The point of all this is that the eternal actuality (without past and with-
out future) of the Spirit is inconceivable by way of the logic of identity
belonging to the old metaphysics of substance: it is conceivable only by
the dialectic such as modern philosophy can conceive it, as a concept not
of being as an object of thinking but of thinking in its own subjectivity;
not a concept but a self-concept (not Begriff, but Selbstbegriff). If thinking
as act is the principle of actualism, its method is the dialectic. Not Pla-
tonic dialectic nor even a Hegelian one, but a new dialectic and one more
properly dialectical, which is a reform of the Hegelian dialectic. This
has already been contrasted to the Platonic type because that was a static
dialectic of ideas that had been thought (or were somehow an object of
thinking), and Hegel in his Science of Logic treated the dialectic instead
as the movement of thinking ideas, or as categories by which thinking
thinks its object.
A dialectic of what has been thought, then, and a dialectic of thinking:
that dialectic of thinking began to be posed as a problem by Fichte. But
it was Hegel who first faced this problem in full awareness of the need for
a new logic to oppose the Aristotelian analytic, which like all ancient phi-
losophy is the logic of Platonism. Hegel poses the problem but does not
solve it, because, by starting from the first categories (being, non-being,
becoming), he allowed himself to avoid the absolute subjectivity of think-
699
ing, and he treated his logic as a movement of ideas that are thought and
therefore must be defined. Such a movement is absurd because the ideas
are thought – defined, in other words – by being shut up in the circle of
their terms and standing fixed. This is the reason why the Platonic ideas
are all linked to one another, and hence they oblige the subjective think-
ing that wants to think one of them to think all the others as well, thus
having to move from one to another without pause while they stand fixed,
like the stadium with athletes running inside it.
They stand fixed, but they are an abstract logos that must get back to
real, actual thinking. Thinking is inasmuch as it is not, and it never stands
fixed, always moving. Yes, it also defines, and it is mirrored in the defined
object, but it does so by starting to define in a different way, always a bet-
ter fit for the unceasing need in whose satisfaction lies its own realization.
Thinking is dialectical through its becoming, which is not a thought unity
of being and non-being, a concept in which the concept of being and the
opposite concept of non-being are identified. It is a realized unity of the
very being of thinking with its real non-being. Obviously we might define
the concept of this unity, but our definition is not an image or a logical
duplicate of a transcendent reality in relation to the logical act. By this act
it is all one and the same.
In this dialecticity lies the answer to the thousand sceptical doubts and
the thousand anguished questions that arise from experience and life’s
conflicts – conflicts between man and nature, life and death, idea and
reality, pleasure and pain, science and mystery, good and evil, and so on:
all the ancient problems that have tortured the religious conscience as
well as the moral life of all people – the anxieties of theodicy as of phi-
losophy. The actualist conception is a spiritualist conception and deeply
religious, even though its religious character cannot satisfy anyone who
is in the habit of conceiving the divine as transcendent or confuses the
act of thinking with the simple fact of experience. Now a coherent reli-
gious conception of the world must be optimistic without denying pain,
evil, and error. It must be idealistic without suppressing reality and all its
defects. It must be spiritualist without shutting its eyes to nature and the
iron laws of nature’s machinery. But all philosophies and all religions,
despite every spiritualist and idealistic effort, are destined to fail if they
stop with the logic of identity where opposites exclude one another –
where, if there is being, there is no non-being, and vice versa – either
by abandoning themselves to an absurd dualism or else shutting them-
selves up in an abstract and hence unsatisfactory and, once again, absurd
monism.
700
The antinomies of the moral life and religious conscience, of the world
and humanity, are insoluble by this logic of identity. And there is no faith
in human freedom, in human reason, in the power of the ideal, or the
grace of God that can save mankind and, in brief, prop him up in a life
entirely pervaded, as man’s is, by the thinking that is inquiry and doubt
and perpetual questioning – with life as the answer. Are we are or are we
not immortal? Is there truth for us? Does virtue have a place in the world?
Is there a God who rules it all? Is this life worth the pain that it takes to
live it? These questions keep coming and coming back again from the
bottom of the human heart, which is why people think and have need of
philosophy, which comforts them to go on living with an answer of sorts.
Everyone who lives gets the answer that he can get. But a logical, solid,
rational answer is not possible if thinking does not withdraw itself from
the objects that it thinks from moment to moment and then welds them
together in an iron chain as its world-system, never turning back on itself,
where all reality has its root and whence it draws its life.
This is where being is not already but comes to be, not existing from the
beginning without mediation; where to know is to learn, and, even if we
already know, to learn anew every time; where the good is not what has
been done and already exists but what has not been done and therefore
is being done; where joy is not what we have but what blossoms from its
contrary, what does not stop by falling into the monotonous boredom
that lies stagnant and breeds death but renews and reconquers itself with
new toil and hence through new pains; where, in a word, the Spirit burns
eternal, flashing and gleaming in the blaze as it consumes all the heavy
slag, dead and inert. In that place, to say being is to say non-being: wisdom is
ignorance there, good is evil, joy is pain, conquest is toil, peace is war, and
the Spirit is nature that makes itself spirit.
4. Nature, real primordial nature, the eternal begetter of which Bruno

spoke, before it becomes what we schematize in space and time and ana-
lyse in all its forms through experience and intellectual construction,
before all this, nature is that deep nature that we encounter in our body
and through our body – not the collection of abstractions whereby think-
ing, in order to think nature, disassembles, crumbles, pulverizes, and
makes it impalpable by systematizing it in the abstract logos.5 Real nature
is the unity that cannot be made manifold. It is the infinite and inexhaust-
ible source of all the manifold reality that opens out in space and time.
First of all, nature is the body that each of us senses in his self-conscious-
ness as the first and irreducible object of his own consciousness. It is that
701
body by means of which we sense and come to have consciousness of each

quality of external things and of each particular given for individuation
in the whole physical universe. I attend to the universe because it is relat-
ed to my body, which is the direct and immediate object of my sensing.
But it stands in this relation in its totality since nothing in the physical
world can be thought except as correlated to everything else in the same
physical world. Thus, it is obvious that my head would fall on the ground
if my trunk were not holding it up and if my legs were not holding up my
trunk. But it is also obvious that eliminating a single grain of sand at the
bottom of the ocean would not only destabilize the nearby grains held up
by it but would actually destroy the universe.
We live on our planet. But this planet is part of a system without which
we would not have the light and heat on our Earth that enable us to live
on it. Everything exists in the universe. And my body, as I actually sense it,
is a centre with an infinite circumference. It is a living component of a liv-
ing organism, which is present and active and comes to have sensation in
each of its components. Thinking of my body as just that part of physical
nature which is inside my skin is an abstraction analogous to regarding
my hand as something that could be entirely abstracted from the arm
to which it must be joined, although if it were detached from my arm, it
would then be deprived not only of its strength but also of its own mate-
rial framework.
To speak of body, then, is to speak of the whole bodily universe in which
we live and die, from which all particular living individuals arise and to
which they return. But what is this body? Where and how do we get its
meaning and learn to understand it? I have already explained: in the
first principle of our sensing when we still sense nothing particular but
sense because we sense ourselves, where we are our own sense, this same
sense that will then keep developing as consciousness of ourselves (self-
consciousness). There, in the primal and originating seed of our spirit-
ual life, there is already a sentient principle as well as something that is
sensed (and what is sensed is just the body). There is a synthesis of these
two terms, each of which exists through the other, and together they real-
ize the act of sensing, that synthesis outside of which it would be useless to
look either for the sentient principle or for the sensed object. This origi-
nating immanence of the essence of body at the Spirit’s primitive core,
this originating and fundamental spirituality and ideality of the body –
and thus of nature in general – is the reason why thinking finds in direct
experience the measure of existence that belongs to reality, that is not an
abstract construction of thinking. Not that thinking has its own measure
702
outside itself, in an imaginary external reality to which it relates by way

of sensible experience. The measure of thinking is in thinking itself. But
thinking as subject, self-consciousness, is first of all a sense of self, the
soul of a body – of the body, of nature. And anything not linked with this
principle of thinking and therefore not realized as a development of this
principle is like a building destined to fall because it was not built upon
the foundations that were needed.
Thinking is always a circle, where the line moves away from its starting
point only to turn back and close on itself. Where the end does not coin-
cide with the beginning, my thinking is not my thinking. I no longer find
myself there. It has no value. It is not truth. The point where the circle of
thinking is closed and welded together is the I that thinks and is realized
in thinking, so that the very thinking that it produces (the concept) is
the concrete and effective existence of the I itself (self-concept). Conse-
quently, everyone’s personality lies in his work.
5. It is not only nature – when we do not see it externally and abstractly –

but all history itself that flows together and issues in the actuality of the
thinking that thinks. History too is self-concept. It is not a consciousness
that a person has of the activity of minds other than the one that he actu-
alizes in his own historical consciousness. It is not consciousness of the
actions of people who no longer exist or of the past, which is a mere ide-
ality whereby thinking distinguishes the present that exists, and alone is
real and matters and is eternal from what does not exist and does not mat-
ter and therefore is not present and is shut out of the world of the eter-
nal (the site of everything that matters from the point of view of Spirit).
Like all thinking, history is consciousness of self. Hence, every history has
been said to be current history since it reflects the problems, interests,
and mentality of the historian and of his time through the representation
of past events and passions.
The so-called remains and records of the past are components of cul-
ture and hence of present intellectual life. They are revived because of
the interest that causes them to be sought out, criticized, and interpret-
ed. They speak and become meaningful by the labour of writing histo-
ry, which is an actual thinking that unfolds only by achieving ever more
acute and careful consciousness of self. The dead would stay quite dead
and would be removed from the picture of reality, which is divine reality,
if there were no one living to speak of them by recalling them in their
hearts and reviving them in their own spirit.
703
6. Is this solipsism? No. The I of the solipsist is a particular and negative I,

which, for that reason, can feel its solitude and the impossibility of escap-
ing it. Hence, the solipsist is an egoist. He denies the good as he denies
the truth. But his I is negative because it is identical to himself – identical
to a thing, not spirit. His negativity is the negativity of the atom, which is
always just that, incapable of any transformation. It can always absolutely
exclude other atoms from itself, and be excluded from them in turn, pre-
cisely because it does not have the strength to negate itself and to change.
But the dialectic of the I, as conceived by actualism, is the principle of
infinite and progressive universalization of the I itself, which in that sense
is infinite and excludes nothing from itself. Any limit can be overcome by
this inner energy that is the very essence of the thinking that thinks. This
energy negates and overcomes the limit because the limit is what it sets
for itself as it gradually determines itself. Starting from the sense of self
though which it is sensing, the I duplicates itself in the two end points,
the subject and object of sensing, and as subject it thus comes to be con-
fronted and hence limited by the object: the I manifests its infinite energy
by ceaselessly positing and negating its own limit.
This negation is not destruction. To be negated in the way that I mean,
the limit must be preserved, but it must be internalized in the subject’s
consciousness of infinity. To love one’s neighbour in the Christian way is
to negate others as an external limit on our personhood, but this does not
mean suppressing the personhood of the other but rather understanding
and sensing it as within our own personality conceived in a deeper way.
That is the meaning of the immanent conversion of the abstract logos
into the concrete logos discussed in actualist logic.
7. Finally, is this philosophy with its radical immanentism an atheist phi-

losophy? This is the persistent accusation aimed at it today by Catholic
and traditionalist thinkers who never manage to account for the distinc-
tion that lies in the unity of the spiritual act. But they are the real atheists,
in a philosophical way. For if that absurd separation between divine and
human being really had to be conceived, any relation between the two
terms would be completely impossible. And I am firmly convinced that
this attitude of those thinkers is atheist because it is anti-Christian. I am
really convinced that Christianity, with its central dogma of the Man-God,
has this meaning theoretically: that at the base of the necessary distinc-
tion between God and man we must posit a unity that can only be the uni-
ty of the Spirit, and this will be the human spirit inasmuch as the spirit is
divine, and it will be the divine Spirit inasmuch as it is also human. If any-
704
one trembles and shies away from taking into his mind this consciousness
of the infinite responsibility whereby man grows weightier by recognizing
and sensing God in himself, he is not a Christian, and – if Christianity is
only a revelation, a clearer consciousness of his own spiritual nature that
the human acquires – he is not even human. By human I mean someone
conscious of his own humanity.
And how will this person be able to feel himself free and thus capable
of recognizing and fulfilling a duty, of grasping a truth, and, in short, of
entering the kingdom of the Spirit, if, in the depths of his own being,
he does not sense history, the universe, the infinite, everything gather-
ing and pulsating? Given the limited powers which, at any moment of his
existence, he finds himself actually possessing, could he confront – as per-
haps he does and ought to do – the problem of life and death that faces
him terribly with the ineluctable might of nature’s laws? And yet, if he is to
live a spiritual life, he must triumph over this law, and, both in the world
of art and in that of morality, by action and by thought, he must partici-
pate in the life of those of immortal things that are divine and eternal. He
must participate in them on his own, freely, since there is no outside help
that can assist the Spirit’s spontaneous capacity unless it is help willed and
valued and therefore freely sought and made effective. In other words,
nothing comes to us from outside that does any good for the salvation of
the soul, the strength of the intellect, and the power of the will.
Therefore, the actualist does not deny God, but along with the mystics
and the most religious souls who have ever lived on earth, he repeats: Est
Deus in nobis.6
NOTES
1 We have used Gentile (1931a), which is the first edition of the Italian version
of the essay that appeared originally in German in Gentile (1931b).
2 Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 2.32: ‘The one thing I know is that I know nothing,’
a saying attributed to Socrates, here in Erasmian Latin.
3 Dante, La vita nuova, 19.
4 Deus absconditus: ‘hidden God.’
5 Bruno (1888): 274 (De la causa, principio et uno, dial. 4).
6 ‘God is in us’ or ‘There is a god in us.’
705
22
Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals
Origins
Fascism is a recent and an ancient movement of the Italian spirit, deep-

ly bound up with the history of the Italian nation, though not without
meaning and interest for all the other nations. Its recent origins go back
to 1919 when a band of men, returned from the trenches and resolved
to fight vigorously against the demo-socialist politics that then prevailed,
gathered around Benito Mussolini. The ruling politicians saw only the
immediate material effects of the Great War from which the Italian peo-
ple had emerged victorious but exhausted. If they did not openly deny
its moral value, they let it go to waste by representing it to the Italians,
from a petty individualist and utilitarian point of view, as a tally of sac-
rifices for which each person had to be compensated in proportion to
the damage suffered. The result was a presumptuous and threatening
opposition of private interests to the state, a disregard for its authority, a
decline in prestige for the King and the Army – symbols of the nation at
a level higher than individuals and the various categories of citizens – an
unleashing of passions and baser instincts, an inciting of social fragmen-
tation, of moral decadence, of a selfish and irresponsible spirit of rebel-
lion against all law and discipline.
The individual against the state: an expression typical of the political
side of corruption in souls that could not abide any higher norm for
human life that might vigorously regulate and constrain the attitudes
and thoughts of each of them. In its origins, then, Fascism was a political
and a moral movement. Its politics felt like a gymnasium of self-denial,
as it campaigned for the sacrifice of the individual to an idea in which
the individual might find his life’s purpose, his liberty, and his every right
Manifesto I
– the idea that is the fatherland, as an ideal that is realized historically

without ever being exhausted, a specific and well-defined historical tra-
dition of civilization, but a tradition that never remains in the past as a
dead memory but becomes a personal force in the citizen’s conscious-
ness, in the awareness that there is a goal to attain, a tradition which is
therefore a mission.
Fascism and the State
This is the source of the religious character of Fascism. Its religious and
therefore intransigent character explains the method that Fascism used
in its struggle during the four years from 1919 to 1922. Fascists were a
minority in the country and in Parliament, where a small core group
arrived after the elections of 1921. The constitutional state was therefore
anti-Fascist, as it had to be, since it was the state of the majority, and it
was precisely this state that called itself liberal which stood opposed to
Fascism. The state was liberal, but its liberalism was the agnostic and
acquiescent kind that understands only external liberty – the state that is
liberal because it regards itself as external to the free citizen’s mind, as
if it were a mechanical system apart from the activity of each individual.
Although the representatives of hybrid socialism – democratizing and
parliamentary – had adapted themselves, even in Italy, to this individual-
ist conception of the idea of politics, this state was plainly not what social-
ists yearned for. Nor was it the state whose idea had worked so powerfully
in the heroic Italian era of our Risorgimento, when the state rose out
the work of small minorities strengthened by the power of an idea to
which individuals deferred in various ways: its basis was the great project
of producing Italians after having given them independence and unity.
Embattled against this state, Fascism also took strength from its idea,
which gathered around it a rapidly growing number of the young because
of the fascination that comes from any religious idea that calls for sac-
rifice. It was the party of the young – just as Mazzini’s Young Italy grew
out of an analogous political and moral need after the events of 1831.
This party also had its Hymn of Youth, which was sung by Fascists joy-
ously with hearts exulting. And like Mazzini’s Young Italy, Fascism began
to be the faith of all Italians who were offended by the past and eager
for renewal – a faith like any faith colliding with a reality, which comes
from breaking up and melting in the crucible of new energies and being
reshaped in keeping with the new ideal, ardent and intransigent. It was
the same faith that ripened in the trenches and in a deep rethinking of
707
the sacrifice offered on the battlefields for the only purpose that could
justify it – the life and greatness of the fatherland – a faith of energy and
violence, disinclined to respect anything that opposed the life and great-
ness of the fatherland.
Thus arose the movement of squadrons – young people, resolute,
armed, wearing the black shirt, and organized militarily, opposing the
law in order to set up a new law, a force armed against the state to estab-
lish the new state. The squadrons moved against the fragmented anti-
nationalist forces whose activity culminated in the general strike of July
1922, and finally risked an uprising on 28 October 1922, when armed
columns of Fascists marched on Rome after occupying public build-
ings in the provinces. Some died in the March on Rome, before and
after it reached its goal, especially in the Po Valley. Like all bold actions
with deep moral content, the march ended first with amazement, then
admiration, and at last with universal acclaim. It thus seemed that at
one stroke the Italian people had rediscovered its enthusiastic pre-war
unanimity, but this was now even more vibrant because people realized
that victory had been won and that a new, refreshing wave of faith had
come to revitalize the victorious nation on its hard new path towards the
urgent restoration of its financial and moral strength.
Fascist Government
The squadrons and the lawbreaking stopped, and Fascism outlined the
elements of the regime that it wanted. Between 29 and 30 October, the
fifty thousand blackshirts who had marched on the capital from the
provinces left Rome in perfect order. They left after parading before
His Majesty the King, and they left at a sign from their Leader, who
became the head of government and the soul of the new Italy that Fas-
cism promised.
Was the revolution over? In a sense, yes: the squadrons no longer had
a reason to exist. The Voluntary Militia for national Security was formed
to incorporate former squadron members into the state’s armed forces.
But the state is not government, and the government was still waiting,
amidst the consensus of the great majority of Italians who saw in Fas-
cism the most potent political force, the one capable of expressing the
nation’s heart and bringing discipline to all its forces for the change in
legislation wherein the state now needed to find the form best suited
to the social trends and spiritual needs current among the Italian peo-
ple. This transformation is gradually taking place amidst perfect public
708
Manifesto I
order, under a strict financial regime that has put the unstable post-war
budget back in balance by reorganizing the army, the judiciary, and the
educational institutions without wobbling or wavering, even while there
has been, and still is, a great deal of vacillation in public opinion, vio-
lently agitated by a public press whose rigidified opposition becomes all
the more furious as it grows more hopeless about any possibility of a
return to the past. The press takes advantage of every mistake and every
accident to stir the people up against the unrelenting and constructive
hard work of the new government.
But foreigners coming to Italy have crossed the ring of flame drawn
around Fascist Italy by the defensive fire of ferocious propaganda, writ-
ten and spoken, internal and external, from Italians and non-Italians,
which has tried to isolate Fascist Italy by slandering it as a country fallen
into the hands of the most violent and cynical power, arbitrarily elimi-
nating every legal civil liberty and every guarantee of justice. As foreign-
ers have been able to see this Italy with their own eyes, listen with their
own ears to the new Italians, and experience their material and moral
lives, they have come to envy the public order that prevails in Italy today.
They have become interested in the spirit that strives every day to gain
more mastery of this well-regulated mechanism, and they have begun
to sense that here beats a heart, one full of humanity even if agitated by
the frustrations of patriotic passion. The fatherland of the Fascist is also
the fatherland that lives and stirs in the heart of every civic person, the
fatherland that stirred feelings everywhere in the tragedy of the war and
now stands vigilant in every region – must stand vigilant to protect its
sacred interests even after the war, indeed, as a consequence of the war
that no one any longer believes to be the last.
This fatherland, moreover, is a reconsecration of traditions and insti-
tutions that are the constant in civilization, in the flux and perpetuity
of traditions. It is also a school for the subordination of the particular
and inferior to the universal and immortal. It is respect for law and dis-
cipline. It is liberty, but liberty to be won through law, liberty established
by renouncing all petty wilfulness and wasteful, irrational ambition. It
is an austere conception of life and a religious gravity that does not dis-
tinguish theory from practice, talking from doing, and does not paint
grand ideals in order to banish them from this world, where the fact
remains that life may go on in its base and wretched way, while it is hard
work to make life ideal by expressing one’s own convictions in action
and in words – these words themselves being deeds that bind the person
who speaks them, and with him they also bind the world of which he is a
709
living, responsible part at every moment of time, in every secret breath

of consciousness.
This ideal is an ideal, but it is an ideal for which a struggle goes on
in Italy today, those very harsh conflicts that show how serious things
are and that there is a faith in people’s hearts. Fascism, like all great
individual movements, grows stronger as it becomes more able to attract
and absorb, more effective and engaged in the workings of minds, ideas,
interests, and institutions – briefly, in the living fabric of the Italian peo-
ple. And so the point is no longer to count and weigh each single person
but to look to and to value the idea, which, like any true or living idea,
is endowed with a power of its own and has been made not by human
beings but through them.
State and Union
Fascism is accused of being a reactionary movement, anti-liberal and

anti-labour, but the accusation is false. For all national forces, Fascism is
a spirit of progress and of driving forward. And its contrary intention is
to break what the old political order created, under the false appearance
of the old democratic liberalism, to encrust the citizen’s effective activity
as an individual, through the atomism of universal suffrage that crushes
real interests so that every individual is brought to feel himself under
obligation to the system of economic forces. That old politics put the
people in the hands of professional politicians dominated by the ever
more powerful coalition of interests that are particularist and therefore
antithetical to the nation’s common interest.
Fascism – whose leaders, starting with the Supreme Leader, have all
lived the socialist experience – aims to reconcile two terms that until
now have seemed irreducibly contrary – state and union: the state, as the
nation’s juridical force in its organic and functional unity; the union, as
the individual’s juridical force, such as the economic activity that can get
its guarantee from law, an activity therefore specified socially and belong-
ing to a social category. This is the state as the way to organize all indi-
vidual activities in their organic and concrete structure. In relation to the
constitutional state it does not go backwards, then, but actually develops
it, with greater intrinsic definition and better realization of its principle
of representing the people effectively in the legislative power. So then,
are police measures imputed to the Fascist government that are destruc-
tive to the freedom of the press?
The questions are more of fact than principle. In the more liberal
states, all constitutional liberties have been suspended when particular
710
Manifesto I
reasons have shown the need to do so, and all theorists and defenders
of liberalism have always recognized the legitimacy of such suspensions.
The point is to see when the government has used these police meas-
ures, whether it is true or not true that a certain publication (deliberately
or not – it makes little difference) had caused the nation to run the risk
of very serious disturbances of public order, so that it was worthwhile for
the government to take the action that it took for the country and for
the liberty that those disturbances would have compromised. The truth
is that the great mass of the Italian people understands this and proves
it by its calm indifference towards the heated protests and complaints of
the opposition – the fact being that in today’s Italy the work on behalf
of the nation’s liberty in the world is being done not by anti-Fascism
but by Fascism, which takes great pains to build a solid foundation for
the structure in which the free activities of citizens can actually develop,
when citizens have the guarantee of a law that truly expresses their real,
organic, concrete will.
In Italy today, hearts are arrayed in two opposed camps: on one side
the Fascists, on the other their opponents, democrats of all shades and
stripes, two mutually exclusive worlds. But the great majority of Italians
remains outside, feeling that the content of the conflict chosen by the
opposition groups lacks a political solidity that might be valued and suit-
ed to popular interest. Those who stay outside the conflict personally
fully understand that when the word ‘liberty’ is invoked, the meaning of
the term is entirely elastic if it can be on the lips of the different parties.
The Opposition to Fascism
In the second place, this small opposition to Fascism, formed from the
debris of the old Italian political machines (democratic, rationalist, radi-
cal, Masonic), is irreducible; gradually, through internal strain and inac-
tion, it is bound to end up always on the margin of the political forces
that operate effectively in the new Italy. This is because it has no princi-
ple that really opposes the principle Fascism, only one that is lower. And
it is a law of history without exception that of two opposite principles,
neither wins: a higher principle triumphs which is the synthesis of the
two different vital components that inspire both principles separately.
However, when one of two principles is lower and the other higher, one
partial and the other total, the first must necessarily succumb because
it is contained in the second, and the motive for its opposition is purely
negative, living in the void.
Facing their opponents, the Fascists know this, and thus they have an
711
unshaken faith that their side will triumph, and they never give in. From
now on, with patient forbearance, they can wait for opposition groups
that have abandoned the legal ground of the struggle in Parliament to
end up convinced of the inevitable necessity of abandoning their illegal
ground as well, as they recognize that the residue of life and truth in
their programs is contained in the Fascist program, but in a bold form,
more complex, more responsive to historical reality and to the needs of
the human spirit. Then Italy’s current spiritual crisis will be overcome.
Then in the very heart of Fascist Italy and of Italy made Fascist, new
ideas, new programs, and new political parties will slowly ripen and come
to light.
The Italian intellectuals committed to Fascism meeting in Bologna
for their first congress (29−30 March) have decided to formulate these
ideas and thereby bear witness to the many, within Italy and outside Italy,
who wish to give an account of the doctrine and the action of the nation-
al Fascist Party.
712
23
A Reply by Italian Authors, Professors, and
Journalists to the ‘Manifesto’ of the Fascist
Intellectuals
A group of authors, professors, and journalists has decided to commu-

nicate to the press a reply to the ‘Manifesto’ of the Fascist intellectu-
als. This reply makes no claim to represent, much less to monopolize,
the anti-Fascist intelligentsia that has not and will not call any congress
to show itself off in an artificial grouping. Instead, the chief point is to
react against the method that would claim to subdue the intelligentsia
into functioning as an instrumentum regni, while a concurrent aim is for
some free intellectuals to protest against the version of Italian events as
interpreted by the Fascist intellectuals, who thought that they had to
spread this beyond the borders of Italy.1 The undersigned invite those
who share the views expressed in their reply to communicate their agree-
ment. With that preface, let us reproduce the document.
The Fascist intellectuals meeting in congress in Bologna have
addressed a ‘Manifesto’ to intellectuals of all nations in order to explain
to them and defend the policies of the Fascist Party. When they set out
upon such an enterprise, these eager gentlemen must not have been
mindful of a similar and celebrated manifesto announced to the world
by German intellectuals at the start of the Great War in Europe – a mani-
festo greeted by universal disapproval at the time and later considered a
mistake by the Germans themselves.
While it is true that intellectuals, experts on the art and sciences, exer-
cise their rights and do their duty as citizens when they join a party and
serve it loyally, nonetheless, their sole duty as intellectuals is to use the
work of research, criticism, and artistic creation to elevate all people and
all parties alike to a higher spiritual level so that they can fight the battles
that they must with ever more positive results. To breach these bounda-
ries of the office assigned to them, to contaminate politics and literature,
politics and science, is a mistake that can scarcely be called fertile, when,
as in this case, it happens by encouraging deplorable acts of violence and
insolence and by suppressing freedom of the press. Moreover, this action
taken by the Fascist intellectuals does not even respond with much sen-
sitivity to the fatherland, for it is not right to submit the fatherland’s
troubles to the judgment of foreigners, who do not take the trouble (nat-
urally, as it happens) to look beyond the various special political interests
of their own nations.
In substance, what they write is a piece of half-baked schoolwork
where one finds intellectual confusions and ill-spun arguments at eve-
ry point – trading the atomism of certain types of eighteenth-century
political science, for example, for nineteenth-century liberalism, treat-
ing anti-historical, abstract, and mathematical democratism, in other
words, as equivalent to the highly historical notion of free competition
and alternation of parties in power, whereby one makes progress, as if in
small doses, thanks to the opposition. Another example is the facile and
fevered rhetoric that celebrates the individual’s dutiful submission to the
whole, as if that were the issue, rather than the capacity of authoritarian
structures to guarantee the most effective moral progress. Or another
example, where we are betrayed by a calamitous inability to distinguish
economic institutions like unions from ethical institutions like legislative
assemblies, thus courting the combining – or rather, the miscegenation –
of the two types, which would end in their mutual corruption or, at least,
their mutual obstruction. And we leave aside the arbitrary interpreta-
tions and manipulations of history, which by now are well-known.
But the violence done by this piece to ideas and history counts for
little in comparison to the abuse of the word ‘religion.’ As the leading
Fascist intellectuals understand things, we should now have found joy
in a war of religion, in the exploits of a new evangel or a new apostolate
against an old superstition that fights to the death what stands above it
and to which it still must bow – and they take this to be proven by the
hatred and spite that now makes Italians rage against Italians as never
before. This is what they are calling a disagreement about religion: the
hatred and spite provoked by a party which denies that elements of other
parties are Italian and insults them as foreigners, by that very act making
itself a foreigner and oppressor in the eyes of the others and thereby
introducing into the life of the fatherland the feelings and habits that
attend such conflicts. Using the word ‘religion’ to dignify the suspicion
and animosity that has been sown everywhere, depriving even univer-
sity students of the trusting sense of brotherhood that they used to have
714
Manifesto II
when they shared youthful ideals, turning them against one another in
fake clashes –this sounds like a rather sorry joke, to tell the truth.
Whatever the new evangel might be, the new religion, the new faith,
one cannot tell from the text of this wordy ‘Manifesto.’ As a practical mat-
ter, however, what its mute eloquence reveals to an objective observer is a
bizarre and incoherent blend of appeals to authority and demagoguery;
a profession of reverence for the law and violation of the laws; ultra-mod-
ern ideas and musty old notions; absolutist attitudes and Bolshevik dis-
positions; flattery for the Catholic Church and denials of belief; a dread
of culture and sterile starts at a culture deprived of its premises; mystical
mawkishness and cynicism. And even if there were any plausible propos-
als for the present government to enact or undertake, there is nothing
in them to brag about, no innovative product to identify a new political
system that would be named Fascism.
For this chaotic and incomprehensible ‘religion,’ then, we are not
inclined to abandon our old faith, the faith that for two and a half cen-
turies has been the soul of a resurgent Italy and a modern Italy, the faith
whose ingredients are love of truth; hope for justice; a generous human
and civic sense; zeal for intellectual and moral education; and eager-
ness for liberty, which is the strength and security on which all progress
depends. When we look back at images of the men of the Risorgimento,
those who laboured, suffered, and died for Italy, their faces seem angry
and upset at the words that are said and the things that are done by our
Italian adversaries, and because we are steadfast in their cause we take
the warnings seriously. Our faith is no abstract, artificial contrivance,
no mental obsession produced by theories poorly supported or poorly
understood. It is possessing a tradition that has become an emotional
disposition and an intellectual or moral structure.
In their ‘Manifesto’ the Fascist intellectuals repeat the hackneyed
phrase that Italy’s Risorgimento was the work of a minority, not mention-
ing the weakness of our political and social makeup on this very point.
Indeed, it almost seems that they take satisfaction when most citizens
of Italy today, faced with disagreements between Fascism and its oppo-
nents, seem to be indifferent – at the least. Liberals have never been
satisfied with such a thing, and they have tried with all their power to
have an ever-growing number of Italians called to public life. This was
the main reason for some of their most controversial actions, such as the
granting of universal suffrage. Even the sympathy with which many liber-
als greeted the Fascist movement in its early days implied, among other
things, the hope that it would introduce fresh new energies into political
715
life, innovating energies and (why not?) conservative energies. But they
never thought to keep the bulk of the nation inert and indifferent, buy-
ing them off with various material goods. They knew that doing so would
have betrayed the purposes of the Italian Risorgimento and would have
restored the evil devices of absolutist and quietist governments.
Even now, neither this putative indifference and inertia nor the obsta-
cles that block the path to freedom lead us to despair or resignation.
What matters is to know that what one wants and should want is some-
thing intrinsically good. The present political struggle in Italy, because
it presents such great contrasts, will serve to awaken our people and give
them a more concrete and deeper understanding of the value of liberal
policies and methods, causing people to have a more conscious sense
of their desire for them. One day, perhaps, people will look serenely at
the past and conclude that the ordeal we are now enduring, harsh and
painful for us, was a stage that Italy had to go through in order to revive
its life as a nation, complete its political education, and learn a harsher
lesson about its duties as a civil society.
NOTE
1 instrumentum regni: ‘tool of the regime.’
716
24
Antonio Gramsci
Notebooks: 11 (1932−3), Introduction to

the Study of Philosophy1
The notes contained here, as in the other notebooks, have been written
rapidly in order to make a quick record. All of them need to be reviewed
and carefully checked since they certainly contain false starts, anachro-
nisms, and things that are imprecise. Since they were written away from
the books to which they refer, it is possible that after checking they may
have to be extensively corrected if the opposite of what has been written
turns out to be true.
Comments and References of an Historical-Critical Nature
1. Antonio Labriola. To put together a complete essay on Antonio Labrio-

la, we need to keep in mind not only his own writings, which are few and
often only allusive or extremely synthetic, but also pieces and fragments
of conversation reported by his friends and students (the memory that
Labriola left is of an exceptional conversationalist). A few such pieces
and fragments can be collected here and there from Benedetto Croce’s
books. In Critical Conversations, for example: … ‘How would you give a
Papuan a moral education?’ Some years ago, one of us students asked
Professor Labriola this question in one of his lectures on pedagogy,
objecting to the uselessness of the subject. ‘Provisionally,’ answered the
Herbartian professor, with the sharpness of Vico and Hegel. ‘I would
make him a slave provisionally, and this would be the pedagogy for the
occasion, except to see if we could apply some of our pedagogy to his chil-
dren and grandchildren.’2 Labriola’s reply should be compared to the
interview that he gave on the colonial problem (Lybia) around 1903 …3
It should also be compared to Gentile’s way of thinking about religious
instruction in the primary schools.4 It seems to be a kind of pseudo-his-
toricism, something quite empirical and mechanical, very close to the

most vulgar evolutionism. We might recall what Bertrando Spaventa says
about those who would like to keep people in the cradle (in the moment
of authority, that is, which may educate immature peoples towards lib-
erty), and to think of all life (the lives of others) as a cradle.5
It seems to me that the problem must be expressed differently in his-
torical terms: that a nation or social group that has achieved a higher
level of civilization cannot (and therefore needs to) accelerate the proc-
ess by which the more backward peoples and social groups are educated
by universalizing their new experience and interpreting it in an appro-
priate way. Thus, when the English enlist recruits from primitive peoples
who have never seen a modern rifle, they do not teach these recruits to
use a bow, a boomerang, or a blowgun. In fact, they teach them to han-
dle a rifle, even if the rules of instruction are necessarily adapted to the
mentality of that particular primitive people.
The way of thinking implied by Labriola’s answer seems not dialectical
and progressive, then, but quite mechanical and reactionary, like Gen-
tile’s pedagogic-religious thinking, which is just a derivative of the notion
that ‘religion is good for the people’ (people = child = primitive phase
of thinking corresponding to religion, and so on) – the (tendentious)
abandonment of education for the people. In the interview on the colo-
nial question, the mechanistic character of Labriola’s thinking seems
even plainer. Indeed, it is quite possible that it is ‘necessary to reduce the
Papuans to slavery’ in order to educate them, but it is no less necessary
that someone affirm that it is necessary only contingently in specific con-
ditions, that this necessity is historical and not absolute. It is necessary, in
fact, for there to be a struggle in this case, and this struggle is really the
condition whereby the Papuan’s sons and grandsons will be freed from
slavery and will be educated according to modern pedagogy. That there
is someone who resolutely insists that the slavery of the Papuans is only
a necessity of the moment and who rebels against that necessity is also a
philosophical-historical fact:
(a) because it will help reduce the time needed for the period of slavery;
(b) because it will induce those same Papuans to reflect on themselves,
to be self-educated, in that they will feel themselves dependent on
people of higher civilization;
(c) because only this resistance shows that we really are in a higher peri-
od of civilization, of thinking, and so on.
718
Gramsci, Introduction to Philosophy
The historicism of Labriola and Gentile is of a very inferior type: it is

the historicism of lawyers who say that the knout is not a knout when the
knout is ‘historical.’6 And there are other reasons why it is a very cloudy
and confused way of thinking. If a dogmatic exposition of educational
material is needed in the elementary schools or if a mythology is needed,
this does not mean that the dogma must be any particular religious dog-
ma or that the mythology must be any particular mythology.
That a backward people or social group needs coercive discipline
from outside in order to acquire civil education does not mean that it
must be reduced to slavery, unless we think that all coercion by the state
is slavery. For labour there is also coercion of the military type, which
can be applied to the dominant class as well, and this is not slavery but
the appropriate expression of modern pedagogy aimed at educating an
immature group (which is immature, admittedly, but alongside already
mature groups, while slavery is the organic expression of universal condi-
tions of immaturity). Taking the point of view of the liberal bourgeoisie
against the historicist sophisms of the reactionary classes, and, speaking
sarcastically, Spaventa was expressing a conception much more progres-
sive and dialectical than that of Labriola and Gentile.
5. Antonio Labriola. Hegel asserted that slavery is the cradle of liberty. For
Hegel, as for Machiavelli, the new principate (the period of dictatorship
that marks the beginnings of every new type of state) and the slavery
connected with it are justified only as education and discipline for peo-
ple who are not yet free. But Spaventa’s … comment was well chosen:
‘The cradle is not life, however. Some would like us to stay in the cradle
forever.’7 (A typical example of the cradle that becomes all of life is pro-
vided by protectionism in trade, which is always advocated and justified
as a cradle but tends to become an eternal cradle.)
6. Giovanni Gentile. On Gentile’s philosophy, compare the article in

Catholic Civilization … which is interesting for seeing how formal scholas-
tic logic can be suitable for criticizing the banal sophisms of the actual
idealism that claims to be the perfection of the dialectic.8 Really, why
should the formal dialectic be superior to formal logic? The only issue
is logical instruments, and a good old tool can be better than a more
modern shoddy tool. A good sailing ship is better then a powered ship
that is broken-down. In any case, it is interesting to read the criticisms
of Gentile’s thinking by the neo-scholastics … With his followers … and
collaborators on the Critical Journal of Italian Philosophy, Gentile can be
719
said to have inaugurated a true and proper seventeenth-century style in

which wit and polished phrases substitute for thinking in philosophy.
All the same, comparison of this group to that of the Bauers satirized in
the Holy Family is the most fitting approach and the most productive in
a literary sense.9
7. Antonio Rosmini. See his Essay on Communism and Socialism … Compare

it with the papal encyclicals issued before 1848 and cited in the Syllabus,
to serve as commentary on the first paragraph of the Manifesto in the
context of Italian history.10
Notes for an Introduction and Guide to the Study of Philosophy and the History
of Culture, I: Some Preliminary Points of Reference
12. We must eliminate the widespread prejudice that philosophy is

something very difficult because of the fact that it is intellectual activity
belonging to a particular category of expert specialists or professional
systematic philosophers. Accordingly, we must first demonstrate that all
people are philosophers by defining the limits and features of the spon-
taneous philosophy that belongs to ‘everyone,’ the philosophy contained
(a) in language itself, which is a collection of specific notions and con-

cepts and not just words grammatically devoid of content;
(b) in common sense and good sense; and
(c) in popular religion and hence also in the whole system of beliefs,
superstitions, opinions, and ways of seeing and behaving that show
up in what is generally called folklore.
Having shown that all people are philosophers – though each in his
own way, unconsciously, since even with only the smallest evidence of any
intellectual activity at all, with language, there is a specific conception of
the world – we move to the second moment, to the moment of criticism
and consciousness, to the question of which is preferable:
either to think without critical consciousness of thinking, in a frag-

mented and momentary way, participating in a conception of the
world mechanically imposed by the outside environment, by one of
many social groups in which everyone is automatically involved from
the moment of entering the conscious world (this can be one’s own
village or province; it can originate in the parish and the intellectual
720
activity of the pastor or the imposing old patriarch whose wisdom dic-
tates law, in the old woman who has inherited wisdom from witches, or
in the petty intellectual embittered by his own stupidities and inability
to act);
or else to work out our own conception of the world consciously and
critically, and then, on the basis of our own mental effort, to choose
our own sphere of activity, to participate actively in producing the
world’s history, to be our own guide, and not to accept, passively and
abjectly, any outside imprint on our own personality?
Note I. Through our own conception of the world, we belong to a defi-

nite grouping, specifically to the grouping of all the social elements that
share the same way of thinking and acting. We are always conformists in
some conformism, always mass-people or collective people. This is the
question: what is the historical type of the conformism and of the mass-
person of which we are part? When our conception of the world is not
critical and coherent but momentary and fragmented, we belong to a
multitude of human masses all at once, and the composition of our own
personalities is bizarre. In each person we find elements of the caveman
and principles of the most modern and advanced science, prejudices
of a narrowly local character from all past phases of history, and intui-
tions of a future philosophy that will belong to the human race unified
throughout the world. Therefore, to criticize our own conception of the
world means making it unitary and coherent and raising it to the level
attained by the most advanced thinking in the world. Thus, it also means
criticizing all the philosophy that has existed up to now, since strata left
over from that philosophy have been built into popular philosophy. The
beginning of critical development is consciousness of what we really are,
a ‘knowing thyself’ as product of the historical process that up to now has
left – without benefit of an inventory – an infinite collection of traces in
‘thyself.’ The first thing we need is such an inventory.
Note II. Philosophy cannot be separated from the history of philosophy or

culture from the history of culture. In the most direct and relevant sense,
there can be no philosophers – no one with a critical and coherent con-
ception of the world – without consciousness of their own historicity, of
the phase of development represented by it, and of the fact that it stands
in contradiction to other conceptions or parts of other conceptions. Our
own conception of the world corresponds to specific problems posed
721
by reality, problems that are completely defined and original in their

actuality. How is it possible to think about the present – a well-defined
present – with thinking that was worked out for problems of a past that
is often quite remote and superseded? When this happens, it means that
we are anachronists in our own time – fossils and not beings living in a
modern way. Or at least that we are composites of a bizarre kind. And it
does happen that social groups showing the most developed modernity
in some ways are in other ways held back by their social situation and are
thus incapable of full historical autonomy.
Note III. If it is true that every language contains elements of a concep-

tion of the world and a culture, it will also be true that we can evaluate
the greater or lesser complexity of any person’s conception of the world
from his language. Someone who speaks only dialect or understands the
national language at different levels necessarily has a more or less limit-
ed and provincial view of the world that has been fossilized, made anach-
ronistic in relation to the great currents of thinking that govern world
history. That person’s interests will be limited, more or less corporate
or economist, not universal.11 Although it is not always possible to learn
more foreign languages in order to put oneself in contact with other cul-
tural experiences, it is at least necessary to learn the national language
well.12 One great culture can be translated into the language of another
great culture, meaning that one great national language, complex and
historically rich, can somehow translate another great culture: it can be a
global form of expression. But a dialect cannot do the same thing.
Note IV. Creating a new culture does not mean just making some ‘origi-
nal’ discoveries on an individual basis; most of all, it also has the specific
sense of spreading truths in a critical way that have already been discov-
ered, socializing them, so to speak, and thereby making them a basis of
living activity, an element of coordination and of intellectual and moral
order. That a mass of people has been led to think coherently and in
a unitary way about current reality is a philosophical fact much more
important and original than the discovery by some philosophical genius
of a new truth that remains the property of small groups of intellectuals.
The connection between common sense, religion, and philosophy. Philosophy is

an intellectual framework, which neither religion nor common sense
can be. Notice that not even religion and common sense really coincide
but that religion is an element of decomposed common sense. Moreo-
722
ver, common sense is a collective term, like religion; there exists no single
common sense because it too is a product of historical becoming. Philos-
ophy is the critique and the overcoming of religion and common sense,
and as such it coincides with the good sense that is contrasted with com-
mon sense.
Relations between science, religion, and common sense. Religion and common
sense cannot constitute an intellectual framework because even in indi-
vidual consciousness, not to speak of collective consciousness, they can-
not be reduced to unity and coherence. Or they cannot be reduced to
unity and coherence freely, since this could happen authoritatively, as,
in fact, it did happen in the past – within certain limits. The problem of
religion is understood here not in the confessional sense but in lay terms
as a unity of faith between a conception of the world and a matching
rule of conduct. But why call this unity of faith religion and not ideology or
simply politics?
In fact, there exists no general philosophy. What exists are different
philosophies or conceptions of the world, and we always make a choice
among them. How does this choice happen? Is the choice a merely intel-
lectual fact or more complex? And does it not often happen that there
is a contradiction between the intellectual fact and the rule of conduct?
Which will be the real conception of the world, then: the one logically
asserted as an intellectual fact, or the one that comes from each person’s
real activity, the one implied by what the person does? And since what we
do is always to do something political, can we not say that everyone’s real
philosophy is contained completely in his politics? This conflict between
thinking and doing, the coexistence of two conceptions of the world,
one asserted in words and the other emerging from what we really do,
need not always have been in bad faith. Bad faith might be a satisfac-
tory explanation for some individuals taken one at a time, or even for
relatively large groups; it is not satisfactory, however, when the conflict
is clearly observed in the life of large masses. Then it can only be the
expression of deeper conflicts in the historical-social order.
This means that a social group with its own conception of the world,
perhaps in an embryonic state, which becomes manifest in action and
therefore discontinuously and episodically when such a group moves as
an organic whole – it means that this group has borrowed, for reasons
of intellectual submission and subordination, a conception not its own
from another group, putting it in words. The group also believes that
it follows this conception because it follows it in ‘normal times,’ when
723
conduct is not independent and autonomous but just submissive and

subordinated. This is why philosophy cannot be detached from politics,
then, and it can also be shown that the choice and critique of a concep-
tion of the world is itself a political fact.
We must next explain how it happens that many systems and cur-
rents of philosophy coexist in every period – how they emerge, how they
spread, why they follow certain lines of cleavage and spread in certain
directions, and so on. This shows how much we need to systematize
our own intuitions of the world and life in a critical and coherent way,
establishing exactly what system has to mean for it not to be taken in the
pedantic and professorial sense of the word. But working this out must
happen and can only happen in the context of the history of philosophy.
This history shows what sort of elaboration the thinking has endured
over the course of the centuries and what the cost was of collective effort
towards our current way of thinking, which sums up and digests all this
past history, even its mistakes and excesses. Besides, even though mis-
takes were made and corrected in the past, nothing says that they may
not be repeated in the present and need correcting again.
What idea of philosophy does the people make for itself? We can
reconstruct it from forms of speech in ordinary language. One of the
most widespread is ‘taking things philosophically,’ which, if we analyse it,
is not to be completely dismissed. True, it contains an implicit invitation
to resignation and patience. On the other hand, the more important
point seems to be the invitation to reflection, to realizing and explaining
that what happens is basically rational and that we must face it as such by
concentrating our own powers of reason and not allowing ourselves to
be carried away by instinctive and violent impulses.
These popular forms of speech could be grouped with similar expres-
sions – taking them from big dictionaries – from writers of a popular
kind who use the terms philosophy and philosophically. It will be seen that
these have the very precise meaning of overcoming basic animal passions
with a conception of necessity that gives conscious direction to our own
behaviour. This is the healthy core of common sense, which is exactly what
could be called good sense and deserves to be developed and made uni-
tary and coherent. For this reason it also appears that it is not possible to
disconnect what they call scientific philosophy from that common and popu-
lar philosophy, which is only a unordered collection of ideas and opin-
ions. At this point, we are posing the problem that is fundamental to any
conception of the world, to any philosophy which has become a cultural
movement, a religion, a faith, by having produced a practical activity and
724
a will that contain an implicit theory as their premise. (We could call it
an ideology if we were careful to give the term ideology the more general
meaning of a conception of the world manifested implicitly in art, law,
economic activity, and all phenomena of individual and collective life.)
This is the problem of preserving ideological unity in the whole social
block that is solidified and unified just by that particular ideology.
The power of religions, and the Catholic Church especially, has con-
sisted, and still consists, in their having a vigorous sense of the need for
doctrinal unity among the whole mass of the religious and in struggling
to prevent the higher intellectual strata from separating from the lower.
The Roman Church has always been the most tenacious in the struggle
to prevent the official formation of two religions, one for intellectuals
and the other for ‘simple souls.’ For the Church itself, this struggle has
not been without serious problems, but these problems are connected
with the historical process that is transforming all of civil society and
which, as a block, includes a corrosive critique of religions. All the more
conspicuous is the clergy’s organizing capacity in the cultural sphere and
in the relation – which in the abstract is rational and just – between intel-
lectuals and simple people that the Church has been able to establish in
its domain. Without doubt, the Jesuits have been the great architects of
this equilibrium, and to sustain it they have brought the Church a pro-
gressive movement that tends to satisfy certain needs of science and phi-
losophy. But the rhythm is so slow and deliberate that changes have not
been detected by the mass of simple people, even though the changes
appear revolutionary and demagogic to ‘integralists.’
In general, one of the greatest weaknesses of immanentist phi-
losophies has really been their inability to create an ideological unity
between low and high, between simple people and intellectuals. In the
history of Western civilization, this fact has been verified on a European
scale by the immediate failure of the Renaissance – and partly of the Ref-
ormation as well – in conflicts with the Roman Church. This weakness
manifests itself in the problem of the schools because the immanentist
philosophies have never even tried to construct a conception that could
take the place of religion in early education – hence the pseudo-histori-
cist sophism that leads non-religious (non-confessional) educators, who
are really atheists, to concede the teaching of religion because religion is
the philosophy of the infancy of the human race and is repeated in every
non-metaphorical infancy.13
Idealism has also shown itself averse to the cultural movements that
‘go towards the people’ and has been seen in the so-called Popular Uni-
725
versities and similar institutions, and the aversion has been not only to
their defective features, since, in that case, the movements would only
have had to try to do better. These movements were worth noticing, how-
ever, and they deserved study. They were successful in the sense that
they showed real enthusiasm on the part of the simple, a strong desire
to rise to a higher level of culture and a higher conception of the world.
Missing from the movements, however, was any organic unity, either of
philosophical thinking or of organizational strength and cultural central-
ization. They left the impression of being like the first contacts between
English merchants and black people in Africa: junk was exchanged for
gold nuggets. Besides, there could be organic unity of thought and cul-
tural strength only if between intellectuals, and simple people there had
existed the same unity that must exist between theory and practice –
if the intellectuals had been organically the intellectuals of those same
masses, working out and making coherent the principles and problems
that those masses created by their practical activity, thereby forming a
cultural and social block.
The question already mentioned was raised again: is a philosophical
movement what it is only by striving to develop a specialized culture for
limited groups of intellectuals? Or instead, is it what it is by never for-
getting to stay in contact with simple people while working to develop
a level of thinking that is higher than common sense and scientifically
coherent – indeed, finding in this contact the source of problems to be
studied and solved? A philosophy becomes historical only through this
contact, by purging itself of intellectualist elements of an individual kind
and becoming life …
A philosophy of praxis can present itself initially only with a polemi-
cal and critical attitude, as the overcoming of the preceding mode of
thinking and of the thinking that exists concretely (or the existing cul-
tural world). Above all, then, this philosophy presents itself as a critique
of common sense (although at first it bases itself on common sense in
order to show that everyone is a philosopher and that the point is not to
introduce a science de novo into everyone’s individual life but to renew
an activity that already exists and make it critical). Hence, it is a critique
of the philosophy of intellectuals that has produced the history of phi-
losophy, and which, in individual cases (since it really develops mainly in
the activity of single individuals with special gifts), can be thought of as
peaks in the progress of common sense – at least the common sense of
the better educated strata of society, and, through them, popular com-
mon sense as well.
726
This is why an introduction to the study of philosophy must provide

a synthetic explanation of problems that have emerged in the process
of developing culture in general. This culture is reflected only partial-
ly in the history of philosophy. And yet, in the absence of a history of
common sense (impossible to put together without documentary mate-
rial), that history is still the most important source of data for criticizing
those problems, for demonstrating their real value (if they still have one)
or the significance that they used to have as (superseded) links in the
chain – also for defining new current problems or the current view of
old problems.
The relation between higher philosophy and common sense is secured
by politics, just as politics secures the relation between the Catholicism
of intellectuals and that of simple people. Differences between the two
cases are fundamental, however. That the Church has to face a problem
with simple people really means that a breach has occurred in the com-
munity of the faithful – a breach that cannot be healed by elevating the
simple to the level of intellectuals. (The Church has not even set itself
this task, which is out of line intellectually and economically with its cur-
rent powers.) Instead, there is iron discipline to keep the intellectuals
from trespassing certain limits on the distinction between them and sim-
ple people, to keep them from making it catastrophic and irreparable.
In the past, these breaches in the community of the faithful were healed
by powerful mass movements that brought about, or else were subsumed
by, the formation of new religious orders around strong personalities
(Dominic, Francis) …14 But the Counter-Reformation sterilized this pro-
fusion of popular forces. The Society of Jesus is the last great religious
order: with its reactionary and authoritarian origins and its ‘diplomatic’
and repressive character, the Society’s birth signalled the rigidifying of
the Catholic organism. For the mass of the faithful, the new orders that
have come after the Jesuits have very little religious significance but great
disciplinary significance. They are branches and tentacles of the Society
of Jesus or have come to be that – not forces for innovation and develop-
ment but tools of resistance to preserve political gains. Catholicism has
become Jesuitry. Modernism has created not religious orders but a politi-
cal party: the Christian Democrats …15
The position of the philosophy of praxis is antithetical to this Catholic
position. The philosophy of praxis does not try to keep simple people
inside their primitive philosophy of common sense but aims instead to
lead them to a higher conception of life. If it asserts the need for contact
between intellectuals and simple people, it is not to limit scientific activ-
727
ity and maintain unity at the low level of the masses but actually to con-
struct a moral-intellectual block that makes mass intellectual progress
– not just progress for a few groups of intellectuals – politically possible.
The active person of the masses works in a practical way but does not
have a clear theoretical consciousness of the work that he does, which
is also knowledge of the world inasmuch as it transforms the world. His
theoretical consciousness can actually be in conflict historically with his
work. We can almost say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or
one self-contradictory consciousness): one implied in his work and really
uniting him with all his co-workers in the practical transformation of
reality; the other superficially explicit or verbal, inherited from the past,
and accepted without criticism.
This ‘verbal’ conception is not without consequences, however: it ties
back to a particular social group and influences moral conduct and the
direction of will in a more or less vigorous way. This can continue up to
the point where the contradictory character of consciousness permits
no action, no decision, and no choice, producing a state of moral and
political passivity. Our critical understanding of ourselves thus comes
about through a struggle of political hegemonies, of opposing directions,
first in the field of ethics, then in politics, leading to a higher develop-
ment of our own conception of reality.16 Consciousness of being part of
a particular hegemonic force (political consciousness) is the first phase
of movement towards a subsequent and progressive self-consciousness in
which theory and practice are finally united. Also, this does not make the
unity of theory and practice a mechanically given fact but a becoming
of history that has its elementary and primitive phase in the sense of dis-
tinction and apartness, of barely instinctive independence, and that then
progresses to real and complete possession of a unitary and coherent
conception of the world. This is why we must stress that political devel-
opment of the concept of hegemony represents great philosophical as
well as practical-political progress, why it necessarily entails and assumes
an intellectual unity and an ethics conforming to a conception of reality
that has superseded common sense and has become (though still within
narrow bounds) critical.
In the most recent developments of the philosophy of praxis, how-
ever, the deepening of the concept of unity of theory and practice is
still only in its initial phase. Residues of a mechanical conception still
remain when they talk about theory as ‘complementary’ or ‘accessory’
to practice – theory as the handmaid of practice. It seems right that this
problem too must be posed historically, as one aspect of the political
728
problem of intellectuals. Historically and politically, critical self-con-

sciousness means creating an élite of intellectuals. A mass of humans
does not ‘distinguish’ itself and become independent on its own without
being organized (broadly speaking). And there is no organization with-
out intellectuals, without organizers and leaders, without the theoretical
side of the theory/practice nexus being made distinct and concrete in a
stratum of people who specialize in working things out conceptually and
philosophically. But this process of creating intellectuals is long, hard,
and full of contradictions, full of advances and retreats, dispersals and
reconsolidations that sometimes put the loyalty of the masses to a hard
test. (Loyalty and discipline are the initial forms taken by the support
of the masses and their collaboration in developing the whole phenom-
enon of culture.)
The process of development is tied to a mass/intellectual dialectic.
The stratum of intellectuals develops quantitatively and qualitatively, but
any leap by the intellectual stratum towards new scope and complex-
ity is tied to an analogous mass movement of simple people, who raise
themselves towards higher levels of culture and simultaneously broaden
their circle of influence when individuals, or even groups of some size,
point towards the stratum of specialist intellectuals. But in this process
moments keep recurring to create distance and loss of contact between
the masses and the intellectuals (or some intellectuals, or a group of
them), and this gives them the impression that intellectual theory is
accessory, complementary, or subordinate. After not just distinguish-
ing but also separating and severing the two components of the theory/
practice nexus (an operation that is really just mechanical and conven-
tional), insisting on the practical element means moving through a rela-
tively primitive historical phase that is still economic-corporate, where
the general framework of structure is transformed quantitatively, and the
appropriate quality-superstructure is in the process of emerging but has
not yet formed organically.17
We must emphasize the meaning and importance that political parties
have in modern times for developing and spreading conceptions of the
world, basically by working out the ethics and politics suited to them,
functioning like historical experimenters who work on these concep-
tions. Parties select individuals from the working masses, and the select-
ing goes on both in the practical field and conjointly in the theoretical,
through a relation between theory and practice that becomes closer as
the conception is more vitally and radically innovative and antagonistic
to old ways of thinking. Therefore we can say that parties are laborato-
729
ries for the new comprehensive and totalitarian types of intelligentsia, a

crucible for the unification of theory and practice understood as a real
historical process …
We can see how the passage from a mechanical and purely external
conception to an activist conception came about – that conception com-
ing closer, as we have observed, to a correct understanding of the unity
of theory and practice, even though it still did not get the whole synthet-
ic meaning. We can observe how the determinist, fatalist, and mecha-
nistic element has been an ideological aroma coming straight from the
philosophy of practice, a form of religion and a stimulant (but like a nar-
cotic), necessitated and justified historically by the subaltern character of
particular social strata.18 When we do not have the initiative in the strug-
gle, and then the struggle itself ends up being identified with a series of
defeats, mechanical determinism becomes a formidable force for moral
resistance and solidarity, for patient and stubborn perseverance …
Why are the limits and territory of ‘the force of events’ restricted? Basi-
cally, because if the subaltern was a thing yesterday, today it is no longer
a thing but an historical person, a protagonist. If it was not accounta-
ble yesterday because it was resistant to an external will, today it feels
itself accountable because it no longer resists but acts, and is necessarily
active and enterprising. But even yesterday was it ever mere resistance, a
mere thing, mere unaccountability? Certainly not. And it must really be
stressed that fatalism is just a covering-up of real active will by weakness.
This is why we must always point out the futility of mechanical determin-
ism, which can be explained as naïve mass-philosophy, and, only as such,
an intrinsic part of power. But when it comes to be adopted by reflective
and coherent philosophy on the part of intellectuals, it becomes a cause
of passivity, of foolish self-sufficiency – and it becomes that without wait-
ing for the subaltern to become directive and accountable. Part of the
masses, even when subaltern, is always in charge and accountable, and
the philosophy of the part always precedes the philosophy of the whole,
not only as theoretical anticipation but as actual necessity.
That the mechanistic conception has been a religion of subalterns is
apparent from an analysis of the development of the Christian religion.
In a particular historical era and in specific historical conditions, Christi-
anity was and continues to be a necessity – a necessary form of the will of
the popular masses, a particular form of the world’s rationality and life
that set the general contexts of real practical activity … But the position
of Calvinism, with its iron conception of predestination and grace defin-
ing a vast expansion of the spirit of initiative (or becoming the form of
this movement) is still more expressive and meaningful …19
730
Why and how do new conceptions of the world spread and become
popular? In this process of diffusion (which is, at the same time, a replace-
ment of the old, and, quite often, a combining of old and new), how
and to what degree do these conceptions influence the rational form in
which the new conception is presented and explained; the authority (to
the extent that this is recognized and valued, at least generically) of the
person who explains and of the thinkers and experts whom the person
cites to support himself; and membership in the same organization for
anyone who supports the new conception (after joining the organization
for a different motive, however, and not sharing the new conception)? In
reality, these things vary depending on the social group and the cultural
level of the particular group. But the question is especially interesting
in the case of masses of people who find it harder to change concep-
tions, and, in any event, never change them at all by accepting things in
pure form, so to speak, but always and only in a more or less bizarre and
irregular mix.
Logically coherent rational form, the thorough reasoning that disre-
gards no positive or negative argument of any weight, has its importance
but is very far from being decisive. It can be decisive in a minor way
when the person involved is already in a state of intellectual crisis, waver-
ing between old and new, having lost faith in the old but not yet having
decided for the new, and so on. We can say the same for the authority
of thinkers and experts. Their authority is great among the people. But
every conception, in fact, has thinkers and experts to put forward, and
authority is divided. Besides, it is possible to make distinctions about any
thinker, to raise doubts about what was really said in the way it was said,
and so on. We can conclude that the process of spreading new concep-
tions happens for political reasons – social reasons, in the final analy-
sis – but that the formal element of logical coherence, the element of
authority, and the element of organization have very large roles in this
process immediately after the general orientation has occurred, both in
single individuals and in large groups. From this we conclude, then, that
in the masses as such, philosophy can be lived only as a faith.
After all, picture the intellectual position of a man of the people. He
has formed various opinions, convictions, rules of judgment, and rules
of conduct for himself. Anyone who takes a position opposed to his, as
long as that person is intellectually superior, knows how to argue a case
better than he, how to swindle him with logic, and so on. So why should
the man of the people change his convictions? Because he cannot pre-
vail in a particular discussion? But then he might need to change once
a day, whenever he meets an ideological opponent intellectually supe-
731
rior to him. So from what ingredients does he make his philosophy?

Especially his philosophy in the form most important to him – a rule of
conduct? The nature of the most important component is undoubtedly
not rational: it is faith. But faith in whom and what? Faith specifically
in the social group to which he belongs inasmuch as he thinks, broadly
speaking, as it thinks.
The man of the people thinks that so many people cannot be as mas-
sively wrong as his opponent in argument would have him believe. True,
he thinks himself incapable of backing up and developing his own rea-
sons as his opponent can do with his reasons. But he also thinks that in
his group there is someone who could do this, surely even better than
that particular opponent. And he actually remembers hearing the rea-
sons behind his faith broadly and coherently explained in a way that
has kept him convinced of them. He does not remember the reasons
concretely and could not repeat them, but he knows they exist because
he has heard them explained, and he has stayed convinced. Having once
been convinced in an illuminating way is the persistent reason for the
persistence of the conviction, even if he does not know how to say any-
thing more about it.
But these considerations lead to the conclusion of great instability in
the new convictions of the popular masses, especially if these new con-
victions are in conflict with (also new) orthodox convictions that are
in social conformity with the broad interests of the dominant classes.
We can see this by reflecting on the fortunes of religions and churches.
A religion, and a particular church, maintains its community of faith-
ful (within certain limits given by the necessities of general historical
development) to the extent that it keeps its own faith permanently and
organizationally, tirelessly repeating its apologetics, always battling at
every moment by using the same arguments, and maintaining a hierar-
chy of intellectuals to give the faith at least the appearance of respect-
able thinking. Whenever the continuity of relations between Church and
faithful has been violently interrupted for political reasons, which hap-
pened during the French Revolution, the losses sustained by the Church
have been incalculable. And when conditions that make it hard to keep
up habitual practices have gone beyond certain limits of time, we have to
think that such losses might have been definitive and that a new religion
might have emerged – as it did emerge in France, after all, in combina-
tion with the old Catholicism.
From this come particular requirements for any cultural movement
that tries to replace common sense and old conceptions of the world in
general:
732
(a) never tire of repeating one’s arguments (while varying their literary
form); repetition is the most effective teaching method when work-
ing with the popular mind;
(b) work ceaselessly to elevate the intellectual conditions of ever larger
strata of the people, to give personality to the amorphous compo-
nent of the masses, which means working to stimulate intellectu-
al élites of a new kind that emerge directly from the masses and
remain in contact with it in order to become its ‘stays.’20
If the second requirement is met, this is what really changes the ideo-
logical panorama of an era. On the other hand, these élites cannot be
constructed and developed unless inside them there arises a hierarchy
of authority and intellectual competence that can culminate in a great
individual philosopher. This person must be capable of reliving, in a
concrete way, the needs of the mass ideological community; capable of
understanding that it cannot have the agility of movement possessed by
an individual mind; and therefore capable of developing the collective
doctrine formally in a manner that is closer and better suited to the way
that a collective thinker thinks.
It is obvious that a mass construct of that type cannot arise arbitrar-
ily, around just any ideology, through the formally constructive will of
a person or group advocating its own religious or philosophical convic-
tions out of fanaticism. The adhering or non-adhering of the masses to
an ideology is how a real critique occurs of the rationality and historicity
of ways of thinking. Arbitrary constructs are eliminated rather quickly
in historical competition even if, through a combination of currently
favourable circumstances, they sometimes manage to gain some popular
support, while constructions that correspond to the needs of a complex
and organic historical period always end up asserting themselves, and
also prevailing, though they pass through many intermediate phases
where they assert themselves only in more or less bizarre and irregular
combinations.
These developments pose many problems, the most important of
which are included in the mode and character of relations among var-
ious strata of the intellectually qualified – in the importance and use
that the creative contribution of higher groups must and can have in
connection with the organic capacity for discussion and development of
new critical concepts on the part of intellectually lower strata. The point,
then, is to define the limits of freedom of discussion and propaganda,
a freedom that must not be understood in the sense of administration
and policing but in the sense of self-defined limits that leaders impose
733
on their own activity – or rather, in the strict sense, defining the direction
of cultural politics.
Who will define the ‘rights of science’ and limits on scientific inquiry,
in other words, and will it be possible for these rights and limits to be
properly defined? It seems necessary that the labour of seeking new and
better truths, more coherent and clearer formulations of those same
truths, should be left to the free initiative of individual experts, even
if they keep questioning the very principles that seem most essential.
Besides, it will not be hard to make it clear when such initiatives for dis-
cussion have interested motives and are not of a scientific kind. Nor is it
impossible to think that individual initiatives might be disciplined and
organized by passing through the sieve of academies or cultural insti-
tutes of various kinds and becoming public only after they are vetted,
and so on.
It would be interesting to make a concrete study, for a single country,
of the cultural organization that keeps the country’s ideological life mov-
ing, and then examine its functioning in practice. Studying the numeri-
cal relation between people professionally committed to active cultural
labour and the population of each country would also be useful, with a
rough calculation of the unemployed. By number of people employed,
schools at all levels, along with the church, are the two largest cultur-
al organizations in every country. There are also newspapers, journals,
book-selling and private educational institutions, either to complete
state schooling or to serve as cultural institutions of the People’s Uni-
versity type. Other professions incorporate no small part of culture in
their specialized activity – physicians, military officers, and lawyers. But it
should be noted that in all countries, though in varying degree, there is a
big break between the masses of the people and intellectual groups, even
those that are most numerous and most on the margins of the nation,
like teachers and priests. This happens because the state as such has no
unitary, coherent, homogenous conception, even where the state claims
in its speeches to have one, and so intellectual groups are fragmented
from stratum to stratum and within the same stratum. Except in some
countries, the university plays no unifying role. A private thinker often
has more influence than the whole university structure …21
II: Observations and Critical Notes on an Attempt at a People’s

Essay on Sociology22
13. A work like the People’s Essay, meant basically for a community of
734
readers who are not professional intellectuals, should have started with
a critical analysis of the philosophy of common sense, ‘the philosophy of
non-philosophers,’ a conception of the world absorbed uncritically by
the different social and cultural domains in which the moral personality
of the average person develops. Common sense is no single conception,
stable in time and space. It is philosophy’s folklore, and, like folklore,
it appears in countless forms. Its fundamental and most characteristic
feature (even in individual minds) is that it is a fragmented, incoher-
ent, and inconsistent conception, conforming to the cultural and social
position of the multitude whose philosophy it is. When a homogenous
social group develops in history, there also develops – counter to com-
mon sense – a homogenous philosophy that is coherent and systematic.
The People’s Essay goes wrong by starting (implicitly) with the assump-
tion that this development of an original philosophy for the masses of
people is opposed by the great traditional systems of philosophy and
the religion of the higher clergy, conceptions of the world belonging to
intellectuals and the high culture. In reality, these systems are unknown
to the multitude and have no direct effect on how they think and act.
This certainly does not mean that they are completely without historical
effect, but the effect is of a different kind. These systems influence the
popular masses as an external political force, as an element of the force
that keeps the ruling classes together, and thus as an element of subor-
dination to an outside hegemony. This is a negative limit on the original
thinking of the masses of people. It has no positive influence as a vital
ferment of internal change acting on what the masses think, embryoni-
cally and chaotically, about the world and life.
The main elements of common sense are furnished by religions, and
so the relation between common sense and religion is much deeper than
the one between common sense and the philosophical systems of intel-
lectuals. But critical distinctions have to be made for religion as well.
Every religion, even the Catholic religion (indeed, especially the Catho-
lic religion, precisely because of its efforts to remain superficially unitary
by not breaking up into national churches and social stratifications), is
really a multiplicity of distinct and often contradictory religions. There
is a Catholicism of peasants, a Catholicism of the petty bourgeoisie and
the urban workers, a Catholicism of women, and a Catholicism of intel-
lectuals, which is itself variegated and disaggregated. But it is not only
the cruder and less developed forms of these various Catholicisms, as
they actually exist, that influence common sense. Earlier religions and
earlier forms of today’s Catholicism, popular heretical movements and
735
learned superstitions tied to past religions, have influenced current

common sense and are components of it. The dominant elements of
common sense are realistic and materialist, the direct product of raw
sensation, but this does not contradict the religious element – far from
it. These elements are superstitious, however, and uncritical. Accord-
ingly, there is a danger present in the People’s Essay, which, instead of
criticizing them scientifically, often confirms these uncritical elements
in which common sense has still remained Ptolemaic, anthropomorphic,
and anthropocentric.
What has been said up to now about the People’s Essay – its criticiz-
ing systematic philosophies instead of starting with criticism of common
sense – must be understood as a methodological point, within certain
limits. I certainly do not mean to say that criticizing the systematic philos-
ophies of intellectuals is to be avoided. When a component of the masses
critically overcomes common sense in a particular case, by this very fact
it accepts a new philosophy. Hence, in an account of the philosophy of
praxis, we see the need for the polemic against traditional philosophies.
In fact, because mass philosophy has this tendentious character, the phi-
losophy of praxis can be conceived only in polemic form, as perpetual
struggle. However, the point of departure must always be the common
sense that automatically becomes the philosophy of the multitudes, and
its aim is to make them homogenous ideologically.
There are more treatises on common sense in French philosophical
literature than in other national literatures. This is due to the character
of French culture, which is more strictly national-popular.23 More than
elsewhere, for various reasons of tradition, intellectuals in France tend
to stay close to the people in order to guide them ideologically and keep
them connected to the ruling group. Hence, it will be possible to find
much material on common sense in French writing to use and to devel-
op. The attitude of French philosophical culture towards common sense
can actually provide a model of hegemonic ideological construction.
English and American culture can also supply much data, but not in a
way that is as complete and organic as the French case.
Common sense has been treated in many ways: as a direct basis for
philosophy; or as criticized from the point view of another philosophy.
In reality, and in every case, the result has been to overcome a particular
case of common sense and make another one out of it that is closer to
the leadership’s conception of the world …
Croce’s attitude to common sense seems unclear. For Croce, the
proposition that every person is a philosopher weighs too heavily on
736
the evaluation of common sense. Croce seems satisfied that particular

philosophical propositions are shared by common sense, but what can
this mean concretely? Common sense is a chaotic aggregate of different
conceptions, and we can find whatever we like in it. Besides, this attitude
of Croce’s towards common sense has not led to a conception of culture
that is productive from the national-popular perspective – not to a more
concretely historicist conception of philosophy, which, in any event, can
come to be only in the philosophy of praxis.
For Gentile, see his article on ‘The Humanist Conception of the
World’ … where he writes that ‘philosophy might be defined as a great
effort made by reflective thinking to achieve critical certainty about the
truths of common sense and naïve consciousness, those truths of which
we can say that each person feels them naturally and that they constitute
the solid structure of the mentality that each person uses in order to
live.’ This appears to be another example of the raw crudity of Gentile’s
thinking: his claim seems to derive naïvely from Croce’s claims about the
people’s way of thinking as confirmation of the truth of particular philo-
sophical propositions. And Gentile has more to say: ‘A healthy person
believes in God and the freedom of his spirit.’24
Thus, in these two propositions from Gentile we may surely find:
(a) an extra-historical ‘human nature,’ exactly what we do not know;

(b) the human nature of the healthy person;
(c) the common sense of the healthy person, and thus also a common
sense of the unhealthy person.
And what will ‘healthy person’ mean? Physically healthy? Not mad? Or
rather that this person thinks in a healthy way – a conformist, a philis-
tine? And what is meant by ‘truths of common sense’? Gentile’s philoso-
phy, for instance, is completely contrary to common sense, whether by
common sense we mean the naïve philosophy of the people that abhors
any kind of subjective idealism or good sense as an attitude of disdain for
the abstrusities, complexities, and obscurities of certain scientific and
philosophical views. This flirtation of Gentile’s with common sense is
quite amusing.
What has been said up to now does not mean that there are no truths
in common sense. It means that common sense is an ambiguous, con-
tradictory, and polymorphous notion and that referring to common
sense as confirmation of truth is nonsense. We can say correctly that a
particular truth has become common sense in order to show that it has
737
spread beyond the sphere of intellectual groups. But in that case we are
only making an observation of an historical nature and a claim about
historical rationality. In this sense, provided that that we use it soberly,
the argument has its value, precisely because common sense is narrowly
misoneist and conservative, while success in making us dig into a new
truth is proof that this truth has enough strength to grow and to be clear.
Remember Giusti’s epigram:
Good Sense once ran a school,

but in our schools he’s dead:
Science, his little girl –
to see how it was done –
hit him over the head.25
This could serve to introduce a chapter and to show how the terms
good sense and common sense are used ambiguously: both as philosophy, a
particular mode of thought, with a certain content of beliefs and opin-
ions; and as an attitude, well-meaning and generous in its disdain for the
abstruse and convoluted. This is why it was necessary for Science to kill
a certain kind of traditional Good Sense in order to create a ‘new’ good
sense.
Marx often refers to common sense and the strength of its convic-
tions. But his references point not to the validity of the content of those
beliefs, just to their formal strength and hence their commanding char-
acter when they produce rules of conduct. In fact, these references imply
an assertion of the need for new popular beliefs, for a new common
sense, and thus a new culture and a new philosophy rooted in popular
consciousness, with the same strength and power of command found in
traditional beliefs.
Note I. Regarding Gentile’s statements about common sense, we must add

that the author’s language is deliberately ambiguous because of an ideo-
logical opportunism that is not worth much. When Gentile writes that ‘a
healthy person believes in God and the freedom of his spirit’ in order to
give an example of one of those truths of common sense whose critical
certainty is worked out by reflective thought, he wants to persuade us
that his philosophy achieves critical certainty for the truths of Catholi-
cism. But the Catholics do not swallow it, maintaining that Gentile’s ide-
alism is pure paganism. All the same, Gentile insists on it, preserving an
ambiguity that is not without consequences for creating an environment
738
of louche culture in which all cats are grey, religion embraces atheism,
immanence flirts with transcendence and Antonio Bruers rejoices, since
the more tangled the knot and the darker the thought, the more Bruers
is seen to have been right in his pidgin syncretism26 … If Gentile’s words
meant what they say, literally, actual idealism would have become ‘the
manservant of theology’27 …
14. On Metaphysics. Can we derive a critique of metaphysics and specu-

lative philosophy from the People’s Essay? It must be said that the very
concept of metaphysics eludes the author inasmuch as the concepts of
historical movement, becoming, and hence the dialectic itself elude
him. Thinking of a philosophical assertion as true at a particular time in
history, as a necessary expression inseparable from a particular historical
event, from a specific praxis, and yet overcome and frustrated at a later
time, without lapsing thereby into scepticism and moral-ideological rela-
tivism, and thus conceiving of philosophy as historicity – this is a mental
operation that is rather arduous and difficult. Instead, the author falls
straight into dogmatism and thus into a form of metaphysics, although it
is naïve. This is clear from the start, from the statement of the problem,
from his desire to construct a systematic ‘sociology’ of the philosophy of
praxis. In this case, sociology just means naïve metaphysics.
In the last paragraph of the introduction, the author cannot respond
to objections from various critics who maintain that the philosophy of
praxis can exist only in concrete acts of history. He does not succeed in
developing the notion of the philosophy of praxis as an historical meth-
odology and then developing this as philosophy, as the only concrete
philosophy. This means that he does not succeed in posing and solving,
from the perspective of the real dialectic, the problem that Croce has
posed and has tried to solve from a theoretical point of view.
In place of an historical methodology, in place of a philosophy,
the author constructs a survey of particular problems conceived and
addressed dogmatically when they are not addressed in a purely verbal
way, by paralogisms as naïve as they are pretentious. This survey might
still be useful and interesting if only it had been presented as such, with
no pretense of providing rough schemes of an empirical nature, use-
ful for immediate application. Otherwise, we realize that it must be
this way because in the People’s Essay the philosophy of praxis is not an
autonomous and original philosophy; it is the sociology of metaphysical
materialism. As such, metaphysics means only a particular philosophical
formulation, the speculative formulation of idealism – definitely not any-
739
thing systematic posited as extra-historical truth, as an abstract universal

beyond time and space.
The (implicit) philosophy of the People’s Essay can be called a positiv-
ist Aristotelianism, an adaptation of formal logic to the methods of the
physical and natural sciences. The laws of causality, the search for regu-
larity, for the normal and the uniform, replace the dialectic of history.
But from this way of thinking how can one derive the overcoming, the
‘praxis overthrown’?28 Mechanically, the effect can never overcome the
cause or the system of causes, so there can be no development other
than the dull and vulgar development of evolutionism. If theoretical ide-
alism is the science of the categories and of the a priori synthesis of the
Spirit – a form of anti-historicist abstraction – the philosophy implicit in
the People’s Essay is an idealism being overthrown, meaning that empiri-
cal concepts and classifications take the place of theoretical categories,
though they are just as abstract and anti-historical …
20. The objectivity and reality of the external world … To get a precise under-
standing of meanings that the problem of the external world can have, it
can help to follow the example of notions of ‘east’ and ‘west’ that never
cease to be objectively real even though analysis shows them to be noth-
ing more than a conventional construct, which is historical-cultural (the
terms artificial and conventional often indicate historical facts produced
by the development of civilization, not rationally arbitrary nor individu-
ally fabricated constructs). We should also recall the example contained
in a little book by Bertrand Russell translated into Italian … The Problems
of Philosophy. This is roughly what Russell says: ‘Unless humans exist on
earth, we cannot think about the existence of London or Edinburgh, but
we can think about the existence of two points in space, where London
and Edinburgh are today, one north and the other south.’29 One can
object that unless we think about the existence of people, we cannot
think about thinking – in which case, generally, we cannot think about
any fact or relation that exists only insofar as people exist.
Without people, what would north/south and east/west mean? These
are real relations, and yet they would not exist without people and with-
out the development of civilization. It is clear that east and west are arbi-
trary constructs, conventional and historical, since outside of real history
every place on earth is east and west at the same time. This can be seen
more clearly by the fact that these terms have not been crystallized from
the perspective of some sad, hypothetical person-in-general but from the
perspective of the educated European classes which have made them
740
accepted everywhere by means of their worldwide hegemony. Japan is

the Far East not only for Europe but also for the American in California
and perhaps for the Japanese himself, who can call Egypt the Near East
because of English cultural politics. Through their historical content,
then, lumped together with geographical terms, the expressions East
and West have turned out to indicate particular relations between com-
plexes of various civilizations. Thus, when Italians talk about Morocco,
they often describe it as an ‘Oriental’ country, referring to Moslem and
Arab civilization. And these references are real, corresponding to real
facts, allowing us to travel land and sea and get where we really want to
go, to foresee the future, to objectify reality, to grasp the objectivity of the
external world. Rational and real are identified.
Without having understood this relation, it seems we cannot under-
stand the philosophy of praxis – its position in contrast to idealism and
mechanical materialism, and the importance and meaning of the doc-
trine of superstructures. It is not correct that in the philosophy of prax-
is the Hegelian Idea has been replaced by the concept of structure, as
Croce claims.30 The Hegelian Idea has dissolved in structure as much
as in superstructures, and the whole way of thinking about philosophy
has been historicized, meaning that a new way of philosophizing, more
concrete and historical than the previous way, has begun to emerge …
32. Quantity and Quality. In the People’s Essay it is said (off-handedly, since
the claim is not justified or evaluated, and does not express a produc-
tive concept, being casual, without antecedent or consequent connec-
tions) that every society is something more than the mere sum of its
individual parts. Abstractly, this is true, but what does it mean concretely?
The explanation provided, empirically, was often baroque. It is said that
a hundred cows one by one are quite different than a hundred cows
together because then they are a herd – which is simply a question of
words. Likewise, it is said that by counting up to ten we get a decade, as if
there were not also a pair, a triplet, a tetrad, and so on – just a different
way of counting.
The more concrete explanation in theoretical-practical terms can be
found in the first volume of the Critique of Political Economy, where it is
shown that there is a production quota in the factory system that can
be assigned not to any single worker but to the whole workforce, to the
collective human.31 Based on the division of labour and jobs, something
similar happens with the whole society, which therefore is worth more
than the sum of its parts. How the philosophy of praxis has concretized
741
the Hegelian law of quantity becoming quality is another of those theo-

retical points that the People’s Essay does not develop but treats as under-
stood, when it is not content with simple plays on words – the water that
changes temperature changes state (ice, liquid, gas), a purely mechani-
cal fact caused by an external agent (fire, sun, or the evaporation of solid
carbonic acid, and so on).32
For man, what will this external agent be? In the factory it is the divi-
sion of labour and so on, conditions created by man himself. In society it
is the collection of productive forces. But the author of the Essay has not
realized that if every social aggregate is something more (and also differ-
ent) than the sum of its parts, this means that the law or principle that
explains society’s development cannot be a physical law since in physics
we never leave the domain of quantity, except metaphorically. In the
philosophy of praxis, however, quality is always connected to quantity,
and it may be that the most original and fertile part of this philosophy
lies in that connection. In fact, idealism hypostasizes this something-more
(quality) by making it an entity on its own (Spirit), just as religion had
made a divinity of it. But if the quality of religion and idealism is an
hypostasis, an arbitrary abstraction and not a process of analytic distinc-
tion required in practice for pedagogic reasons, the quality of vulgar
materialism is also an hypostasis that divinizes a hypostatic matter.
We must compare this way of looking at the conception of society with
the conception of the state that the actual idealists have. For actualists,
the state really ends up being this something that is higher than individu-
als … The conception of the vulgar actualists has fallen so low into pure
parroting that comic caricature has become the only possible critique.
One could have imagined a recruit who explains to the draft board the
theory of the state that is higher than individuals, asking that they leave
his physical and material person free and draft that bit of something that
contributes to the construction of the national something that is the state.
Or recall the story in the Novellino in which the wise Saladin settles the
argument between the grocer, who wants to be paid for the use of aro-
matic emanations from his foods, and the beggar, who does not want to
pay: Saladin makes him pay by jingling coins, telling the grocer to pocket
the sound in the same way that the beggar had ingested the aromatic
effluvia …33
44. The Technique of Thinking. On this topic, compare the claim made in
the preface to the Antidühring … that ‘the art of operating with concepts
is nothing innate or given in ordinary consciousness; it is a technical
742
effort of thinking that has a long history, no more nor less than experi-
mental research in the natural sciences’ … Citing this passage, Croce
notes in parentheses that the issue is not a foreign concept but one that
had already become common sense before Engels.34 The issue, however,
is not the greater or lesser originality or strangeness of the concept, in
this case and in this context; it is the importance and position that the
concept must have in a system of philosophy of praxis, and the point is
to see if the concept gets the practical and cultural recognition that it
must have.
We must refer to this concept to understand what Engels means when
he writes that some old philosophy – including formal logic – remains
after the innovations produced by the philosophy of praxis, a claim
that Croce reports in his essay on Hegel, marking it with an exclama-
tion point.35 Croce’s amazement at the ‘rehabilitation’ of formal logic
that seems implicit in the claim that Engels made must be connected
with Croce’s teaching on the technique of art, for example, and with
the whole series of other views that add up to Croce’s basic anti-histor-
icism and his being abstract in method. (The distinctions, the principle
of method that Croce was proud to have introduced into the dialectical
tradition, became scientific from the start, causing abstractness and anti-
historicism in their formal application.)36
But the analogy between artistic technique and the technique of think-
ing is superficial and false, at least in a certain sense. An artist can exist
and understand nothing consciously or reflectively about earlier devel-
opments in technique. (He will get his own technique naïvely from com-
mon sense.) But this cannot happen in the domain of science, where
there is progress and must be progress, where the progress of knowledge
is closely connected with instrumental, technical, and methodological
progress and is actually conditioned on it – especially in the experimen-
tal sciences in the strict sense. This immediately makes us ask wheth-
er modern idealism – and Croceanism especially, with its reduction of
philosophy to a methodology of history – is not basically a technique,
whether the very concept of speculation is not basically a technical
inquiry, though understood in a higher sense, obviously, as less external
and material than the inquiry that resulted in the construction of for-
mal scholastic logic … A question may arise about the place that such
a technique must have in contexts of philosophical science, whether it
becomes part of that science as such, as already developed, or part of
the propaedeutic to science and of the process of its development as sci-
ence. (No one can deny the importance of catalytic agents in chemistry
743
just because no trace of them remains in the final product.) The same
problem arises for the dialectic, which is a new way of thinking, a new
philosophy, but thus also a new technique.
The principle of distinction maintained by Croce – and hence all his
battles with Gentile’s actualism – are they not technical problems too?
Can we detach the technical fact from the philosophical fact? If not, we
can isolate it for practical educational purposes. In fact, we must note
the importance of the technique of thinking in constructing educational
programs. And the technique of thinking cannot be compared with old
rhetorical techniques. These did not create artists, did not create taste,
and did not produce criteria for appraising beauty. They were useful
only for creating a cultural conformism and a language for conversa-
tion among the educated. The technique of thinking, developed as such,
will surely not create great philosophers, but it will provide criteria of
judgment and verification and will correct deformities in the way that
common sense thinks. This would be interesting: a comparative test of
the technique of common sense, of the philosophy of the man on the
street, and the technique of reflective and coherent thought. Macaulay’s
observation about the logical weaknesses of culture formed by means of
oratory and declamation also holds in this case.37
This whole topic must be carefully studied after gathering all the
information about it that we can get. And with this topic we must con-
nect the question asked by the pragmatists about language as a cause of
error – Prezzolini, Pareto, and so on.38 We must carefully examine the
question of the study of the technique of thinking as propaedeutic, as
a process of development, but we must be cautious because the image
of a technical instrument can lead us into error. There is more likeness
between technique and thinking in act than there is in the experimental
sciences between material instruments and science, properly speaking.
Perhaps we can conceive of an astronomer who does not know how to
use his instruments (he could get research material from elsewhere by
developing it mathematically) because the relations between astronomy
and astronomical instruments are external and mechanical, and even
in astronomy there is a technique of thinking beyond the technique of
material instruments. A poet might not know how to read and write. In
a certain sense, a thinker also might make himself read and write eve-
rything that interests him by other thinkers or everything that he has
already thought. The reason is that reading and writing have to do with
memory: they are aids to memory. The technique of thinking cannot be
compared to these activities, for which we can say that it is important
744
to learn this technique, just as it is important to learn to read and write

without any philosophical connection, just as reading and writing have
nothing to do with the poet as such …
45. Philosophical and Scientific Esperanto. The consequence of not under-

standing the historicity of languages and hence of philosophies – the
historicity of ideologies and scientific opinions – is the tendency found
in all forms of thinking (including the idealist-historicist forms) to make
themselves into Esperantos or Volapüks of philosophy and science.39 We
can say that this has perpetuated (in forms that always vary and are more
or less attenuated) the state of mind of primitive peoples towards other
peoples with whom they made contact. Every primitive people named
(or names) itself with a word that means ‘human,’ naming others with
words that mean ‘mute’ or ‘stammering’ (barbarian), as if they did not
understand ‘the language of humans.’ (From this came the splendid par-
adox whereby ‘cannibal’ or ‘eater of humans’ originally – etymologically
– means ‘excellent human’ or ‘true human.’)40 For the esperantists of
philosophy and science, anything not expressed by their language is mad-
ness, prejudice, superstition, and so on. By a process analogous to what is
observed in the mentality of the cult, they transform what ought to be a
simple historical judgment into a moral judgment or a diagnosis of a psy-
chiatric kind. Many traces of this tendency are found in the People’s Essay.
The roots of philosophical esperantism are especially deep in positivist
and naturalist conceptions, and sociology is perhaps the main product
of such a mentality: hence the tendencies of sociology towards abstract
classification, methodologism, and formal logic. Logic and general
methodology are conceived as existing in themselves and on their own,
as mathematical formulas abstracted from concrete thinking and from
particular concrete sciences (as some suppose that language exists in the
dictionary and grammars, the technique standing outside the work and
the concrete activity, and so on). On the other hand, there is no need
to believe that the anti-esperantist form of thinking indicates scepticism,
agnosticism, or eclecticism. It is certain that every form of thinking must
regard itself as correct and true and must fight other forms of thinking –
but in a critical way. Hence, the question is about the dosage of criticism
and historicism contained in every form of thinking. The philosophy of
praxis, by confining the speculative to the right limits (and denying that
the speculative, even as understood by the historicists of idealism, is the
essential feature of philosophy), appears to be the historical methodol-
ogy that stays closest to reality and truth …
745
53. Speculative Philosophy. We must not conceal the difficulty presented

by discussion and criticism of the speculative character of certain phil-
osophical systems, the theoretical negation of the speculative form of
philosophical conceptions. Questions that arise are
(a) Does the ‘speculative’ element belong to every philosophy; is it just

the form that every theoretical construct as such must take, meaning
that ‘speculation’ is synonymous with ‘philosophy’ and ‘theory’?
(b) Or should the question be historical instead? Is the problem only an
historical problem and not theoretical in the sense that every con-
ception of the world, in a particular historical phase, takes a specula-
tive form that represents its climax and the beginning of its end?
There is an analogy and a connection with the development of the

state, which passes from the economic-corporate phase to the hegem-
onic phase (of active consensus). We can say, in other words, that every
culture has its speculative or religious moment that coincides with the
period of complete hegemony of the social group that expresses – and
perhaps really corresponds to – the moment in which the real hegemony
breaks up at its base, molecule by molecule. But this system of think-
ing, precisely because it perfects itself dogmatically (by reacting to the
breakup), becomes a transcendental faith.
Accordingly, we note that every so-called Age of Decadence (in which
a breaking-up of the old world occurs) is characterized by refined and
highly speculative thinking. Criticism must therefore break speculation
down into its real terms of political ideology, as an instrument of practi-
cal action. But criticism itself will have its speculative phase, which will
mark its climax. The question is this: whether this climax may not be the
beginning of an historical phase of a new type in which, since necessity/
liberty is an organically interpenetrated complex, there will be no more
social contradictions, and the only dialectic will be that ideal dialectic of
concepts and no longer of historical forces?
54. Unity of Theory and Practice. We must research, analyse, and criticize
the different form in which the concept of the unity of theory and prac-
tice appears in the history of ideas, since it is beyond doubt that every
conception of the world and every philosophy is concerned with this
problem:
1. The claim made by Saint Thomas and scholasticism: intellectus specula-
746
tivus extensione fit practicus; just by extension, theory is made into prac-

tice, an affirmation of the necessary connection between the order of
ideas and that of action.
2. An aphorism from Leibniz, so much esteemed by Italian idealists: quo
magis speculativa, magis practica – said about science.
3. The statement by G.B. Vico that verum ipsum factum, so much dis-
cussed and so variously interpreted (see Croce’s book on Vico and
other polemical writings by Croce himself). Croce develops this in
the idealist sense that knowing is doing and that we know what we do,
where ‘doing’ has a special meaning, so special that it means noth-
ing other than ‘knowing,’ resulting in a tautology (a conception that
must still be related to the conception belonging to the philosophy of
praxis) …41
59. What is philosophy? A purely receptive activity or at best a regulative

one or an absolutely creative activity? We must define what we mean by
receptive, regulative, and creative. Receptive implies the certainty of an abso-
lutely immutable external world that exists in general – objectively, in
the ordinary sense of the term. Regulative comes close to receptive: even
though it implies activity in thinking, this activity is limited and narrow.
But what does creative mean? Will it mean that the external world is cre-
ated by thinking? But by what thinking and whose?
We may lapse into solipsism. In fact, every form of idealism necessarily
lapses into solipsism. To avoid solipsism, and, at the same time, avoid the
mechanistic conceptions implied by conceiving of thinking as a recep-
tive and regulative activity, we must pose the question in a historicist way,
and, at the same time, locate will (practical or political activity, in the
final analysis) at the foundation of philosophy. But this is a rational will,
not arbitrary, which is realized in that it corresponds to objective histori-
cal necessities, insofar as it is universal history itself in the moment of its
progressive actualization. If this will is represented initially by a single
individual, its rationality is proved by its coming to be accepted, and
accepted permanently, by a great number of people, by its becoming a
culture, a good sense, a conception of the world with an ethics matching
its structure.
Up to the time of classical German philosophy, philosophy was con-
ceived as a receptive, or, at most, a regulative activity; it was conceived as
knowledge of a mechanism functioning objectively, outside the human
being. Classical German philosophy introduced the concept of creativity
in thinking, but in an idealist and speculative sense. It seems that only the
747
philosophy of praxis has taken a step forward in thinking, on the basis

of classical German philosophy, avoiding any tendency to solipsism and
also historicizing thought by taking it in as a conception of the world, as
good sense spread over the great majority of people (a spreading that
would not have been thinkable at all without rationality or historicity).
And good sense was spread in that way by being converted into an active
rule of conduct. Creative must then be understood in the relative sense,
as thinking that changes the way that the greater number of people per-
ceives things, and, therefore, as the same reality that cannot be thought
without this larger number. It is also creative in the sense that it teaches
that there is no reality standing on its own, in itself and by itself, but only
a reality historically related to the people who change it, and so on …
62. The Historicity of the Philosophy of Praxis. That the philosophy of praxis
conceives of itself in a historicist way, as a transitional phase of philo-
sophical thinking, is clear not only implicitly, from the system as a whole,
but also explicitly, from the well-known thesis that historical develop-
ment will be marked at a certain point by the passage from the kingdom
of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.42 All philosophies (philosophi-
cal systems) existing up to now have been the manifestation of inter-
nal contradictions that have torn society apart. But each philosophical
system, taken by itself, has not been the conscious expression of these
contradictions since that expression could be produced only by all the
systems struggling against one another. Every philosopher is, and can
only be, convinced that he expresses the unity of the human spirit, the
unity of history and nature. In fact, if there were no such conviction, peo-
ple would not act, they would not create new history, and philosophies
could not become ideologies, could not in practice take on the fanatical
granitic solidity of popular beliefs that have the same energy as physical
forces.
In the history of philosophical thinking, Hegel represents a direction
of his own because, in his system, in one way or another, perhaps in the
form of a ‘philosophical novel,’ he manages to grasp what reality is.43
In other words, in a single system and in a single philosopher, there is
that consciousness of the contradictions that came previously from all
systems together, from all philosophies in dispute with one another, con-
tradicting one another. In a certain sense, therefore, the philosophy of
praxis is a reform and a development of Hegelianism. It is a philosophy
liberated (or seeking to be liberated) from every one-sided and fanati-
cal ideological element. It is full consciousness of the contradictions by
748
which the philosopher himself – taken as an individual or taken as a

whole social group – not only grasps the contradictions but posits him-
self as a component of the contradiction and elevates this component to
a principle of knowledge and hence of action.
NOTES
1 We have used Gramsci (1975), II, 1365−1487, along with the extensive
notes and bibliography in vol. IV of Gerratana’s edition, though biblio-
graphical references supplied in the Italian text have sometimes been
omitted in our translation. We have also made less use of quotation marks
for emphasis (scare-quotes), which are frequent in the Italian text. Since
Gramsci’s access to books and journals was limited and erratic, his refer-
ences are sometimes from memory and sometimes indirect.
2 Croce (1918b): 601: for Labriola and Herbart, see section 14 of the Intro-
duction; Papua was a British and then an Australian colony in Labriola’s
lifetime.
3 Labriola (1906): 432−41; until the Italian invasion of 1911, the territories
now called Libya were part of the enfeebled Ottoman Empire.
4 See n13 below.
5 Gramsci cites Spaventa from Alderisio (1931): 287−8.
6 Gramsci alludes to a famous purple passage from Marx’s Contribution to the
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, for which see the Italian version in Marx,
Engels, and Lasalle (1922), I, 25: ‘One school (the historical school of law)
that legitimizes the disgrace of today with yesterday’s disgrace is a school
that declares a rebellion at every cry of the serf against the knout, once the
knout is antique, an ancestral knout, a knout with history.’
7 Gramsci cites Hegel, Machiavelli, and Spaventa from Alderisio (1931):
287−8; see also the master/slave dialectic in Hegel (1986), 3.145−55, and
new princes in Machiavelli (1990): 103−21.
8 Anon. (1930a).
9 Bruno Bauer (1809−82), a theologian of the Young Hegelian Left, and his
brother Edgar were targets of The Holy Family of 1844, which was the first
collaborative project by Marx and Engels (1845).
10 In the stirring prologue to the Communist Manifesto, the Pope is one of the
old powers chasing down the specter of communism. Pius IX, who was
responsible for the infamous Syllabus of Errors (1864), had been close to
Rosmini until the events of 1848−9 ended the philosopher’s political useful-
ness. For Gramsci’s source, see Tarozzi (1930).
749
11 Corporativo-economisto is a term of art for Gramsci, indicating economic inter-

ests specific to some particular group, such as merchants, as distinct from
broader interests involving people from other callings, which can eventu-
ally become political, moral, and intellectual as well: Gramsci (1975), III,
1583−5.
12 Language was still a very serious socio-political problem as well as a cultural
issue in Gramsci’s Italy. One estimate is that the number of residents of the
peninsula and its islands who spoke ‘Italian’ (meaning a form of Tuscan)
at the time of national unification in 1860 was less than 3 per cent. Even
today, some people from Gramsci’s native Sardinia speak Catalan: Duggan
(1994): 27−30.
13 As minister of education in 1923 in Mussolini’s first government, Gentile
was responsible for a reform that enforced compulsory religious education
in elementary schools, even though (like Croce) he had been an outspoken
critic of traditional religion: Turi (1995): 316−44.
14 In the thirteenth century, St Dominic and St Francis founded the two great
mendicant orders that carry their names; these new organizations respond-
ed to socio-economic changes, especially in the cities, which were then
underway in Europe.
15 The Christian Democrats formed as an anti-socialist and anti-union mani-
festation of the policies of Pope Leo XIII, who recognized problems caused
by industrial and agrarian poverty and sought a means of addressing them
in a way that would suit the Church’s interests. In Gramsci’s day, a populist
heir of this policy was Don Luigi Sturzo, the leader of the Partito Popolare
Italiano, whom Mussolini crushed in 1923. A few years later, Communist
support for the Christian Democrats helped ensure the establishment of the
Lateran Pacts with the Church in 1929.
16 Hegemony is another key term for Gramsci: it is the leadership of an eco-
nomically class-conscious group that becomes stronger by looking beyond
its immediate economic interests to the concerns of other groups and to
broader issues of culture, morality, and philosophy manifested not only
in political but also in civil society and maintained by consent and leader-
ship rather than by coercion and domination: Gramsci (1975), II, 1222−5,
1234−5; III, 1513-40.
17 Following Croce’s lead, Gramsci challenged the conventional Marxist
notion that all changes in the political, ideological or cultural superstructure
are caused by changes in the structure or economic base: Gramsci (1975), II,
871−3, 1051−2, 1249−50, 1298−1301.
18 For descriptions of subaltern groups, see Gramsci (1975), III, 1589−91,
1860−63.
750
19 Gramsci alludes to Weber (1904−5).

20 Stays (stecche) as in a corset.
21 Croce, and Gentile to a lesser extent, operated outside the university.
22 For Nikolai Bukharin’s Manual, which Gramsci read in a French translation,
calling it a Saggio popolare di sociologia, see section 25 of the Introduction:
also Bukharin (1925), (1927).
23 Gramsci regretted that Italy lacked a national-popular culture such as he
believed to exist in Russia, Germany and France, as evidenced especially
by the popularity of the great Russian novelists whom he saw as models of
the artist-intellectuals whom he did not find in Italy. He reasoned that their
absence explained the serialization in Italian newspapers of old French
novels like The Count of Monte Cristo: Gramsci (1975), III, 2113−20.
24 Gentile (1931c).
25 The poet Giuseppe Giusti (1809−50) was a political activist and popular
satirist.
26 For Antonio Bruers, an admirer of Gabriele d’Annunzio, see Gramsci
(1975), I, 94; Garin (1966b): 310−11, 451−2.
27 Above, in the second paragraph before n17, the gender is reversed and
theory is ‘the handmaid [ancella instead of ancello] of practice.’
28 See Gentile’s translation of the third Thesis on Feuerbach in his ‘Philosophy
of Praxis,’ where he translates ‘revolutionary praxis (revolutionäre Praxis),’ as
‘praxis rovesciata’: Gramsci has ‘rovesciamento della praxis.’
29 Russell (1922): 113−14.
30 Croce (1930).
31 Marx, Engels, and Ferdinand Lasalle (1922), VII, 382−2.
32 Hegel (1986a), 5.394−8; (1969): 333−6.
33 Anon. (1930b), in the story called ‘Qui si determina una quistione e senten-
tia che fu data in Alessandria.’
34 The statement by Engels is paraphrased from Croce (1921): 31; see also
Engels (1894).
35 For Croce’s being surprised by Engels, see chapter. 11 of ‘The Philosophy of
Hegel,’ citing Engels (1894): 9−11, 137−46.
36 For Croce’s ‘distinctions’ see the Logic and the ‘Philosophy of Hegel,’ with
sections 18−20 of the Introduction.
37 Gramsci took the reference to Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800−59)
from Bonghi (1927).
38 Vilfredo Pareto (1848−1923) was a pioneer of the modern social sciences;
for Prezzolini see section 20 of the Introduction (1904); also Prezzolini
(1904); Pareto (1923).
39 Esperanto and Volapük are artificial languages invented in the late nine-
751
teenth century. They were well known to Gramsci, whose formal higher
education was in linguistics.
40 Gramsci alludes to the story that ‘cannibal’ came from a name (Galibi),
meaning ‘brave people,’ that Columbus heard Native Americans calling
themselves.
41 ‘The speculative intellect becomes practical by extension’; ‘The more specu-
lative, the more practical’; ‘Truth itself is made.’ Gramsci could have found
these learned aphorisms in sources well known to him: Anon. (1932);
Croce (1911a), (1921b):226; see also Aquinas, Summa theologiae, IIa-IIae
4.2.ad 3; cf. Aristotle, De anima, 433a15.
42 Engels (1894), though the original conception of the opposition between
physical necessity and moral freedom is Kant’s.
43 For ‘philosophical novel,’ see Croce, ‘Philosophy of Hegel,’ chapter 5.
752
25
Benedetto Croce
History of Europe in the Nineteenth

Century: Epilogue1
Suppose someone makes a comparison of political geography before and

after the Great War and sees the German Republic replacing the Ger-
many of the Hohenzollerns; sees the Austrian Empire taken apart and
replaced by new or enlarged nation-states, with German Austria and
Magyar Hungary confined to narrow frontiers; sees France reintegrated
with the provinces lost in ’70; sees Italy reunited with the ‘unredeemed’
lands and extending its borders to the Brenner pass; sees Poland recon-
stituted and Russia no longer czarist but Soviet; sees the United States of
America elevated among the major factors in European politics; and so
on through the other great transformations that have taken place in ter-
ritories and relations of power. And then, by contrast, suppose that the
same someone has been led to think again, first, of the earlier Europe
– orderly, rich, flourishing with commerce, abounding with goods, its
life easy, gallant, and self-assured; but then to contemplate in sadness the
later Europe – impoverished, restless, sad, broken up everywhere by high
customs barriers, the brilliant international society that its capitals used
to welcome now dispersed, each people occupied by its own worries and
by fear of something worse and hence distracted from matters of the Spir-
it, so that the shared life of thinking, art, and civilization has been burned
out, or nearly burned out.
That person has been led to put a deep divide between the two Europes
and to mark the distance between them by the boundary – or rather the
chasm – of the war of 1914−18.
On the other hand, someone who moves from the extrinsic and sec-
ondary to what is intrinsic, searching for the passions and actions of the
European soul, soon reconstructs in his mind the continuity and homo-
geneity between the two Europes that seem so different. Looking closely
in both directions, without letting himself be diverted by those superficial

impressions, he finds the same features, even though they were aggra-
vated after the War and by what has happened since then. In the altered
political circumstances, the dispositions are the same and the spiritual
conflicts are the same, though made more burdensome by that heaviness
and dullness that the war – by killing millions, by making violence habit-
ual and by eliminating the lively mental habit of critical and construc-
tive effort, of careful attention and subtlety – could not help producing,
along with the harsh effects of its own profound tragedy.
Activism emerges, as impetuous as before and actually more violent.
Nationalist and imperialist impulses shake the victorious peoples because
they are victors and the vanquished because they have been vanquished.
The new states that have arisen add new nationalisms and imperialisms.
Impatience for liberal politics has given rise to dictatorships, opened or
concealed, and to desires for dictatorship everywhere. The liberty that
before the war was a static faith, or was practised without much faith, has
vanished from people’s minds even where it has not vanished from insti-
tutions. It has been replaced by the activist libertarianism that dreams,
more than before, of wars, revolutions, and destruction, bursting out in
disordered movements and devising showy, barren projects – careless
or contemptuous of works built on concentration and love, works with
a dutiful sense of the past and the burning strength that opens up the
future; despising deeds that come from the heart and reach to the heart,
the meditations that speak words of truth, the histories that make us
aware of everything that mankind has created in weary work and struggle,
the poetry that is poetry, and, as such, beautiful.
Communism, which under the name of socialism was allowed into
political life, into the state and the course of history, has come back again
with its own fragmentation and crudeness, another embittered enemy of
the liberalism that it mocks, calling it naively moralistic. Like the activism
often confused with it, this communism is sterile and suffocates think-
ing, religion, art, and all those other things that it would like to enslave
but cannot without destroying them. Also back again, in the domain of
theory and judgment – as if they were ideas newly born and fresh with the
truth of the young – are all those cockeyed, shop-worn sophisms of the
historical materialism that anyone with expertise in criticism and the his-
tory of ideas knows how to evaluate. Nonetheless, those ideas have again
acquired the look of the novel and modern just because, having been
exported to Russia from Europe, they have come back here again, even
clumsier and more simple-minded then they were before, faring well
again in times that are crude, simple, and credulous.
754
Croce, Liberty
On another front, the Catholicism that had tried to regain strength

through irrationalism and mysticism has welcomed – and goes on wel-
coming, in great numbers – souls that are feeble or enfeebled, the mud-
dled and misbegotten buccaneers of the Spirit. Even the pessimism and
the voices of decadence heard in literature before the war are now heard
again, preaching the decline of the West or of the whole human race: hav-
ing tried to ascend from beast to human, mankind is now about to relapse
into a brutish life – according to the new philosophers and prophets.2
All that is fact. There is no point in denying it or even confining it to
a few persons or to this or that country or people, because, like the fact
of which it is a continuation, it belongs to Europe and the whole world.
And because it is a fact, it must have a function in the development of the
Spirit, in social and human progress, if not directly as a creator of new
values, then at least as matter and motive to reinvigorate, deepen, and
extend the old values. But only the historian of the future will know and
describe what the function of that fact may be; he will see before him, at
the end of its development, the movement in which we are now involved
and what it will have started. Just because we are now involved in it, we
cannot know or describe this movement. As we live and move in the midst
of it, there are many things that we can observe and understand – that we
do, in fact, observe and understand – but not that one thing that has not
yet happened and whose history cannot be thought.
And what difference does it make to any of us, in practice, that this
history cannot be thought? This difference: it means that we must par-
ticipate in history not by contemplating what cannot be contemplated
but by playing the part assigned to each of us, as conscience directs and
duty commands. Those who violate Solon’s ancient warning by striving to
understand and evaluate a life ‘before it is over,’ getting lost in guesswork
and great expectations, should take care that they have not strayed into
what cannot possibly be known because an evil demon has lured them,
beguiling them into idleness and distracting them from action.3
It is not the ‘history of the future’ – as older authorities used to define
prophecy – but the history of the past recapitulated in the present that
we need for work and action, which would not be genuine were it not
illuminated by the light of truth.4 From that same need came this reflec-
tion that we have tried to apply – and invite others to apply – to the
history of the nineteenth century. For present and current purposes, we
must examine, and in every case re-examine, the ideals that are now
being accepted or proposed or tried in order to see if they have the
power to dissolve or overcome or correct our own ideal, and, at the same
time, to change or modify ours as a consequence of the criticism that
755
it has undergone, and, in every case, to take possession of it again in a

firmer way.
It is obvious that today the ideal of a transcendent order of truth, of
a moral and practical law and an associated governance from heaven
above, exercised on earth by a pastor and represented by a church, has
still not acquired that intrinsic intellectual justification whose absence
was discovered over the course of centuries. Pointing this out is almost
distasteful, as in all debates that turn on something obvious and raise
the risk of seeming ungenerous. It is the main point, however. And the
renewed temerity of the clergy in the years after the war – owing to the dif-
ficulty in which officials found themselves and the concessions that their
problems induced them to make – may cause resentment, but it has no
real importance in itself: it is a familiar event and something transitory.
Here it is useful to cite what a German Catholic has recently written:
that ‘only in appearance, and only on the surface of its actual nature, has
Catholicism made gains in recent times. But the great idea that gave it
unity is no longer alive, and never has it been so insecure, unstable, and
wrapped up in material and superficial things.’5 On this last point, one
must really wonder what strength the Church can take from the quality
of the people who have crowded into her bosom. And yet the spiritual
motive that has pushed the best of them to take refuge in Catholicism
or return to it (or to similar sites of refuge, less venerable and with less
stable authority) has been nothing more than the need – in the tumult of
changing feelings and colliding ideas – for a fixed truth and an imposed
rule. Or rather it is a lack of trust and a disavowal, a weak and childish fear
of the notion that all truth is absolute and relative at the same time, fear
of the need for the constant criticism and self-criticism from which truth
grows and is renewed at every moment, along with the life that grows and
is renewed. But a moral ideal cannot adapt itself to the requirements of
the weak, the distrustful, and the fearful.
Equally, it cannot be adapted to the purposes of those who get drunk
on action for the sake of action, which, when it is felt, conceived, and
done in this way, leaves nausea in its wake and indifference to everything
that has stirred or can stir human passion, as well as unfitness for any
objective labour. By now the human race has had experience of nation-
alisms, imperialisms, and other such efforts and triumphs, and already
it says inveni amariorem felle.6 Activism still rages widely, but where in it is
peace of mind or trust or the joy of living? Sadness marks the faces of
those people, the better among them, because where not even that can
be seen, there is worse: there is boorishness and stupidity. And perhaps
756
Croce, Liberty
the very excesses that activism allows itself, the passion in which it writhes,
the shakeups that it threatens, signal that a healing of the fever that has
infected and still infects Europe and the world is not far off – a fever, and
not an ideal, unless we want to sublimate the fever in an ideal.
Communism, which is usually said to be a settled and accomplished
fact in Russia now, has not been accomplished as communism but in the
way that its critics pointed out and which was suited to its internal contra-
diction – as a form of autocracy, in other words, which has deprived the
Russian people of what little mental space or liberty they had or procured
under the earlier autocracy of the czars. The evolution of the state, the
‘transition from the kingdom of necessity to that of liberty’ that Marx the-
orized, has not only not happened, since communism has not abolished
the state – and could not abolish what no one will ever be able to abolish
– but also, given the irony of things, has put together the most ponderous
state of which one could ever conceive.7 In saying this there is no intent
to take anything away from the necessity that the Russian revolutionaries
faced, forcing them to follow that path and no other; nor of the immense
labour that, in those conditions, they undertook and pushed forward,
seeing to it that the rich productive forces of that land were made fruitful;
nor of the various lessons that can be drawn from their various deeds; nor
of the mystical enthusiasm, even if it is a materialist mysticism, that ani-
mates them and alone can enable them to bear the huge weight placed
on their shoulders and give them the courage to tread underfoot – as
they are now doing – religion, thought, and poetry, everything that we
revere as sacred, everything that we love as noble.
The point of our assertion, rather, is that by now, with words, acts of
violence, and repressive methods, they have arbitrarily denied but have
not solved – nor could they ever solve in that way – the basic problem of
human community, which is that of liberty, the only condition in which
human society flourishes and bears fruit, the only reason for humans to
live on earth, without which life would not be worth living. That prob-
lem remains there and cannot be eliminated; it is born out of the guts of
things, and they must feel it stirring in the same human material that they
want to pick up and shape according to their own notions. If they ever
face up to it in the future – or if others face it for them – it will destroy the
materialist basis of what they have constructed, and then that construct
will need to be sustained in a different way and greatly modified. And just
as pure communism has not been achieved now, likewise it will not be
achieved even then.
Even though that pseudo-communism impresses thinkers outside Rus-
757
sia because of the added impact described by the old saying that ‘maior
e longinquo reverentia,’ because fascination with what is remote in time
and space gives it fantastic and alluring forms, this communism has still
not spread, or else it has been suppressed as soon as it has appeared.8
Actually, in Western and Central Europe, the two conditions that were
present in Russia are absent: the czarist tradition and mysticism. So Milyu-
kov was not wrong twelve years ago when he said that he thought Lenin
‘was building on the firm soil of the good old autocratic tradition in Rus-
sia, while designing castles in the sky for other countries to see.’9 And
even if experiments of this kind are done in other parts of Europe, one
of two things will happen: either that pseudo-communism will become,
under similar names and appearances, an entirely different thing when
transported to countries that differ in religion, civilization, culture, cus-
tom, and tradition – countries that have different histories, in short; or
else we will have a time, perhaps a long one, of dark anguish, and, sooner
or later, out of the heart of that travail, liberty, or rather humanity, will
grow again.
Liberty is the only ideal that has the solidity that Catholicism once had
and the flexibility that it could not have; it is the only ideal that always
faces up to the future and makes no pretense of containing it in a particu-
lar contingent form; it is the only ideal that stands up to criticism, and, for
human society, constitutes the point where equilibrium always reasserts
itself amid society’s continuing oscillations and frequent losses of equi-
librium. Hence, when we hear people asking whether liberty can achieve
what they call the future, we must answer that it has something better – it
has eternity. Even today, despite the coldness, contempt, and scorn that
liberty faces, it still exists in many of our institutions, our customs, and
our habits of mind, and there it does its good work. More important is
that it survives in many of the best minds in every part of the world. Even
scattered and isolated, reduced almost to an aristocratic but small repub-
lic of letters, they still keep the faith, surrounding it with more reverence
and following it with a hotter love than in the days when there was no
one to harm it or call its absolute mastery into question. Around them
swarmed the mob that shouted liberty’s name, infecting it with the vulgar-
ity of which it has now been cleansed.
It is not only in those people that liberty lives. It is not just that liberty
exists and resists in the government of many of the greater states and in
institutions and customs. Its power also operates in things themselves,
opening a path, more or less slowly, amid the severest difficulties. We see
this mainly in the feeling and thinking that people are now concerned
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Croce, Liberty
about – a truce or reduction of the armaments that cause unrest, a peace

and alliance among the states of Europe, an agreement about intentions
and projects among its peoples. Around the world and for the good of
the world this would preserve, if not the economic and political suprem-
acy of nations, then their age-old supremacy as creators and advocates of
civilization and their acquired aptitudes for that unending work.
This is the only political plan, among many made after the war, that
has not drifted off and dissipated but actually gains ground year after
year, and attracts thinkers who used to reject it or seemed unconvinced
or wanted to believe in it but did not dare. It helps to hope that it will
not be allowed to disappear and will reach its goal despite all the opposi-
tion, overcoming all obstacles and finding its way through them, aided by
the skills of statesmen and the will of the various peoples. It may be that
the World War – which future historians may consider the reduction to
absurdity of all nationalisms – has soured some relations between states
because of the iniquitous and stupid peace treaty that ended it. But it
has also created a deep community among peoples who have felt them-
selves, and more and more will always understand themselves, as equals
in their virtues and mistakes, in their strengths and weaknesses, subject to
the same fate, saddened by the same loves, suffering the same pains, and
proud of the same patrimony of ideas.
Meanwhile, we are present at the conception of a new consciousness
in every part of Europe, a new kind of nationality: the reason, as already
noted, is that nations are not given in nature but are states of conscious-
ness and historical products. Seventy years ago, a Neapolitan of the old
Regno or a Piedmontese of the subalpine Kingdom became Italian not by
repudiating a prior nature but by raising it up to that new nature and thus
resolving it; in the same way, the French, the Germans, the Italians, and
all the rest will raise themselves up into Europeans. They will direct their
thoughts to Europe, and their hearts will beat for her as they used to beat
for their lesser fatherlands, not forgotten but better loved.
This process of European unification directly opposes nationalist
competitions, already resists them, and one day will be able to liberate
Europe from them altogether. It strives at the same time to liberate her
from the whole psychology that is bound up with nationalisms, sustaining
them and producing behaviors, habits, and actions akin to them. If such
a thing comes to pass, or when it comes to pass, the liberal ideal will be
fully restored to people’s minds and will reclaim its domain there. But
we must not imagine the restoration of this ideal as a return to the condi-
tions of some other time, like one of those returns to the past dreamt of
759
by Romanticism while it dozed in its sweet idyll. Whatever has happened,

whatever will happen in the meantime, cannot have happened for noth-
ing. Some institutions of the old liberalism will need to be modified in
greater or lesser degree or be replaced by others that are better adapted.
Political and ruling classes constituted much differently than the earlier
ones will arise. The experience of the past will produce different con-
cepts, directing the will in different ways.
With those mental and moral attitudes we will need to take up again
the problems that we call ‘social.’ Obviously they were not born yesterday;
thinkers and politicians have been working at them for centuries, solv-
ing them, from time to time, in ways suited to the age. Throughout the
nineteenth century, they were the object of the most passionate attention
and fervent concern, but even then they were solved, from time to time,
as they could be, and with such results as greatly changing the conditions
of labour, improving the quality of life for workers, and raising their legal
and moral status. The economics – ‘rationalized,’ as people like to say
– that has now become a leading topic of debate is also not a new thing
in itself. The crux of the discussion cannot be using this rationalism to
require the replacement of the economics of the individual or free enter-
prise, which are indispensable to human life and to economic progress
itself. The debate can only be about allotting more or less to the one side
or the other in relation to goods, locations, times, and other circumstanc-
es. This is a problem for the experts and politicians who have the job of
solving it, from time to time, in the way most advantageous to the growth
of productivity and most equitable for the distribution of wealth. But
experts and politicians will be unable to do their jobs and cannot hope
for anything but a fictitious implementation of their proposals if liberty
does not provide and maintain the intellectual and moral environment
needed for so great a work, and if liberty does not guarantee the legal
arrangements in which implementation can be achieved.
These notions, sketched rapidly here, are not the great expectations
forbidden to us and to everyone just because they are empty. They are
directions for travel that our current moral awareness and observation
may suggest for those whose regulative concepts and whose interpreta-
tion of nineteenth-century events agree with the narrative of those events
provided by this history. Others, with different minds, different concepts,
different temperaments, and different cultural qualities, will choose
other routes, and if they do so with a pure mind, obeying a command
from within, they too will do a good job of preparing the future. A history
informed by liberal thinking cannot end, even in its practical and moral
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Croce, Liberty
corollary, by absolutely rejecting and condemning those who feel and

think differently. Only to those who think along with it does it say: ‘Work
along the line indicated for you here, with all that you have, every day,
every hour, in your every action; don’t worry about divine providence,
which knows more about it than any of us and works with us, within us,
and above us.’ Words like those, that we have learned and spoken often in
our Christian life and education, have their place, as do other words from
the same source, in the ‘religion of liberty.’10
NOTES
1 We have used Croce (1932): 349−60: although this version was released in
April, only two months after the book first appeared, the title-page calls it the
‘third edition revised’: very large sales required rapid reprintings, in which
Croce undoubtedly made small changes, although the text of the part trans-
lated here seems to be very close, if not identical, to the standard version, as
in Croce (1991).
2 Oswald Spengler (1880−1936) was not a Nazi or a racist, although he was
an authoritarian nationalist, but also a sort of socialist and a critic of liberal-
ism; his enormously influential Decline of the West was first published in 1918:
Spengler (1918−23).
3 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1100a10−12: ‘Should we regard no other
human being as happy while alive, following Solon’s saying, “Look to the
end”?’
4 For ‘conjectural history’ in Kant and other writers, see Palmieri (2003).
5 Perhaps Croce is thinking of Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg-
Acton, 1834−1902), an eminent Catholic liberal, a protégé of the theologian
Johann Döllinger and a Regius professor of history at Cambridge who wrote
about the history of freedom.
6 I have found it more bitter than gall; cf. Eccles, 7:27; Prov. 5:3−4 (Vulgate).
7 The words that Croce paraphrases actually come from Engels: see section 62
of Gramsci’s ‘Introduction.’
8 ‘Awe inspires better at a distance’: Tacitus, Annals, 1.47.
9 Pavel Milyukov (1859−1943) was a leading Russian liberal who lived in exile
in France after the Bolsheviks came to power: Milyukov (1922): 49.
10 In Hegel, ‘Religion der Freiheit’; see Hegel (1986), 17.203−4, and section 26
of the Introduction.
761
26
Antonio Gramsci
Letters from Prison1
Letter 300, 18 April 1932
Dearest Tania:2
Thanks for making me a copy of the letter in which Giulia gave you more
details on the state of Delio’s health. I will take the Somatose, as I wrote
to you – no need to get me too worked up about it because I’m already
persuaded, enough to make me take it anyhow.3
When I’ve read the Croce book, I’ll be very happy to help you with it
by writing some critical notes about it – though not a complete review, as
you ask, because it would be hard to gulp it all down right away. However,
I’ve already read the introductory chapters of the book, which appeared
some months ago as a separate work.4 So I can already start to make some
points today that might help you do research and get better information,
if you want to give your work a certain unity and broaden it somewhat. In
my opinion, this might be the first question to ask: What cultural inter-
ests now dominate Croce’s literary and philosophical activity, both those
that are currently relevant and those of more general significance relat-
ing to deeper needs and not arising from the passions of the moment?
The answer is not in doubt: Croce’s activity has distant origins, from the
period of the War, to be precise. To understand his recent work, one
must review his writings on the War, collected in two volumes (Pagine
sulla guerra, 2d ed., enlarged).5
I don’t have these two volumes, but I did read the pieces one by one as
they were published. Their essential content can be briefly summarized:
a struggle against the definition given to the War under the influence
of French and Masonic propaganda, whereby the War became a War
Gramsci, Letters
for Civilization, like a crusade with its unleashing of popular passions

and its character of religious fanaticism. After war comes peace, mean-
ing not just that conflict must be followed by new cooperation among
peoples but also that groupings produced by war will be followed by
groupings of peace, and nothing says that the two coincide. But how will
this new cooperation be possible, both the general and the particular,
if a direct criterion of utilitarian politics becomes the universal and cat-
egorical principle? This is why intellectuals must resist these irrational
forms of propaganda, and, while not making their country weak in war,
must resist demagoguery and protect the future. Croce always sees the
moment of war in the moment of peace and the moment of peace in that
of war, always doing his best to prevent the destruction of every possibil-
ity of mediation and compromise between the two moments.
In practice, Croce’s position permitted Italian intellectuals to renew
relations with German intellectuals, something that was not and is not
easy for the French and the Germans. For this reason, Croce’s activity has
been useful to the Italian state during the postwar period when the deep-
est impulses of the nation’s history have pointed to the end of the Fran-
co-Italian military alliance and to a shift of policy against France through
reconciliation with Germany. Croce, who had never involved himself in
activist party politics, therefore became minister of public education in
the Giolitti government of 1920−1.6
But did the War end? And did the mistake end – the mistake of wrong-
ly promoting particular criteria of current politics to general principles,
expanding ideologies into philosophies and religions? No, of course not.
Hence, the intellectual and moral struggle continues: interests are still
alive and current, so we must not abandon the battlefield.
The second question is about the position that Croce holds in the
field of world culture. Even before the War, he was held in very high
regard by intellectual groups from all countries. What is interesting, con-
trary to popular opinion, is that his reputation was greater in Anglo-
Saxon countries than in the German one. There are lots of English
translations of his books, more than German and more than [French].7
It is clear from his writings that Croce has a high opinion of this position
of his as ‘leader’ of world culture and of the duties and responsibilities
that come with it. His writings obviously assume an élite world audience.
We must remember that in the last years of the previous century
Croce’s writings on the theory of history gave intellectual ammunition
to the two most important ‘revisionist’ movements of the time, those of
Eduard Bernstein in Germany and Sorel in France.8 Bernstein himself
763
has written of being convinced to rework all his philosophical and eco-
nomic thinking after having read Croce’s essays.9 The close link between
Sorel and Croce was known, but its depth and persistence became espe-
cially obvious after the publication of the letters of Sorel, who, in a sur-
prising way, often shows himself to be Croce’s inferior intellectually. But
Croce carried his revisionist activity still farther, especially during the
War and especially after 1917. The new series of essays on the theory of
history begins after 1910 with the memoir, Cronache, storie e false storie,
and it continues up to the final chapters of the Storia della storiografia
italiana nel secolo XIX, the essays on political science and the most recent
literary appearances, among which is the Storia dell’ Europa – so it seems,
at least, from the chapters that I’ve read.10 I find that Croce holds above
all to his position as leader of revisionism and that he understands this
to be his best current work … He says explicitly that the whole reworking
of his theory of history as ethical-political history (meaning all or almost
all that he has done as a thinker for almost twenty years) is meant to
complete his revisionism of forty years ago.11
Dearest Tania, if suggestions like this can be useful to you for your
work, let me know when you write, and I will try to do more of them.
I hug you tenderly,

Antonio
Letter 302, 25 April 1932
Dearest Tania:
I received your postcards of April 17 and 22. I’ve also received a book, as
you promised. How is your cough? The weather here keeps changing a
lot. Maybe it’s been changing in Rome too, and you’ll need to be a little
careful of your health. I’m glad that my letter to Delio arrived. We’ll see
if he answers and if it will be possible, even with so many ups and downs,
to put a correspondence together.
I still don’t know if the notes about Croce that I wrote for you were
interesting to you and if they suit the needs of you work: I’m sure you’ll
tell me, and then I’ll be able to do better. In any case, understand that
these are bits and pieces that would have to be developed and completed.
I’m writing a paragraph for you again this time, and then you can reor-
ganize as seems best. One question that I find very interesting asks about
764
Gramsci, Letters
the reasons for the great success of Croce’s work; this does not usually
happen to philosophers during their lifetimes, and it is especially unu-
sual outside of academic circles. I think we should look to his style for one
reason. It has been said that Croce is the greatest writer of Italian prose
since Manzoni.12 The claim seems true to me, with this qualification: that
Croce’s prose derives not so much from Manzoni’s as from the great writ-
ers of learned prose, and especially from Galileo. Croce’s innovation as
stylist is in the domain of learned prose, in his ability to explain with great
simplicity, as well as great power, explaining material that other writers
usually present in a muddled, quibbling, obscure, and wordy way.
Croce’s literary style expresses a style that suits his morality, an attitude
that can be called Goethian in its serenity, order, and unshakable confi-
dence. As so many people lose their heads, wavering among apocalyptic
feelings of intellectual panic, Croce, with his steadfast certainty that evil
cannot prevail metaphysically and that history is rationality, becomes a
point of reference for acquiring inner strength. Moreover, we must note
that to many people Croce’s thinking does not present itself as a cumber-
some philosophical system and hence as something hard to assimilate.
I find that Croce’s outstanding quality has always been this: putting his
conception of the world in circulation unpedantically in a whole series
of brief writings in which philosophy is presented straightforwardly and
then absorbed as good sense and common sense. In this way, his solutions
to many problems end up circulating anonymously, finding their way into
newspapers and everyday life. There are a great many ‘Croceans’ who do
not know what they are and may not even know that Croce exists. In this
way, a kind of summa of idealist notions has penetrated into Catholic writ-
ers, who are now seeking to free themselves from them, though without
success, attempting to present Thomism as a self-sufficient conception
and one that suffices for the intellectual needs of the modern world.
I hug you tenderly,

Antonio
Letter 303, 2 May 1932
Dearest Tania:
I’ve received three letters, of April 23, 25, and 27. I’ve read and re-read
the letter from your Dad and your long thoughts about it, which gen-
erally seem right to me.13 There are other pieces of the problem that
765
necessarily elude you, of course, and those may be the main and decisive
causes of the state of confusion and painful powerlessness in which they
are all floundering a bit. But the greater difficulty lies in not knowing
where to start in order to react with energy to the situation and fix it. You
talk about energy, energy, always energy. But in Rome, thinking about it
now, even applying all your energy, what would you be able to get? You
would not be up against anything solid and well founded that could be
cleanly reversed, but a gelatinous state of affairs, so to speak, offering no
resistance and shifting its shape continuously and invincibly.
You once criticized me for not having asked you the question in Rome
and for not having tried to make an alliance between the two of us, as it
were, and unite our forces. Maybe you were right, and this was the duty
that I ought to have done. But then there were many things to which I
did not attach the same importance that I would now, and it happened to
me then as if I were in the middle of a forest, seeing each tree clearly but
not seeing the whole. Many things appeared to me rather as picturesque
qualities, aesthetically interesting, not as symptoms of a sickly condition.
You see that I am very frank with you and give you the evidence to judge
me harshly. I believe there are mitigating circumstances, however. The
most important, as far as I’m concerned, is that I’ve always lived isolated,
outside the family, and I’ve actually always had a certain impatience with
family life. Therefore, I’ll convict myself of being hypercritical, of seeing
the mote in the eye of the next person and not the beam in my own eye.
This made it necessary for me not to intervene but to let everyone live
his own life independently.
But I don’t know what to do and where to begin. I’m grateful to you
for what you’ve written because I can at least orient myself concretely,
which until now has not been possible. From now on, anyhow, I won’t
throw stones in the dark, something that may have happened on these
recent occasions.
I don’t know if I’ll ever send you the outline on ‘Italian intellectuals’
that I promised you. The point of view from which I see the problem
sometimes changes: maybe it’s still early to summarize and synthesize.
The material is still in a fluid state and will need further development.
Don’t get it in your head to re-copy the proposal for publishing on Ital-
ians abroad: it seems not worth the trouble to me, especially since Mar-
zocco has given a rather accurate summary of it.14 If you can get a copy of
it, fine; otherwise, relax. Likewise, I certainly have no need of the works
of William Petty to deal with the problem of Machiavelli’s economic ide-
as. The reference is interesting, but the reference is enough.15 Instead,
in a little while I’ll ask for the complete works of Machiavelli himself,
766
Gramsci, Letters
which, as you may recall, I asked for when for when I was still in Milan,
but publication had not yet happened.
I can still give you a point of reference for a study of Croce’s book
(which I have not yet read as a whole). Even if these notes are a lit-
tle disconnected, I think that they may be useful to you all the same.
You might then think of organizing them on your own, for the purposes
of your work. I’ve already mentioned the great importance that Croce
assigns to his theoretical activity as a revisionist – also, by his own explicit
admission, how all his work as a thinker during these last twenty years has
been aimed at completing the revision until it becomes liquidation. As
a revisionist, he has contributed to maintaining the trend of economic-
legal history (still represented today in a weakened form by Academician
Gioacchino Volpe especially).16 He has now given written form to the his-
tory that he calls ethical-political, of which the Storia d’Europa is supposed
to be and to become the model.
What is Croce’s innovation? Does it have the significance that he
attributes to it, and, in particular, does it have that liquidating effect that
he claims? We can say concretely that Croce, in his historical-political
activity, puts the accent solely on the moment which in politics is called
the moment of hegemony, consensus, and cultural direction, in order to
distinguish it from the moment of force, compulsion, and intervention
by the legislature and the state or the police.17 In fact, I cannot under-
stand why Croce believes that his position on the theory of history has
the capacity to liquidate every philosophy of praxis definitively. In the
same period when Croce fashioned this so-called truncheon of his, what
actually happened is that the philosophy of praxis, according to its great-
est modern theorists, was fashioned in the same way, and the moment
of hegemony or cultural direction was systematically revalued exactly
against the mechanist and fatalist conceptions of economism. In fact,
it has been possible to assert that the essential feature of the most mod-
ern philosophy of praxis is precisely the historical-political concept of
hegemony. So it seems to me either that Croce is not ‘up to date’ with
the research and bibliography of his chosen fields or that he has lost his
capacity for critical orientation. As for his own information, it is based
directly on a notorious book by a Viennese journalist, Fülop-Miller.18
This point should be developed thoroughly and analytically, but that
would require very long treatment. For your interests, I think these sug-
gestions are enough. It would not be easy for me to extend them.
Dear one, I hug you tenderly,

Antonio
767
Letter 304, 9 May 1932
Dearest Tania:
I received your postcard of April 30 and a letter of May 6. I haven’t

received the issue of Riforma Sociale for September-October 1931, nor
any of the books ordered then. Four books reached me one after anoth-
er: the edition of Machiavelli’s Prince done by Luigi Russo; the autobi-
ography of Gandhi with a preface by Senator Gentile; Senator Croce’s
Storia d’Europa; and a little book of local Genoese history by Mario Bet-
tinotti. But up to now only The Prince has been delivered to me. The book
by Benco is La Storia del Piccolo di Trieste, published by Treves-Trecanni-
Tuminelli, and the book by Emilio Zanella is Dalla Barbarie alla civiltà nel
Polesine, published by Problems of Labor.19
As for other books, see that they send me none at all. From now on,
this is the rule that we need to follow strictly: if I need a book, I will say so
myself. In this last period, the books sent to me have not been delivered.
For each one I have to apply to the Ministry, which is not only tedious but
absurd. Don’t you think? You had written about subscribing to Cultura,
for which I had already gotten permission, but I don’t know if this was
done. I’ve seen now that it’s published in four issues a year and that the
first issue for 1932 has come out. From home I’ve had no news for more
than a month and a half. Fifteen days ago I got a postcard from Teresina
with just a hello.20
Since I still haven’t read the Storia d’Europa, I can’t give you any clue
about its real content. But I can put down some observations that would
only seemingly be external to it, as you’ll see. I had already written to you
that all Croce’s efforts of the last twenty years as an historian have been
aimed at developing a theory of history as ethical-political history, in con-
trast to the economic-legal history that used to reflect the theory derived
from historical materialism, following the revisionist process that it had
gone through because of the work of Croce himself.
So is Croce’s history ethical-political? It seems to me that Croce’s his-
tory can only be called speculative or philosophical history, not ethical-polit-
ical, and that its opposition to historical materialism lies in this feature,
not in its being ethical-political. An ethical-political history is not exclud-
ed by historical materialism inasmuch as it is the history of the hegem-
onic moment, while speculative history, like all speculative philosophy,
is excluded. In working out his philosophy, Croce says that he wanted
to free modern thinking of every trace of transcendence, of theology,
768
Gramsci, Letters
and hence of metaphysics in the traditional sense. Pursuing this course,

he went as far as to reject philosophy as system precisely because there
is a theological residue in the idea of system. But his own philosophy
is a speculative philosophy, and as such it fully sustains transcendence
and theology while using historicist language. Croce is so immersed in
this speculative method and language of his that he can only judge in
those terms. When he writes that structure in the philosophy of praxis is
like a hidden God, this would be true if the philosophy of praxis were a
speculative philosophy and not an absolute historicism, really – not just
verbally – liberated from any transcendental and theological residue.21
Connected with this point is another observation that relates more
closely to the conception and composition of the Storia d’Europa. Can
you imagine a unitary history of Europe that starts from 1815, from the
Restoration? If a history of Europe can be written as the formation of a
block of history, it cannot exclude the French Revolution and the Napo-
leonic Wars, which are the economic-legal premise, the moment of force
and struggle, in the block of European history. Croce is thinking of the
next moment, the one in which forces previously unleashed have been
stabilized – have undergone catharsis, so to speak – and to construct
his historical model he turns this moment into a fact on its own. He
did the same thing with the Storia d’Italia.22 By starting in 1870, this his-
tory bypasses the moment of struggle, the economic moment, to offer
an apology for the purely ethical-political moment, as if it had fallen
from the sky. Naturally, with all the clever and cunning moves of modern
critical language, Croce has produced a new form of rhetorical history,
whose current form is speculative history and precisely that.
We can see this even better if we examine the historical concept that
is at the centre of Croce’s book – the concept of liberty. Contradicting
himself, Croce confuses liberty as a speculative concept or philosophical
principle with liberty as ideology or as a practical instrument of govern-
ment, a component of hegemonic moral unity. If all history is the history
of liberty, or of the Spirit that creates itself (and in this language liberty
is equivalent to the Spirit, the Spirit is equivalent to history and history
to liberty), why should the history of Europe in the nineteenth century
be the only history of liberty? This history will not be one of liberty in the
philosophical sense, then, but of the self-consciousness of this liberty and
of the spreading of this self-consciousness under the form of religion at
the level of intellectuals and of superstition at the level of the people,
who feel themselves united to the intellectuals, who feel themselves to be
participants in a political block where those intellectuals are the stand-
769
ard-bearers and priests. So we are talking about an ideology, a practical

instrument of government, and it will be necessary to study the nexus of
practice on which it is based.
Liberty as a historical concept is just the dialectic of history, which has
no distinct and individuated representative practices. History was liberty
even in the satrapies of the Orient, so truly that even then it was histori-
cal movement, and those satrapies collapsed. In the end, it seems to me
that the words change, that the words may be well said, but that they
don’t even scratch the surface of the facts. I think that an article in Critica
Fascista has made the correct criticism, though not explicitly, when it
observes that Croce, looking at the present in perspective, will be able to
find its historical justification as a process of liberty within twenty years.23
Otherwise, if you remember the first point that I made in writing you
– my observations about Croce’s attitude during the war – you’ll under-
stand his point of view better. As ‘priest’ of the modern historicist reli-
gion, Croce lives the thesis and the antithesis of the historical process and
insists on ‘practical reasons’ in the one, and in the other because he sees
the future in the present and worries about the future as much as about
the present. Each person has his part to play – the priests are the custo-
dians of tomorrow. At bottom, there’s a good dose of moral cynicism in
this ethical-political notion. It’s the current form of Machiavellianism.
I hug you tenderly,

Antonio
Letter 307, 23 May 1932
Dearest Tania:
I received your postcard of the 17th and the letter of the 19th. The
news that Carlo gave you about the state of my health is not very clear. I
haven’t had serious bouts of uric acid, even though the continuing intes-
tinal inflammation must certainly be connected with excessive acidity.
On the other hand, I have been suffering for some time from insomnia,
if you can call it that. More precisely, I don’t sleep not because I’m not
sleepy but because sleep is interrupted by external causes, which has
put me in a state of great fatigue and exhaustion, and this is apparent
even externally, as Carlo noticed. The problem is complicated, and I’ll
be able to speak with you about it if you come to talk. For the date when
you come I have no special preferences. You should pick the time that’s
770
Gramsci, Letters
convenient for you from any point of view. I’ve read your Dad’s letter
with great interest. It’s quite charming and full of observations that make
me think. As far as what you say about my being able to write him, I don’t
agree. It would be hard for me to give you a full account of the reason.
Some things I don’t like writing about in a letter from prison.
You haven’t given me your opinion of the notes I wrote you about
Croce. Do they seem generally useful to you? Anyhow, you must keep in
mind that they cannot be complete, that they could not deal with cer-
tain issues that may need to be dealt with, and that, even as they stand,
they’ve suffered voluntary mutilation.
I finally got the books ordered a long time ago. But I haven’t received
the issue of Riforma Sociale for September-October 1931. I’m also missing
the April 1932 issue of Problemi del Lavoro, and I’ll be grateful if you ask
for it. (I’ve never received the first issue of Cultura for the year.)
If you happen to write to Piero, mention to him that in a passage of
Certezze, a recent book by Silvio D’Amico, a chapter dedicated to Spiel-
berg talks about a petition for mercy sent by Federico Confalonieri to
the Emperor of Austria that should go straight to Spielberg’s own Italian
museum. D’Amico does not reprint this entreaty, but he hints around
as if it were written by a person reduced to the lowest level of degra-
dation and humiliation. Piero may know if this piece by Confalonieri
was already printed in some publication about Confalonieri. I think I’ve
never heard anything about it.24
Could you also send me some Hunt Salts, dearest? I can no longer do
without taking them, and I’ve almost finished the supply. I’ve tried to
stop using it, but the problems come right back.
I embrace you tenderly,

Antonio
Letter 308, 30 May 1932
Dearest Tania:
I received your postcard of the 25th and the money order of the 28th.
I’m deeply grateful, but I assure you that there was no urgency. As I
wrote some months ago, the expenses that I have are relatively small;
and besides, it’s impossible to buy anything worth eating. It’s really bet-
ter not to go off a strict diet so things don’t get worse. Any change or any
771
attempt to increase the amount of food that I eat causes me such trouble
that from now on I’d rather not even try. Besides, I’m not worried about
this now, and I feel no weaker than usual. You must not think that I’ve
turned into a fatalist and abandoned myself to the moving current like a
chien crevé.25 On the contrary, I keep fussing about it to find more rational
solutions, but my range of choice is quite restricted and keeps becoming
more restricted with every effort that turns out to be useless.
But let’s talk about more interesting things that will let me express my
mania and string four bits of gossip together. I want to make a series of
observations so that, if you have a chance, you can send a copy to Piero
and ask him for any bibliographical information that would help me
enlarge the scope of my thinking and orient myself better. I would like
to know if there is any special publication, even in English, on Ricardo’s
own method of research in the economic sciences and on the innova-
tions in methodological criticism that Ricardo introduced. Ten years ago,
specifically on the centenary of his death, I believe that a rich literature
on this subject appeared, and that there is some likelihood of finding
there exactly what has to do with my topic.26 This is where my thinking
is going: can we say that Ricardo was important for the history of phi-
losophy as well as the history of economics, where he certainly stands
in the first rank? And can we say that Ricardo contributed to pointing
the first theorizers of the philosophy of praxis towards their overcom-
ing of Hegelian philosophy and towards the construction of their new
historicism, purged of every trace of speculative logic?27 It seems to me
that one could try to prove this proposition, and that it would be worth
the trouble to do so.
I start with two concepts, fundamental for economics, which I believe
we owe to Ricardo, those of a determinate market and of a trend law. Here
is my reasoning: may it not be from these two concepts that we get the
motive to reduce the immanentist conception of history, as expressed in
the speculative and idealist language of classical German philosophy, to
a directly historical, realist immanence, wherein the law of causality in
the natural sciences has been purged of its mechanism and identified
synthetically with the dialectical reasoning of Hegelian thought? Maybe
this whole nexus of ideas still seems a bit muddy, but what matters to me
is just the overall understanding, even if it is approximate, as long as it
suffices to learn whether the problem has been foreseen and studied by
some expert on Ricardo.
We must remember how Hegel himself, in other contexts, had seen
these necessary connections between different scientific activities, and
772
Gramsci, Letters
also between scientific activities and practical activities. Thus, in the Lec-
tures on the History of Philosophy, he found a nexus between the French
Revolution and the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, and he
said that ‘only two peoples, the German and the French, as opposed
as they may be to one another, yet, just because they are opposed, have
taken part in the great epoch of universal history’ at the end of the eight-
eenth century and the first part of the nineteenth century, once the new
principle ‘erupted as Spirit and concept’ in Germany while in France it
unfolded ‘as effective reality.’28 From the Holy Family it appears that this
nexus between French political activity and German philosophical activ-
ity posited by Hegel was taken over by the theorists of the philosophy
of praxis.29 The point is to see how and to what extent classical English
economics, in the methodological form worked out by Ricardo, contrib-
uted to the later development of the new theory. That classical English
economics contributed to the development of the new philosophy is
commonly accepted, but we usually think of Ricardo’s theory of value. It
seems to me that we must look farther and identify a contribution that
I would call synthetic, having to do with the world view and the mode of
thinking, and so it is not only analytic, regarding a particular doctrine,
but also fundamental.
In his research for the critical edition of Ricardo’s Works, Piero might
be able to collect valuable material on this topic. In any case, let him see
if some publication exists that deals with these issues or might help me
in my imprisoned state, when I cannot do organized research in a library.
Dearest Tania, I hug you tenderly,

Antonio
Letter 309, 6 June 1932
Dearest Tania:
I received your letter of May 30, and I’ve also received the samples deliv-
ered with the medicines. I’ve already taken the Sedosine, but I have to
say that it doesn’t do anything for me. I’ve taken Somatose now and then,
but still not on a regular basis. I really don’t know what to do because the
food that I get doesn’t work for mixing with a preparation of that kind.
I’ll just trying swallowing it loose in cold water, but I not sure how that
will work. Maybe you have to put it in a hot liquid.
I assure you that I have no problem calling things by their names. I
773
call them as I can, given what I know. I don’t know how to call ‘intesti-
nal inflammation’ anything but that. Likewise, it is correct that it is not
‘organic’ insomnia that keeps me from sleeping. I believe that not sleep-
ing, even if it is called ‘insomnia,’ is not always to be cured like insomnia.
I think it better not to ask questions about words. The important thing
is to understand, and I think you have understood what the problem is.
For the three months beginning on July 1, please subscribe again to
the Corriere della Sera, but this time please send L17 instead of L14.50,
and specify that you also want the Monday issue.30 Looking closer at
the subscription advertisement that they sent me because the last three
months is expiring, I noticed that you can also subscribe for the Monday
issue, which was not clear from the heading in the newspaper. I’m send-
ing you the form for the checking account that you can use to send the
money from Rome without delivery charges!
I’ll try to answer the other questions that you ask me about Croce, even
though I don’t quite understand why they are important, and maybe I
think I’ve already answered them in what I said before. Look again at the
note in which I mentioned the attitude maintained by Croce during the
War, and see if it doesn’t contain the answer to one part of your current
questions implicitly.
The break with Gentile occurred in 1912, and it’s Gentile who dis-
tanced himself from Croce and tried to make himself philosophically
independent.31 I don’t believe that Croce has changed his position from
that time on, even though he has defined his teachings better; the more
notable transformation occurred between 1900 and 1910. The so-called
‘religion of liberty’ is not a discovery of the present years. In one sharp
formulation, it sums up his thinking over the whole period from the
moment when he abandoned Catholicism – as he himself writes in his
intellectual autobiography (Contributo alla critica di me stesso). And I do
not think that Gentile disagrees with Croce about this.
I believe that the interpretation of the ‘religion of liberty’ formula
that you give is incorrect since you attribute a mystical content to it (one
might think so from the fact that you refer to a ‘taking refuge’ in this reli-
gion and thus to a kind of ‘flight’ from the world, and so on). Nothing
of the sort. ‘Religion of liberty’ simply means faith in modern civilization
that has no need of the transcendental and revelatory but contains in
itself its own rationality and its own origin. Hence, it is an anti-mystical
formula, and, if you like, anti-religious. For Croce, every conception of
the world, every philosophy, insofar as it becomes a rule of life and a
morality, is religion. Religions in the confessional sense are religions too,
774
Gramsci, Letters
but mythological religions, and thus, in a certain sense, ‘lower’ and primi-
tive, as if corresponding to an historical infancy of the human race. The
origins of this doctrine are already there in Hegel and Vico, and they are
the common heritage of all Italian idealist philosophy, whether Croce’s
or Gentile’s. This doctrine is the basis of Gentile’s educational reform
with regard to religious instruction in the schools, which even Gentile
wanted to restrict to elementary schools alone (infancy true and prop-
er), and which, in any event, not even the government has wanted to
introduce into the upper level.
Thus, I think you may be exaggerating Croce’s position at the present
moment, seeing it as more isolated than it is. We must not let ourselves
be deceived by the polemical effervescence of writers who are dilet-
tantes, more or less, and irresponsible. Croce has explained much of his
current thinking in the journal Politica, edited by Coppola and Minister
Rocco.32 Not only Coppola, I believe, but many others are persuaded of
the usefulness of the position taken by Croce, which creates the situation
that makes it possible to give real education, aimed at the life of the state,
to new groups of leaders who surfaced in the postwar period.
If you study the whole history of Italy from 1815 on, you see that a
small leadership group managed methodically to absorb into its circle
all the political personnel produced by originally subversive mass move-
ments. From 1860 to 1876, the Action Party of Mazzini and Garibaldi
was absorbed by the monarchy, leaving an insignificant residue that con-
tinued to exist as the Republican Party, but with an effect that belongs
more to folklore than to the history of politics. The phenomenon has
been called transformism, but it was not an isolated phenomenon.33 It
was an organic process, which, for the formation of the ruling class,
took the place of what had happened in France with the Revolution and
Napoleon and happened in England with Cromwell. Indeed, even after
1876, the process continues, bit by bit. This phenomenon is of great
moment in the postwar period when the traditional leadership group is
apparently in no position to assimilate and digest the new forces thrown
up by events. But this leadership group is more malin and capable than
we might have supposed. Absorbing them is difficult and burdensome,
but, despite all that, it happens, in many ways and by various methods.
Croce’s activity is one of these ways and these methods. His teaching
produces perhaps the largest quantity of ‘gastric juices’ involved in the
work of digestion.
When we put it in historical perspective – Italian history, naturally –
Croce’s energy seems to be the most powerful machine for ‘conforming’
775
the new forces to the vital interests (not only current, but also future)
of the group dominant today, which, I believe, puts the right value on it,
certain superficial appearances notwithstanding. When you melt down
different substances to produce an alloy, effervescence on the surface
indicates that the alloy is actually forming, and not the reverse. And
likewise in these human cases, concord always shows up as discord, as a
struggle and a battle, not a hug on the stage. But concord it always is, and
the deepest and most effective kind.
I hug you tenderly, dearest,

Antonio
NOTES
1 We have used Gramsci (1996a): 562−87, along with Antonio Santucci’s very
informative notes.
2 For Tania Schucht (1887−1943), see section 27 of the Introduction. Tania
was the sister of Giulia Schucht (1896−1980), Gramsci’s wife, and both were
daughters of Apollon Schucht, a Russian exile. Giulia joined the Bolsheviks
in 1917. When Gramsci went to Moscow in 1922, Giulia met him while he
was recovering from exhaustion in a sanatorium near Moscow. She was very
ill for much of the time that Gramsci spent in prison.
3 Delio was Giulia’s and Antonio’s oldest son, born in Moscow in 1926. Soma-
tose was a dietary supplement.
4 The book in question is Croce (1932), parts of which Gramsci had read in
Croce (1931b): see section 27 of the Introduction.
5 Croce (1928b), collecting essays from La Critica and elsewhere.
6 The Liberal Giovanni Giolitti (1842−1928) was the most persistent presence
in Italian politics between Cavour and Mussolini, premier five times between
1892 and 1921. Croce served his last government as minister of public educa-
tion in 1920−1: Duggan (1994): 178−90; Bonetti (2001): 149−50.
7 The Italian text has più che in tedesco e più che in italiano.
8 Eduard Bernstein (1850−1932) became the champion of an anti-Hegelian
critique of orthodox Marxism that came to be called ‘revisionism’ (by
Lenin, for example, referring to the possibility of participation in electoral
politics), in the way that criticisms of early Christianity came to be called
‘heresy.’ For Sorel, see sections 14 and 27 of the Introduction.
9 Sorel (1927): 311.
10 Croce (1912), (1921a), (1925b), (1932).
776
Gramsci, Letters
11 Croce (1928−9); Gramsci (1996a), ed. Santucci, II, 565.

12 Crémieux (1928):190.
13 The letter from Apollon Schucht, Tania’s father, was about the health of
Giulia, Gramsci’s wife; Tania thought the letter inappropriate: Gramsci
(1996a), II, 571.
14 Marzocco was a Florentine journal of art and culture founded in 1896; it had
drifted far to the right by the time of its extinction in 1932. Gramsci refers
to the issue of 6 March 1932 in which the government had announced
plans for a publication about Italians abroad: Gramsci (1996b), II, 554.
15 William Petty (1623−87) was an early economic theorist regarded as impor-
tant by Marx.
16 The distinguished medievalist Gioacchino Volpe, who signed the Fascist
Manifesto of 1925, also wrote influential works about the Italy of his own day.
17 For hegemony, see Gramsci’s ‘Introduction to Philosophy,’ and sections 25
and 27 of the Introduction.
18 Fülop-Miller (1926).
19 Silvio Benco (1874−1949) was a journalist and critic for Il Piccolo, a news-
paper in Trieste; Emilio Zanella was a political activist and a follower of
Nicola Badaloni: Gandhi (1921); Machiavelli (1931); Benco (1931); Croce
(1932); Bettinotti (1932); Zanella (1931).
20 Teresina was Gramsci’s sister.
21 Gramsci (1975), II, 1225−6.
22 Croce (1928a).
23 D’Andrea (1932).
24 Federico Confaloniere (1785−1846) was an aristocrat and a revolutionary
who suffered harsh interrogations and a sentence of life imprisonment in
Spielberg in Austria, but then was allowed to go into exile: D’Amico (1932).
For Piero Sraffa see section 27 of the Introduction.
25 Dead dog.
26 David Ricardo (1772−1823) was a major systematizer of classical economics
and the author of the ‘iron law of wages.’
27 It was Marx and Engels who were ‘the first theorizers of the philosophy of
praxis’: see Gentile’s ‘Philosophy of Praxis.’
28 Gramsci quotes Hegel from Croce (1918b): 292−4.
29 For The Holy Family, see Gramsci, ‘Introduction,’ section 6; Gramsci uses
Marx (1927), II, 67.
30 Founded in 1876, the Corriere della Sera became one of Italy’s most widely
read newspapers, maintaining its editorial independence and centrist point
of view until the Fascist period.
31 See section 23 of the Introduction on Gentile’s relationship with Croce.
777
32 The journalist Francesco Coppola (1878−1957), who founded Politica with

Alfredo Rocca (1875−1935), was a Fascist and supported racism; Rocca was
an ex-Marxist and a minister in the Fascist government. Croce’s articles,
which appeared in Politica in 1919, were collected in Croce (1928b).
33 For transformism, see the notes to Gentile, ‘Idealism,’ as well as Musella
(2003).
778
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804
Name Index
A Reply to the ‘Manifesto’ of the Fascist Amabile, Luigi, 635

Intellectuals, 142−6, 713−16 Amari, Michele, 50
Abruzzi, 49, 493 Amendola, Giovanni, 143, 147
Accademia dei Lincei, 54, 334 America, 3−4, 7, 128, 167, 169, 186,
Accademia del Cimento, 334 205, 389, 392, 395, 472, 610, 629, 660,
Accademia della Crusca, 54, 311 671, 736, 741, 752−3
Accademia Pontaniana, 91, 106, 502, Amphitrite, 355, 369
662 Anaxagoras, 268
Achilles, 549 Anaximenes, 581
Achillini, Alessandro, 352, 354 ancien régime, 24, 580
Aconcio, Jacopo, 321, 326, 328, 331, Angiulli, Andrea, 54, 474, 483
339−40, 779 Anselm of Aosta, 7, 267, 269, 438, 445,
Acton, Lord (John Dalberg-Acton), 536, 579, 625
761 Aoma, 266
Adam, 70, 567, 604 Apollo, 376, 627, 640
Aeneas, 465 Aquinas, Thomas, 7, 26, 30, 164, 166,
Africa, 116, 611, 614, 726 257, 267, 269, 352, 381, 390, 634, 674,
Agricola, Rudolf, 318, 340 746, 752
Agrippa von Nettesheim, Henry Araldi, Michele, 9
Cornelius, 327, 341 Archimedes, 46, 316
Agrippina, 416−17 Ardigò, Roberto, 54, 88, 127, 165, 178
Ajello, Giambattista, 48 Arethusa, 459, 462
Alaric, 590 Ariosto, Ludovico, 431, 457, 627
Albert of Saxony, 277 Aristotelian, 141, 166, 269, 317, 340,
Alcaeus, 479 342, 345, 347, 352, 462, 532, 551, 577,
Alexandrian, 267−8, 316 579, 582, 589, 600, 624, 672−3, 681,
Alfieri, Vittorio, 36 696, 699, 740
Alps, 88, 163, 674 Aristotle, 8, 69, 82, 238, 269, 275, 308,
Name Index
317−21, 323, 329, 331, 340, 345, Bebel, August, 477, 483
378−9, 387, 396, 409, 412, 418, 458, Bentham, Jeremy, 4, 245, 263, 373, 448
469, 472, 549−50, 571, 580, 589, 608, Bergson, Henri, 117, 623, 641
632, 640, 652, 659, 663−4, 673, 679, Berkeley, George, 8, 21, 245−8, 250−2,
687, 696, 752, 761 254, 263, 448
Arnauld, Antoine, 263 Berlin, 61, 401, 625, 629−30, 635, 638,
Aryan, 392, 470, 482 640
Asia, 116, 266, 400, 468, 610−11, 614 Bern, 69, 421
Aspasia, 505 Bernard, Claude, 371, 382, 399
Assyria, 469,482 Bernard of Clairvaux, 268−9
Asturaro, Alfonso, 473, 482 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques
Athens, 83, 432, 435, 468, 472, 621, Henri, 558, 629
682 Bernheim, Ernst, 465, 467, 485, 491,
Augustine, 30, 257, 267−8, 284, 694 494, 502−3, 506, 509, 513−14
Australia, 610, 749, 795 Bernstein, Eduard, 160, 763, 776
Austria, 11, 24−5, 45, 505, 508, 753, Berthelot, Marcelin, 371, 399
771, 777 Berti, Domenico, 635
Avellino, 60 Bethnal Green, 495, 509
Avesta, 277 Bettinotti, Mario, 768
Bibel-Babel, 468, 482
Babel, 468, 482 Bible, 11, 264, 276, 482, 627
Babylon, 468 Bichat, Marie F.X., 453, 461
Bacinetti family, 68 Bismarck, Otto von, 562, 630
Bacon, Francis, 47, 56, 62−3, 73, 324, Bobbio, Norberto, 3−6, 163, 165,
330−3, 341, 352, 357, 378, 398, 401, 167−9, 171, 173, 189−90, 370
410−11, 431, 448, 579, 589, 632, 636, Bologna, 45, 50, 52, 66−7, 70, 143, 343,
694 433, 439, 444, 712−13
Bactria, 277 Bolshevik, 715, 761, 776
Baillie, J.B., 681 Bomba, 48
Bain, Alexander, 88, 682 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon, 45
Balzac, Honoré de, 512 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 595
Barbaro, Ermolao, 317, 340 Bonatelli, Francesco, 87
Barth, Paul, 469, 482, 640 Bonaventura of Bagnoregio, 7, 30,
Barzellotti, Giacomo, 86−9, 142, 181 267, 269, 284, 289, 311
Bastille, 429, 444 Born, Friedrich Gottlob, 23, 174
Bauer. Bruno and Edgar, 720, 749 Bosanquet, Bernard, 504, 629
Bavaria, 68 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 374, 390,
Bayard, 544, 627 399, 437, 445
Beatrice, 487, 504 Bothwell, Earl of (James Hepburn),
Beattie, James, 338 513
806
Name Index
Bouillier, Francisque, 438, 446 Cambridge, 159, 761

Bradley, F.H., 629 Campanella, Tommaso, 7, 47, 50, 52,
Brenner Pass, 753 88, 127, 269, 323−5, 328, 330−3, 339,
Bresciani, Antonio, 50 344, 348, 352−5, 357, 364−5, 367, 378,
Breton, 269 595, 635, 676, 682, 695
Britain, 73−4, 76, 86, 88, 163, 166−7, Campania, 445−6
169, 621, 749 Campo de’ Fiori, 79
Broussais, François, 453, 461 Candide, 55
Brucker, Jacob, 608, 638 Cannes, 418
Bruers, Antonio, 739, 751 Canterbury, 445
Brunetière, Ferdinand, 127−8, 681 Capuana, Luigi, 512
Bruno, Giordano, 7, 37, 47, 50, 52, 66, Carbonari, 36, 45
68−9, 79, 88, 119, 127, 168, 181, 269, Cardano, Girolamo, 269, 319, 327, 340
319, 322, 331, 333, 344, 348−9, 352, Carducci, Giosuè, 90, 498−9, 511;
354−9, 362−3, 365−7, 369, 378, 396, Hymn to Satan, 526−7, 532; Odi
418−21, 428, 550−2, 624, 627−8, 635, barbare, 498, 511
672, 695, 701 Carlo Alberto, 36, 38
Brussels, 36, 642, 644 Carlo Felice, 36
Buckle, Henry, 53−4, 182, 493, 502−3, Carlyle, Thomas, 152
507−8, 510 Carnap, Rudolf, 639
Buddhism, 114, 266, 576, 579, 611, 624 Cartesianism, 8, 18, 20, 38, 46, 71−2,
Bukharin, Nikolai, 149−51, 734−6, 109, 270−1, 276, 331, 334, 357, 436−8,
739−42, 745, 751 443, 551, 577, 624, 676, 685
Bunsen, Baron Karl von, 69, 418, 421, Cassino, 77
428 Cassirer, Ernst, 117, 639, 788
Burckhardt, Jacob, 53, 66, 95, 179, 369 Castel dell’Ovo, 60
Burtt, E.A., 186 Castelli, Enrico, 176
Butler, Samuel, 632 Castelvetrano, 118
Böhme, Jacob, 551, 628 Catalan, 750
Büchner, Ludwig, 371, 399, 660, 664 Catholic, 10, 12−13, 24, 38, 49, 68,
86−7, 127, 156−8, 161, 164−7, 171,
Caesar, Julius, 267, 590 263−8, 310, 340, 348, 352, 354, 477,
Calabria, 11, 60, 66 564, 566, 595, 633, 704, 715, 719, 725,
Calais, 96 727, 732, 735, 738, 755−6, 758, 761,
Caliban, 95, 490 765, 774
California, 741 Cattaneo, Carlo, 25
Caligero, Guido, 186 Cavour, Camillo Benso di, 26, 47, 60,
Calonne, Charles-Alexandre de, 632 562, 630, 776
Calvello, Giambattista, 48 Ceci, Luigi, 468, 482
Calvinism, 730 Celtic, 269, 272
807
Name Index
Cesalpino, Andrea, 319, 327, 340−1, Commune of Rome, 142

352, 354 Comte, Auguste, 52−3, 56, 73−4, 88,
Chabod, Federico, 153 165, 331, 342, 371−2, 376−7, 385,
Chaldaea, 275 392−3, 399, 448−9, 451, 453, 460−1,
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 609, 468, 474, 505, 507, 509, 562, 630;
638 Cours de philosophie positive, 53, 331,
Charles I, 509 342, 448
Charles II, 495, 509 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 8−11,
Chateaubriand, François René de, 36 33, 126, 163, 174, 234, 245, 248, 252,
Chevalier, Sulpice, 512 263, 322, 338, 373, 401, 411, 507, 570,
Chieti, 49 631
China, 430, 610−11 Confaloniere, Federico, 771, 777
Chios, 662 Confucius, 266
Christ, 30, 69, 166, 265, 444 Conti, Augusto, 86, 505
Christianity, 3, 24, 36−7, 64, 121−2, 166, Copernicus, Nicolaus, 266, 327
188, 267−70, 273−6, 302, 349−50, 367, Coppola, Francesco, 775, 778
370, 389, 391, 400, 409, 474, 497, 505, Corriere della Sera (newspaper), 774,
550−1, 554, 564, 579, 608, 610-611, 777
618, 624, 627, 640, 644-646, 653-654, Corsini, Lorenzo, 439, 446
663-664, 704-705, 727, 730, 750, 761, Cosenza, 334
776 Cossa, Pietro, 417
Church, 12, 24−5, 37, 51, 54, 79, 87, Counter-Reformation, 727
157, 161, 164−6, 269, 348, 352, 354, Cousin, Victor, 9−10, 13, 25, 48, 66, 70,
564, 595, 628, 715, 725, 727, 732, 750, 174, 277, 338−9, 554, 629, 637
756 Cremonini, Cesare, 319, 340, 352, 458,
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 7, 170, 297, 462
317, 321 Crivelluci, Amedeo, 118
Cieskowski, August von, 640 Croce, Benedetto, 6−7, 52, 54, 60−1,
Cilento, 439, 446 63, 66, 73, 79−80, 89−119, 126, 131,
Cimini, Angiola (Angela Cimmino), 142−3, 145−7, 149−51, 153−61,
439, 446 163−70, 182−3, 188, 482, 484−641,
Civiltà Cattolica (Catholic Civilization), 643, 680−1, 694−5, 717, 736−7, 739,
49, 164 741, 743−4, 747, 749−65, 767−71,
Claudius, Emperor, 417 774−8; ‘Fundamental Theses of an
Clement XII, 446 Aesthetics,’ 94; ‘History Brought
Cleophantus, 682 Under the General Concept of
Cohen, Hermann, 639−40 Art’,’ 54, 80, 91, 94, 482, 484−515;
Collechi, Ottavio, 48−9, 60 ‘Reply by Italian Authors, Profes-
Collingwood, R.G., 169, 182 sors and Journalists,’ 143; ‘The
Columbus, Christopher, 542, 752 Gentile Case and Dishonesty in
808
Name Index
Italian University Life,’ 131; Aes- Inferno, 513, 693; La Vita Nuova, 504,
thetic as a Science of Expression and 705; Paradiso, 639−40; Purgatorio, 46,
General Linguistics, 94, 99, 107, 695; 177
Contribution to the Critique of Myself, Darnley, Henry Stuart, 501, 513
153, 169, 182; Critical Conversations, Darwin, 65, 124, 127, 165, 475, 603,
717; History as Thought and Action, 636, 669
153; History of Europe in the Nine- Darwinism, 54, 78, 475, 603, 666, 680
teenth Century, 153−61, 168, 753−78; David, Jacques-Louis, 96, 495, 509
History of Italian Historiography, 153, Davidson, Donald, 107, 183
168, 764; History of Italy from 1871 De Gérando, Joseph, 176
to 1915, 153; History of the Age of the De Meis, Camillo, 606, 635, 637
Baroque in Italy, 153, 168; History De Ruggiero, Guido, 5−6, 143
of the Kingdom of Naples, 153, 168; De Sanctis, Francesco, 7, 48, 51, 53,
History, Chronicle and False Histo- 60−6, 77, 90, 167, 170, 401−17, 490,
ries, 764; Logic as Science of the Pure 498, 503−6, 510−11, 680; ‘Science
Concept, 99, 515−32; New Essays on and Life,’ 60−1, 66; ‘The Ideal,’
Italian Literature in the Seventeenth 64−5, 413−17; ‘The Principle of
Century, 153, 168; Outlines of Logic, Realism,’ 61−4, 66, 401−12; The His-
106; Philosophy as Science of the Spirit, tory of Italian Literature, 60−1
107; Philosophy of Practice, 107; The Delfico, Melchiorre, 493, 507
Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, 747; Delitzsch, Friedrich, 482
Theory and History of Historiography, Demiurge, 123, 267, 656
107; What is Living and What is Dead Democritus of Abdera, 579, 582, 662
in Hegel’s Philosophy?, 106, 533−641 Dennett, Daniel, 183
Cromwell, Oliver, 775 Descartes, René, 8, 11−12, 19−20, 37,
Croton, 266−7 47, 50, 52, 67, 70−2, 74, 88, 120, 193,
Cuoco, Vincenzo, 46, 67 267, 270, 276, 281, 297, 328, 331−3,
Curci, Carlo, 38 336, 352, 357, 398, 401, 409, 430−1,
Cusani, Stefano, 48 436−9, 442−4, 446, 454, 551−2, 562,
Cusanus (Nicholas of Cusa), 353, 356, 564, 577, 579, 582, 597, 618, 649,
550, 626−7, 694 663
Cyprus, 341 Destutt de Tracy, Antoine, 10, 174,
193, 234
d’Amico, Silvio, 771 Devenir social, 106, 662
d’Ancona, Alessandro, 118 Dewey, John, 4
d’Annunzio, Gabriele, 751 Diana, 462
Dante Alighieri, 46, 60, 115, 127, 154, Dilthey, Wilhelm, 91, 510
167, 177, 188, 266, 350, 389, 400, 432, Diogenes, 705
445, 465, 487, 496, 499, 504, 511, 513, Dionysian, 545, 627
590, 639−40, 674, 682, 693, 705; Döllinger, Johann, 761
809
Name Index
Dominic Guzman, 727, 750 372, 378, 394−5, 397, 430, 467, 496,
Dominican, 48, 323, 352, 354, 627 510, 611, 614, 629, 713, 741, 750,
Don Abbondio, 492, 507 753−5, 757−9, 764, 767−9
Droysen, Johann Gustav, 182, 484−6, Eustachi, Bartolomeo, 327, 341
495−6, 502−3, 508
Dumas fils, Alexandre, 499, 511 Fabroni, Angelo, 460, 462
Edinburgh, 291, 628, 740 Fallopio, Gabriele, 327, 341
Egypt, 64, 466, 468, 480, 483, 508, 611, Fascism, 3−7, 117, 132, 137, 142−7, 149,
741 153−4, 158, 161, 163−4, 169, 173,
Einaudi, Luigi, 143 706−15, 770, 777−8
Einstein, Albert, 117 Fascist regime, 3, 132, 143, 153−4, 163,
Eleatic, 46, 114, 268, 316, 324, 376, 548, 708−9, 716
576−7, 579, 624 Ferrari, Giuseppe, 431, 444
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 167 Ferrari, Sante, 87
Empedocles, 7, 46, 316 Ferri, Luigi, 86−7, 181
Enciclopedia Italiana, 142 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 77, 83, 119−22,
Engels, Friedrich, 49, 79, 83, 119, 400, 473−4, 482, 642, 644−8, 651,
149−50, 473, 482, 561, 620−1, 630, 653−5, 661, 663−4, 751
637−8, 640, 642−4, 646, 662−3, 742−3, Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 5, 12, 35, 120,
749, 751−2, 761, 777 126, 250−1, 253−4, 263, 272, 337, 363,
England, 3−5, 9, 24, 49, 53, 67, 88, 93, 403, 407, 409, 478, 553−4, 561, 570,
101, 128, 167, 169−70, 173−5, 182−3, 579, 622, 629, 637, 640, 651, 661, 699,
232, 245, 248, 269, 333, 355, 369, 773
371−2, 448, 451, 457, 461, 485, 487, Ficino, Marsilio, 378
503, 507, 509, 530, 579, 601, 608, Fiorentino, Francesco, 7, 66−75, 118,
624−6, 633, 660, 671, 681, 693, 718, 168, 170−1, 429−62, 504, 531, 627−8,
726, 736, 741, 763, 772− 3, 775 635−6, 663, 680; Giordano Bruno and
English Channel, 73, 448, 629, 681 His Times, 69; Letters on the New Sci-
Enlightenment, 9, 11, 27, 36, 86, 126, ence to the Marchesa Florenzi Wadding-
131, 163−4, 263, 507, 562, 564, 597, ton, 67−8, 70−3, 429−46, 628, 636;
628, 664 The Pantheism of Giordano Bruno, 66;
Epicurus, 565, 658, 662 The Philosophical Resurgence of the
Erizzo, Sebastiano, 322, 331, 339, 341 Fifteenth Century, 66−7, 627; ‘Positiv-
Erkenntnisproblem, 628 ism and Idealism,’ 67, 73−6, 170−1,
Ermengarda, 685, 693 447−62
Esperti, Giuseppe Luigi, 438, 446 Fischer, Kuno, 535, 621, 625, 627, 636,
Etruscan, 72, 266−7, 441 640
Europe, 5, 8, 13, 36, 48, 50, 52, 69, 88, Florence, 45, 49, 53, 86, 117−18, 330,
90, 116, 122, 126, 154, 156−8, 160, 334, 389, 399−400, 464, 467, 482, 487,
163, 168, 193, 273, 275−6, 351, 355, 496, 562, 630, 777
810
Name Index
Florenzi Waddington, Marianna, 7, Galilei, Galileo, 7, 10, 37−8, 46−7,

66−76, 79, 180, 418−46, 531, 628, 56−7, 63, 74−5, 127, 160, 243, 266,
636; ‘Pantheism as the Founda- 270−1, 274, 277, 313, 316, 327−33,
tion of the True Good,’ 69, 418−21; 339, 341, 378−81, 385, 393, 396, 398,
‘Remarks on Pantheism,’ 68, 411, 431, 449, 454, 457−8, 460, 462,
422−29; Essays on Psychology and 672, 687−8, 694, 765
Logic, 68; translation of Schelling’s Gallo, Niccolò, 503−4
Bruno, 68−9, 421; Various Thoughts, Galluppi, Pasquale, 7−8, 11−25, 37−9,
69 45, 47−50, 52, 66, 86−8, 119, 163,
Formíggini, Angelo, 475, 483 166, 173−6, 193−244, 254, 271, 334,
Fornari, Vito, 503−4, 506 344, 348, 363−5, 368, 695; Elements
Foscolo, Ugo, 24, 36, 277 of Philosophy, 12, 14−23, 193−244;
Fracastoro, Girolamo, 327, 341 On Analysis and Synthesis, 12, 235;
France, 9, 11, 36, 69, 73, 75, 245, 272, Philosophical Essay on the Critique of
318, 333, 338, 355, 371−3, 471, 622, Consciusness, 12, 212, 235; Philosophi-
629, 632, 664, 670, 732, 736, 751, 753, cal Letters, 12; Philosophy of Will, 13
761, 763, 773, 775 Gandhi, Mohandas, 768
Francesca da Rimini, 685, 693 Gans, Eduard, 595, 634−5
Franchi, Ausonio, 87 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 47, 60, 775
Francis of Assisi, 633, 727, 750 Garin, Eugenio, 54, 67, 183
Freeman, E.A., 503 Gassendi, Pierre, 319, 340
Frege, Gottlob, 639 Gatti, Stanislao, 48
Freiburg, 508 Gavarni, Paul (Sulpice Chevalier),
French, 8−11, 36−8, 45, 47, 61, 66−7, 512
70, 87, 93, 126, 159, 163, 166, 234, Gebhardt, Bruno, 503
269, 271−2, 281, 339, 357, 371, 389, Genesis (Bible), 428
399, 401, 410, 439, 444, 446, 451, 455, Geneva, 482
461, 466, 481, 485, 487, 502, 507−8, Genoa, 47, 87, 768
512, 561, 595, 609, 630, 632, 635, 637, Genovesi, Antonio, 11, 119, 163, 270,
658, 662−4, 732, 736, 751, 759, 762−3, 277, 334
769, 773 Gentile, Giovanni, 6−8, 50, 52, 61,
French Revolution, 4, 9, 24, 65, 79, 82, 66−7, 80, 89, 106, 117−46, 149−51,
154−5, 234, 389, 466, 471, 473, 481, 161, 163−7, 169−70, 173, 175−81,
561, 580, 595, 609, 630, 632, 635, 659, 185−7, 189−90, 277, 533, 628, 637,
732, 769, 773, 775 642−712, 717−19, 737−9, 744, 750−1,
Froebel, Friedrich, 120, 651, 663 768, 774−5, 777−8; ‘Critique of
Fülop-Miller, René, 767, 777 Historical Materialism,’ 119, 664;
‘The Act of Thinking as Pure Act,’
Gabelli, Aristide, 54, 88 131−41, 187, 683−94; ‘The Founda-
Galen of Pergamum, 320, 323 tions of Actual Idealism,’ 131−41,
811
Name Index
695−705; From Genovesi to Galluppi, 37, 40−4, 278−311; On the Civil and
119; A General Theory of the Spirit Moral Primacy of the Italians, 4−5, 8,
as Pure Act, 132; The Philosophy of 36−9, 47, 50, 168, 264−77, 609; The
Marx, 119; ‘The Philosophy of Modern Jesuit, 38; On the Philosophi-
Praxis,’ 118−25, 642−64, 751, 777; cal Errors of Antonio Rosmini, 38; Phi-
‘The Rebirth of Idealism,’ 126−30, losophy of Revelation, 348; Protology,
665−82; Rosmini and Gioberti, 348; Theory of the Supernatural, 37
118−19, 126, 173; A System of Logic as Giobertians, 51, 66, 86, 347
a Theory of Knowledge, 132; Teaching Gioia, Melchiorre, 10, 24, 174
Philosophy in High Schools, 126 Giolitti, Giovanni, 142, 161, 763, 776
Gerdil, Hyacinthe, 257, 263 Giornale critico della filosofia italiana,
German, 9, 11, 23, 27, 37−8, 48−50, 61, 142
66−70, 77−8, 80, 87, 91−2, 94, 97, 122, Giornale dei letterati, 440, 443, 445−6,
132, 148, 159, 163, 174, 236, 239, 253, 462
265, 269, 271−2, 281, 359, 363, 371−4, Giusti, Giuseppe, 738, 751
399, 401, 410, 429, 443−4, 463, 468, God, 13, 30−1, 33, 37, 42, 44, 47, 59,
471−2, 482, 485, 499, 501, 503−4, 506, 68, 107, 120, 123, 128, 155, 197,
566, 609−11, 624, 626, 628−31, 635, 207−8, 211, 230, 243, 246−7, 249−51,
638, 642, 667, 695, 705, 713, 747−8, 257−8, 263, 265, 270, 276, 279, 282,
753, 756, 759, 763, 772−3 284−5, 289, 295−6, 302, 306−10, 318,
Germany, 5, 48, 77, 86−7, 89, 126, 154, 344, 346−9, 351−3, 355−68, 373, 376,
157, 194, 251, 272, 280, 355, 371, 384, 383, 385, 388, 390−1, 397, 399, 405,
400−1, 430, 445, 477, 482−4, 487, 418−19, 421−8, 433, 438, 442, 445−6,
502−4, 528, 551, 562, 597, 611, 621−2, 460, 462, 501, 526, 549−51, 564, 576,
624, 629−30, 638, 671, 751, 753, 763, 578, 583−4, 597, 613, 618, 625−6,
773 639−40, 645, 649, 656, 671, 674−5,
Gerson, Jean Charlier de, 311 687, 694, 701, 704−5, 737−8, 769
Gervinus, Georg, 463, 465, 482 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 160, 384,
Giani, Costanzo, 441, 446 435, 496, 501, 513, 557, 561, 597, 604,
Gibbon, Edward, 96 608, 629−30, 634−8, 765
Gioberti, Vincenzo, 5, 7−8, 25, 36−47, Goldbach, Christian, 505
50-52, 57, 66−8, 86−8, 106, 118−19, Goldberg, Rube, 168
126, 163, 166−8, 170, 173, 177, 263−5, Goldbridle, 544, 627
267, 269, 271, 273, 275−9, 281, 283, Golgatha, 429, 444
285, 287, 289, 291, 293, 295, 297, Goncourt, Edmond de, 512
299, 301, 303, 305, 307, 309−11, Gospel, 271, 415, 417, 694
344−9, 354, 362, 364−6, 368−9, 400, Gracchi brothers, 267
417, 426, 428, 609, 663, 695; The Grammont, Philibert, Comte de, 509
Catholic Reform of the Church, 348; Gramsci, Antonio, 4, 7, 147−53,
Introduction to the Study of Philosophy, 159−64, 166−8, 170, 188−90, 717, 719,
812
Name Index
721, 723, 725, 727, 729, 731, 733, 735, Hebrew, 435, 445, 564, 640
737, 739, 741, 743, 745, 747, 749−52, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 5,
761−3, 765, 767, 769, 771, 773, 775−7; 8, 37, 48−53, 57, 60−4, 68, 70, 77−8,
Letters from Prison, 159−62, 762−78; 87−9, 96, 99, 104−22, 125−6, 148,
Prison Notebooks: Introduction to the 150−1, 155−6, 162, 170, 184, 188, 251,
Study of Philosophy, 147−52, 717−52 265, 267, 272, 363, 369, 373−4, 384,
Gramsci, Carlo, 770 387, 392, 397−9, 402−3, 405, 408−10,
Gramsci, Delio, 762, 764 412, 451, 473, 476, 482, 493−4, 496,
Gramsci, Teresina, 768, 777 498, 502, 504, 508, 525, 532−641,
Graz, 508 644−5, 649, 653−64, 671, 680−1,
Greece, 37, 46, 72, 80, 187, 194, 241, 694−5, 699, 717, 719, 743, 748−9,
266−8, 270, 274, 277, 317, 320, 333, 751−2, 761, 772−3, 775, 777; Aesthet-
345−6, 348−9, 378, 387, 390−1, 394, ics, 576, 584, 587, 609, 613; Encyclope-
403, 428, 432−3, 440, 445, 451, 457, dia Logic, 576, 633, 639, 694; Lectures
462−3, 468, 479−80, 482, 497, 509, on the History of Philosophy, 548,
528, 548, 554, 580, 593, 609−11, 663 579−80, 583, 592−3, 604, 608, 610,
Gregory XVI, 24−5, 165 621, 773; Philosophical Dissertation
Grotius, Hugo, 431, 445, 600, 636 on the Orbits of the Planets, 604; Philo-
Guardian (newspaper), 3 sophical Propaedeutic, 583; Philosophy
Guelf, 38, 50−1, 66, 87, 400 of History, 78, 96, 115, 156, 482, 493,
Guerrini, Orlindo (Lorenzo Stec- 508, 591−5, 601−2, 604−7, 621, 630,
chetti), 511 634−5; The Difference between Fichte’s
Gumplovicz, Ludwig, 508 and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy,
Guyau, Jean Marie, 504 629; The Encyclopedia of the Philosoph-
Göttingen, 77, 421, 631 ical Sciences, 106−7, 533, 535, 566,
569, 576, 587, 591−2, 600, 604, 608,
Haeckel, Ernst, 512 617, 625, 633−4, 636−7, 639−40, 694;
Halley, Edmond, 327 The Phenomenology of Spirit, 48, 156,
Hamann, Johann Georg, 67, 435, 445, 535, 546, 554, 566, 575−6, 580−1, 583,
552, 628 585, 587, 599, 613, 625, 629−30, 632,
Hamilton, Anthony, 495, 509 674; The Philosophy of Nature, 115,
Hampton Court Palace, 495, 509 566, 583, 591, 599, 601−5, 607−8, 611,
Hartmann, Eduard von, 94, 409, 615−17, 619−21, 633, 637, 639; The
412, 488, 497, 504−6, 510−12, 618, Philosophy of Right, 629, 637, 749;
639; German Aesthetics, 94, 504−5, The Philosophy of Spirit, 582−3, 591,
510−11; Philosophy of the Beautiful, 601, 613, 633, 636, 681; The Science of
488, 505−6, 511−12; Philosophy of the Logic, 531, 535, 576, 578, 580−3, 599,
Unconscious, 94, 409, 412 614, 681, 699; The System of Ethical
Harvard University, 186 Life, 583
Haym, Rudolf, 640 Hegelian, 7−8, 48−53, 60−2, 64, 67−8,
813
Name Index
77−8, 83, 87−8, 94, 104, 106−7, 110, Hutten, Ulrich von, 640
115−16, 119, 128, 143, 148, 160, Hölderlin, Friedrich, 629
169−70, 188, 267, 272, 452, 473−5,
487−8, 493, 503−4, 533, 544, 548, 556, I Ching, 266
561−3, 566−8, 571, 583, 595−6, 606−7, Iago, 94−5, 490
614−15, 618−22, 624−7, 629, 632, Idéologues, 10, 234
636−7, 640, 642, 644−5, 661, 666−7, Il Cimento, 49
671, 681, 699, 741−2, 748−9, 772, Il Contemporaneo (newspaper), 4
776 Il Mondo (newspaper), 143
Heidelberg, 625 Il Piemonte (newspaper), 49
Helmholtz, Hermann von, 637 Imbriani, Vittorio, 503−4, 506, 513
Helvétius, Claude-Adrien, 245, 263 Index of Forbidden Books, 12, 25−6, 157,
Heraclitus, 549, 579, 582, 608, 624, 627 263, 348
Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 77−8, India, 266, 279, 293, 310, 610−11
84, 87, 90−1, 94−5, 181−2, 475, 483, Inquisition, 355, 396
487−9, 491, 505−6, 562, 569, 622, Ionia, 376
630−1, 640, 717, 749 Iran, 275
Hercules, 430, 451 Ireland, 510, 581, 633
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 67, 508, Israel, 469
579, 635 Italy, 189, 663, 769, 779−80, 782−5,
Herodotus, 463, 479, 482 789−91, 796−7, 799−802, 804
Hidden God (Deus absconditus), 699,
705, 769 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 19, 67–68,
Hirth, Georg, 512 175, 277, 552, 579, 597-598, 608, 623,
Historical Right (Destra storica), 119, 628, 632, 635, 694
504 Jacobin, 24, 156, 559, 562-563
Hitler, Adolf, 117, 154, 157 Jäger, Johannes, 640
Hobbes, Thomas, 321, 330, 658 Jaja, Donato, 118-119, 127, 142, 665,
Holmes, Roger, 186 680
Homer, 274, 391, 395, 435, 460, 468, James, William, 167, 170
499, 609 James I of England, 513
Horace, 626−7, 662, 682 Janet, Paul, 622, 640−1
Horapollon, 483 Jannelli, Cataldo, 508
Huizong (U Sheng), 266, 277 Jansenist, 509
Hume, David, 8, 16, 19−22, 62, 163, Japan, 741
203, 232−3, 244, 246−8, 250, 252, Jena, 625
410, 442, 444, 448−9, 451, 552, 577, Jerome, 633
579 Jesuit, 25, 38, 49, 164, 178, 340, 497,
Hungary, 753 725, 727
Hus. John, 633 Jesus, 164, 399−400, 727
814
Name Index
Jews, 121, 508, 549, 611, 635, 647, 653, Köstlin, Karl, 499, 505
785 Krug, Wilhelm, 606, 637
John’s Gospel, 417, 639, 682, 694
Jouffroy, Théodore, 9−10, 174 La Critica, 5−6, 106, 117, 126, 142−3,
Jowett, Benjamin, 682 153, 164, 169, 628, 681, 695, 776
Judgment of Paris, 604, 636 La Critica Fascista, 770
Jupiter, 169, 375−6, 410, 449, 460 La Revue des deux mondes, 127
La Stampa (newspaper), 3, 483
Kaffir, 392 La Voce, 117
Kant, Immanuel, 5, 7−8, 10, 12, 14, 16, Labriola, Antonio, 7, 77−86, 90−1,
19−23, 27−8, 35, 38, 49−50, 52, 55−6, 94, 106, 119−20, 122, 149, 170, 181,
62, 66−8, 70, 72−4, 77, 88, 93, 107, 463−83, 506−8, 511, 513, 638, 640,
123, 126, 129, 136, 138, 148, 163, 168, 644, 650, 653, 658, 660, 662−4,
170, 174−5, 187, 194, 212, 214−16, 717−19, 749; Dell’insegnamento della
218−22, 225, 227−8, 230−3, 235−44, storia, 513; Discorrendo di socialismo
248−51, 253−4, 271, 318, 325, 336−7, e di filosofia, 640, 662; ‘History,
363, 370, 373, 386, 398−400, 405−7, Philosophy of History, Sociology
409, 430−1, 433, 435, 437, 439, 441−5, and Historical Materialism,’ 80−5,
450−1, 454, 458−9, 504, 536, 552−5, 463−83, 638; I Problemi della filosofia
569−70, 577, 579, 582, 587, 597−8, della storia, 506, 508, 511; In Memory
608, 613, 621−2, 625, 628, 637−40, of the Communist Manifesto, 79, 106
657, 661, 663, 676−7, 681−2, 690, Lammenais, Hugues Félicité Robert
695−6, 752, 761, 773; Critique of Judg- de, 25
ment, 552, 587; Critique of Practical Lamprecht, Karl, 503
Reason, 639; Critique of Pure Reason, Lange, Friedrich, 400
19−24, 72, 74, 163, 174, 214, 236−7, Lao Tse, 266
243, 249−50, 373, 399, 430, 444, 454, Lasalle, Ferdinand, 749, 751
487, 552, 625, 628, 639 Lateran Pacts, 157, 164, 750
Kantian, 8, 21, 24, 38, 48−9, 55, 67, 75, Laterza, Giovanni, 106
77, 87−8, 117−18, 126−8, 138, 167, Latin, 23−4, 42, 64, 71, 174, 267−70,
169−70, 215, 229, 271, 412, 487, 504, 296−7, 317, 325, 333, 349, 415,
549, 552, 555, 559, 621, 624, 629, 438−41, 472, 474, 480, 501, 651
638−9, 669−70, 672, 681, 690−1 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 634
Kapila, 279, 310 Lavoisier, Antoine, 65, 453
Kepler, Johann, 266, 327 Lazarus, Moritz, 95, 182, 492, 495, 506,
Kirchmann, Julius von, 61, 401, 509, 511−12
409−12 Lecky, William, 182, 496, 510
Kitcher, Patricia, 21 Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques, 318, 340
Königsberg, 12, 23, 35, 77, 212, 232, Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 8, 11, 27,
248, 442, 637 52, 77, 163, 270, 281, 321, 340, 357−8,
815
Name Index
370, 390, 398, 409, 489, 505, 539, 270, 331, 399, 435, 437, 467, 496, 564,
551−2, 579, 582, 597, 626, 691, 747 609, 630−1, 719, 749, 766, 768, 770,
Leipzig, 401, 469, 482, 631, 637 777
Lely, Peter, 495, 509 McTaggart, John, 629, 681
Lenin, Vladimir, 758, 776 Mai, Angelo, 462
Leo XII, 45 Malatesta, Paolo, 685, 693
Leo XIII, 26, 164, 189, 750 Malebranche, Nicolas, 8−9, 30, 257,
Leonardo da Vinci, 46, 117, 326−7, 263, 277, 281, 284, 426, 428
330−1, 334, 339 Mamiani, Terenzio, 7−8, 25, 45−7,
Leopardi, Giacomo, 60, 416−17, 457, 51−2, 69, 87, 167−8, 173, 177−8,
462, 489, 505 180−1, 273−4, 310, 312−42, 363−4,
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 68, 510, 368, 370, 400; Dialogues, 368; The
628 Renewal of the Ancestral Italian Phi-
Lewes, George, 448, 461 losophy, 45, 312−42
Lewis, C.I., 186 Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals,
Libya, 749 142−6, 706−12
Littré, Paul-Émile, 75, 371, 385, 399, Mann, Thomas, 154
455, 461, 474 Manzoni, Alessandro, 25, 36, 159, 167,
Livy, 465 492, 507, 511, 693, 765
Locke, John, 8−11, 14, 28, 33−4, 47, Marat, Jean-Paul, 96
62, 163, 175, 229, 234, 245−8, 252, Marie Antoinette, Queen of France,
263, 270, 335−7, 352, 357, 387, 401, 632
410−11, 444, 448−9, 579, 602 Marinetti, Filippo, 143
Lockhart, William, 174 Marsyas, 639−40
Lombroso, Cesare, 509 Martha, Constant, 510
London, 69, 421, 509, 740 Marucci, Achille, 479, 483
Loria, Achille, 480, 483 Marx, Karl, 49, 79−80, 83−4, 106,
Lotze, Rudolf Hermann, 504, 573, 631 119−27, 148−9, 473, 475−6, 480, 482,
Louis XIV, 509 620, 630, 636, 642−4, 646, 648−51,
Louis XVI, 632 653, 655−64, 680−1, 738, 749, 751,
Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, 45 757, 777; A Contribution to the Cri-
Lucan, 626 tique of Political Economy, 642−3; A
Ludwig I of Bavaria, 68−9 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Lull, Ramon, 322 Philosophy of Right, 749; Theses on
Luther, Martin, 37, 267, 270, 595 Feuerbach, 119−20, 644−8, 662−3
Lybia, 717 Marx and Engels, The Communist
Manifesto, 49, 79, 106, 562, 749; The
Macaulay, Thomas, 73, 448, 744, 751 German Ideology, 482; The Holy Fam-
Macedonia, 621 ily, 720, 749, 777
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 7, 37, 53, 161, Marxism, 80, 86, 106, 119, 126, 151,
816
Name Index
160, 638, 644, 661−2, 680−1, 750, Montaigne, Michel de, 451−2, 461
776 Montecassino, 49
Marzocco, 766, 777 Moore, Thomas, 633
Masci, Filippo, 504 Morocco, 741
Masons, 145, 159, 711, 762 Moscow, 147, 776
Maudsley, Henry, 632 Moses, 424
Maurolico, Francesco, 327, 341 Moslem, 497, 741
Maximilian II of Bavaria, 421 Munich, 69, 508
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 36, 47, 60, 144, Mussolini, Benito, 3, 5, 132, 142−3,
417, 707, 775 147, 154, 157−8, 161, 163, 169, 706,
Mazzoni, Domenico, 48 750, 776
Medici family, 327, 334 Müller, Friedrich Max, 392, 400
Medusa, 668
Mendelssohn, Moses, 68, 628 Nahlowsky, Josef, 505
Mesopotamia, 482 Naples, 5, 11, 13, 46, 48−51, 53, 60−1,
Messalina, 416−17 64, 66−8, 77−8, 86, 90−1, 117, 119,
Methuselah, 678 126, 131, 143, 153, 168, 334, 354, 417,
Metrodorus of Chios, 642, 662 429, 431−2, 434−5, 439, 444, 454, 460,
Mexico, 610 504, 513, 533, 566, 606, 624, 637, 649,
Michelet, Jules, 67, 163, 632 665, 680, 695, 759
Michelet, Karl Ludwig, 605, 619, 637, Napoleon Bonaparte, 8−9, 24, 154−5,
640 167, 509, 595, 635
Middle Ages, 37−8, 269, 274, 293, 344, Nask (Avestan), 266, 277
349−51, 353−4, 356, 367, 377−82, 389, Neo-Guelf, 38
410, 467, 609 Neo-Kantian, 181, 672
Milan, 55, 334, 767 Neo-scholasticism, 6, 149, 164, 166,
Mill, John Stuart, 4, 52, 56, 73−5, 88, 189, 719
170, 371−2, 385, 448−9, 451−3, 456−7, Neoplatonism, 316, 346, 550, 608, 624,
461−2, 624, 628 627
Milyukov, Pavel, 758, 761 Nero, 417
Mind, 86 Nerva, 267
Minerva, 375, 410 Neudecker, Georg, 504
Mnesarchus of Tyre, 267 New Testament, 466
Moby Dick, 168 Newton, Isaac, 55, 62, 163, 380−1, 398,
Mocenigo, Filippo, 323, 341 431, 600, 604, 620, 636−7
Modena, 50 Niebuhr, Barthold, 609, 638
Modernism, 165, 727 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 545, 627, 669
Mommsen, Theodor, 465−6, 482, 496, Nineveh, 468
609, 638 Nizolio, Mario, 321, 326, 328, 331,
Mondolfo, Rodolfo, 143 339−40
817
Name Index
Nobel Prize, 482, 511 Pericles of Athens, 468

Nola, 348, 369, 624 Peripatetic, 267, 269, 293, 318, 321,
North America, 167, 169 323, 326, 328, 333, 341
Novara, 38 Persia, 422, 428, 610−11, 621
Nuova Antologia, 132, 412, 503 Persico, Federico, 413, 417
Peru, 610
Ockham, William of, 269 Perugia, 68−9
Ornato, Luigi, 273, 277 Pesaro, 45
Orwell, George, 137, 187 Pescasseroli, 90
Oswald, James, 338 Peter Abelard, 269, 277
Ovid, 369 Peter the Hermit, 394
Owen, Robert, 647 Petrarch, 317, 340, 506
Oxford, 86 Petty, William, 766, 777
Phenarete, 649
Padua, 24, 54, 354 Phidias of Athens, 395
Palermo, 131−2, 693 Philo Judaeus, 549, 627
Palladio, Andrea, 168 Phoenicia, 470
Palmieri, Luigi, 49, 51, 178 Phoenix, 566
Pangloss, 55 Physiocrats, 659, 664
Pantheon, 429, 444 Piedmont, 36−8, 49, 273, 277, 759
Papal States, 45 Pirandello, Luigi, 143
Papini, Giovanni, 117, 633 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 168
Papua, 717−18, 749 Pisa, 53, 66, 73, 118, 127, 142, 170, 380,
Pareto, Vilfredo, 744, 751 431, 454, 460, 462, 666, 680
Paris, 36, 38, 45, 69, 354, 399, 421, 444, Pius VIII, 24, 45
461, 509 Pius IX, 25−6, 46, 69, 79, 165, 720, 749
Parma, 9 Pius X, 165
Parmenides, 7, 549, 582, 608, 627, 631 Planck, Max, 117
Passerini, Giambattista, 48 Plato, 8, 27, 30, 46, 70, 123−4, 128−9,
Pastonchi, Francesco, 475, 483 169, 257, 266−7, 275, 277, 317, 320−1,
Patrizi, Francesco, 269, 319, 325, 331, 323, 341, 345, 347, 381, 387, 391, 396,
340−1 404, 409, 431−5, 437−9, 445, 486, 495,
Pattison, Mark, 86 549−50, 561, 608, 614, 627, 630, 633,
Paul (New Testament), 68, 290, 419 640, 649, 656, 660, 669, 673, 682, 687,
Paul, Hermann, 508 696; Cratylus, 435, 445; Parmenides,
Pavia, 86 549, 627, 631; Philebus, 549, 673;
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 117, 167 Republic, 70, 432−4, 438, 630, 633,
Pelasgian, 37, 168, 266−7, 269−70, 669; Sophist, 549; Timaeus, 438, 673
273−5 Platonism, 47−8, 70, 87, 124, 141,
Pellico, Silvio, 90 269−70, 273, 325, 330−1, 334, 345,
818
Name Index
347, 438, 440, 549, 577−9, 624, 660, Reid, Thomas, 8−10, 12, 27−8, 33−5,
673, 676, 696, 699−700 37−9, 126, 163, 174, 176, 247−8, 251−
Pliny the Elder, 323 3, 263, 271, 291, 304, 306, 336, 338
Plotinus, 7, 403, 408, 550, 627 Remus, 465
Plutarch, 682 Renaissance, 8, 46−7, 50, 53, 56, 66−7,
Po (river), 708 71, 127, 168, 369, 453, 461, 469, 482,
Poland, 753 562, 595−6, 609, 630, 695, 725
Politecnico, 55, 399 Renan, Ernest, 371, 399, 502
Poliziano, Angelo, 317, 340 Restoration, 8−11, 24−6, 45, 161, 354,
Polonius, 607 561, 630, 769
Polybius of Megalopolis, 609 Reuchlin, Johann, 640
Pomponazzi, Pietro, 46, 66−7, 127, 2 Revolutions, Italian and European,
69, 317−19, 333−4, 340, 352−4, 671, 19th Century, 8, 11, 25, 36, 45, 47,
681 50, 60, 65, 87, 121, 154, 161, 234, 277,
Popper, Karl, 169 481, 561−2, 595, 647, 655, 664, 777
Porphyry of Tyre, 277, 317, 532 Rhea Silvia, 465
Poseidon, 369 Ricardo, David, 161, 772−3, 777
Prague, 505, 508 Richter, Johann Paul (Jean Paul),
Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 117, 744, 751 526, 532
Proclus, 316, 320, 331, 550, 627 Risorgimento, 66−7, 69, 71, 73, 75, 79,
Procrustes, 582, 668 144, 146, 168, 173, 369, 461, 482, 627,
Protestant, 37, 68−9, 88, 270, 340, 554, 695, 707, 715−16
633 Rivista italiana di filosofia, 47, 181
Proteus, 75, 455 Rocca family, 445
Provence, 461 Rocco, Alfredo, 775, 778
Prussia, 69, 212, 421, 482, 484, 503, Rodin, Auguste, 96
561, 630 Rollin, Charles, 495, 509
Pythagoras, 7, 265−7, 445 Romagnosi, Gian Domenico, 10, 24,
Pythagorean, 37, 70, 265−9, 275, 376, 37, 270, 277, 508
579 Roman, 37, 64, 71−2, 79, 83, 168,
267−9, 349−50, 355, 378, 389, 394,
Quattrocento, 67, 627 417, 436, 440−1, 444, 468−9, 472, 477,
Quine, W.V., 183 480, 495−6, 507, 509, 610−11, 624,
Quintilian, 297 725
Roman Catholic, 10, 68, 164, 166, 725
Rabelais, François, 583, 633 Rome, 12, 25, 45, 47, 69, 72, 77, 79,
Ranke, Leopold von, 503 86−7, 90, 142−3, 147, 165, 169, 186,
Ravenna, 68 267−8, 277, 334, 348−9, 421, 436, 441,
Reformation, 354, 471, 595, 609, 725 444, 470, 481−2, 504, 509, 513, 528,
Regno (Kingdom of Naples), 759 590, 609, 621, 638, 708, 764, 766
819
Name Index
Romulus, 267, 441, 465 Saluzzo Roero, Diodata, 461

Roscelin of Compiegne, Jean, 269 Samanean, 266, 277
Rosenkranz, Johann Karl Friedrich, Sambiase Catanzaro, 66
605, 620, 628, 630, 632−3, 637−8, 640 Samkyha, 279, 310
Rosmini-Serbati, Antonio 7−13, 23−36, Samos, 267
38−9, 46−7, 50, 52, 57, 68, 86−8, 106, Sanfedisti, 45
118−19, 126, 163, 165−6, 173−7, 245, Santarosa, Annibale Santorre, Count
247, 249, 251, 253, 255, 257, 259, of, 273, 277
261, 263, 271−2, 277, 281−2, 284−91, Santayana, George, 170
310, 340, 344−8, 363−5, 368, 373, Sardinia, 36, 147, 750
400, 545−6, 622, 641, 695, 720, 749; Sardou, Victorien, 499, 511
A Sketch of Modern Philosophy, 27−35, Sarpi, Paolo, 37, 270, 277
174, 245−63; Essay on Communism Satan, 25, 526
and Socialism, 720; New Essay on the Savonarola, Girolamo, 53, 170
Origin of Ideas, 8, 10, 12, 24, 27−8, 46, Savoy, 263, 482
174−5, 281; The Five Wounds of the Schasler, M.F.A., 504
Holy Church, 25; The Renewal of Phi- Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph,
losophy in Italy Proposed by Mamiani, 68−9, 113, 251, 337, 363, 397, 403−4,
46, 310; Theosophy, 25, 176; Treatise 409, 418, 421, 426−8, 553−5, 570,
on Moral Conscience, 25 577, 579, 587, 597−8, 601−2, 606−8,
Rosminianism, 38, 271−2, 347 617−18, 623, 629, 631, 636−7, 639−40
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 163, 263, 373, Schiller, Friedrich, 416, 498, 501, 504,
561, 629−30, 633, 635 506, 513, 587, 635
Rovereto, 271, 277, 347 Schlegel, Friedrich, 36, 461
Royer-Collard, Pierre-Paul, 9 Schmid, Aloys, 627
Ruggeri, Cosmo, 333 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 94−5, 182, 407,
Russell, Bertrand, 4, 143, 150, 169, 491, 493−5, 498, 506, 510, 562, 587,
639, 740 618, 622, 640
Russia, 48, 147, 150, 157, 751, 753−4, Schoppe, Caspar (Scioppius), 318,
757−8, 761, 776 340
Russian Revolution, 147, 149, 157−8, Schucht, Giulia, 147, 776
757 Schucht, Tania, 147, 159−62, 762−78
Ryle, Gilbert, 109, 112 Scientific Revolution, 57, 398
Scotism, 272
Saint-Martin, Louis Claude de, 340 Scott, Walter, 594
Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouv- Scottish, 8−9, 27, 37−9, 45, 126, 247−8,
roy, Comte de, 453, 461, 474 271, 288, 290−1, 304, 306, 321
Saints Maurice and Lazarus, Order Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa,
of, 473, 482 118−19, 142, 664, 680
Saladin, 742 Sellars, Wilfrid, 107, 184
820
Name Index
Semitic, 468, 630 losophy,’ 343−70; ‘Jesuit Saturdays,’

Senate, 3−4, 142−3, 768 49; Italian Philosophy in Relation to
Seneca the Younger, 268, 297 European Philosophy, 50; Principles
Sepulveda, Juan Ginés de, 318, 340 of Philosophy, 51−2; ‘Prolusione e
Servite, 277 introduzione alle lezioni di filoso-
Servius Tullius, 267 fia,’ 627; Studies on Hegel’s Ethics, 52
Settembrini, Luigi, 511 Spaventa, Silvio, 49, 51, 90, 777
Shakespeare, William, 94, 167, 494, Spencer, Herbert, 54, 74, 86, 88, 165,
514, 526, 532, 607, 609; Hamlet, 607; 181, 450−1, 458, 462, 504, 562, 624,
Macbeth, 96, 494, 526, 532; Richard 630, 641, 682
III, 494 Spengler, Oswald, 755, 761
Sicily, 46, 118−19, 126, 131, 462 Spielberg, 771, 777
Siebeck, Hermann, 505 Spinelli, Matteo, 501, 513
Siena, 3 Spinoza, Baruch, 50, 52, 68−9, 77, 88,
Silenus, 669−70, 681 117, 129−30, 276, 280, 356−9, 363,
Simmel, Georg, 91, 182, 507, 510 366−7, 398, 403−5, 408−9, 422, 425,
Sismondi, Jean Charles Léonard de, 515, 517, 531, 551, 562, 577, 579, 582,
461 597, 618, 624, 628, 631−2, 639, 677,
Smith. Adam, 8 694
Soave, Francesco, 174 Spoleto, 66
Socrates, 77, 120, 266, 268, 315−16, Sraffa, Piero, 159, 771, 777
320, 345−6, 372, 381, 392, 441, 549, St Helena, 24
577, 608, 624, 640, 648−9, 705 St Bartholemew’s Day, 50
Solla, Nicola, 439, 446 Staël, Madame de (Staël-Holstein,
Solon of Athens, 479, 755, 761 Anne Louise Germaine de), 457,
Sorbonne, 9, 641 461
Sorel, Georges, 79, 106, 160, 644, 662, Stalin, Josef, 149
680−1, 763−4, 776 Stecchetti, Lorenzo (Orlindo Guer-
Soviet Union, 147, 149, 753 rini), 498, 511
Spain, 276, 509 Stewart, Dugald, 8, 10, 174, 176
Sparta, 621 Stilo, 676
Spaventa, Bertrando, 7−8, 47−54, Stirling, James H., 621, 624, 628−9,
66−7, 69−70, 77, 79, 87−8, 90, 106, 640
118−19, 126−7, 149, 167−8, 170, Stirner, Max (Johann Schmidt), 473,
173−4, 178, 180, 343, 345, 347, 349, 482
351, 353, 355, 357, 359, 361, 363, 365, Stoic, 267−8, 323, 409, 565, 608, 624
367, 369−70, 400, 504, 616, 621, 627, Strato of Lampsacus, 269
631, 635, 637, 639−40, 665−6, 672, Strauss, David, 400
680, 718−19, 749; ‘The Character Stresa, 25
and Development of Italian Phi- Stuart dynasty, 495
821
Name Index
Stuart, Mary, 501, 513 Trent, Council of, 164, 277, 595
Sturm und Drang, 597 Treviranus, Gottfried Reinhold, 608,
Sturzo, Luigi, 750 637−8
Swift, Jonathan, 71 Trieste, 768, 777
Swiss, 45, 66, 634 Tropea, 11, 193
Sybel, Heinrich von, 503, 507 Troy, 604, 636, 662
Symonds, John Addington, 53 Tübingen, 629, 664
Syria, 611 Tuscan, 167, 327, 507, 750
Tyrrhenian, 267
Tabor, 429, 444
Tacitus, 431, 437, 467, 501, 513, 761 Ullmann, Heinrich, 503
Tai Chi, 266 United States, 4, 167, 753
Taine, Hippolyte, 371, 385, 399, 609,
632, 638 Vacherot, Étienne, 70, 371, 399
Tantalus, 667 Valbusa, Domenico, 179
Taoism, 266, 277 Valla, Lorenzo, 46, 317−18, 321, 326,
Targioni Tozzetti, Fanny, 505 328, 331, 340
Tari, Antonio, 48, 503−4 Vanini, Giulio Cesare, 319, 333, 340
Tartaglia, Niccolò, 327, 341 Vatican, 25, 387
Tasso, Torquato, 462 Vatolla, 437, 445−6
Telesio, Bernardino, 66−7, 269, 319, Venice, 277, 355
323−6, 328, 334, 340−1, 352, 354, 378, Venn, John, 86
695 Venus, 449
Tertullian, 268 Vera, Augusto, 48, 77, 87, 605, 620,
Thales of Miletus, 581 635, 637, 640, 662
Themistocles, 672, 682 Verdi, Giuseppe, 167, 511
Theophrastus of Eresos, 269 Vergil, 154, 513, 680
Thomism, 164, 166, 765 Vico, Giambattista, 7, 10, 37, 45−6, 50,
Thucydides, 467, 609 52, 56, 58, 67, 70−4, 88, 91, 120, 127,
Tiber, 268 131, 150, 162−3, 168, 190, 270, 273−4,
Tiedemann, Dieterich, 608, 638 277, 297, 334, 344, 348, 360−5, 367−8,
Tissot, C.J., 174 370, 376, 392, 394, 399, 429−46, 454,
Tocco, Felice, 118−19, 635, 663 461, 508−9, 531−2, 551−2, 564−5,
Tommasi, Salvatore, 54, 606, 637 570−1, 597, 624, 628, 631, 649−50,
Torino, 3, 25, 36, 38, 46−7, 49, 60, 147 663, 668, 674, 695, 717, 747, 775;
Tours, 437 Autobiography, 430; The Most Ancient
Trajan, 267−8 Wisdom of the Italians (De antiquis-
Treitschke, Heinrich von, 561, 630 sima italorum sapientia), 437−40, 445,
Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf, 622, 649; The New Science, 67, 70, 72, 163,
627, 640−1 168, 270, 359−60, 370, 392, 429−34,
822
Name Index
437−9, 442−6, 532, 566, 649, 674; The Werner, Karl, 663
Sole Origin and End of Law, 437, 441, Westphalia, 642
445; Universal Right, 439 Windelband, Wilhelm, 91
Vienna, 505, 767 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 184
Vieusseux, Giovan Pietro, 45 Wolff, Christian, 11, 358, 370, 579, 638
Villari, Pasquale, 7, 51, 53−60, 73, 82, Woltmann, Ludwig, 609, 638
88, 90, 92, 118, 127, 165, 168, 170, Wundt, Wilhelm, 475, 483, 507, 681
371−400, 445, 467, 482, 503, 509−10;
History of Girolamo Savonarola and Xenophon of Athens, 317, 320
His Times, 53; ‘Is History a Sci-
ence?’ 54, 90, 92, 482, 503, 509−10; Yoga, 310
Niccolò Machiavelli and His Times, Young Italy (newspaper, movement),
53; ‘Positive Philosophy and His- 36−7, 60, 144, 707
torical Method,’ 51, 371−400, 445
Villers, Charles, 174 Zabarella, Jacopo, 319, 340, 352
Volapük, 745, 751 Zanella, Emilio, 768, 777
Volpe, Gioacchino, 143, 154, 767, 777 Zarathustra, 127
Voltaire, 163, 499, 511 Zeller, Eduard, 77
Vulgate Bible, 639, 761 Zeno of Elea, 46, 316, 320, 331, 548−9
Zervan Akarana, 266, 277
Waddington, Evelino, 68 Zeus, 499
Waddington-Kastus, Charles, 69, 421 Zimmermann, Robert, 488, 504−5
Wagner, Richard, 501, 638 Zola, Émile, 61
Wallace, William, 681 Zoroaster, 266, 277, 428
Waterloo, 595, 635 Zumbini, Bonaventura, 511
Weber, Max, 751 Zurich, 60
823
General Index
a priori, 22, 34, 61, 74, 123, 128, act, 28−9, 34, 41−2, 70, 104, 123,
194, 213−22, 224, 226, 228−30, 132−4, 138−41, 157, 169, 196,
232, 234−7, 240−1, 243−4, 289, 201−2, 205−6, 216, 221−2, 248,
298, 302, 314, 322, 328, 336−7, 251, 274, 280, 282−5, 290−305,
410, 450, 515, 532, 552−3, 577, 309, 311, 313, 325, 360−1, 365,
583, 592−5, 628, 656−8, 677, 682, 368−9, 414, 428, 455, 516, 519,
740 525−6, 532, 555, 559−61, 566,
Absolute, 16−18, 22, 57, 62, 114−15, 580, 586, 589, 634, 646, 650, 674,
206−8, 230−1, 243, 280, 373, 377, 683−93, 696−704, 714, 721, 730,
384−5, 388, 390, 404, 407, 412, 735, 739, 744, 748, 757
420−1, 451−2, 529, 550, 553, action, 14, 71, 79, 81, 85, 104,
557, 576−7, 579, 581, 585, 587−8, 138−9, 146, 153, 157−8, 195−6,
601, 616, 618−19, 623, 626, 629 203, 208, 216, 220, 238, 240,
abstract, 30−2, 41−2, 58, 70−1, 246, 251, 268, 276, 282−3, 285,
82−4, 102−4, 108, 110, 113−15, 297, 300, 302, 304−5, 318, 337,
120−2, 125, 131−4, 136−7, 349−50, 360, 372, 388, 402, 407,
139−41, 250, 259−60, 282−4, 414, 419, 424−7, 437, 449−50,
290−4, 361, 363, 470−2, 476−7, 455−6, 464−5, 474, 490, 492, 494,
495, 510, 519−30, 547, 549−50, 501, 510, 519, 525−6, 531, 560,
576, 634, 645−61, 682−92, 696−7, 594, 599, 646, 651, 670, 698−9,
700−4, 740, 743, 745 703, 705, 708−9, 711−12, 714−15,
abstraction, 15, 28−9, 31, 33, 723, 728, 746−7, 749, 753, 755−6,
137−40, 196−7, 260−1, 283−4, 759, 761, 775
292−3, 545−6, 556, 576, 651−2, activism, 117, 145, 157−8, 169, 730,
656, 658, 684, 692, 696 751, 754, 756−7, 763, 777
accident, 201−2, 214, 219−20, 239, activity, 14−15, 28−9, 33−5, 40−1, 44,
243, 258−60, 405, 523, 532, 556, 75, 78−80, 99, 103, 105, 108, 110,
593 120−3, 134, 136, 138−40, 148,
General Index
155, 195−6, 203, 213, 216−17, 156, 181, 237, 374, 401, 464,
228−9, 233, 236, 246, 266, 282, 487−8, 495, 497−9, 503−6,
295−6, 299−301, 305, 309, 313, 510−12, 519, 534, 564, 568−9,
324−5, 334, 345−6, 348, 351−2, 576, 584, 587, 609, 613, 625
362, 365−9, 375, 382, 403, 406−7, affect, 14, 19, 194−5, 200, 215−18,
424, 427, 450, 455−7, 486−7, 491, 229−30, 236−8, 262, 425, 499,
497, 500, 514, 516, 520, 524, 604, 672
534−5, 537−8, 543, 555, 559−60, affirmation, 15, 28, 43, 110, 133−40,
563, 568−70, 572, 576, 579, 197, 218−19, 234, 306−7, 363,
584−8, 592, 595, 599−600, 605, 420, 517, 519, 524, 527, 540,
616, 626, 646−57, 661, 663−4, 543−4, 558, 572, 602, 617, 629,
667, 675, 679, 687, 690, 697, 645, 671−2, 683−4
702−3, 707, 710−11, 720−8, 730, affirmative, 211, 218, 220, 234, 238,
734, 744−8, 762−4, 767, 772−3, 580
775 age, 13, 36−7, 52, 60, 70, 85, 147−8,
actual, 7, 43, 97, 121, 126, 131, 163, 171, 266, 281, 323, 326, 329,
133−41, 149, 164, 169, 220, 239, 358, 362, 368, 377, 391, 399, 411,
260, 287, 290, 296−7, 303, 306, 416, 444, 455, 481−2, 508, 530,
347, 363, 529, 546−7, 559−60, 622, 695, 759−60
563, 593, 595, 646, 651, 676, age (epoch), 157, 562, 595, 608−9,
683−700, 703, 719, 730, 739, 742 746
actual idealism, 7, 121, 126, 131, agency, 58, 79, 94, 120, 122−3, 146,
149, 164, 695−6, 719, 739 156, 388−9, 456, 560, 742−3
actualism, 126, 131−3, 137, 140, agnostic, 128, 144, 552, 672, 682,
142, 151, 158, 164, 186, 695−6, 707, 745
699−700, 704−5, 742, 744 alchemy, 56−7, 374, 377−8, 381,
actuality, 141, 169, 243, 282, 309, 384−5, 668, 682
423, 428, 559, 684, 689, 696, 699, alienation, 127, 562, 616−17, 667
703, 722 alteration, 75, 239, 243, 289, 301−2,
actualization, 155, 296, 309, 368, 304, 454−6, 517, 521, 653
522, 560, 606, 693, 696−7, 699, ambiguity, 80, 149, 239, 290, 486,
703, 747 505, 606, 737−8
aesthetic, 72, 81, 92, 94−7, 117, anachronism, 128, 151, 673, 717,
216−17, 237−8, 352, 415, 478, 722
485−9, 496−9, 504−5, 511, 516, analogy, 3, 17, 56, 70, 97, 110, 138,
526, 528, 541, 551, 553, 573, 581, 167, 210, 231, 243, 254, 288, 290,
584−9, 597, 620, 623, 631, 640, 296, 312, 326, 329, 348, 378, 393,
695, 766 428, 463, 496, 516, 522, 541−2,
aesthetics, 78, 91, 93−4, 96, 99, 576, 590, 600−3, 606, 654, 661,
106−7, 112, 114−15, 131, 153, 702, 707, 729, 743, 745−6
826
General Index
analysis, 12, 15−16, 22, 38, 40, 42−3, anticlericalism, 118, 165
62, 88, 102−4, 141, 152, 183, antinomy, 62, 72, 74, 136, 138, 405,
193−202, 216−17, 229−33, 235, 450, 552, 554, 577, 628, 690, 701
246, 262, 271, 273, 279, 281, 289, antithesis, 62, 114, 145, 160−1, 293,
292, 310, 319, 322, 324, 327, 330, 345, 405, 451, 538−9, 541, 543,
336−7, 370, 403−4, 408, 419−20, 550−4, 557, 573−4, 581, 601, 610,
469, 473, 476, 487, 494, 537, 582, 612−13, 618, 628, 632, 690, 692,
590, 614, 646, 648−9, 699, 701, 710, 727, 770
735, 740, 742, 746, 767, 773 anxiety, 270, 320, 427, 456, 700
ancestor, 45−6, 149, 270, 312, aphorism, 557, 630−1, 638, 747, 752
315−16, 326, 330, 332, 334, 339, apodictic, 46, 220, 289, 316, 335−6
368, 449, 457, 749 apparent, 212, 216, 283, 293, 345,
ancient thought and culture, 8, 36−7, 423, 491, 500, 549, 617, 620, 688,
46, 56, 70, 167−8, 238, 264−6, 695
269−70, 273, 275−6, 278−9, 281, appearance, 20−1, 42−3, 96, 111,
296, 300−1, 309−10, 313, 319−20, 127, 129, 138, 202, 214−16,
322, 324, 333, 340, 346, 348−9, 229−30, 236−40, 242, 244, 246,
353, 367, 377, 379, 382, 385, 248−50, 296, 298, 304, 311, 351,
388−9, 396, 419, 428, 437−42, 356, 360, 362, 365, 402, 405,
451, 460, 465−70, 479−80, 523, 407−8, 415−16, 422−3, 425, 438,
548, 608−10, 621, 627, 676, 696, 464, 472, 478, 485, 489, 492, 494,
699−700, 706, 755 497, 506, 536, 538, 548, 552,
ancient wisdom, 8, 37, 46, 168, 266, 555−7, 568, 570, 575−8, 582, 593,
270, 272−5, 320, 437−40, 442, 460 599, 603, 606, 615, 654, 656, 662,
ancients, 238, 265, 279, 281, 301, 668−9, 673, 675, 677, 695, 710,
322, 324, 333, 349, 379, 467 724−5, 732, 735, 756, 758, 766,
anglophone, 3−5, 7, 24, 53, 86, 88, 776
99, 107, 112, 163, 167, 169−71, apperception, 19, 84, 222, 236, 240−
174,763 1, 402, 478, 490, 497, 628, 698
animal, 9, 32, 64−5, 84, 116, 124, appetite, 65, 70, 361, 416, 432−3
217, 223−4, 234, 241, 252, 258, apprehension, 10, 29, 33−4, 115,
262, 327, 360, 362, 376, 382, 176, 201, 239, 244, 251, 282−3,
391−2, 414−16, 426, 433, 464, 285−6, 289−91, 300−1, 303−5,
478, 489−90, 515, 522, 532, 565, 309, 348, 365, 479, 551, 587
594, 602−3, 605, 612, 617, 636, arbitrary, 27, 34−5, 149, 157, 232,
658−9, 678, 687, 724 314, 517, 520, 522−3, 528, 532,
annihilation, 205, 214, 327−8, 357, 536, 541, 543, 545, 556, 560, 571,
544−5, 591, 692 578, 581, 583, 587, 592, 599, 602,
anthropology, 72, 114, 313, 398, 606, 612, 660, 667, 690, 709, 714,
574, 608, 613, 645−6 733, 740, 742, 747, 757
827
General Index
architecture, 228, 387, 495, 497, 292, 294−5, 384, 416, 526, 530,
605, 613 539, 547−8, 551, 558, 577−9, 582,
argument, 18−19, 27−8, 32, 68, 72, 590, 593−4, 615, 657−8, 672−3,
76, 95, 120, 146, 176, 219−20, 683−7, 696, 723, 733, 738−9
233, 235, 246, 250−1, 264, assumption, 17, 31−2, 64, 129, 175,
279−80, 282−4, 288, 298, 313, 203−4, 210−11, 221−3, 226−9,
317, 322, 324, 330, 333, 335−6, 235, 260−1, 285−9, 292, 300,
338, 346, 411, 430, 438, 445−6, 302−4, 314, 316−17, 325, 329,
450, 455, 459−60, 492, 496, 536, 336−7, 407−8, 433, 450, 458, 469,
546, 549, 575, 604, 608, 625, 653, 471, 474, 498, 535−6, 538, 570,
677, 714, 731−3, 738, 742 575, 579, 588, 590, 599, 602, 617,
aristocracy, 11, 68, 70, 267, 570, 610, 620, 623, 635, 644, 649, 652, 657,
758, 777 675, 728, 735
arithmetic, 50, 347, 489, 505, 571, astrology, 56−7, 374, 377, 381,
582, 600, 620, 650, 688 384−5, 395
art, 54, 58, 61, 64, 80−1, 85, 91−9, astronomy, 56, 266, 341, 374, 380,
107, 111−15, 119, 167, 241, 275, 611, 620, 744
321−4, 326−7, 329−32, 350−1, atheism, 149, 250, 265, 269, 279−80,
364, 372, 378, 381, 387−8, 393, 562, 704, 725, 739
395, 397−8, 401−2, 404, 407, atom, 64, 74, 100−1, 123−4, 340,
414−16, 428, 434, 443, 451, 453, 358, 412, 453, 516, 519, 523, 569,
457, 463−5, 467, 470−1, 480−2, 579, 603, 659, 704, 710, 714
484−91, 493−503, 505, 507, attention, 15, 34, 196−200, 212, 242,
509−14, 519, 521, 528−9, 532, 403, 406, 477, 689, 702
534−5, 541, 553, 558, 560, 568, attitude, 5, 84, 119, 148, 169, 302,
570−4, 584−90, 594, 596, 601, 354, 402, 463, 476, 481, 535, 559,
607, 609−11, 613, 618, 621, 623, 561−2, 564, 586, 594, 623, 666,
634, 638−9, 641, 649, 666, 668−9, 704, 706, 715, 726, 736−8, 760,
671, 680, 682, 705, 713, 725, 765, 770, 774
742−3, 750, 753−4, 777 attribute, 358−9, 409, 422, 478,
artificial, 79, 102, 120, 150, 289, 517, 551, 557, 578, 618, 670, 685,
295, 407−8, 435, 602, 678, 713, 691
715, 740, 751 authentic, 84, 103, 115, 352, 377,
artist, 96−7, 113−15, 127, 143, 326, 477−8, 481, 570, 677
387−8, 465−6, 484−5, 490−1, authority, 6, 25, 53, 139, 152, 165,
494−6, 499−502, 510−13, 558, 170−1, 209−10, 212, 274−5, 302,
560, 568, 571−3, 584, 586−8, 590, 314, 316, 318−19, 321, 325, 328,
597, 610, 619, 713, 743−4, 751 331−2, 334, 339, 362, 372, 378−9,
assertion, 31, 41, 128, 132, 140, 219, 400, 406, 435−6, 447, 454, 467,
238, 247−8, 252−5, 258, 260, 289, 471, 515, 552, 564, 672, 698, 706,
828
General Index
714−15, 718, 727, 731, 733, 756, 222, 230, 237, 243, 247−8, 254,
761 257−63, 275, 280−2, 284−311,
autobiography, 152−3, 163, 169, 173, 314, 325, 329, 335, 345−8, 355,
182, 444, 511, 580−1, 768, 774 357−69, 377, 384−5, 402−11,
autocracy, 157, 757−8 414, 419−20, 422−8, 438, 517,
autoctisis (self-creation), 140, 187 525−9, 532, 538−9, 543−7, 549,
autonomy, 41, 80, 115−16, 294, 357, 551, 557−9, 571−8, 581−3, 592,
367, 400, 415, 423, 469, 476, 572, 613−16, 626, 652, 674, 686, 692,
584, 589, 591, 601, 607, 619, 663, 698−701, 705
671, 722, 724, 739 belief, 28, 30, 33−4, 134−5, 248−9,
axiom, 108, 264, 297, 301, 329, 255, 258, 275, 283, 288, 339,
335−7 350−6, 375, 379, 390, 411, 451,
456, 460, 497, 564, 651, 653−4,
bacchant, 355, 546, 611, 667, 674, 715, 720, 737−8, 748
669−70, 680 biography, 175, 177, 182, 185, 188,
bad habit, 319, 323, 334, 457 446, 461−2, 512, 561, 564, 581,
bad infinity, 62, 105, 529, 532, 556 637
baptism, 164, 280, 576 biology, 54, 67, 73, 83, 124, 448,
barbarian, 150, 268−9, 273, 317, 453, 474, 478, 637
321, 350, 392, 468, 498, 523, 536, body, 15, 22, 27, 34, 39, 75, 120,
563, 604, 610, 622, 745, 768 140, 155, 166, 194, 196−7, 201−2,
baroque, 153, 168, 497, 741 207, 211−12, 214, 217−20, 222,
beauty, 55, 61, 64, 92−4, 103−4, 224, 229, 233−4, 246, 248, 250,
108, 111−12, 328, 330, 348, 374, 253−4, 256, 270, 272, 283−4, 288,
386−7, 415, 425, 486−90, 505−6, 290−1, 296, 301, 304, 327, 337,
511, 516−17, 520, 524, 526, 528, 358, 360, 372, 375−6, 380−1, 383,
538−9, 541, 557, 572, 583, 587, 403−4, 408, 416, 423, 426, 456,
611, 744, 754 489, 510, 557, 577, 579, 612, 617,
becoming, 61, 64, 116, 125, 133, 646, 655−6, 668, 674, 701−3, 799
140, 216, 228, 283−4, 293, 355, botany, 327, 391, 494, 507, 608, 611
357, 361, 406, 414, 424, 426−7, bourgeois, 120, 471, 648, 719, 735
435−6, 452, 472, 525, 543−5, 549, brain, 236, 337, 403, 407, 410, 499,
557, 560, 565, 571−3, 575−6, 581, 539, 552, 559, 675
583−4, 596, 601, 603, 613−14,
616, 620−22, 626, 655, 659, 661, canon, 19, 67, 163, 223−4, 229, 269,
667, 687, 692, 699−700, 723, 726, 475, 578, 629, 660
728, 739 categorical, 219−20, 239, 243, 267,
being, 12, 17, 30−4, 41−4, 51, 57, 763
61−2, 108−9, 111, 114, 116, 136, categorical imperative, 552
139−41, 196, 203−8, 213, 216, category, 19, 62, 80, 93−4, 101−2,
829
General Index
112, 128, 220, 222−30, 233, 81, 85, 138, 160, 168, 194, 202,
237−9, 241, 256, 317−18, 336, 209−210, 213, 221, 223, 242,
395, 402, 406−7, 410, 424, 443, 246−50, 260, 280, 294−5, 302,
448, 480, 490, 494, 498, 518, 305−6, 312−14, 316, 320, 324−5,
538−9, 549, 570, 576, 580−3, 589, 328−9, 332, 335−8, 354, 357, 359,
593, 614, 621, 627, 657, 673, 676, 362, 365, 374, 378−9, 383−4, 388,
690−1, 699, 706, 710, 720, 740 393, 398, 403, 406, 419, 425−6,
cathedral, 122, 431, 458, 497, 654 430, 433−5, 439, 441−3, 454,
Catholic, 10, 12−13, 24, 38, 49, 68, 466−7, 478, 493, 495, 528, 544,
86−7, 127, 156−8, 161, 164−7, 558−60, 564, 581, 585−6, 597,
171, 263−8, 310, 340, 348, 352, 599, 643, 649, 683, 688, 737−8,
354, 477, 564, 566, 595, 633, 704, 745, 747, 765, 771
715, 719, 725, 727, 732, 735, 738, change, 19, 43, 74−5, 77−8, 81, 84,
755−6, 758, 761, 765, 774 120, 124, 148, 151−2, 155, 163,
causality, 16, 18−21, 42−3, 109, 166, 193, 208, 228, 243, 298, 304,
137−9, 203, 205−8, 211, 219, 228, 306, 313, 338, 374−6, 386, 389,
232−3, 239, 297, 299−302, 304, 391−2, 398, 430, 452−6, 465, 473,
306, 336, 402, 448−50, 467, 507, 476, 481, 492, 502, 512, 520−1,
511−12, 514, 650, 679, 690, 740, 543, 555, 559−60, 565, 577−8,
772 582−3, 585, 623, 626, 647−8, 650,
cause, 11−12, 14, 16−19, 21, 43, 659−60, 704, 708, 725, 731, 733,
70, 72−5, 84, 121, 129, 138, 195, 735, 748, 750, 755−6, 760, 774
197−8, 203−12, 219−20, 228−9, chaos, 71, 146, 151, 265, 349, 369,
231, 239−40, 246−8, 252, 264−5, 477, 675, 715, 735, 737
274−6, 280, 288, 290−1, 294, character (abstract/empirical/intel-
297−302, 304, 307−8, 312−13, ligible), 138, 305
315, 317−19, 324, 328, 330, 332, character (dramatic, fictional), 94,
337−9, 348−9, 351, 354−5, 357, 150, 369, 488−90, 492, 506−7, 512
361−2, 366−7, 375−9, 381−2, 384, character (intellectual, moral, aes-
386, 389−90, 393, 401, 405, 419, thetic, historical, national, ethnic),
422, 424, 426−7, 431−2, 437, 52, 124, 144, 160, 169, 268,
442−3, 447−8, 450, 453, 457−8, 275−6, 279, 330, 343, 345, 349,
467, 476, 481, 492−3, 501, 506, 353, 367−8, 371, 375, 392, 398,
512, 530, 538, 540, 542, 553, 441, 460, 469−70, 481, 484, 486,
562−5, 567−9, 573, 600, 604, 607, 488−9, 492−4, 514−15, 529, 533,
620, 652, 656, 664, 666, 668, 535, 542, 563, 567, 576, 584−5,
670, 672, 676−7, 690, 703, 711, 588−9, 594−6, 599−600, 609−10,
715−16, 730, 740, 742−4, 750, 661, 675, 677, 700, 707, 718, 721,
756, 759, 766, 770, 772 727, 730, 733, 735−6, 738, 746,
certainty, 41, 46, 55, 57, 70−2, 74, 763
830
General Index
character (logical, metaphysical), 607, 610, 617, 620, 698, 707, 709,
523, 529−30, 535, 542−3, 545, 718−19, 725, 740−1, 753, 758−9,
553, 563, 589, 594−5, 599, 618, 763, 768, 774
728 class (logic, taxonomy, metaphysics),
character (objective/subjective), 29, 30−1, 100, 122, 218, 238, 249,
284, 304, 324 257−8, 279, 456, 496, 516, 520,
character (phenomenal), 409 537, 558, 587, 590, 595, 606, 634,
characters (symbols), 243, 657 654
chemistry, 27, 56, 65, 73, 116, 312, class (socio-economic, political), 36,
372, 374, 377, 383, 399, 416, 48, 82, 85, 88, 90, 97, 118, 147,
448−9, 453, 485, 507, 582−3, 605, 151−2, 167, 469−71, 476−7, 481,
611−12, 657, 668, 679, 682, 743 499, 561, 587, 680, 719, 732, 735,
choice, 58, 85, 136, 138, 148, 154, 740, 750, 760, 775
157, 271, 275, 344, 360, 408, classical (curricular, theoretical),
424−5, 428, 452, 479, 512, 520, 36, 148, 183, 193, 508, 533, 642,
532, 566, 669, 679, 697, 711, 721, 747−8, 772−3, 777
723−4, 728, 760, 772 classical English economics, 773, 777
chronicle, 513−14 classical German philosophy, 148,
chronology, 10, 173, 180, 188, 289, 508, 642, 747−8, 772
446, 514, 579, 632−3, 691 classics (ancient), classicism, 37, 71,
church, 75, 164, 199−200, 352, 497, 269, 399, 496, 508, 510, 610, 621
663, 732, 734−5, 756 classification, 30, 62, 70, 82, 101,
circulation, 8, 48, 50, 126, 343 103, 112−13, 258, 317, 338,
circumstance, 70, 75, 97−8, 330, 387−8, 392, 424, 464, 467, 470,
432, 437, 454, 490, 496, 498−9, 488, 494, 496−7, 499, 522−3, 532,
561, 595, 733, 754, 760 568−9, 571, 589, 602, 613, 631,
citizenship, 4, 37, 112, 144−5, 270, 740, 745
369, 410, 706−7, 710−11, 713, 715 clergy, 25, 51, 69, 79, 87, 446, 725,
city, 3, 25, 60, 69, 90, 143, 147, 165, 735, 756
268, 303, 349, 362, 387, 400, 432, coercion, 478, 697, 719, 750
480, 507 cogito, 18, 72, 443, 649, 691
civil, 37, 114, 145−6, 267−8, 350, cognition, 12, 14−22, 28−9, 35,
359, 477, 565, 574, 614, 632, 709, 40−1, 46, 54, 74, 96, 113, 138,
715−16, 719, 725, 750 193−4, 198, 204, 209−25, 230−1,
civil society, 114, 146, 477, 574, 614, 234−42, 245−51, 253−6, 258, 260,
632, 716, 725, 750 262, 265, 275−6, 282, 289, 291,
civilization, 53, 64, 72, 84, 159, 161, 293, 304−5, 308, 313, 315, 322,
164, 275−6, 333−4, 349, 388, 324−5, 332, 337−8, 361, 363−4,
390−1, 394−5, 410, 416, 441, 468, 368, 384, 402−3, 406−7, 411, 425,
472, 477−8, 480, 484, 507−8, 518, 428, 442, 453, 509, 515, 531, 571,
831
General Index
574, 582, 585, 597, 602, 615, 628, conceiving, 29, 64, 105, 137, 204−5,
649, 655, 668, 692 220, 226−8, 256, 282, 287−8, 291,
collective, 84−5, 151, 334, 454−5, 298−300, 302, 348, 358, 367,
465, 478−80, 506, 721, 723−5, 403, 414, 422−3, 426, 451, 466,
733, 741 518−19, 524, 526, 528, 530, 539,
colony, 37, 46, 168, 472, 717−18, 543, 545, 553, 562, 567, 569−71,
749 574, 577−8, 581, 589, 594, 601,
colour, 30−1, 100, 123, 213, 215−16, 610, 618, 643, 646−8, 651−3, 655,
226−7, 232, 241, 404, 489, 551, 657, 664, 688, 690, 694, 696−700,
586−7, 613, 656−7 704, 736, 739, 744−5, 747−8, 756
comedy, 50, 65, 97, 115, 417, 493, concept, 40, 42−3, 62−4, 83, 95−109,
496, 499−500, 504, 506, 569, 590, 112−16, 121−3, 128−9, 132,
596, 625, 742 155−6, 160, 183, 216−21, 225−9,
commerce, 82−3, 219−20, 239, 350, 231−3, 236−9, 241−3, 265, 275,
753 278−309, 336, 346−8, 359, 362,
commune, 464, 467, 501, 513 367−8, 402−12, 422, 458, 465,
communication, 19, 42, 223, 253−4, 479−80, 484−6, 489−95, 498,
257, 284, 491, 501, 518, 585, 634, 502−3, 515−32, 534−45, 549,
669, 713 551−2, 555−7, 565−6, 568−623,
communism, 3, 79, 85−6, 106, 147, 626, 629, 634−5, 638, 643−4,
149, 156−8, 473, 476, 480, 562, 648−9, 655−8, 660, 671, 673−4,
620−1, 648, 720, 749−50, 754, 676, 678−9, 687, 689−92, 694,
757−8 699−700, 703, 720, 728, 733,
community, 51, 152, 157, 239, 343, 739−43, 746, 760, 767, 769−70,
349, 352, 401, 727, 732−4, 757, 772−3
759 conception, 20, 22, 29, 34, 56, 74,
comparison, 33, 83, 204, 215, 234−5, 81, 93, 119, 124, 138, 145, 155,
286−7, 297, 300, 303, 314−15, 160, 315, 327, 409, 434, 457, 461,
323, 325, 334, 345, 391, 397, 400, 464−6, 473, 481, 527, 545, 548,
403, 406, 468, 479, 493, 497, 500, 550, 554−5, 557−8, 561, 563, 566,
506, 510, 512−13, 518−19, 521, 572, 577, 587, 599, 611, 642−3,
539, 542, 585, 602, 649, 720, 742, 646, 648, 655, 658−9, 661, 691,
744, 753 700, 707, 709, 719−32, 734−7,
competition, 264, 477, 714, 733, 759 742, 745−8, 752, 759, 765, 767,
comprehension, 109, 253, 274, 280, 769, 772, 774, 798
290, 300, 355−6, 364, 373, 391, concrete, 30−2, 41−2, 70−1, 82−3,
420, 535, 550−1, 577−8, 586, 602, 95−6, 108−10, 113, 115−16, 121,
607, 652 131−41, 145, 151, 156, 250,
compulsion, 160, 750, 767 259, 282, 288, 291−4, 302, 314,
conceivable, 137, 524, 539, 571, 699 349−50, 361, 387, 390, 436, 438,
832
General Index
441, 454, 470−2, 475−6, 487, 490, 284, 303, 321, 327, 337, 347, 353,
492, 494, 498, 520, 535−8, 541−3, 355, 359−61, 366, 368, 375, 387,
545, 547, 549, 552, 556−7, 562, 390, 418, 425, 427, 433−4, 451,
564, 566, 568, 570−2, 574, 576−8, 486, 497, 541−2, 553, 573, 585,
580, 583, 588, 591−2, 594, 600, 587, 594, 597, 600−1, 623, 753,
608, 610, 612−13, 617, 619, 623, 755
626, 640, 645−6, 651−3, 661, content, 29, 40, 61−2, 82−4, 94−7,
683−7, 690, 692, 696−7, 703−4, 128, 213, 278, 303, 305, 307,
710−11, 716, 726, 729, 732−4, 313−14, 340, 365, 402−8, 465,
737, 739, 741, 745, 766−7 469, 475, 477−9, 486, 488−90,
concreteness, 41−2, 83, 284, 288, 495−500, 505−6, 509, 511, 517,
291−3, 305, 488, 494, 545, 576, 521, 531−2, 544−5, 582−3, 586,
616, 623, 696 590, 600, 610, 618, 644−7, 653,
condensation, 95−6, 182, 492, 495, 660−2, 671, 676−7, 720, 738, 741
531, 613 contingency, 17, 22, 29, 34, 42−3,
conscience, 12, 25, 356, 389, 667, 58, 203, 206−7, 214, 220, 231,
700−1, 755 234, 239−40, 257, 261, 263, 267,
consciousness, 12, 14−16, 18, 46, 285, 289, 292, 294, 299, 302, 304,
72−4, 84−5, 123, 139−41, 151, 306, 308, 337, 364, 386, 426, 529,
194−203, 208−12, 215, 221−4, 545, 592, 595, 619, 718, 758
226, 230, 235, 240, 242, 244, contract, 358, 373, 613
253, 273, 290, 316, 323, 325, 337, contradiction, 62−3, 72, 77, 104−5,
339, 343−4, 347−8, 352−4, 357−9, 110−11, 114, 124−5, 134−9, 143,
362−3, 366−7, 369, 386−7, 390−1, 204, 210, 232−3, 257, 262−3, 294,
397, 402, 410, 414, 416, 420, 338, 356, 375, 404−10, 422, 491,
426−7, 434−5, 442−4, 450, 453−5, 527−30, 541, 543, 546−52, 568,
459, 472, 474, 477−80, 486, 492, 573, 578−9, 584−7, 591, 594, 602,
500−1, 516, 535, 539−41, 549, 619, 622, 634, 644, 647, 652,
555−6, 560, 563, 565−6, 571, 659−61, 663, 669, 686, 690, 697,
588, 592, 601, 611, 613, 617−18, 721, 728−9, 737, 746, 748−9, 757
623−4, 649, 655, 662, 666, 671, contrary, 103, 129, 264−5, 291−2,
678−9, 683, 688, 691−2, 698, 294, 405, 422, 524, 538, 543, 546,
701−5, 707, 710, 716, 720−1, 549−51, 556, 615, 627, 676−7, 710
723−4, 728−9, 737−8, 742−3, 748, corso e ricorso, 531
750, 759, 769 cosmos, 265, 267, 275, 277, 310,
conservative, 127, 151, 165, 561, 319, 346, 366, 549, 562, 581, 611
716, 738 country, 3−4, 37, 167, 270−1, 331,
constitution, 24−5, 37, 69, 142, 145, 339, 394, 401, 410, 487, 493,
154, 277, 389, 707, 710 502−3, 621, 681, 707, 709, 711,
contemplation, 70−1, 114, 266, 274, 734, 755, 758, 763
833
General Index
creation, 37, 42−4, 51, 57−8, 65, 68, 323−5, 363, 431−2, 445, 451,
79, 115, 126, 138, 140−1, 148, 459, 463, 468, 470, 477, 484,
155, 165, 187, 195, 208, 228, 251, 488, 494, 498, 501, 505−6, 509,
256, 264−9, 274−6, 282, 285−8, 511−12, 533, 535, 545, 568−9,
292, 295, 298−309, 333, 344, 584, 589, 592, 597, 608−9, 615,
347−9, 362−9, 384, 394, 414−15, 619, 621, 623−4, 628, 630, 632,
420, 422, 424−5, 427−8, 431, 443, 637−8, 642−4, 647, 649−50, 652,
457, 478, 501−2, 509, 528, 560, 655, 657, 662, 666, 670−2, 680−1,
590, 618−19, 639, 649, 656−7, 695−6, 713, 717, 719−22, 724,
660, 663, 670, 676, 690, 692, 713, 726, 728−9, 733−8, 745−6, 754−6,
742, 747−8, 754−5, 759, 769 758, 762, 767, 769−70, 772−4, 776
Creator, 32, 43, 208, 260, 262, 285, critique, 12, 19, 21, 23−4, 50, 52,
308, 348, 365, 368 67, 72, 74, 106, 119−20, 125, 148,
creature, 140, 285, 292, 308, 350, 151, 153, 163, 176, 212, 214,
353, 490, 526 236−7, 243, 249−51, 257, 373,
crime, 96, 143, 444, 494, 509 399, 430, 444, 454, 487, 503,
criminology, 96, 494, 509 515, 519, 552, 579, 581−2, 587,
criterion (aesthetic, moral, political, 617, 625, 628−9, 639, 642−5, 655,
historical), 81, 112, 345, 464, 468, 660−1, 664, 666, 671, 673, 723−6,
481, 496−7, 514, 519, 548, 568, 733, 739, 741−2, 749, 776, 794,
744, 763 796, 800
criterion (logical, epistemic), 248, cronotopos, 275, 277
329, 442−3, 451, 459, 528, 548, culture, 4, 6−7, 9, 11, 25, 47, 53, 55,
568, 626, 744 64, 66, 68, 70−1, 78, 81, 88, 90,
critic, 48, 52, 55, 57, 60−1, 63, 66, 92, 117, 119, 126, 131, 142−3,
72, 92, 95, 107, 119, 122, 126−7, 145, 147, 149, 151−5, 157, 160,
165−6, 194, 263, 277, 417, 439, 163−4, 166−71, 189, 266, 349,
446, 461, 473, 482, 498, 506, 394, 398−9, 410, 468, 506−7, 609,
511−12, 535, 562, 581, 601, 608, 635, 638−9, 665, 680, 695, 703,
619, 622−3, 626, 628, 630, 633, 715, 720−2, 724−7, 729, 731−2,
680, 682, 739, 750, 757, 761, 777 734−41, 743−4, 746−7, 750−1,
critical philosophy, 12, 23, 27, 38, 758, 760, 762−3, 767−8, 771, 777
212, 250−1, 271−2, 325, 363, 451,
696 Dasein, 239, 243, 581
criticism, 5−6, 10, 12, 19, 23, 27, data, 16, 21, 58−9, 73, 75, 90−1, 95,
34−6, 38, 51, 61−3, 81, 88, 96−7, 123, 127, 213, 217, 230−3, 236,
104, 106−7, 117, 120, 126, 128, 331, 474, 492, 523, 567, 592−3,
142−3, 146, 148, 151−3, 157−8, 601, 667, 669, 676, 727
160, 164, 166, 169, 176, 183, dead, 64−5, 103, 106−7, 121, 136,
212, 249−51, 271−2, 277, 316−17, 141, 170, 355, 376, 398, 413−14,
834
General Index
417, 420, 498, 508, 524, 533, 567, 322−3, 327, 330, 336, 359, 384,
588, 624, 666, 682, 698, 701, 703, 388, 392, 394, 408, 418, 449, 451,
707, 738 460, 522, 536, 570−1, 579, 589,
death, 108, 129, 136, 382, 392, 423, 623, 633−4, 672, 676, 720
523, 538, 549, 557, 559, 572, 588, dependency, 16−18, 40, 42−3, 85,
591, 626, 652, 676, 682, 700−1, 101−3, 108−10, 203−4, 223, 279,
705 298, 308−9, 449, 480−1, 507, 539,
decadence, 37, 65, 158, 415, 480, 561, 565, 572, 669, 718, 731
622, 706, 746, 755 derivation, 44, 63, 83, 103, 123, 141,
decline, 82, 96, 153, 269−70, 274, 233, 280, 297, 318, 330, 373, 375,
333, 346, 370, 392, 428, 430, 445, 379−80, 386, 419, 474, 520, 522,
466, 468, 526, 706, 755, 761 544, 651, 664, 667−8, 673, 718,
deduction, 21−2, 56, 73−4, 76, 85, 739−40
194, 202, 210, 234−5, 240, 243, description, 31−2, 73, 95, 103, 105,
245, 289−90, 378, 380, 407, 442, 260, 262, 329, 335, 449, 477−8,
449, 453, 458−9, 479, 570, 580, 492, 494, 507, 509, 549, 600, 673,
583, 595, 600, 606, 612, 637 755
deed, 104, 343, 445, 559−60, 599, desire, 121, 198, 200, 276, 402, 404,
635, 668, 693, 709, 754, 757 416, 420−1, 447, 494, 523, 526−7,
definition, 32, 73, 82, 97, 101−2, 529, 674, 682, 698, 716, 726
122, 148−9, 155−6, 193, 229, 235, destiny, 68, 263, 271, 327, 397, 430,
238, 247, 254−5, 261−2, 292, 294, 449, 466, 471−2, 528, 553, 559,
311, 316, 322, 325, 330, 332, 339, 592, 601, 667, 670, 700, 703
352, 361, 371, 382, 385, 388−9, determination, 15, 30−2, 34, 100,
392−3, 409, 438, 445−6, 449, 460, 102, 125, 138, 141, 154, 197,
474, 476−7, 480, 484, 489−91, 202, 216−17, 224−5, 227, 235,
500−2, 514−16, 520−3, 534, 239−40, 242−3, 249, 257−62, 294,
555−6, 562, 579, 581, 586, 589, 348, 361, 364−5, 394, 404, 406,
594, 599, 602, 634, 642, 649, 655, 424−6, 428, 492−3, 497, 518−20,
674, 682, 686, 696, 700, 720, 727, 522−3, 526, 528−9, 535, 543−4,
734, 737, 747, 755 547, 550, 572, 575, 580−1, 583,
degeneration, 119, 158, 270, 358, 585, 599−601, 604, 612−13, 615,
573, 644 617−18, 622, 626, 652, 660, 662,
degree, 227, 230, 243, 292, 427 669, 679, 686, 690, 693−4, 697−9,
demagogue, 146, 159, 715, 725, 763 751, 772
democracy, 3, 69−70, 145, 152, 156, determinism, 129, 137−9, 141, 150,
432, 476, 483, 570, 610, 619, 707, 450, 483, 645, 660, 667−71, 676,
710−11, 714, 727, 750 679, 690, 730
demonstration, 46, 58, 203−4, 275, development, 52, 56, 78−82, 85,
282, 289, 310, 314, 316, 319, 95, 125, 127, 156, 289, 343, 345,
835
General Index
349, 352, 362, 365, 367, 391−2, doctrine, 12, 33, 39, 63, 68, 83,
404, 407−10, 414−15, 424, 426−7, 87−8, 104−5, 122, 150−1, 162,
437−8, 442, 459, 464−5, 475, 164, 170−1, 174, 231, 234, 236,
477, 491, 494, 516, 542, 544−5, 266−9, 275−6, 278, 282, 290, 301,
548−9, 553, 557−8, 562, 572, 578, 304, 308, 310, 319−21, 324−5,
592−3, 601, 610, 616, 620, 623, 331−2, 337−40, 354, 371−3, 389,
636, 651−2, 655, 660, 667, 674, 409, 411, 422, 426, 447, 449−50,
678−80, 728−9, 732, 740, 742, 461, 463, 473−5, 477, 481, 498,
748, 755 511, 518, 520−2, 532, 536−7,
dialect, 392, 395, 507, 511, 722 539, 542, 548, 563, 566, 570,
dialectic, 46, 80, 83, 104−5, 109−16, 577−9, 582−3, 596, 600, 614, 617,
122, 125, 134−6, 141, 145, 150, 619−20, 625, 629, 643, 647−9,
152, 155−6, 265, 316−17, 320−1, 651, 654, 663, 666, 681, 712, 725,
340, 354, 407−8, 410, 473, 526, 733, 741
528−30, 534, 542−5, 547−9, dogma, 9, 35, 46, 50, 54, 61, 63,
551−8, 563−4, 566, 568, 571, 68, 72, 86−8, 130, 157, 165, 167,
574−8, 580, 582, 588, 594, 603, 211−12, 249, 251, 305, 312−13,
607, 609−14, 616−17, 619−22, 316, 320, 328, 331, 333, 335−7,
626−8, 632, 649, 655, 660, 681, 353−4, 474, 503, 654, 677, 704,
686−7, 689, 692, 699−700, 704, 719, 739, 746
718−19, 729, 739−40, 743−4, 746, doubt, 66, 71, 78, 90, 94, 119, 144,
749, 770, 772 211, 251, 253, 272, 281, 291,
dictator, 157, 269, 719, 754 305−6, 316, 322−4, 329, 332, 336,
dignity, 349, 351, 419, 563, 584, 595, 348, 356, 373, 383, 396−7, 399,
672 406, 408−9, 424, 431, 447, 457,
distinction, 93, 95, 99−116, 118, 469, 480, 490, 499, 501−2, 509,
134−9, 146, 150, 182−3, 253−6, 520, 523−4, 534, 541, 548, 558,
264, 308, 356, 366, 434, 442, 490, 564−5, 578, 584, 589, 592, 597,
515−30, 532, 537−8, 543, 547−8, 616, 622, 643−4, 674, 678, 682,
551−2, 555−7, 562, 566, 568−89, 700−1, 725, 731, 746, 762
592, 594−6, 612, 616−19, 623, 626, drama, 90, 94, 155, 558, 595, 613
631−2, 698, 729, 742−4, 751, 770 dualism, 37, 55, 109, 122, 124,
divine, 9, 30, 41−2, 56, 68, 71, 107, 129, 136, 264−5, 267, 353, 408,
115, 117, 128, 251, 257−8, 267−9, 538−40, 542−3, 548, 550, 553,
273, 280, 284, 295, 302, 306−8, 555, 557−8, 562−3, 614−18, 660,
348, 350−3, 355−6, 358, 360, 362, 672−3, 675, 700
364−6, 369−70, 372, 376−7, 391, duration, 16, 21, 204−6, 208,
404, 409, 418−20, 423−8, 438, 213−14, 403
550, 565, 570, 645, 673, 687−8, duty, 33, 64, 115, 146, 263, 399, 413,
700, 703−5, 742, 761 458, 460, 500, 559, 565, 605, 629,
836
General Index
677, 705, 713−14, 716, 754−5, empiricism, 14, 16, 18, 20−1, 23,
763, 766 29, 33, 38−9, 45, 47, 50, 52, 57,
61, 63, 77−8, 82, 85, 100, 103,
eclecticism, 125, 270, 339, 499, 661, 108−9, 112, 115−16, 121, 127,
745 129, 137−41, 166, 193−4, 211,
economics, 54, 80−5, 93, 106, 120, 215−16, 221−4, 226−9, 231−4,
122, 151, 158−61, 170, 411, 464, 236−41, 312, 314, 325, 327, 330,
469−72, 475−6, 478, 480−1, 483, 335, 339, 345, 352, 357−9, 394,
526, 534, 563, 568, 609, 642−3, 402, 410−11, 426, 466, 471, 478,
646, 654−5, 659, 663−4, 710, 714, 495, 509, 511, 515−16, 522−4,
722, 725, 727, 729, 741, 746, 750, 528, 530, 535−7, 539, 545, 556,
759−60, 764, 766−9, 772−3, 777 567, 569, 571, 582, 584, 590, 593,
education, 50−1, 54, 60, 77, 81, 597, 599−600, 602, 605−9, 611,
118, 126, 129, 131, 142−3, 149, 613, 615, 617, 619, 624, 645, 657,
152, 164, 234, 351, 381, 459−60, 676, 682, 688, 693, 696, 698, 718,
464−5, 482−3, 487, 504−5, 513, 739−41
532, 537, 624, 633, 647, 663, 709, encyclical, 164−5, 720
715−19, 725, 734, 744, 750, 761, encyclopedia, 106−7, 264, 266, 274,
763, 775−6 276, 307, 329, 410, 448, 465, 476,
egoism, 539, 645, 669, 704 533, 535, 559, 564, 566, 569, 576,
election, 25, 61, 267, 680, 707, 776 587, 591−2, 600, 604, 608, 625,
electricity, 381, 612, 621 629, 633−4, 636−7, 639−41, 694
element, 21−2, 42−3, 116, 164, energy, 124, 144, 161, 358, 431,
193−5, 197, 199, 201−5, 207, 503, 649−50, 655, 660, 667, 704,
209, 211−33, 235, 237, 239, 241, 707−8, 715−16, 748, 766, 775
243, 258−60, 270, 275, 278, 280, entailment, 101−2, 105, 108−9, 133,
285−8, 290−3, 297, 304, 307, 321, 422, 490, 492, 673, 678, 728
323, 352−4, 365, 403, 419, 435, enthusiasm, 324, 355, 447, 456, 458,
438, 457, 464, 470−1, 474−5, 481, 599, 666, 708, 726, 757
484, 509, 511, 531−2, 581, 584, entity, 39, 246, 280, 284, 304, 308,
586, 588−9, 592−3, 605, 611, 617, 358, 367, 386, 472, 659, 742
623, 634, 652, 673, 684, 690, enumeration, 280, 320, 514, 522,
697, 708, 714, 719, 721−2, 726, 570
728−31, 735−6, 746, 748, 750, 775 environment, 19, 75, 79, 149, 455−6,
eloquence, 73, 87, 146, 317, 328, 467, 469, 647, 720, 738, 760
465, 502, 550, 715 epistemic, 40−4, 132, 168
emanation, 266, 269, 298−9, 301−2, epistemology, 12, 18, 21, 40, 58,
306, 579, 742 77−8, 126, 277, 628
emotion, 85, 156, 364, 391, 416, equality (logical, mathematical,
479, 514−15, 529, 666, 690, 715 physical), 15−16, 197, 204, 213,
837
General Index
218, 226, 234, 242, 282, 285−6, 487−8, 524, 531, 534, 568−9,
380, 390, 405, 422, 427, 517, 660 574−5, 583, 600, 613−14, 631−3,
equality (moral, political, legal), 51, 639, 658, 668, 714, 728−9, 747,
83, 154−5, 343, 472, 759 761, 764, 767−70
equivalence, 75, 105, 347, 363, 383, etymology, 42, 80, 241, 254, 296−7,
450, 455, 470, 476, 509, 584, 616, 321, 445, 461, 651, 681, 745
652, 660, 676−7, 714, 769 event, 31, 80−2, 85, 135, 138−40,
Erkenntnisproblem, 628 228, 265, 274, 334, 344, 351, 376,
error, 18−19, 40, 74, 110, 115−16, 393, 431, 435, 437, 447, 449−50,
134−6, 165, 209−13, 253, 272, 463−8, 470−1, 476, 478, 481, 485,
301, 303, 315, 328, 335, 408, 489, 492, 494, 496, 506−7, 512,
496, 517, 519, 532, 557−8, 567−8, 514, 561, 588, 594, 605, 643, 668,
576−80, 607, 614−15, 632, 685−6, 703, 707, 713, 730−1, 737, 739,
694, 700, 744, 749 749, 756, 760, 775
erudition, 71, 118, 319, 366, 431, evidence, 39, 56, 72, 75, 96, 157,
436 208−10, 212, 278−9, 294, 304,
esperantism, 150−1, 745, 751 310, 314, 316, 327−8, 336, 426−7,
essence, 29, 32−3, 57−8, 100, 108, 435−6, 445, 455−6, 458, 464, 469,
111, 120, 123−4, 201−3, 239, 478, 495, 503, 534, 546, 550, 555,
252−3, 255−6, 259, 262, 265, 275, 628, 644, 650, 678, 766
290, 300, 311, 318, 335, 338, evil, 104, 108−12, 136, 156, 160,
354, 356−8, 361, 364−5, 368−9, 169, 245, 293, 422, 424, 428,
377−83, 386−8, 391−3, 396, 405, 524−6, 538−9, 543, 551, 557−9,
419−28, 449, 532, 536, 556−7, 562, 599, 698, 700−1, 716, 755,
562, 573, 578, 582−3, 593−7, 765
617−18, 621, 629, 645, 647−8, evolution, 54, 61, 64, 67, 78, 83, 124,
655, 657, 660, 676, 691−2, 702, 149, 376, 412, 414, 472, 510, 603,
704, 767 636, 644, 670, 680, 682, 718, 740,
eternity, 30, 33, 56, 58, 70−1, 74, 757
105, 127, 136, 138−40, 158, 165, existence, 15−18, 20, 22, 27, 29, 33,
257, 263, 280, 284−5, 347, 350−1, 42−4, 51, 57, 61−3, 65, 72, 82, 85,
359, 370, 381, 383, 386, 388, 396, 96, 109−10, 129, 136, 156, 197,
403, 406, 412, 418−27, 432, 445, 203−13, 215−16, 220, 228, 230−1,
449, 453, 518, 521, 529−31, 544, 233, 239−40, 243, 246−8, 250−4,
547, 570, 573, 577, 588, 594, 602, 256, 263, 272, 282−3, 285−9,
618, 631, 656, 667, 689, 691−2, 291−3, 296−8, 300−2, 304−9,
694, 699, 701, 703, 705, 719, 758 311, 313, 324, 336, 346, 348−50,
ethics, 52, 78, 93, 106−7, 112, 352−5, 357, 359, 361−4, 366, 373,
114−15, 156, 160−1, 266, 268, 376, 384, 388−91, 393, 395−6,
271, 407, 450, 466, 478, 481, 402−6, 408, 411, 415, 419−28,
838
General Index
433, 438, 443, 445, 449−50, 122−3, 138, 144, 159, 166, 194,
459, 468, 470−4, 476−80, 486−7, 196−201, 205, 207, 209, 212,
492−3, 496, 498, 500, 510, 516, 215, 217, 221, 223−5, 228, 230,
519, 525−6, 529, 534, 536, 538, 235, 237, 239, 247−8, 250−3, 256,
547, 555, 557, 559, 561, 565, 258−61, 271, 275−6, 281, 287−8,
571−2, 575, 585, 595, 602, 605, 295, 300, 302, 305−8, 313−17,
607, 612−13, 615, 617, 625, 632, 325−6, 329, 335, 337, 345, 353,
635, 643, 645−6, 652, 656−7, 659, 358, 362, 364, 368, 371, 373,
664, 671, 674−5, 684, 693, 701−3, 376−7, 379, 387, 390−2, 394, 396,
705, 708, 721, 723, 726, 732, 735, 402, 409, 416, 428, 432, 442, 445,
739−40, 743, 745, 747−8, 751, 448−9, 458, 464, 466−7, 473−6,
758, 765, 773, 775 478−81, 485, 488−9, 492, 504,
existent, 51, 57, 206, 209, 220, 507, 512−13, 522, 564−8, 570,
298−9, 303−9, 311, 365−6, 384−5, 575, 577−8, 588, 609, 624, 635−6,
402, 405, 612, 699 646−50, 653−4, 668, 670, 695,
existential, 519, 529, 612 702, 707, 713, 723−4, 727, 730−2,
existentialism, 3, 6 741−2, 751, 765, 775
experience, 12, 14−24, 27, 42, 47, expression, 15, 18, 40−3, 87−8, 94−7,
52, 61−2, 64, 74, 78−9, 94, 100−1, 102, 105, 113−14, 122, 129, 136,
107, 123, 140, 166, 173, 198, 202, 145, 197, 199, 203, 206, 209−10,
204, 206, 209−10, 213−16, 218, 219−20, 229, 243, 246, 256−7,
222−4, 226−33, 235−8, 241−3, 269−70, 273−4, 276−8, 280, 282,
247, 249, 252, 259, 261, 271, 287, 290, 292, 294−301, 303−4,
273, 281, 301, 308, 314, 319, 307−11, 325, 329, 333, 340, 344,
324−6, 330−2, 335−7, 352, 354, 350, 355, 361, 364−5, 368, 375,
357, 365−6, 369, 375, 377−8, 402, 392, 403, 405−6, 410, 440, 453,
404−9, 411, 420, 426, 434, 442, 458, 460, 462−3, 465, 470, 477−8,
450, 452, 454, 458, 479, 552, 599, 481, 486, 488−92, 496−7, 505,
601−2, 604, 615, 623, 639, 657, 508−9, 516, 518, 526−7, 530, 532,
666, 681, 696−7, 700−3, 709−10, 541−3, 548, 550, 557, 561, 569,
718, 722, 756, 760 572, 586, 590, 597, 599, 613, 615,
experiment, 38, 46, 57−9, 74−5, 624, 631, 638, 643, 649, 659,
127−8, 234, 270−1, 278, 307, 312, 677, 686, 706, 708−9, 711, 713,
316, 319, 326−32, 334, 336, 364, 718−19, 722−4, 730, 739, 741,
379−80, 382, 385, 390−5, 397, 745−6, 748, 765, 772
399, 409−10, 454−5, 464, 483, extension (logical, semantic, spatial),
534−5, 596, 604, 620, 650, 657, 102, 214−15, 224, 229, 356, 358,
668−70, 678, 681, 729, 743−4, 758 409, 416, 498, 517, 520, 528−30,
explanation, 27, 35, 38, 70, 72−3, 551, 577, 586, 618, 685, 747, 752
79, 83−5, 96, 100, 103, 109, 116, externality, 171, 273, 285, 298−9,
839
General Index
305, 350, 427, 593, 596, 603, 477, 481, 528, 565, 574, 614, 632,
612−13, 639, 674 647, 663, 720, 749, 766, 773, 777
extinction, 156, 386, 777 fantasy, 85, 205, 266, 281, 316, 320,
329, 333, 337, 347, 383, 404, 457,
fact, 17−18, 33, 35, 38, 43−4, 51, 479, 487, 516, 585, 611, 622, 645,
53, 55−9, 73−6, 80−5, 94−6, 111, 758
115−16, 123, 138−9, 193, 208−10, fatalism, 160, 276, 301, 730, 767, 772
214, 230, 247, 253, 268−9, 271, fate, 156, 302, 355, 357, 360, 566,
273, 279, 285, 289, 291, 301, 668
305−8, 321−6, 328−9, 331−2, 336, fatherland, 144, 161, 267, 271−3,
339, 353, 365, 372, 377−9, 381, 315, 335, 414, 707−9, 714, 759
383−4, 388−90, 393−7, 406−8, feeling, 22, 64, 108, 119, 128, 216,
419−20, 433−4, 437, 448−50, 221−2, 261, 272, 288, 291, 320,
452−60, 463−4, 466−8, 470−8, 349, 352, 365, 387, 390−1, 394,
487−8, 492−3, 506−10, 512−14, 397, 402, 404, 413−15, 421, 425,
518−19, 526, 529, 558−62, 565, 444, 456, 468, 477, 484, 486, 488,
590, 592−6, 602, 604−7, 612, 617, 493−4, 497, 499, 529, 535−6, 541,
635, 646−7, 649−50, 653, 655−6, 549, 557, 559−60, 566−7, 573,
658, 660, 667−8, 679, 681, 683, 584, 607, 612, 621−5, 645, 648,
690−2, 697, 700, 710, 723−4, 728, 662, 666, 668, 671, 698, 704−5,
740−2, 744, 747, 755, 769−70 709−11, 714, 718, 730, 737,
faculty, 9, 14−15, 18, 20−2, 28, 59, 756−8, 761, 765, 769, 772
70, 85, 195−6, 198, 200−1, 213, feudalism, 471, 476, 481, 545
228, 231, 237−8, 240−1, 245, fiction, 61, 103, 531, 599, 604, 760
247−8, 252, 261, 271, 283−4, 288, finality, 330, 332, 448, 552, 558, 611,
313, 315, 317, 319, 327, 337−8, 668, 679
361, 364, 376, 384−5, 387, 389, finite, 17, 29−30, 101−2, 111, 138,
393, 398, 404, 414, 426, 432−3, 207, 257−8, 291−2, 299, 308,
454, 509, 569−70, 635 353−4, 364, 367, 405, 419, 422−5,
faith, 12, 51, 68, 88, 121, 128, 132, 427, 517−18, 536, 549, 556, 562,
144, 146, 151, 154, 156, 161, 578, 589, 597, 600, 615, 618, 645,
164−5, 167, 237, 266, 275, 348, 690
353−6, 360, 364−5, 383, 390−1, folklore, 720, 735, 775
393, 397, 406, 451, 457, 459, force, 51, 116, 125, 155, 160−1,
472−3, 535, 553, 594, 613, 619, 273, 288, 315, 326, 328, 347,
633, 644−5, 648, 666, 669, 671−2, 351, 358, 360, 379−83, 387−8,
681, 683, 701, 707−8, 710, 712, 395−6, 407−8, 416, 428, 432, 450,
715, 723−4, 727, 731−2, 746, 754, 453, 456−7, 465, 507, 556, 565,
758, 774 569−70, 599, 601−5, 649, 660,
family, 114, 116, 360−2, 392, 456, 664, 667−9, 672, 697, 707−8,
840
General Index
710−11, 727−8, 730, 735, 742, 263−4, 271, 279, 307, 330, 333,
746, 748, 757, 767, 769, 775−6 347−9, 352, 363, 374−5, 402, 407,
foreign, 10−11, 37, 48, 51, 68, 89, 410, 418−19, 423, 426−7, 435,
144, 166, 214, 237, 271−3, 280, 442, 451−2, 576, 590, 597, 604,
318, 333−4, 344, 371−2, 429, 617, 621, 648−9, 655, 695, 703, 711,
709, 714, 722, 743 747
form, 27, 32, 37, 42−3, 61−3, 73−5, freedom, 12, 65, 74, 78, 137−9, 145,
82−5, 93−7, 99, 103, 107, 114−16, 154−6, 188, 266, 268, 321, 356,
121, 151, 153, 183, 215−17, 367−9, 415, 424−5, 427, 450, 480,
224−9, 236−8, 244, 249−51, 259, 505, 512, 565, 587, 615, 624, 665,
261−2, 280, 283, 289, 292, 296, 687, 689, 692, 697−8, 701, 710,
298−9, 301, 304, 318, 338, 356, 714, 716, 733, 737−8, 748, 752,
366, 376, 387, 394−5, 402−3, 761
405−7, 410, 414−15, 423−4, 428, fundamental, 32, 79, 81, 94, 128,
442, 448, 451−2, 455−6, 461, 236, 252, 267, 276, 307, 310, 385,
464, 468, 470, 472, 474−5, 480, 399, 445, 536, 539, 553, 582,
488−90, 499−500, 505−6, 511, 610−11, 671, 686, 697, 702, 724,
516−31, 534−8, 540, 542−3, 545, 727, 735, 772−3
548−51, 553−6, 566, 568, 571−5,
579, 582−91, 596−8, 600, 603, genre, 127, 153, 465, 497, 499, 508
605, 609−19, 623, 632, 634, 639, genus, 103, 111−13, 225, 350, 392,
642, 644−8, 653, 656, 659−62, 438, 515, 523−4, 532, 550, 571
667−8, 671, 678−9, 689, 691, 694, geography, 474, 492−3, 619, 741,
696−7, 701, 708, 724, 729−36, 753
739−40, 745−8, 758, 767, 769−70, geology, 270, 312, 327, 395, 611−12
773 geometry, 224, 226, 312, 314, 316,
formal, 93, 108, 148, 150, 164, 241, 320, 327, 330, 332−3, 407, 523,
274, 403, 487−8, 490, 498, 589, 611, 688
591, 601, 620, 719, 731, 733, 738, gnoseology, 553, 564, 582, 590,
740, 743, 745 599−600, 613, 623, 628
formalism, 93−4, 96, 150, 349, Gnostics, 269, 549, 579, 627
487−8, 498, 505, 510, 512, 589 government, 70, 142−5, 154−5, 157,
formula, 39−43, 51, 62, 166, 274−9, 164, 267−8, 307, 313−14, 324,
281−3, 285, 287, 289, 291, 293, 340, 351, 388−9, 411, 432−3, 452,
295−7, 299−301, 303−5, 307−9, 460, 493, 513, 545, 556, 561,
311, 320, 368, 373, 375, 402, 407, 564−5, 570, 619, 635, 657, 698,
527−8, 536, 542, 561−2, 610, 657, 708−11, 715−16, 722, 750, 756,
745, 774 758, 763, 769−70, 775−8
foundation, 13, 18, 40, 43−4, 55, grammar, 318, 321, 340, 463, 474−5,
62, 72−4, 90, 207, 231, 248, 257, 508, 586, 720, 745
841
General Index
harmony, 119, 246, 248, 265, 267, historicism, 54, 61, 149−50, 155,
338−9, 350, 357, 377, 383, 409, 160−1, 170−1, 474, 564, 670, 719,
481, 540, 549, 551, 554, 566, 569, 725, 737, 740−1, 743, 745, 747−8,
602, 626, 644, 698 769−70, 772
heaven, 92, 164, 235, 266, 329, 351, historiography, 5, 8, 47, 54, 67, 79,
355, 437, 472, 487, 536, 546, 559, 107, 153, 168, 502, 584, 589,
687, 756 591−2, 634
hegemony, 151−2, 160−1, 166, 728, history, 3−5, 7−10, 12, 46, 50−4,
735−6, 741, 746, 750, 767−9, 777 56, 58−61, 64−5, 67, 70−1, 73−8,
heresy, 9, 37, 68, 165, 266, 270, 352, 80−7, 90−9, 106−7, 112, 115−16,
467, 633, 735, 776, 800 118−20, 124, 127−8, 131, 141,
hierarchy, 85, 152, 354, 432, 454, 143, 145−6, 151, 153−60, 163−5,
480−1, 491, 631, 668, 732−3 167−71, 173, 181, 193, 266−7,
historian, 51, 53−4, 60, 66, 72, 75, 277, 313−15, 317, 325, 330−1,
81−2, 84, 92, 95−9, 154, 169−70, 333, 335−7, 343−4, 346, 349,
355, 394, 398−9, 444, 456, 466−7, 351−2, 354, 358, 361−2, 364−7,
469−71, 482, 484−5, 487, 496, 369−72, 374−6, 378, 388−91,
500−3, 509−14, 547, 560−2, 393−5, 398−401, 406, 410,
590−2, 594, 604, 608−10, 616, 414−15, 419−20, 431, 433−8,
638, 703, 755, 759, 768 441−5, 447−8, 450−7, 459,
historical, 8−9, 12, 45, 50−6, 59, 70, 463−77, 479−82, 484−8, 490−7,
75−86, 88, 90−1, 95−8, 106, 115, 500−4, 506−10, 512−14, 518−19,
118−20, 124−5, 127, 141, 149−51, 521, 531, 534−5, 540, 547−9,
153, 156−7, 160−1, 167, 169, 551−2, 555, 557, 562−4, 566−7,
173−4, 182, 189, 314, 331, 371, 569−73, 576, 578−80, 582−4,
392−3, 395−9, 414, 435, 438, 454, 587−96, 599−602, 604−11, 614,
456, 459−60, 463, 465−8, 470−82, 616, 619−21, 623−5, 628−30,
484−5, 491−7, 500−3, 507−9, 511, 634−5, 637−8, 642−4, 646,
515, 518, 530, 534, 540, 545, 648−50, 653, 659−61, 663−4,
548, 559, 561−3, 567, 574, 590−3, 667−8, 671, 692−3, 703, 705−6,
595−6, 601−2, 606−10, 615, 624, 711, 714, 720−2, 724−8, 735,
627, 631, 634−5, 638, 640, 642−4, 739−40, 743, 746−9, 753−5, 758,
646, 648−9, 655, 659−61, 663−4, 760−1, 763−5, 767−70, 772−3, 775
668−9, 695, 703, 707, 712, 714, holism, 102−3, 105, 183
717−19, 721−3, 725−6, 728−30, human, 9, 12, 14, 16, 19, 27, 30,
732−3, 735, 737−41, 745−9, 754, 32−4, 41−4, 51−60, 64−5, 68,
759, 767−70, 772, 775 70−4, 76, 78−81, 83−5, 93, 96−7,
historical materialism, 78, 80, 83−6, 99, 120−4, 128, 138, 146, 152,
90, 106, 118−20, 124−5, 149, 157, 156−8, 201−3, 209, 211−12,
160, 463, 473−81, 642−6, 655, 228−9, 241, 245−53, 255−63,
659−61, 664, 669, 754, 768 266−8, 275−6, 278, 283−4, 290,
842
General Index
292−3, 295, 299−301, 305−7, idea, 8−9, 14−16, 18, 20, 27−35,
313, 315−16, 318, 321, 324−5, 39−44, 55−9, 64, 71, 73−9, 88,
327, 329−30, 332−3, 336−8, 344, 93−4, 96, 107, 119, 122, 128−30,
346−63, 365−70, 372−9, 384, 136, 141, 144, 146, 166, 197−202,
386, 388−9, 391−9, 405, 407, 206−8, 214−15, 221, 229−30,
411, 414−16, 418, 420, 424−7, 234, 236, 238−40, 244, 251, 256,
430, 432−7, 442−4, 447, 449−50, 258−62, 268−70, 273−5, 278−94,
452−4, 456−9, 464, 466, 468, 297−307, 309, 317, 323−5, 328,
470−3, 475−6, 478, 481, 487, 490, 335, 345−50, 353, 357−8, 361,
494−5, 499−501, 507−8, 519, 525, 363−6, 377−93, 410, 414−16,
535, 538−9, 550−2, 557, 559−60, 420, 423, 425, 430−5, 438, 445,
562−5, 570, 573, 576−7, 579, 584, 448−9, 452, 458, 465−7, 472, 487,
586−8, 592, 594, 602, 604, 617, 489, 495, 498, 504, 529, 548,
619−20, 622−3, 639, 645−9, 651, 550, 552−4, 557−60, 562−3, 568,
653−6, 660, 664, 667, 669−70, 574, 578−83, 586, 589, 593−7,
674, 679, 688, 701, 704−6, 710, 603−4, 607, 615−16, 618, 624,
712, 715, 721, 725, 737, 741, 745, 649, 655−7, 661, 671, 675−6, 678,
747−8, 755−8, 760−1, 775−6, 783, 696, 700, 706−7, 710, 724, 741,
793, 795 756, 769
human nature, 9, 32, 72, 81, 248, 252, ideal, 15−16, 30, 32, 40, 42−3, 56,
256, 374−5, 393, 457, 466, 737 61, 64−5, 70−1, 78, 80, 88, 94−5,
human race, 59, 64, 84, 97, 349, 97, 111, 119, 122, 128, 145−6,
360−1, 365, 372, 376, 379, 389, 153−6, 158, 169, 197−8, 204−5,
391, 394, 414, 416, 447, 450, 256, 258, 262, 267, 284−5, 300−1,
454−5, 457, 459, 467, 469, 475, 306−8, 346−7, 350−2, 356−7, 363,
478, 508, 562, 577, 604, 619, 674, 365, 367, 370, 381, 389, 391, 397,
721, 725, 755−6, 775 409, 415, 419, 423, 425, 432,
humanist, 54, 168, 340, 737 434−5, 445, 488, 490, 492, 496,
humanity, 55, 58, 64−5, 79, 81, 85, 498, 501, 512, 518, 521, 523, 526,
140, 267, 293, 349−50, 353, 358, 529, 531, 539, 545, 552, 557−60,
361, 367, 386, 390−1, 393−4, 570−1, 573, 576, 587, 594, 597,
415−16, 433−4, 453, 459, 461, 603, 612, 622−3, 633, 661, 667,
464−5, 472, 519, 536, 560, 568, 672−3, 679, 701, 707, 709−10,
620, 638, 648, 698−9, 701, 705, 715, 746, 755−9
709, 758 Ideal Formula, 39−44, 51, 166,
hypostasis, 151, 663, 742 276−311, 368
hypothesis, 57, 63, 203, 207, 239, idealism, 4−9, 20−1, 23, 28−9, 33,
243, 285, 287, 296, 303, 305−6, 35, 40, 45, 48, 50−2, 61−4, 66−7,
314, 328−30, 336−7, 374, 379, 70−5, 78, 83, 87−9, 93−6, 117,
397, 404, 409−11, 441, 474, 481, 120−3, 126−9, 131−2, 137, 142,
488, 740 146, 149−51, 155, 161−7, 169−70,
843
General Index
190, 229, 246, 248, 250−1, 253−4, 490, 494−5, 500, 502, 528, 535,
301, 306, 345, 354, 402−3, 407−9, 537−8, 541, 552, 554, 566, 570,
412, 417, 447−8, 451−3, 457−9, 572, 576, 578, 614, 625, 645, 674,
473−5, 478, 487, 493, 495, 498, 689, 694, 697, 742, 759, 769
503, 505, 508, 510−11, 615, 618, immanence, 107, 117, 123−5, 129,
621, 629, 631, 637, 645−6, 648−9, 140, 149, 155, 161, 166, 301, 304,
651, 653−4, 657, 660−1, 665−7, 309, 345, 347, 355, 366, 368, 560,
669, 671−3, 675−81, 686, 689, 563, 618−19, 639, 644, 646, 648,
691, 695−7, 699−701, 703, 705, 657−8, 660−1, 676, 679, 684, 691,
719, 725, 737−43, 745, 747, 765, 696−7, 699, 702, 704, 725, 739,
772, 775, 778 772
ideality, 93, 99, 346−7, 358, 416, independence, 14−16, 18−19, 32−3,
487, 490, 519, 613, 670, 702−3 36−7, 45, 108, 113, 161, 165, 167,
idealize, 108, 121, 358, 510, 635 203, 205, 213−14, 216−18, 221−2,
identical, 17, 29−31, 75, 102, 110, 224, 228−30, 236, 248, 250, 252,
124, 203, 208, 234, 264, 275, 256, 263, 267, 279, 304, 309,
280, 282, 285−6, 289, 305−6, 363, 317−18, 351, 354, 388, 393, 415,
403, 422−3, 425, 427−8, 454, 450, 476, 488, 567, 569, 572, 601,
518, 520−2, 532, 544, 592, 654, 608, 615, 647, 651−2, 655, 658,
659−60, 692, 704, 761 663, 670, 696, 707, 724, 728−9,
identity, 16, 93, 105, 110, 124, 766, 774, 777
134−7, 194, 202, 204, 209−11, individual, 30−1, 41−2, 65, 74, 79,
231, 234, 251, 265, 267, 280, 81, 84−5, 95, 97, 99−105, 112,
285−6, 304, 329, 356, 403, 116, 120, 123−4, 139−40, 144,
408−10, 521, 526−8, 530, 539, 146, 152, 225−8, 288, 291−2, 334,
546−7, 549, 552−3, 556, 568, 570, 347, 357, 360−1, 372, 376, 389,
577, 582, 594, 617, 626, 645, 658, 393, 415, 420, 423−4, 426, 442,
677, 686−7, 691−2, 699−701 454−5, 465, 467, 473−5, 478−80,
ideology, 8, 10, 14−19, 21, 23, 28, 483, 487, 492, 499, 507, 515−16,
32, 54, 118, 121−2, 149, 152, 158, 519, 530, 535, 539, 541, 545,
161, 193, 201−2, 206, 208, 221−2, 560−1, 573, 586, 591, 593, 595,
235, 247, 263, 472−4, 482, 503, 606−7, 609−12, 616, 619, 633,
562, 642, 653, 655, 660, 663, 723, 645−8, 650, 658, 673, 696, 698,
725, 730−1, 733−4, 736, 738−9, 706−7, 710, 714, 722−3, 725−6,
745−6, 748, 750, 763, 769−70 733−5, 741, 747, 749, 760
imagination, 15, 33−5, 40, 63−5, individualism, 144, 706−7
81, 85, 96−7, 108, 119, 156, 158, individuality, 41−2, 85, 99, 140, 283,
197−200, 228, 238, 241−3, 245, 288, 291−2, 357, 422, 424−5,
273, 286, 293, 324, 361, 376−9, 478−9, 492, 516, 560, 579, 587,
393, 409−11, 414−16, 454−7, 466, 593, 595, 688
844
General Index
individuation, 31, 42, 102−4, 137, 150−2, 156, 159, 165−6, 409,
139, 702, 770 706−16, 720−38, 750−1, 760, 763,
induction, 19, 38, 46, 56−9, 62, 765−6, 769, 774
73−6, 271, 289, 316, 322−3, intellectualism, 116, 156, 357, 359,
325−7, 329−32, 376, 378−80, 409, 552, 554, 562, 566, 588, 597,
393−5, 398, 407−10, 412, 449, 631, 726
454−60, 552, 589, 678, 718, 756 intelligence, 17, 32, 207−8, 240, 254,
infallibility, 318, 338, 430 257, 260−1, 268, 280, 316, 348,
infinite, 16−17, 30, 41−2, 62, 100−1, 357, 360, 425, 428, 450, 453, 458,
105, 111, 140, 205−8, 214, 216, 463, 565−6, 617
218, 238, 242, 257, 284, 287, intelligentsia, 713, 730
291−3, 298−9, 308, 320, 329, intelligible, 115, 128, 138, 141, 280,
344, 347−9, 351, 355, 357, 362−5, 285−8, 290−1, 293−5, 300, 307,
367−8, 377, 389−90, 393, 397, 346−7, 536, 570, 646, 657, 664,
405, 415, 418−20, 422−8, 438, 673, 677−9
476, 517, 522, 529, 531−2, 549, interest, 97, 472, 486, 492, 496,
556, 562, 597, 606, 645, 667, 688, 499−500, 506, 510−11
692, 697−8, 701−2, 704−5, 721 interpretation, 22, 56, 120, 329,
innate, 27, 32, 34−5, 129, 245, 250, 429−30, 440−1, 467, 472, 475,
262, 321, 335−6, 338, 357, 404, 484, 492, 501, 566−7, 592,
676, 742 615−19, 624, 643−4, 648, 654,
instinct, 27, 65, 150, 248, 250, 660, 662, 684, 703, 713−14, 747,
252−3, 270, 276, 290, 314−15, 760, 774
327, 338, 351−2, 414, 416, 431, intuition, 19, 28−30, 34, 39−44, 88,
450−1, 530, 586, 602, 621, 706, 99, 105, 108, 114, 121, 129, 131,
724, 728 176, 215−16, 221, 223−5, 227,
intellect, 9, 28, 32−4, 62, 71−2, 112, 229−30, 236−8, 240−2, 244, 251,
125, 141, 198, 200−1, 235, 254, 255, 258, 262, 265, 275, 282−6,
257, 262, 266, 273, 282, 284, 288−92, 294−5, 302−6, 308−9,
289−90, 297, 306, 308, 313−14, 311, 345, 348, 365, 367−8, 409,
323−5, 328, 347, 354−5, 357, 420, 425−6, 428, 458, 464, 466,
361−2, 367−8, 374−5, 390, 392, 481, 487, 515−16, 520, 523,
398, 404, 406, 409, 412, 425−6, 529−30, 536, 541−2, 545, 553−4,
451, 457, 459, 466, 499, 508, 518, 570, 574, 576, 585−6, 588, 590−2,
550, 553−5, 562, 566, 585−9, 597, 597, 615−16, 623, 632, 646−51,
599−600, 611, 631, 636, 649, 653, 655, 657−8, 662, 667, 676,
657−8, 661, 676, 688, 701, 705, 689, 721, 724
714−15, 720−3, 746, 752, 756 investigation, 240, 258, 281, 312,
intellectual, 3−6, 46, 53, 60, 70, 79, 319−20, 322−3, 326−7, 329, 332,
90, 118−19, 132, 143, 145−6, 148, 335, 431, 440, 442, 501, 507, 509,
845
General Index
534, 538, 549, 561, 564, 570, 592, language, 30, 71−2, 75, 78, 83, 85,
665, 674, 677 150−1, 167, 202−3, 243, 270, 294,
296, 321, 333, 337, 358, 364,
journalism, 36, 49, 60, 68, 117, 143, 391−2, 395, 398, 400, 403, 405−7,
147, 170, 609, 713, 767, 777−8 436, 440−1, 455−6, 461, 474−5,
just, 83, 93, 97, 101, 114, 134, 140, 479, 489, 495−6, 508, 511, 538,
206, 265, 300, 305, 307, 345, 350, 563, 570, 584−9, 623, 629, 650−1,
362, 431, 468, 500−1, 515, 523, 720−4, 744−5, 750−1
564, 568, 573−4, 601, 656, 755 law, 15, 24, 34−5, 53−9, 62, 70−5,
justice, 25, 85, 164, 349, 351, 479, 78, 81, 83−5, 95, 105, 109, 123,
559, 709, 715 128, 137, 139, 144−5, 150, 154,
justification, 18, 240, 353, 475, 490, 164, 166, 194, 199, 216, 228,
514, 536, 540−2, 546, 551, 553, 233−6, 241, 248−9, 254, 267,
555, 558−9, 561, 579, 581, 599, 275, 293, 316, 323, 327, 331−2,
605, 609, 649, 661, 672, 708, 719, 335, 349−51, 358, 360, 362, 364,
730, 741, 756, 770 369−70, 372, 374, 379−89, 392−6,
398−9, 402−9, 412, 416, 419,
kind, 94−5, 128, 492, 516, 602, 668, 425, 427, 431−7, 441−50, 453−4,
673 458, 460, 464, 467, 469−70, 472,
knowledge, 18−19, 22, 28−30, 32, 474−6, 479−81, 492−3, 507−10,
34−5, 39, 46, 58−9, 61−2, 70, 527−30, 538, 547, 559, 563, 565,
72−3, 78, 85, 92, 112, 115, 120−2, 570−1, 599, 601−5, 613−14, 618,
128, 132, 134, 136, 150, 157, 194, 620, 632, 635−6, 657, 659, 667,
198, 209, 211−12, 217, 220−1, 669, 671, 673−4, 682, 685−6, 690,
224, 228−9, 233−6, 243, 246−66, 694, 697, 700, 705−11, 715, 721,
274−6, 279−80, 283, 286, 288−90, 725, 740, 742, 749, 756, 772, 777
294−5, 298, 301−10, 312−15, lawyer, 149, 417, 575, 635, 719, 734
318−27, 331−5, 338, 346, 352−60, level, 102−4, 113−16, 123, 164, 488,
364−8, 375, 378−99, 401−11, 514−22, 528−9, 569−78, 582,
420, 424−7, 430, 435−8, 442−4, 587−8, 591−3, 603, 613, 619,
449−53, 458−60, 485, 491−5, 631−2, 634, 648, 655, 667−8,
499, 502, 507−8, 510, 517, 521−3, 673−6, 679, 706, 713, 718, 721,
530, 539, 548, 550−2, 556, 563−4, 726
584, 590, 592−3, 597, 600, 611, liberalism, 7, 25, 36, 69, 86−7, 118,
613, 618, 623, 628, 649−59, 665, 143−6, 153−8, 160−1, 165, 168,
670−3, 676, 682, 684−8, 697−8, 482, 503, 707, 710−11, 714−16,
701, 705, 721, 728, 737, 743, 747, 719, 753−61, 776
749, 755, 761 liberty, 37, 139, 145, 153−8, 160−1,
188, 354, 360, 503, 559−60, 565,
landscape, 97, 500 592, 611, 664, 706−7, 709−11,
846
General Index
715, 718−19, 746, 754−5, 757−61, 449, 475, 492, 515−39, 542−57,
769−70, 774 563−71, 574−83, 586−92, 594,
liceo, 66, 90, 126, 131, 680 596, 598−601, 605, 613−21, 625,
life, 58−61, 66, 75, 83, 108, 124, 629, 631−5, 639, 644, 646, 648,
128, 136, 141, 144−5, 155−6, 656, 661−2, 674−9, 681, 686,
164, 198, 220, 246, 265−6, 268, 690−4, 697−701, 704, 719, 723,
274, 290, 306, 343, 348−55, 358, 731, 740, 743−5, 751, 772
360−6, 369−70, 374, 376, 382, logicism, 116, 516, 532, 614, 619,
389, 396−402, 404, 407, 411, 639
414−30, 439, 441, 448−57, 460, logos, 141, 267, 616−18, 639, 696−7,
468, 470−6, 490, 493, 495, 498, 700−1, 704
507, 509, 516, 518−19, 524, 527,
529, 534, 538, 540, 542, 545−7, materialism, 10, 55, 61−3, 78−80,
551, 555, 557−62, 565−8, 572−4, 83−6, 90, 106, 109, 111, 118−25,
579, 583−4, 587, 590, 594, 596, 127−9, 149, 151, 157, 160, 167,
610, 612, 615, 621, 623−4, 626, 245, 250, 254, 263, 310, 357−9,
632−3, 638, 645−8, 651−3, 658, 372, 374, 381, 390, 396, 399−400,
665−71, 676, 682, 684, 692, 402−3, 410−11, 423, 463, 465,
697−703, 705−9, 712−19, 723−7, 467, 469, 471, 473−7, 479−81,
730, 734−5, 753−7, 760−1, 765−6, 483, 506−7, 539−40, 548, 556−7,
774−7 562−3, 566, 597, 618, 621, 638,
linguistics, 42, 75, 84, 94, 147, 392, 642−8, 651−62, 664, 667−70, 672,
464, 466, 476, 482, 508, 631, 752 682, 697, 736, 739, 741−2, 754,
literature, 45, 60−1, 81, 92, 96, 106, 757, 768
118, 126, 153, 164, 168, 170, 268, mathematics, 56−7, 62, 71−4, 108,
273, 275, 321, 351, 381, 391, 395, 115, 232, 236, 307, 327, 341, 358,
399, 463, 465, 482, 485, 488, 375, 383, 385, 398, 404, 438,
503−4, 507, 511, 563, 580, 584, 442−3, 448, 452−3, 460, 489, 496,
607, 609, 635, 643, 654, 713, 720, 534−6, 545, 551−2, 556, 567, 581,
755, 762, 764−5 596−604, 608, 611, 618, 620,
logic, 3, 13−22, 28, 34, 51−2, 57-58, 623, 633, 635, 649, 657, 688, 714,
63, 68, 73, 77−8, 86, 93, 99−109, 744−5
111−12, 115−16, 125, 132, 136, matter, 27, 77−85, 111, 122−5, 151,
150−1, 164, 184, 193−4, 197, 155, 215−16, 228, 236−7, 249−50,
204−5, 209, 212−13, 225, 231, 332, 337, 356, 359, 366−7, 373,
234−5, 238−42, 247, 251, 253, 379, 381, 402, 420, 423, 428, 556,
256, 280, 282−4, 293, 296, 298, 617, 635, 645, 655−61, 667, 673,
301, 306, 317, 322, 331, 337, 696, 742, 755
341, 363, 379−80, 383−4, 386, meaning, 50, 78, 82, 94, 96, 133,
393, 404, 408, 416, 426, 432, 438, 155, 164, 170, 202, 274, 276,
847
General Index
278, 287, 296−7, 300, 303, 317, 70−1, 77−8, 80−1, 83, 85, 99,
336, 343−6, 351, 359−63, 368, 101, 103, 105−6, 108, 112, 116,
390, 407, 419, 429, 436, 466−72, 123, 126, 136, 141, 151, 160,
478, 480, 487−92, 508−9, 526, 166, 176, 202, 209−10, 221, 223,
539, 543−6, 549, 553−4, 558, 562, 234−5, 267, 277, 296−7, 309−10,
572, 580−1, 583, 586, 592−3, 313, 315, 319, 321, 324, 329,
595−6, 600, 612, 616, 629, 647, 332, 359−60, 363−8, 370, 373−4,
669, 684−5, 691, 696, 702−6, 711, 377−8, 383−6, 389−90, 393,
724−5, 729−30, 737, 740−1, 745, 395−400, 409, 412, 420, 430,
747 432−3, 438, 441−2, 479, 491, 506,
measure, 82, 206, 241, 313, 325, 508−9, 535, 549, 553, 569, 577,
334, 358, 375, 380, 426, 467, 508, 580, 591, 593, 599−600, 603−4,
552, 578−9, 611, 668−9, 674, 696, 614, 618−19, 622−3, 625, 627,
702 632, 634, 639−40, 656, 663, 666,
mechanical, 65, 81, 109, 129, 137, 670, 691, 696, 699, 739, 765, 769
139, 156, 160, 212, 327, 358, method, 38, 40, 45−7, 51, 53−4,
367, 396, 423, 438, 448−9, 467, 56−9, 63, 71, 73−6, 81, 91, 102,
523, 537, 539, 552, 582−3, 587, 107, 111−12, 116, 140, 148,
611−12, 616, 621, 650, 668, 670, 150−1, 169, 194, 211−12, 269,
676, 679, 689−90, 697, 707, 709, 271, 274− 5, 278, 281, 285, 293,
718, 720, 728−30, 740−2, 744, 299, 302−3, 305, 310, 312−16,
747, 767, 772 318, 320−42, 371−2, 375−6, 379,
memory, 15, 18, 34−5, 100, 198−200, 382, 384−5, 387, 391−3, 395−9,
209−10, 212, 235, 245, 403, 450, 408−9, 411, 416, 436−7, 449−52,
455, 475, 586, 685, 707, 744 454−5, 457− 60, 463−7, 472,
mental, 14, 18, 20, 28−9, 31−4, 476, 484−5, 492, 494, 503, 506,
39−41, 44, 58, 61, 74−5, 84, 90, 510, 512, 534−6, 568−70, 580−2,
109, 113, 120−1, 171, 205, 213, 589, 591−3, 597−8, 600, 605−8,
217, 220, 236, 254, 293, 297−8, 619−21, 634, 651, 663, 670,
303−6, 308, 317, 326, 332, 336−7, 695−6, 699, 707, 713, 716, 733,
402−4, 419, 447, 454, 457, 460, 736, 739−40, 743, 745, 757, 769,
476, 479, 484, 520, 534−5, 555, 772−3, 775
570, 595, 623, 625−6, 643−4, mind, 12, 14−16, 19−20, 27−35,
657−8, 715, 721, 739, 754, 757, 40−1, 44, 56, 58, 70−1, 73−4,
760 96, 108, 111, 120−1, 128, 152,
metaphor, 113, 296−7, 518, 525, 155, 176, 195−206, 209−19,
542, 546, 549, 566, 571−3, 577, 223−36, 240−1, 245−63, 271, 273,
650, 668, 725, 742 278−309, 313−14, 320−1, 325−37,
metaphysics, 12−13, 15, 18, 27, 34, 343, 346, 352, 355, 359−64, 367,
37, 47, 51−2, 54−7, 59, 63−4, 370, 373, 376−83, 386−7, 390,
848
General Index
393−4, 403−4, 408, 411, 415−16, 474, 476, 480−1, 498−9, 502−3,
419−20, 422−5, 431−8, 441−4, 508−10, 516, 519, 524, 534−5,
450−62, 475, 483, 487, 489, 494, 538, 553, 559, 568, 571, 575, 587,
509, 531, 538−42, 550−1, 566, 597, 613, 621, 628−9, 632, 641,
569−70, 586, 615, 626, 632, 663, 669, 700−1, 705−9, 714−15,
649−50, 653−4, 657−8, 668−70, 717, 722, 728, 730, 735, 739, 745,
673−4, 689, 698, 703, 705, 707, 750, 752, 754, 756, 760, 763, 765,
710, 733, 735, 745 769−70, 774
mistakes (philosophical), 109, Mother Idea, 27−35, 166, 261, 290,
114−15, 313, 335, 500, 557, 567, 297
575−609, 614, 622−3, 724, 759 motion, 110, 197, 207, 214, 233,
modality, 14−16, 29, 108, 194−8, 267, 329, 347, 383, 387, 423,
200−3, 205−6, 212−13, 215−21, 599−600, 617
227−8, 231, 245−7, 249−50, movement, 42−3, 80, 86−9, 129,
253−4, 256−7, 281, 285, 288−9, 139, 143−4, 195−6, 201, 226, 267,
299−301, 356−9, 370, 392, 405−7, 297, 303, 305, 309, 311, 355, 362,
424, 497, 516, 518, 522−3, 535, 380−1, 403, 419, 421, 456, 464,
551, 555, 586−7, 613, 650, 653, 542, 545−6, 548−9, 554, 559−60,
660, 733, 738, 755, 757, 760, 773 592−4, 601, 623−4, 660−1, 675,
moment, 81, 104, 110−11, 113−16, 678, 687, 692, 699−700, 703
121, 128, 134, 141, 159−60, music, 94, 266, 387, 397, 453, 487,
344−5, 367, 369, 464, 523, 525, 489, 495, 504−5, 573, 585, 587,
527, 529, 532, 542−4, 571−4, 576, 591, 613, 640
578, 592, 612−16, 621−2, 652−3, mysticism, 47, 71, 79, 108, 128, 157,
658, 671, 684−92, 699, 701, 718, 161, 168, 181, 316, 337, 461, 477,
720−1, 729, 746−7, 756, 763, 516−17, 536, 541, 550, 552, 563,
767−9 608, 623, 628, 648, 670, 672, 705,
monism, 55, 62−3, 74−5, 101, 109, 715, 755, 757−8, 774
122, 124, 129, 136, 403, 408, 453,
539−40, 542−3, 548, 558, 655, narrative, 7, 80−1, 85, 95, 97, 118,
660, 675, 691, 700 370, 463−5, 467, 469, 476, 481,
morality, 4, 14, 24−5, 32−3, 37, 54−5, 492−3, 497, 501−2, 506, 509, 514,
58−9, 65, 71−2, 74−5, 77−9, 81, 590−1, 595, 602, 760
85, 88, 90, 94, 103, 111−12, 128, nation, 7−8, 37−8, 51, 58, 60, 66−7,
144, 148, 155, 161, 197, 235, 69, 73, 78, 86−8, 97, 118, 127,
245, 247, 263−4, 268, 275, 316, 142, 144, 146, 151, 154, 156−8,
349−51, 359, 367, 371, 373−5, 164−71, 268, 333, 335, 343−4,
379, 392, 395−6, 398, 404, 407, 349−51, 358−61, 364, 369−70,
410−11, 414, 416, 419−20, 424, 376, 394, 430, 432, 445, 448−9,
449−50, 453−4, 456, 465, 470, 468, 499, 504, 509, 531, 565−6,
849
General Index
592, 609−10, 630, 695, 706, 708, 315−16, 319−20, 323−7, 329−30,
710−14, 716, 718, 722, 734−7, 332, 334−5, 337−9, 346−9,
742, 750−1, 753−4, 756, 759, 761, 352−62, 364−7, 370−1, 373−5,
763, 790−1, 803 377, 379−93, 396−8, 403, 405,
natural, 9, 14, 17−18, 24, 32, 44−7, 409−10, 414−16, 418−19, 422−8,
50, 55−9, 62, 64, 72, 74-75, 78, 81, 430, 432, 434−7, 445, 450−1,
95, 108, 112, 114, 116-117, 120, 453−8, 465−6, 473, 475, 479, 486,
127-129, 137-139, 166, 193, 196, 489−90, 496−7, 500, 502, 506−7,
201, 211, 224, 228, 230, 245, 248, 509, 514, 521, 524, 527, 530, 533,
253, 262, 267, 275−6, 282, 293, 535, 549−53, 555−7, 559, 565−6,
307, 309, 312−15, 318, 320−2, 570, 573, 576, 583, 586−7, 591−2,
324, 326, 328−30, 332−6, 338−40, 596−608, 611−13, 615−21, 623,
347, 349, 351−4, 358−63, 366−71, 629, 631−3, 635, 637, 639, 650,
374−5, 377−8, 381−2, 385, 387, 652, 654, 657, 659−61, 667−9,
389−92, 395−6, 399, 405, 407, 671−3, 675−9, 685−91, 694,
410−12, 419, 441, 445, 449−50, 696−8, 700−3, 705, 717, 732,
452, 454−6, 460, 466−7, 469, 737−9, 748, 756, 759
472−3, 477−9, 481, 484, 490, 507, necessary, 16−17, 20−2, 29−30, 32,
511−12, 514, 516, 533−4, 536, 34, 41−3, 62, 78, 102, 104−5, 111,
541−2, 564−5, 567, 574, 576, 582, 113, 115−16, 119, 124, 129, 134,
584−5, 587, 596−8, 600, 602−4, 137−8, 145, 155, 195, 202−3, 205,
606, 608, 610−11, 613, 615, 617, 208, 212, 214, 217−22, 226−9,
620, 623, 626, 631, 633, 635−7, 231−4, 239, 243−4, 248, 253,
646, 648−9, 655, 659−60, 669−72, 257−8, 261−2, 280, 283−4, 286,
674, 678, 681, 689, 695−7, 714, 289, 294, 297−9, 302−3, 306, 308,
737, 740, 743, 769, 772, 775 313, 320, 322, 332, 337, 345,
naturalism, 35, 40, 54, 61, 74, 79, 350−1, 357, 359, 363, 402, 422,
89, 117, 124, 127-129, 166, 279, 425−7, 432, 440, 443, 449−50,
306, 359, 367, 453, 511, 534, 551, 458−60, 498, 517, 521−2, 528−9,
554-556, 563-564, 568, 587, 589, 536, 539, 543−4, 551−2, 564, 578,
597-598, 600-603, 605, 629, 631, 581−2, 587−9, 592, 595−6, 598,
658-659, 666-670, 672, 675, 678- 619, 651, 655, 657−8, 660, 666,
680, 686, 695, 745 670, 672, 676, 685−7, 690, 704,
nature, 9, 32, 34−5, 40, 43, 53, 55, 711, 718, 722, 728, 730, 734,
57−8, 61, 72, 74−5, 81, 85, 113, 738−9, 747, 766, 770, 772
115−17, 123, 127−30, 136−41, necessity, 22, 29−30, 41, 74, 119,
166, 196, 200−1, 204−9, 226, 137, 158, 212, 214−15, 220, 233,
228−9, 232−3, 240, 248−9, 252−6, 237, 239, 256−7, 280, 283, 285,
262, 268, 270, 278−9, 285, 293, 298, 336, 339, 353, 367, 370,
298, 300−2, 305, 307−11, 313, 402−3, 406−8, 419, 424−5, 427−8,
850
General Index
448, 534, 573, 581, 587, 595, 599, 651−2, 655−7, 663, 668−70, 675,
612−13, 647, 667, 675, 686−8, 677, 682, 690−2, 696−7, 699,
697, 712, 718, 724, 730, 732, 702−5, 715, 724, 740, 742−5, 747,
746−8, 752, 757 756, 760, 763, 774
negation, 42, 57, 65, 104−5, 108−10, noumenon, 19, 221, 223, 230, 451
113, 129, 133−40, 183, 218−20, nullism, 364−5
234, 238−9, 251, 292−3, 349−50, number, 100−2, 205, 207, 219,
363−4, 379, 403, 405, 415−16, 224−6, 229, 242, 256, 259−60,
427, 473, 482, 493, 517, 524−9, 264−6, 280, 284, 301, 312, 317,
536, 538, 542−5, 549, 556−8, 572, 325, 338, 369, 374−5, 377, 390,
574−5, 579, 588, 591, 594, 596, 405, 410, 421, 425, 428, 452, 456,
599, 612, 615−17, 620−1, 626, 479, 505, 517−18, 522−3, 525,
640, 652, 660, 671, 675−6, 678−9, 528, 538, 543, 569, 600, 613, 629,
684−90, 692, 694, 704, 711, 731, 633, 669, 678−9, 687, 689−90,
735, 746 694, 707, 715, 734, 747−8, 750,
newspaper, 3−4, 37, 49, 60, 483, 734, 755
751, 765, 774, 777
nominalism, 15, 55, 176−7, 269, 276, object, 14−22, 28−35, 39, 41, 44,
377, 602, 658, 687 61, 63, 70, 74−5, 78−83, 94−9,
non-being, 114, 136, 525−7, 532, 107−8, 120−5, 133−4, 139−40,
539, 543, 545, 549, 557−9, 571−2, 195−8, 209−33, 236, 238−57,
574−5, 578, 581, 616, 692, 260, 283−91, 294−5, 303−6, 309,
699−701 324−7, 346−8, 353, 355, 357,
nothing, 29, 32, 61−3, 65, 73−4, 84, 359, 363, 366−7, 375, 402−9, 452,
86−7, 90, 95, 98, 101−2, 108−11, 465−70, 487−500, 506−7, 510−14,
114, 116, 123, 139, 141, 155, 516, 518, 523, 531, 534−6, 553,
160, 166, 170, 204−8, 214, 217, 556, 558, 570, 579, 585, 587, 594,
219−21, 223, 230, 236, 238−9, 599, 610, 617, 638, 645−6, 649,
241, 245−6, 248, 250−1, 254−8, 651−5, 658, 661−4, 667, 673−4,
261−2, 271, 279, 281−3, 287, 683−4, 690−1, 696−7, 699−702,
289−90, 292, 294−5, 298, 300, 704, 740, 760
303−5, 323, 327, 332−3, 336, 345, objectifying, 570, 699, 741
348−53, 357, 361−4, 366−8, 374, objectivity, 12, 15−16, 20−2, 28−9,
378, 383, 393, 397, 403, 408, 412, 35, 39, 41, 44, 55, 79−81, 120−1,
416−18, 422−7, 430, 434−7, 446, 128, 133−4, 137, 139, 197−8,
449, 451−2, 464, 477−9, 485, 502, 202−6, 213−15, 219−23, 226−33,
511, 514, 525, 530, 536, 538, 540, 237, 240−3, 248−50, 252, 267,
543−6, 556, 558, 560, 562−3, 576, 284, 293−5, 303−6, 310, 324, 346,
583−5, 591, 593, 597, 600, 606−7, 367, 384, 386, 390, 407, 410,
610, 614−18, 623, 625−6, 646−7, 420, 464−7, 497, 512, 526, 544,
851
General Index
564, 570−2, 581−2, 595, 601, 613, 672−3, 684, 686, 689−90, 692−3,
646−7, 653−4, 662, 664, 683−4, 697−8, 704, 712, 723−4, 726, 736,
688−91, 696, 715, 740−1, 747, 756 739−40, 755, 759, 772
observation, 18, 38, 46, 53, 56−7,
59, 62, 64, 75, 97, 212, 232, 249, painting, 96−7, 387, 494−5, 497,
254, 269, 271, 281, 291, 314, 500, 509−10, 573, 587, 591, 594,
316, 319, 321, 324−31, 339, 365, 609, 613
372, 376, 378−9, 383−4, 386−90, panlogicism, 116, 532, 614−15, 619,
393, 403, 407, 410, 412, 419, 437, 639
452, 454−5, 464, 480, 487−8, 495, pantheism, 25, 37, 40, 48−9, 55, 66,
500−1, 504, 507, 510, 513, 521, 68−9, 180, 250, 253, 264−9, 272,
534, 540, 552, 560, 598−9, 604, 274−6, 279−81, 288−9, 298−302,
608, 612, 615, 622, 650, 654, 658, 306, 308, 357−8, 363, 372, 374,
678, 688, 715, 723, 730, 745, 755, 382, 390, 418−19, 421−3, 425,
760 427, 562, 579, 628
ontologism, 50, 275−6, 281, 285, papacy, 25, 38, 45, 50, 69, 88, 164,
302−3, 310, 323, 345−8 269, 277, 400, 465, 720
ontology, 40, 43−4, 50, 63, 84, 109, paradox, 21, 33−4, 319, 588, 627, 745
254, 272, 275−82, 284−5, 290, paralogism, 301, 739
295, 302−6, 308, 310, 320, 322−3, participation, 286, 360, 383, 419,
325−6, 331, 337, 345−8, 366, 424, 705
419−20, 445−6, 536, 625, 693 particular, 15, 22, 28, 30−1, 41,
opinion, 338, 349, 411, 496, 557, 62, 82−3, 95, 99−102, 105, 108,
720, 724, 731, 738, 745, 771 116, 127, 136−40, 144, 194, 202,
opposite, 70, 101−5, 108−16, 124, 217−18, 222, 234, 238, 250,
136, 145, 183, 235, 254, 267, 310, 257−61, 292, 314, 319, 322, 326,
346, 382, 405, 524−9, 534−58, 332, 336, 347, 357, 379, 383,
562−3, 566−78, 582, 584, 586, 398, 408, 434, 441, 459, 466, 469,
588, 603, 616−17, 619, 622, 626, 472−3, 479, 488, 490, 492, 494,
632, 658, 697, 700, 711 509, 514, 516, 520−3, 529, 531,
opposition, 71, 82, 104−5, 108−10, 536−8, 543, 550, 555, 560, 565,
112, 118, 136−7, 150, 155, 568, 570, 572−615, 645−8, 656−7,
290, 352−4, 405, 408, 448, 468, 662, 670−1, 687−90, 698, 702,
523−30, 538−43, 557, 577, 612, 704, 709−10, 718−20, 725, 728,
626, 632, 646, 690, 698, 752, 768 730−2, 736−41, 745−6, 750, 758,
overcome (aufheben), 110, 141, 763, 773
145, 344, 358, 367, 471, 476, passion, 14, 65, 195, 203, 375−7,
516, 523, 540, 542, 547, 553−4, 384, 389, 393−5, 416, 516, 560,
557−8, 560, 566, 571−2, 574, 585, 565−6, 594, 599, 604−5, 703, 706,
614, 617−18, 622, 658, 666−7, 724, 753, 756−7
852
General Index
passivity, 14, 28, 43−4, 108, 110, 121, 551, 563, 650, 652, 737, 739−40,
138−9, 148, 151, 195, 203, 216, 770, 775
228, 238, 246, 528, 538, 572, 616, pessimism, 94−5, 139, 155, 182, 540,
650−1, 721, 728, 730 558, 755
past, 15, 33, 80−2, 97, 115, 128, phenomenon, 21, 38, 56−8, 83, 116,
133−6, 141, 153, 157, 167−71, 127, 206−7, 213−14, 229−30, 236,
198−200, 206, 252, 272, 345, 372, 252, 271, 314, 319, 325, 327,
394−5, 464, 466, 468, 501, 506, 330, 332, 335−6, 351, 358, 376−7,
588, 603, 612, 638, 654, 658, 671, 379, 383, 387−8, 390, 407, 409,
684−6, 691, 693, 699, 703, 707, 415−16, 419, 422−3, 436, 448−50,
709, 716, 721−4, 728, 736, 754−5, 452, 469, 474−6, 488−9, 504,
759−60 556−7, 581, 585, 596, 604, 656,
patriotism, 5, 24, 36, 64, 143, 165, 668, 725, 729
168−9, 709 phenomenology, 3, 31, 48, 123, 156,
pedagogy, 77, 118, 120, 131, 151, 535, 546, 554, 566, 575−6, 580−1,
476, 518, 581, 584, 633, 651, 583, 585, 587, 599, 613, 625, 629−
717−19, 742 30, 632, 653, 655−6, 674, 677, 793
perception, 14−16, 18, 20, 31, 33−5, philology, 54, 64, 67, 71−2, 80, 351,
39, 43, 61−3, 108, 195−6, 198−9, 366, 369, 392, 395, 397, 400, 413,
201−2, 204−5, 209−15, 221, 223, 417, 435−7, 441−2, 454, 456, 460,
230−3, 237, 241−3, 247−8, 254, 462, 464−6, 533, 564, 593
260, 282−3, 285, 288, 290−2, 301, philosophy of praxis, 79, 118−25,
303−6, 324, 328, 357, 367, 402−4, 148, 151−2, 160, 642−64, 726−8,
407, 411, 422, 434, 442, 449, 456, 736−45, 748, 751, 767, 769,
497, 524, 536, 556, 560, 571, 588, 772−3, 777
597, 622−3, 673−5, 748 physical, 15, 81, 83, 90, 101, 109,
perennial, 50, 338, 349, 372, 667 116, 119, 123−4, 127, 129, 131,
perfect, 79, 200, 238, 273, 284, 166, 202, 213, 220, 222−3, 234,
330, 337, 357, 366, 389, 418−19, 263, 296, 313−14, 317, 320, 326,
423−6, 433, 438, 468, 490, 499, 330, 338, 351, 399, 419−20, 438,
506, 514−15, 541, 643, 652, 442, 450, 457, 489, 519, 584,
687−8, 719, 746 595, 605, 610−12, 615, 618, 620,
personality, 56, 64, 103, 123, 161, 645−6, 656, 668, 677, 702, 737,
307, 346−8, 356−8, 363, 373, 408, 740, 742, 748, 752
413, 418−19, 460, 467, 479−80, physics, 54, 73, 197, 307, 314, 319,
488, 492, 496, 524, 593, 595, 618, 323, 327, 329, 331, 341, 352, 372,
679, 699, 703−4, 707, 721, 727, 377, 383, 395−6, 438, 449, 485,
733, 735, 775 507−8, 519, 552, 599, 601−5, 608,
perspective, 81−2, 97, 120, 254, 280, 611−12, 620, 635−7, 668, 742
334, 346, 424, 467, 490, 497, 506, physiognomy, 402, 634
853
General Index
physiology, 80, 116, 371, 382, 399, 461, 468−9, 474, 479, 483, 503−4,
403, 408, 464, 489, 501, 507, 512, 506, 562−3, 587, 605, 607−8, 611,
542, 605−6, 608, 611−12, 646, 617, 620−2, 632, 635, 637, 668,
668, 670, 679 670, 682, 695, 740, 745
poetry, 15, 24, 46, 60, 64, 75, 90, practice, 7, 15, 37, 52, 55−9, 62,
96−7, 115, 156−7, 198, 266, 318, 70, 72, 74, 79−85, 91, 93, 98−9,
341, 347, 361−2, 372, 378, 384, 103, 107, 114, 119, 122, 139−40,
387, 395, 397, 403−4, 412, 417, 148, 151−2, 155−6, 159, 161, 198,
426, 431, 453, 461, 464, 479, 228, 264, 266, 268, 278, 281−2,
482−3, 488, 490, 493−4, 496−7, 285, 302, 306, 310, 314, 316−19,
499, 505, 509−11, 514−15, 519, 323−8, 331−2, 334, 339−40, 352,
526, 529, 534−5, 541−2, 545, 552, 360, 362, 378, 389, 391, 393, 404,
566, 568, 570−1, 573, 585−8, 590, 411, 419, 441−3, 447, 450, 457,
594, 597, 605, 609, 613, 616, 624, 464, 477, 479, 488, 499, 502, 505,
633−4, 682, 689, 698−9, 744−5, 514, 516, 519, 523−4, 531−2, 535,
751, 754, 757 572, 574, 576, 582−3, 597−9, 601,
politics, 3−6, 9, 12, 24, 26, 28, 36−9, 613, 632, 635, 647−8, 653−5, 663,
47, 49, 51−5, 58, 60−1, 66−70, 680, 690, 709, 715, 724, 726,
78−81, 84−6, 88, 90, 106, 119, 728−30, 732, 734, 741−4, 746−8,
122, 124, 142−9, 152−5, 158−61, 751−2, 754−6, 760, 763, 769−70,
163, 165, 167−9, 171, 173, 234, 773
264−5, 267−9, 276, 331, 341, pragmatism, 6, 58, 117−18, 744
350−1, 359, 388−9, 394, 399, praktri, 279, 310
417, 445, 465, 469, 476, 481, praxis, 79, 119−26, 148−52, 160,
483−4, 499, 503−4, 507, 509, 519, 573, 623, 642−3, 645−51, 653−5,
561−2, 565, 601, 609, 628, 630, 657−61, 663, 726−8, 736−7,
642−3, 659, 664, 666, 680, 706−8, 739−43, 745, 747−8, 751, 767,
710−16, 723−4, 727−9, 731−2, 769, 772−3, 777
734−5, 741, 746−7, 749−51, Primacy (Primato), 4−5, 8, 36−9, 47,
753−4, 759−60, 763−4, 767−70, 50, 168, 177, 264−77, 609
773, 775−7 Prime (principle), 264, 275, 277,
pope, 25−6, 37−8, 45, 47, 69, 156, 279−82, 290, 292, 367
164−6, 263, 269, 352, 354, 400, prolusione, 49−51, 53, 60, 73, 78, 127,
446, 564, 749−50 170, 399, 445, 627, 640
positivism, 6, 47, 51, 53−4, 56−7, 59, prose, 95−6, 159−60, 318, 485, 491,
61, 66−7, 73−6, 78, 80, 83, 85−6, 496−7, 570−1, 587, 765
88, 90−1, 93, 117−19, 126−8, 150, protology, 37, 183, 264, 275−7, 348
165−6, 178, 330, 334, 336, 366, providence, 5, 71, 81, 127, 273,
371−9, 381−5, 387, 389, 391−3, 359−62, 374, 399, 437, 444, 467,
395−400, 447−9, 451−3, 455−9, 565, 668, 761
854
General Index
psychologism, 37, 40, 43−4, 52, 272, 498, 510, 554, 564, 695, 711, 760
276, 281, 284−5, 295, 302−4, 345, rationality, 131, 160−1, 313, 435,
367 522−3, 560, 606, 647, 657−8, 679,
psychology, 12−15, 18, 28, 32, 37−40, 681, 730, 733, 738, 740, 747−8,
54, 57−9, 68−70, 77−8, 83−6, 765, 774
94−6, 114, 123, 129, 138, 193−6, reaction (historical), 24−6, 45, 47,
200, 213, 231, 234−5, 263, 270−1, 145, 154, 158, 165, 372, 402, 561,
275−85, 290, 292, 295, 303−10, 566−7, 569, 597, 609, 666, 710,
316, 319, 325, 332, 335−7, 359, 718−19, 727
361−8, 384, 394−5, 399, 454, 467, realism, 5, 21, 37, 55, 61−6, 71, 122,
474−8, 481, 483, 487, 492, 494−7, 125, 127, 161, 229, 267, 269−70,
500−1, 504, 506, 508, 512, 514, 274, 276, 365, 377, 401−12,
519, 569, 574, 586, 590, 601, 608, 415−16, 511−12, 661, 669, 680,
613, 618, 620, 653, 656, 668, 670, 687, 696−7, 736, 772
676, 679, 682, 688, 759 recirculation, 48−51
regulative, 79, 148, 240, 328, 747,
quality, 21, 64−5, 151, 196, 202−3, 760
205, 215, 217−20, 224, 227−8, religion, 24, 28, 36−8, 59, 64, 69,
230, 238, 246, 249, 259, 281, 318, 85, 97, 114, 119−22, 127−8, 131,
327, 332, 360, 388, 414, 416, 419, 144−6, 149, 151−66, 188, 193,
425, 468, 567, 613, 617, 626, 702, 245, 247, 266, 268, 274−6, 280,
729, 741−2, 756, 760, 765−6 301, 340, 350, 352−3, 356, 362,
quantification, 73−4, 77, 448, 553, 364−5, 389−91, 393, 398, 400,
556, 626, 694 404, 409, 414−15, 434, 443, 449,
quantity, 151, 217−18, 220, 225−8, 451, 455, 457, 461, 467, 470,
234, 238, 241−2, 249, 375, 425, 473−4, 481, 497, 499, 507, 553,
448, 456, 582, 612−13, 621, 741−2 563−4, 570, 574, 581, 587−8,
590, 601, 608−9, 611, 618, 624,
racism, 156, 168, 638, 761, 778 633, 639, 645−8, 653−4, 666, 668,
railroads, 25, 165, 381 670−1, 700−1, 705, 707, 709,
rational, 18, 32, 74, 108, 111, 125, 714−15, 717−25, 727, 730, 732−6,
166, 209−10, 234, 243, 261, 267, 739, 742, 746, 750, 754, 757−8,
289−90, 307, 312, 318, 324, 330, 761, 763, 769−70, 774−5
332−3, 350, 365, 532, 557−8, 561− representation, 20, 28−9, 33, 44,
3, 565, 567, 591−3, 599, 611, 630, 81, 85, 88, 95−100, 105−8, 114,
648, 657, 660, 674−5, 677, 699, 138−9, 141, 144, 183, 207,
701, 724−5, 731−2, 741, 747, 772 214−15, 217−18, 221−7, 229−32,
rationalism, 37−8, 93−4, 96, 145, 236−7, 239−43, 251, 269, 282−4,
266, 270, 272, 276, 321, 328, 290, 297−8, 303−4, 307, 309, 345,
330−1, 335−7, 352, 487, 495−6, 350, 352, 357, 361, 366, 368,
855
General Index
403−6, 415, 432, 445, 463−4, 466, scholasticism, 6, 18, 26, 37, 62, 87,
469−70, 476, 478−9, 481, 484, 149−50, 164−6, 189, 269, 317−18,
487, 490−2, 494−502, 506, 509, 321, 333, 353−4, 357−8, 377−8,
512, 517, 523, 529−32, 536, 541, 380−4, 388, 393−4, 396−8, 409,
545, 548, 557, 569, 574, 586−7, 412, 569, 579, 586, 591, 647, 656,
592, 594−6, 599, 603, 611, 619, 696, 719, 743, 746
622, 632, 634, 644−5, 647, 650, scientism, 156, 182
662, 668, 673−4, 678, 680, 693, Scotism, 272
696−8, 703, 706, 710, 713, 721, secular, 9, 25, 87, 118, 161, 165, 269,
728, 746−8, 756, 767 399−400
republic, 11, 25, 69−70, 83, 267−8, seminary, 49, 168, 629
432−4, 438, 472, 477, 565, 630, sensation, 9, 14, 16, 19, 28−9,
633, 669, 753, 758, 775 31−4, 38, 121, 123, 140, 174,
revelation, 41−2, 108, 266, 274, 276, 194−6, 199−202, 211, 215−19,
290, 295, 307, 348, 355−6, 362, 221, 223−4, 226−30, 236−7, 243,
390, 705, 774 245−8, 252, 254, 257, 259−62,
revisionism, 160, 763−4, 767−8, 776 271, 288, 291, 323−4, 374, 449,
revolution, 4, 8, 11, 25, 36, 45, 47, 454, 474−5, 515, 623, 633, 653,
50, 56−7, 60, 65, 82, 85, 87, 111, 656, 668, 702, 736
121, 149, 157−8, 167, 193−4, 234, sense, 9, 14−17, 27−9, 31−5, 38, 62,
277, 347, 378, 385, 394−6, 398, 83, 123, 129, 134−5, 140, 147−52,
481, 509, 552, 561, 564, 569, 647, 160, 164, 194−201, 209−16, 220,
655, 660, 663−4, 708, 725, 751, 223−4, 229−30, 237−42, 247−9,
754, 757, 777 252−4, 256, 259, 262, 269−73,
rhetoric, 19, 73, 81, 146, 170, 439, 286−8, 291, 301, 315−19, 325,
444, 446, 465, 480, 485, 497, 502, 328−32, 335−9, 352−7, 360−2,
587, 613, 714, 744, 769 368, 402, 404, 407, 412, 424,
Romantic, 36, 46, 70, 145, 156, 164, 426, 433, 454, 480, 489−90, 509,
417, 496, 510, 532, 554, 564, 584, 541, 549−50, 565, 570, 581,
587, 610−11, 623, 628, 630, 636, 585, 603, 606, 612−13, 617,
760 646, 652, 655−8, 661, 668, 671,
674−8, 701−5, 709, 716, 720−8,
scepticism, 18−20, 33, 35, 40, 44, 52, 732, 735−8, 743−4, 747−8, 765;
73, 75, 87, 90, 101, 130, 132, 211, common sense, 27, 32, 34−5, 38,
246, 248−51, 272, 283−5, 294, 134−5, 147−52, 160, 164, 166,
301, 312, 316, 324, 337−8, 346, 247−8, 262, 271, 315−17, 328,
353−4, 356, 364−5, 367−8, 390, 335−9, 368, 480, 606, 720, 722−8,
393, 396, 399, 409, 451, 508, 516, 732, 735−8, 743−4, 765; good
549, 577, 579, 608, 624, 677, 683, sense, 147−52, 160, 273, 541, 668,
692, 700, 739, 745 720−4, 737−8, 747−8, 765
856
General Index
sensibility, 14−16, 22, 195−6, 198, 248, 316, 328, 451, 457, 473, 549,
200−1, 215−17, 221, 224−5, 228, 608, 719, 725, 754
237−8, 240−1, 249, 270, 317, 655 soul, 10, 14, 32−3, 68, 114, 141,
sensible, 31, 38, 44, 93−4, 111, 115, 194−5, 198, 200−3, 218−19,
123−4, 128, 196, 211, 215−17, 236−8, 241, 246, 254, 261−3, 272,
221, 224−6, 228, 230, 233, 236−7, 274, 310, 349, 351, 353, 355,
240−2, 247, 249, 254, 260, 271, 358−9, 363, 373, 383, 386, 397,
285−7, 291, 293, 307−9, 314, 337, 402−5, 407, 411, 415, 418−20,
339, 346, 376, 387, 391, 426, 425−6, 433, 513, 557, 559−60,
487−8, 545, 551, 556, 585, 588, 566, 569, 574, 613, 666, 668−9,
612, 645−6, 651, 653−60, 663−4, 679, 681, 698−9, 703, 705−6, 708,
673−4, 703 715, 725, 753, 755
sensism, 7−9, 23−4, 28−9, 33, 37−8, Spirit, 93, 99, 103, 107, 113−17,
45−6, 48, 61, 63, 109, 126, 166−7, 121−2, 125−32, 136−41, 151, 155,
174, 248, 252, 256, 269−72, 276, 157, 165−70, 344−9, 355−69,
285, 287, 301, 324, 335, 337, 373, 419, 426−7, 451, 454, 456, 496,
402, 411, 474, 507, 539, 562, 570, 510, 516, 518−21, 524−5, 529,
581, 597 531−2, 535, 537, 550, 553−63,
sensory, 14−15, 18−22, 41, 121−3, 566−87, 591−5, 601, 610, 613−23,
129, 140, 248, 252, 254, 282, 285, 626, 633−6, 639, 652−6, 659−61,
291, 646−8, 653, 655−6, 673−4 666−81, 685, 690, 692, 695−705,
sensual, 92−4, 96, 404, 432, 487, 740, 742, 753, 755, 769, 773
498, 539 squadrons, 144, 158, 708
sentiment, 60, 63−4, 145, 156, 402, state (physical, metaphysical, moral),
404, 409−11, 493, 497, 510, 541, 14, 29, 43, 46, 51, 64, 84−5, 158,
564, 597−8, 608, 611, 613, 622, 200, 208−9, 216, 218, 236, 284,
662 291, 297, 304, 307, 315−16, 360,
slavery, 83, 85, 137, 149, 378, 365, 367, 375−7, 382, 390, 402−4,
469−70, 472, 560, 565, 717−19, 412, 414, 426, 461, 464, 467, 469,
749, 754 475, 478, 480−1, 493, 531, 536,
socialism, 4, 78−9, 84, 118−19, 147, 545, 548, 567, 574, 586, 603, 644,
473, 476−7, 479, 483, 561, 620, 651, 654, 685, 723, 728, 731, 742,
640, 642, 662, 669, 706−7, 710, 745, 759, 762, 766, 770, 773
720, 750, 754, 761 state (political), 51, 85, 114, 144−5,
sociology, 73, 80−5, 127, 149−50, 149, 151, 157−8, 160, 169, 267,
448−9, 453, 463, 468−77, 479, 349−52, 358, 361, 408, 460, 476,
482, 507−8, 590, 609, 734, 739, 479, 561−5, 574−5, 580, 594, 600,
745, 751 610, 614, 630, 632, 706−10, 719,
solipsism, 137, 148, 689, 704, 747−8 734, 742, 746, 753−4, 757−9, 763,
sophism, 9, 23, 35, 149, 157, 164, 767, 775
857
General Index
style, 321, 333, 546, 720, 765 427, 448, 453, 486, 517, 541, 551,
subaltern, 730, 750 556−7, 560, 568, 578, 605, 609,
subject, 15, 20−1, 28−9, 35, 40, 612, 615, 618, 657, 671, 677, 694,
72, 78, 81, 84, 121, 123−4, 132, 699, 714, 776
135−7, 140, 194, 197−8, 202−6, supernatural, 37, 50, 86, 111, 166,
209, 213, 215, 218−20, 227, 177, 352−4, 366, 437, 556−7, 670
229−35, 238, 240, 243, 249−50, superstition, 150−1, 376, 391, 654,
253−6, 282, 299, 301, 304, 307, 714, 720, 736, 745, 769
312−13, 316, 318, 320−1, 324, syllogism, 50, 75, 149, 194, 243, 289,
327, 333, 338, 355, 366−7, 369, 320, 326, 407, 449, 537, 574, 582,
371, 373−4, 385, 388, 391, 395, 589, 603, 612−13, 634
400, 404, 407, 409, 413, 423−4, syndicalism, 79, 106
436, 446, 449, 464−5, 475, 477,
479−80, 503, 511, 517, 532, 537, theism, 24, 279, 566, 618
548, 551, 553, 557, 570, 578, theocosm, 275, 277
585, 587, 610, 612, 615, 618, 638, theology, 10−11, 14, 18, 23−4, 32,
651−3, 658, 661, 667, 677, 684−5, 36−7, 56, 68, 87−8, 121, 149, 160,
688−90, 696−7, 703−4, 717, 759, 165−6, 193, 257, 263, 275, 277,
772 298−9, 310, 318, 350, 353−6, 376,
subjectivity, 13, 15, 19−22, 29, 35, 399−400, 421, 464−6, 503, 554,
38−9, 44, 46, 81, 121, 125, 140, 597, 618, 628, 634, 645, 672, 739,
197−8, 204, 213−21, 224−33, 237, 749, 752, 761, 768−9
240−1, 248−50, 252, 271, 288−9, tradition, 50, 84, 148−9, 170−1,
294−5, 306, 316, 324, 332, 367, 273−4, 343−5, 368, 445, 447, 456,
381, 386, 420, 443, 449, 454, 459, 460, 478, 492, 648, 704, 707, 709,
463, 467, 478, 512, 544, 547, 553, 715, 738, 758
564, 570, 574, 578, 594, 601−2, tragedy, 97, 493, 500, 558, 609
613, 646, 648−9, 653, 655, 661, transcendence, 14, 19−21, 23, 29,
668, 674, 696, 699−700, 737 35, 71−2, 78, 84, 117, 129, 138,
subsistence, 28−9, 31, 34, 202, 206, 140− 1, 149, 155, 157, 160, 166,
255−6, 258, 260, 262, 280, 284−8, 194, 212−14, 216−17, 221−4, 226,
290, 297, 303, 309, 311, 347, 408 229− 33, 236−9, 243, 249−51, 253,
substance, 14−16, 21, 33, 41, 43, 57, 332, 336, 345, 366−8, 443, 478,
73, 77, 129, 141, 196, 200, 202−3, 536, 553, 555, 560, 563, 577−8,
206, 208, 219−20, 227−30, 237, 618−19, 645, 657, 661, 676, 691,
239, 243, 247−8, 250, 252, 268−9, 696−7, 700, 739, 746, 756, 768−9,
274−5, 279−80, 282, 288−9, 291, 774
297−9, 301, 304, 308, 310, 318, transcendental aesthetic, 216−17,
336, 346−7, 356−8, 361, 367, 237−8
377−9, 384, 404−5, 422−3, 425, transcendental analytic, 238
858
General Index
transcendental deduction, 21 431, 438−9, 441−3, 445, 498,

transcendental idealism, 20, 23, 35, 507−9, 516, 519−20, 522, 526,
117, 166, 229, 250−1, 253 530, 535−8, 541−3, 545, 547, 549,
transformism, 161, 666−7, 678−80, 555−6, 560, 568−70, 572−4, 586,
775, 778 588, 591−3, 601, 610−11, 614,
triad, 61, 93, 114, 505, 526, 543−4, 616, 619−20, 640, 645, 648, 657,
550−1, 553, 558, 571, 574−5, 660, 687−9, 708−10, 713, 715,
581−2, 610−13, 617−18 719, 722, 740, 747, 763, 773
universality, 22, 29−30, 97, 102, 105,
unconscious, 64, 94, 347−8, 359, 214−15, 220, 237, 239, 256−7,
395, 409, 411−12, 427, 444, 456, 266, 349, 357, 434, 520−1, 523,
485, 489, 500, 527, 564, 614, 530, 560, 573, 582, 617, 657,
617−18, 644, 679, 720 687−8
universal, 15, 18, 22, 28−31, 34, 42, universalization, 31, 112, 159,
62, 72, 99−100, 102, 107−9, 116, 260−1, 704, 718
123, 137, 145, 176−7, 197, 212, university, 3−4, 11, 24, 36, 52−3, 60,
214, 217−18, 220, 222, 225, 234, 68, 73, 77−8, 90, 112, 118, 126,
238, 256−8, 260−1, 280, 292, 300, 131, 147, 164, 343, 355, 369, 444,
302, 307, 313, 324−5, 329, 331−2, 460, 462, 469, 477, 481, 485, 508,
336, 341, 347−50, 352, 355, 357, 630, 664−5, 714, 734, 751
361−2, 380−1, 383, 387, 394,
397, 404, 409, 419−20, 425−7, verism, 127, 498, 511, 669, 680
859

From Kant To Croce Modern Philosophy in Italy, 1800 1950

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From Kant To Croce Modern Philosophy in Italy, 1800 1950

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FROM KANT TO CROCE

MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN ITALY, 1800−1950

Modern Philosophy in Italy

Edited and translated with an introduction by

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Printed on acid-free paper

The Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

(Lorenzo da Ponte Italian library series)

1. Philosophy Italian – 19th century. 2. Philosophy, Italian – 20th century.

b3601.c66 2011 195 c2011-904229-0

The University of Toronto Press acknowledges the ﬁnancial

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the ﬁnancial support for its

Preface and Acknowledgments vii

1 A Strange History (Bobbio I) 3

24 Manifestos (Croce and Gentile) 142

Part II: Translations 191

1 Galluppi, Elements 193

Because of what it is – the history of a modern nation’s philosophy for

addresses, philosophical letters, personal letters, unpublished medita-

When Norberto Bobbio died in 2004, an obituary in the Guardian

At the end of the day, then, Bobbio was a philosopher.

Writing as a philosopher, Bobbio surveys the cultural scene in post-war

bers the crimes of Fascism, of course, which he connects with ‘idealism’

The implication is that Mussolini’s imperial fantasies had been nour-

La Critica is the journal that Benedetto Croce (1866−1952) and Gio-

Consider two lists of thirteen names each: ﬁrst, Pythagoras, Parmenides,

cal and historical. ‘In the whole history of philosophy,’ he thundered,

when by his subjectivism he puts man in God’s place as the foundation

Galluppi described his philosophy of experience as salvaging Kant’s fail-

1. An effect is something that comes to be;

1. There is no effect without a cause;

The conclusions about the Absolute that end Galluppi’s ideology

claims, which violates inductive requirements for reasoning. He insists

1. Transcendental idealism holds that cognition of causal connections origi-

The motivation of Galluppi’s familiar (and misplaced) criticisms emerg-

‘The transcendental philosophy … treats many objective elements as sub-

The resulting picture of Kant is not uncommon, and it arose during

features of objects of experience and thought – does not and cannot

‘The philosophy that I am investigating declares the following basic princi-

For Kant, universality and necessity are marks or indications of whether

Taking this papal counsel to heart, Rosmini moved to Stresa on Lake

Rosmini’s understanding – or misunderstanding – of Reid, and of Reid’s

a Sketch of Modern Philosophy, published posthumously and translated

In fact, Rosmini’s idea has more in common with our notion of a

ideas; it is an act of the mind that predicates something of an object

epistemically and etiologically, the reﬂective judgment is the basis of

sistere (‘put,’ ‘plant,’ ‘cause to stand,’ ‘cause to appear’). The preposi-

an object given to it – revealed to it – by real Being, which makes the

path to this goal in history – or in mytho-history. Mamiani was inspired

begun a philosophical restoration in Italy, even though fate opposed his

Seeking a ‘natural method’ for the progress of science, Mamiani located

the reactionaries who controlled the Pope blocked movement towards

‘The Virgin Mary, anti-revolutionary; natural effects of the new dogma;

While exercising his genius for Rabelaisian comedy, Spaventa continued

To pick up again the sacred thread of our philosophical tradition; to revive

Having established himself as Hegel’s champion in Naples, Spaventa also

study of logic as metaphysics – or the reverse – in the Hegelian manner,

In the year of Spaventa’s death, Villari published a response to Henry

and so when I published my speech in Politecnico in Milan, a lively debate

Galileo’s revolution in method had two parts, negative and posi-

phy and thereby ﬁnd a method to verify at least some of philosophy’s

perceiving are necessary, is that philosophers have tried to reduce one to