THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE
The idealistic conception of culture enables us to get an initial
understanding of the spirituality of the school. This spirituality is
surely felt by all those who live within the class-room; but it should
be understood in the most rigorous and absolute manner by those who wish
to have a deeper consciousness of the extreme delicacy of the tasks
performed and the words uttered by those who enter it with the sincere
heart and the pure soul of the teacher.
The school is obviously not the hall which contains the teacher and the
pupils. These may have a hall, may even have the teacher, without yet
possessing the school, which consists in the communication of culture.
This culture, we have seen, is not really pre-existent to the act which
communicates it; it is not to be found in books, not to be looked for in
an ideal transcendent world, not to be demanded of the teacher. It is
only in the spirit of the person who is in the act of learning. It is
there in the manner in which it is possible for it to be there, not
comparable to any presumed form of pre-existing culture. The school
gains its existence entirely in the soul of the learner.
Knowledge is not to be found beyond the bounds of the human spirit. I
insist on this conception because I am well aware that the minds of many
rebel against this conclusion, no matter how irrefutable its grounds may
be. For they ask: what then is the learning which we ascribe to the
master minds of humanity, now indeed dead but still active in their
works? They also ask how we are able to think and account for that
learning which we feel we are not originating, which we know we are
re-acquiring for ourselves after it has many times been in the domain of
others.
Can we really consider as non-existent what we as yet do not know, may
perhaps never know, but which is none the less capable of being known?
When we are filled with reverence for the glory of men whose learning
surpasses our powers, are we the victims of an illusion? Are we
prevailed upon by ignorance and lack of reflection? And how then can we
justify the cult which every civilised man consecrates to the mighty
spirits--philosophers, poets, artists, and heroes--who added so much to
the moral fund of humanity? Was there not a Dante six centuries back,
who composed a lofty poem, which was admired by everybody, at a time
when we, who now read it and bring it to life in our souls, were still
so far removed from the entrance of this life?
The answer to all these questions is very simple, so simple that we must
be careful lest we miss its significance. All this lore of the past
which we strive to preserve surely does exist; it does contain all the
names which are sacred to the memory of humankind. The _Divine Comedy_
has been written and no longer awaits its Dante. But this lore of the
past, as we for brevity's sake call it, is nothing else than what _we
think_ as such. History, as it unfolds itself from century to century,
is never compressed within a past which because of its completeness
might be made to exist beyond the present and in opposition to it; but
it exists in a past which is in the present as a plant that grows or an
animal that lives, never adding anything new to the old, always
transforming the old into the new; at no time, therefore, having
anything but what is new, never being anything else but the new. In
history, thus comprehended, we to-day are but one person with the men
who thought before us, with the poets, the philosophers, the spiritual
creators of the past. With them we are a person that grows and develops,
ever acquiring, never losing; a single being that apprehends and recalls
and constantly makes all his past bear fruit in the present. Our
childhood has not completely passed away into nothing: it keeps
returning to the ever-busy phantasy that tenderly fondles it, cherishes
it, idealises it into poetry. If we consider this childhood as something
that once was, that existed in utter ignorance of this poetry that was
yet to be written, that could not then be written, surely this infancy
is quite dead; we should rather say that it never existed. But it does
live as the childhood which is a recollection, which arouses feelings,
and such feelings as are at a given moment the actual sentiment of the
adult. Once in the years long gone by a kindly word reached the depths
of my soul. We all have heard in the years long gone by some such kindly
words that in the mystery of our childish mind appeared as a revelation.
Such words as fall from the lips of a mother and inspired by her tender
affection have the secret power of appeasing us in a moment of rage, and
of making us feel the gentle sweetness of that goodness which is made of
love. We may since have forgotten that word, and the circumstances in
which it was uttered: but it is none the less true that on that day our
soul was modified and became endowed almost with a sixth sense. This
sense has enabled us subsequently to perceive so many things that are
beautiful in life, and it in turn grew stronger because of frequent use
and increasing exercise, until it finally became the most potent organ
of our moral personality. Here too our development has been a constant
acquiring with no losing: a preserving of the past by which it was
converted into the present, and therefore annulled as past pure and
simple.
Such is the moral development of man, who believes himself an
individual, but is in truth humanity considered momentarily in one of
its fragments. Such is history: the unfolding of the spirit in its
universality. It is not therefore difficult to determine what is the
past culture in which we desire to graft our present one. It is our own
actual culture in so far as it is not the patrimony, not the spiritual
life of the isolated individual, of a particular being; but is instead
the life of the spirit in its universality, the development of the human
personality taken in its effective, historical concreteness.
The past with its entire content is a projection of our actual
consciousness, i.e., of the present. But we must not give this
proposition a sceptical sense. As I have already pointed out, the
present neither in the particular individual nor in the universal
history of the spirit, is sundered from the past by that abyss which is
ordinarily seen from a materialistic point of view. The past is one and
the same thing with the present. The past _is_ the present in its inmost
substance; and the present is the past that has matured. The grain of
wheat which was buried in the furrow is now no longer to be found under
the glebe. It lives, multiplied in the ear of wheat. The seed as such
was decomposed and destroyed in the soil; it is there no more, it sprung
thence as a blade of grass, it grew, was transformed, still is, still
lasts, and will continue to endure in other forms. Where is it now? Why,
in whatever form it may now have assumed. It is the past in the present,
as the present.
So then, what is Dante the poet who towers over the centuries, the
object of our admiration, the master of all who speak and use the
Italian language? He is the lordly poet of the fourteenth century, not
because he then lived his own individual life, but because he survives
to-day in us who think him, who appreciate him even when we are not
fully acquainted with him. In this sense he lives in us, as the seed
does in the ear of corn.
I have just hinted at the possibility of appreciating something without
fully understanding it. I wanted to make clear how impossible it is to
separate, with a clean cut, knowledge from ignorance. It is far from
true that before taking up a certain science we know absolutely nothing
about it,--that the boy who goes to school for the first time is
completely devoid of all knowledge, or that he who is in quest of a book
which he has never read can in no way whatever speak about it.
For fair renown begets love for the unseen person, as the poet reminds
us and as experience often teaches. Frequently we know of the existence
and the beauty of a woman whom we have never seen, but who is not
therefore completely unknown to us. So also many of us desired to go to
school long before we had seen the inside of a classroom. What is dearer
than the joy foretasted at the first imaginings of school? We look
forward to that new life upon which we are about to enter in the company
of our bigger brothers and of our older playmates. They have told us so
many things about it. From their accounts and from the fond memories of
our parents we already know the school before we approach it, and its
pleasing aspects invite us into the classroom.
For the same reason we search for books we have never seen, and we are
drawn towards new studies and pursuits. There is no leaping from
ignorance to knowledge, as from pitch darkness to noon-tide brilliancy.
The transition is imperceptible, as when the dim morning twilight merges
into the first glimmerings of dawn, which in turn fade away under the
dazzling flashes of sunrise. And even from the midst of darkness we
yearn for a world which though unseen is somehow present to our
consciousness, already illumined by our thought, warmed by our
sentiments. Or, in other words, the culture which we do not yet possess,
and which we expect to get at school, is already implanted in our mind,
where it will sprout and grow and bear fruit, fused and confused with
the life of our spirit.
Having now reached this point, can we define culture? I am inclined for
a moment to assume the role of Don Ferrante in Manzoni's novel.[2] By
pedantic ratiocinations he proved that the plague could not be a
contagious disease: "for," he said, "in nature everything is either a
substance or an accident." Contagion, he then went on to prove, could
neither be the one nor the other; therefore the plague was but an influx
of the stars, and there could be no use in taking precautions; and
having proved this, he fell a victim to the epidemic, and died cursing
the stars like an operatic hero. Let us follow for a moment in the
footsteps of this pedant, whose method, ridiculous as it may seem, has
had nevertheless a glorious history, and one which Manzoni himself
admired.
I say: We can think only and we do think only two kinds of
reality,--person or thing. Every one of us is naturally drawn to this
distinction; and when we have formulated it, we feel more or less
vaguely, more or less clearly, that every possibility is comprised
within these two terms, that outside of them it is impossible to think
any reality whatsoever. The reason is this: if we think, if we act, if
we live, we inevitably place ourselves in a situation such that we on
one side are as centre, as beginning, or as subject of our activity; and
on the other side are the objects toward which our activity is directed
and by which it is terminated. _We_ therefore as subject of the entire
surrounding world; and _this world_ as the end of our thoughts and of
our scientific inquiries, end of our desires and of our practical
activity; the world which is represented in our consciousness, and which
we strive to dominate by our labours, and our reason. Can there be
anything else beside _us_ and what _we_ think?
The world which we think and which we oppose to ourselves seems at first
to contain different kinds of objects. There seem to be both persons and
things; simple objects of cognition which we ordinarily call _things_
which can never become subjects; and persons who at first are
represented to us as objects of our knowing, of our love, and of our
hatred, as ends of our activity; but who under a closer scrutiny are
transformed before our eyes into knowing and acting subjects, who, in
other words, become just exactly what we are. But when we really get to
know these beings that surround us as subjects on an equal basis, then
we cease to consider them as objects of our cognition, and as solely
endowed with that material objectivity which at first put them in the
same category with the inanimate things, with plants and animals. We
then find them close to us, very close: fused with our own spiritual
substance. We feel them to be our fellow men, our kinsmen, with whom we
constitute that person of whose existence I am aware every time I say
_We_: the person we must take into account whenever we wish to affirm
our personality in a concrete manner, the only person, the one subject,
the true subject of human knowledge and of human activity. The subject
which knows and acts as a universal in the interests of all men, or
rather in behalf of the _one man_ in whom all single individuals are
united and with whom they are all identified.
Then if we give a rigorous and exact meaning to the expressions, "We and
what is before us," "We and the objects," "We and the World," we have a
correct classification of all thinkable reality differentiated into
persons and things, but with the understanding that all persons are in
reality one Person.
One _person_, and things innumerable! As we look about us, we find the
horizon peopled with thousands and millions and infinite quantities of
objects, which may one by one attract our attention, and may be gathered
up in the vast, unbounded picture surveyed by the eye as it moves on
from thing to thing, incessantly, without ever reaching the last. The
world which we first discover is the world of matter, of things which
strike our senses. This world rushes impetuously into our mind at the
beginning of our natural experience. And these material objects are many
not only _de facto_ but also _de jure_. They must be, they cannot but be
many if we are to consider them as material things. It is their peculiar
nature, it is their very essence to be an indefinite multitude.
A material thing means a thing occupying space. And space is made up of
elements, each one of which excludes all the others and is therefore
conceived independently of the others, must so be conceived. For it is
the very nature of space to be divisible. When it is narrowed down to a
point and cannot be further subdivided, then it ceases to be space. Its
divisibility signifies that space is nothing more than the sum of its
parts; that it contains nothing in addition to these parts; that it
therefore resolves itself into them without at all losing its being and
without any of the parts being deprived of anything which was theirs in
the whole. In fact, if anything were lost of the entire whole, this loss
could not but be felt in each single part. A book, considered as a
material thing, is composed of a certain number of printed leaves
stitched together; and if the leaves fall apart, they may be brought
together again so that they will compose the same book as before. An
iron rod weighs the same before and after it has been broken up into
parts.
Things cease to be exclusively and solely material when, though they may
be divisible in a certain respect, they are nevertheless indivisible in
another respect. Plants, animals, all living organisms, considered
simply as objects occupying space and as therefore having certain
dimensions, admit surely of being separated into parts. Trees are cut
into logs, sawed into boards; animals are slaughtered and quartered. But
considered from the point of view of its peculiar quality, of the
essential property which distinguishes it from all other bodies, an
organism is not divisible. If we do divide it, each component part
ceases to be what it previously was when conjoined with the others. Such
a part cannot be preserved; it withers, it decays, and is dispersed, so
that the whole can never be reconstituted. The various parts of an
organism, considered as such, are inseparable, because each of them is
and maintains itself on the strength of its relations to the others,
forming with them a true and essential unity. If we however try to find
out what this unity is by which all the limbs are indissolubly held
together, we shall discover nothing which can be observed and
represented spatially, nothing endowed with dimensions, however small,
after the manner of the several limbs which this unity fuses within
itself and vivifies.
If unity which is the life-giving principle of every organism could be
spatially represented, or in other words, if it were something material,
it would be one of those very limbs that have to be unified, and could
not then be the unifying principle itself. Hence the vanity of the
efforts on the part of materialistic physiologists who obstinately
strive to explain life by observing the parts which compose the organic
mass, by studying the concurrence of their processes, their chemical
relationships, and their mechanism. A material being, organically
constituted, is something more than a material thing pure and simple: it
announces already a higher principle; it presages the spirit.
But the things that we all agree to regard as spiritual defy absolutely
every attempt at division. A poem may be considered in a certain way as
material, and may accordingly be divided into various parts,--stanzas,
lines, words. But it is clear that such a separation cannot have the
value which we assign to the divisions of things material. For in their
case every part can stand by itself, and is in no way deprived of its
characteristic being; whereas every part of a poem, stanza, verse, word,
calls out and responds to every other part; and if isolated from them,
loses the meaning which it had in the context; or rather it loses every
meaning, and consequently perishes. It is true that by conjectures we
interpret even very small fragments of ancient poems. But we do so only
in so far as we claim the possibility of restoring approximately the
entire poem in which the given fragment may live, by which it may be
restored to life. Likewise all the words lined up in dictionaries are as
so many bleeding limbs of living discourses, to which they must somehow
or other be ideally reconnected, if we are to understand what they
really were and what functions they had. Multiplicity of parts in things
of the spirit is only apparent: it must be reduced to indivisible unity,
from which every element of the multiplicity derives its origin, its
substance, and its life, so that we may give to it a real meaning and a
foundation.
Nor is this the only unity possessed by the things that are assumed to
be spiritual. We have already considered the unity whereby, for example,
the words of a poem cannot be separated from the poem itself, in which
each of them acquires a particular accent, a particular expression, and
therefore a particular individuality. We shall now consider another
unity. He who really perceives a poem is not confronted by an observable
thing, compact if you will, unseverable and united, but none the less
independent of human personality. Poetry is only understood when in the
flowing unity of its verses and in the continuous rhythm of its words we
grasp a sentiment in its development, a soul's throb in a moment of its
life, a man, a personality. The poetry of Dante is very different from
that of Petrarch, because each is the expression of a powerfully
distinct personality. Any composition of these poets is understood and
enjoyed only when we feel in it the personal accent which distinguishes
one poetical personality from the other. A poet without individuality
has no significance whatsoever, and therefore no existence as a poet.
But the real artist leaves his imprint more or less markedly in all his
productions, so that in every given instance, over and beyond the
variety of the subject matter, we feel the living soul of the poet. A
poem then is the poet; it is a person and not a thing. And the same can
be said, as we can easily see, of all things that are commonly called
spiritual.
But in addition to things material, it seems that there are immaterial
ones which do not pertain as one's own to any particular person. The
ideas of which we had occasion to speak before,--immaterial entities,
not perceptible by the senses, but thinkable by the intellect, and
which severally correspond to all sorts or species of the various
material things,--were once conceived as things by philosophers, and
they are still so conceived to-day by the majority of men. It is
not requisite that one actually think them; it is sufficient that they
be in themselves thinkable. As a matter of fact, they may or may not
be thought, no differently therefore from any of the material objects
which are not created by our senses, but must already exist in order
that our senses may perceive them. These ideas are many, in a manner
corresponding to the material objects; and they are all different.
They mirror, so to speak, the multiplicity of material things in
whose semblance and likeness they were devised. There are horses in
nature, and there is the idea of the horse by which we are able to
recognise all the animals that belong to that species. There are
dogs, and there is the dog which we rediscover in every one of them.
And there are flowers and the flower; and pinks, roses, and lilies,
as well as the pink, the rose, and the lily; and likewise iron,
copper, silver, gold, lime, water, and so on, to infinity. It is
impossible to set a limit to ideas, because it is not possible ever to
stop dividing, distinguishing, subdividing that nature which unfolds
itself throughout space.
This boundless multitude of ideas, through which our mind can rove,
surely has no spatial extension. But because of the necessity of
conceiving any multitude as existing in some kind of space, it was
thought proper to posit an ideal space in addition to the physical one.
In other words, metaphorical dimensions were added to dimensions
properly so called. But whether spatially or not, we strive to conceive
ideas as many, each one of them existing by itself, and susceptible of
being thought independently of the others. In reality however we never
succeed in thinking them except as bound together and forming a system,
in such a way that no single one of them can be thought except by
thinking the others with it. Take man as an instance: each one of us has
intuitively the idea of man, but this idea is not possessed like a word
of which we may not even know the meaning. In thinking the idea we must
think something which is its content. If we know what man is, we must be
able to attribute a content to the idea of man. We may say, as the
ancients did, that man is the laughing animal, or the speaking animal,
because he is the only animal capable of expressing the emotions of his
soul by laughter or by the inflection of his voice; because, in other
words, he is the only animal who is conscious of what goes on within
him. Or perhaps we might say that man is the reasoning animal, and we
think this idea when we have thought the idea of _animal_ and the idea
of _reason_. But can the idea of animal be thought by itself alone? It,
as well as the idea of reason, must have a content; that is, each must
be connected with other ideas, without which it would be deprived of all
consistency.
And so the mind that begins to think one single idea is compelled,
almost dragged, to pass on to another, then to a third, and so on
indefinitely. It finds itself in the condition of the man who tried to
grasp a single link of a chain, just one, and found that he could not
have it except on condition of taking the whole chain. So it is with
ideas. We may not be capable of encompassing all of them in one single
thought; but whenever we try to fix any one of them in our mind, it
presents itself to us as a knot in which many other ideas are
interlaced, twisted, and entangled. They form an infinite chain, in
which it is not possible to think the first link or the last one,
because the beginning is welded to the end, and we turn and turn and
never reach the last. Is not this the nature of the ideas as we see
them, as they constitute the field from which we must harvest all our
possible thoughts?
Ideas are not, therefore, a true multiplicity, because they are not
things, either material or ideal, and because they do not occupy any
space whatsoever. Our imagination may present them to us as so many
lights of an ideal sky; but our intelligence warns us that they cannot
be separated one from the other and placed side by side. As I have
already said: when we think one, we think them all. Or in any event we
should, if we had mastered all that there is to be known. So that to our
thought ideas appear as constituting one unique whole, a unity, that
something which we call science, truth, knowledge. They are not a
multitude, for the simple reason that in multiplicity they would be
unthinkable. Their connection with and participation in an absolute
unity come from the fact that they are the object of thought, and are
therefore submitted to its activity, whereby they are ordered,
correlated, organised, unified. In order that we may say that one idea
contains another, or many others, we must analyse this first idea and
define it. This first idea must be distinguished from the others, and
they likewise among themselves. It is not therefore sufficient to say
that there are these ideas, motionless, inert, lifeless, as they
necessarily would be if they existed _per se_, as objects of mere
possible contemplation. There must also be some one to analyse them,
define them, and distinguish them. It is not enough to have the material
of thought, we need thought also to mould and fashion this material,
turn it effectively into thought stuff, reduce it to something
susceptible of being thought. Ideas as things would in no way be related
among themselves. But they do have that relationship which is generated
by thought as it thinks them. Thought generates this relationship not as
a fixed one, as would be the case if it were inherent in the things
themselves; but as a relationship which is being formed by degrees, and
which is continuously changing and developing. No ideal, abiding
science, existing only as the object of a vague phantasy, can therefore
result from this relationship. It constitutes instead a science which is
ever re-formed and is never formed; it gives to the ideas an ever
renewed aspect: it matures them, elaborates them, perfects them, by
concentrating on each one of them the constantly increasing light of the
system into which it closely binds them.
Ideas, then, as we really think them, are not a minutely fractioned and
scattered multiplicity. Nor are they a mass of concurrent elements. They
are Thought as it becomes articulate, and gains distinctness by these
many Limbs, by these ideas, which exist, all of them, in the process by
which they are gradually formed, developed, and complicated, and arrayed
in an order which is constantly being renewed and which is never
definitely perfected.
There are not then many ideas; there is one Idea, which is Thought. Only
in a metaphorical sense can we consider them as things; and, properly
speaking, they are the human person itself as actualised in thought,
which is busily occupied in the construction of knowledge. They are an
indivisible unity, in which each idea is found collaborating with every
other one so as to answer the questions which Thought constantly
propounds. They are the human person, not the persons; for we have
already concluded that only in an abstract sense is it possible to speak
of many persons; concretely there is but one universal Person which is
not multiplicable.
There are not, then, going back to our original division, persons and
things, material and spiritual. At the most there is one person, Man,
and there are the material things which constitute this nature, as it
occupies space, and in which we too believe we have a place, in as much
as we consider ourselves beings of nature. Nothing beyond this can be
conceived: on one side a sole immultiplicable reality, on the other a
manifold reality, indefinitely divisible.
Here we might perhaps stop considering the special interest that called
forth this inquiry. For no one could possibly suppose for a moment that
culture could be placed in the midst of material things rather than in
the spiritual reality which is a person. However, since the intimate
nature of this spiritual reality which we call culture is not yet
clearly revealed, we must continue our investigations, and give more
attention to this division which for a moment we thought might be final.
I mean the division of the world into persons and things: the equipoise
of spirit and matter.
Do we really _think_ this matter as we say we do, and which we believe
we are justified in opposing to the spirit, in as much as the spirit is
unity or universality, and matter, in its entirety, in every one of its
parts, in everything, is an indefinite multiplicity? Matter can in truth
be thought only on condition that it be possible to think multiplicity,
that pure multiplicity which is the characteristic quality of matter.
What then is the meaning of multiplicity? In absolute terms we call
multiple that which consists of elements each one of which is quite
independent of all the others, and absolutely devoid of any and every
relationship with them. The materialist conceived the world as an
aggregate of atoms, separated one from the other and having no
reciprocal relevance of any sort whatsoever. In the world of pure
quantity, which is the same as absolute multiplicity, mathematical
science claims the knowledge of units indifferent to their nexus, and
therefore susceptible of being united and separated, of being summed up
and divided, without any alteration taking place within the individual
unit itself. Numerical units are therefore pre-eminently irrelative.
But the concept itself of the multiplicity of irrelative elements is an
absurd one. In order that we may conceive many unrelated elements we
must, to start with, be able to conceive a couple of such elements. Let
us take A and B, absolutely unrelated, and such that the concept of one
will contain nothing of the other's, and will therefore exclude it from
itself. If A did not so exclude B, something of B would be found in A,
and we could no longer speak of the two elements as irrelative.
Irrelativity means reciprocal exclusion, a capacity by which each term
is opposed to the other, and prevents the other from having anything in
common with it. Without this reciprocal action whereby each term turns
to the other and excludes it from itself, establishing itself as a
negation of it, there would be no irrelativity. But this action by which
each term is referred to the other so as to deny it, what is it but a
relationship? Every effort therefore tending to break up reality into
parts completely repugnant amongst themselves, mutually excluding one
another, and therefore reciprocally indifferent, results in the very
opposite of what was intended, viz.: the relative in place of the
irrelative, unity instead of multiplicity.
Neither duality nor multiplicity is conceivable without that unity
whereby the two engender that whole in which the two units are
connected, even though they mutually exclude one another: without that
unity which fuses and unifies every multiplicity determined in a number,
which correlates among themselves the units which constitute the number.
We could strip multiplicity of all unity only by not thinking it. But
then in the gloom of what is not thought, multiplicity truly enough
would not be unity, but it would not even be multiplicity, because it
could not be anything at all. Or, if we prefer, it would be absolutely
unthinkable.
Thought then establishes relationships among the units of the multiple,
and thus constitutes them as the units of the manifold, and as forming
multiplicity. It adds and divides, composes and decomposes, and
variously distributes, materialising and dematerialising, so to speak,
the reality which it thinks. For it materialises the reality when it
conceives it as manifold: but it can conceive it as such only by
unifying it, and therefore by dematerialising it and reabsorbing it into
its own spiritual substance.
Matter is a manifold reality, without unity. What it is we already have
seen: a material reality, and as such divisible into parts, placed in
the world in the midst of a congeneric multitude. Now, since pure
multiplicity is not conceivable except on condition that we abstract
from that relationship to which the reciprocal exclusiveness of manifold
elements is reduced, it is evident that matter and things are abstract
entities. Thought stops to consider them, and regards them as existent,
only because it withdraws the attention from that part of itself which
it contributes to the making of the object represented. Thought
therefore prescinds from that unity which material things could not by
themselves contain, but from which it is impossible to prescind
absolutely unless we wish to be reduced to an absurd conception.
Objective things then, the world of matter itself which we are wont to
oppose in equipoise to the person, are in truth not separable from it.
For matter has its foundation in thought by which the personality is
actualised. Things are what we in our own thought counterpose to
ourselves who think them. Outside of our thought they are absolutely
nothing. Their material hardness itself has to be lent to them by us,
for it ultimately is to be resolved into multiplicity, and multiplicity
implies spiritual unity.
This then is the world: an infinity of things all of which have however
their root in us. Not in "us" as we are represented ordinarily in the
midst of things; not in the empirical and abstract "us" which feeds the
vanity of the empty-headed egoist, of him who has not the faintest
notion of what he really is, who can therefore think of himself only as
enclosed within the tight husk of his own flesh and of his particular
passions. No! they are rooted in that true "us" by which we think, and
agree in one same thought, while thinking all things, including
ourselves as opposed to things. And he who fails to reach this profound
source, this root from which all reality receives its vitalising sap,
may indeed get a blurred glimpse of a blind, inert, material mechanism,
but he cannot even fix and determine this mechanism. He cannot upon
further reflection stop at the conviction that it is in truth, as it
appears in semblance, something real, for it reveals itself to him as so
absurd as to become unthinkable. The world then is in us; it is our
world, and it lives in the spirit. It lives the very life of that person
which we strive to realise, sometimes satisfied with our work, but
oftener unsatisfied and restless. And there is the life of culture.
It is not possible to conceive knowledge otherwise than as living
knowledge, and as the extolment of our own personality. This is our
conclusion. We shall, later on, derive from it two corollaries that are
very important for teachers, in as much as they bear directly on the
problems of education.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] _I Promessi Sposi_ ("The Betrothed").