draws such conclusions as these, is not in the right. That is to say,
he is right to laugh at ingenuous sages and at odious preachers and
moralists, for their theories are certainly simplicist and false. But
he is wrong in not understanding that his own theory is also simplicist
and false, for it runs into the opposite extreme.--Habits and passions
are habits and passions, because slowly formed: it is therefore a vain
illusion to attempt to destroy them at a blow. Perhaps it is believed
that the passions are tender flowerets or grasses that a child has
attached to the surface of the soil? They are a rank growth, strong
oaks whose roots dive deep into the earth!--That is most true, but it
is not for this reason impossible to modify and destroy them. They are
indeed actually modified, for that very pain, that very disappointment,
are a beginning of modification; since we do not persist in what we
abhor and follow, dragged along by force; and little by little we
end by freeing ourselves. The process of freeing ourselves from
the passions, or from vicious habits, then, is effective, but slow,
as the formation of those habits has been slow. We do not cure an
illness with a sudden act of will, but nevertheless the will guides
and directs the process of healing, and can open or close the entrance
to the medicinal forces of nature. Now the passions or vicious habits
are maladies that must follow their course, which, in order to be
beneficial, must coincide with the cure. The sages who give receipts
for freeing ourselves from them immediately are the Dulcamaras of moral
maladies; but the existence of the Dulcamaras should not impel us to
deny the existence of doctors, and above all of ourselves as doctors
of ourselves. And we should certainly adopt a very bad and illusory
method of cure, were we to accept the method so often recommended, of
destroying passion with passion, or vice with vice, thus adding vice to
vice, as those who treat the illnesses of the body with narcotics or
with stimulants often add malady to malady.
[Sidenote: _Volitional habits and individuality._]
Habits, then, not less than single volitional acts, of which they were
and are composed, can be and are continually conquered and modified,
in so far as they are opposed to the new volitional syntheses. This
confirms what has already been said in criticizing the polipathetic
view, which ignores the volition for the volitions, as the virtuous
habit is ignored in favour of vicious habits. But the theory of
apathicism is also to be found in this field, and it is needful
to assert in opposition to it, the great importance proper to the
volitional habits in giving concrete form to virtue. This second
critical thesis is that which affirms the value of _individuality or
peculiarity_ in the practical field.
[Sidenote: _Negations of individuality for uniformity and their
critique._]
Every individual is furnished by mother nature with certain definite
habits, according to the contingencies of reality among which he enters
the world; and he acquires yet others in the course of life, owing
to the actual conditions through which he passes and to the works
that he accomplishes. Those habits which he has from birth are called
aptitudes, dispositions, natural tendencies: the others acquired. The
individual in his reality is, as has been said, nothing but these
groups of habits and changes as they change. Now is it rational and
possible (the two questions here form one) that the individual in his
willing and acting should rid himself of such habits? Is it possible
to consider them as things without value? Is it possible to establish
an antithesis between individuality and rational action, as between
good and evil?--The levellers who claim to impose the same task upon
all and wish to make of the female a male, of the poet a reasoner,
of the man of science a warrior, of the saint a man of business, and
thus to give to every one a part of the task of others;--the dreamers
of a future society, in which all this shall have been done, and the
poet should attend to his poem, after having played the philosopher
for a couple of hours, for another couple of hours the tailor, and for
yet another two the waiter at an inn;--all the pedants of abstract
regularity, whom we meet to our great annoyance in life;--behold the
apathicists appear anew, for, as in the theory of the volitional act,
they advocated an abstract action, conducted by the rational will
alone in the void of the passions; so here, they advocate an abstract
rational habit, in the theory of volitional habits, a model of human
activity, to which all individuals would be obliged to conform. Perhaps
some such sensible observation as this of Vauvenargues should suffice
to confute them: _Il ne faut pas beaucoup de réflexion pour faire cuire
un poulet; et, cependant, nous voyons des hommes qui sont toute leur
vie mauvais rôtisseurs: tant il est nécessaire dans tous les métiers,
d'y être appelé par un instinct particulier et comme indépendant de
la raison._ But since it might be said that we wish to solve a grave
question with a joke, we will recall that the volitional acts and the
passions, volition and the volitions, are of the same nature (though
the one is actual and the others only possible), and that the nature of
willing implies actual definite situations, and that for this reason
we never will in universal but always in particular. In the same way
virtue, the virtuous habit of the will, is not of a different nature to
the volitional habits in general, to the passions, but is particular
and individual as they are. Those who make war upon individual habits
never succeed in substituting for them a universal habit, which is
inconceivable, but at the most other habits, equally particular and
individual. The poet who will play the farmer, the tailor, and the
waiter, in the imagined society of the future, will do all these things
as a poet. This may perhaps be an advantage, but may also perhaps be
the contrary, as future consumers of grain, of garments, and of repasts
will become aware. For the rest, do we not even now see women devoting
themselves to the severe studies of philology, of philosophy, and
of mathematics? But with the rarest exceptions, they remain always
women: their production, which is without originality, is not like
that of man, done with the complete dedication of the whole being to
the search for truth and of artistic perfection; and if in the midst
of the most abstruse inquiry, the image of themselves as wife or
mother pass through their minds, they desert, at the critical moment,
the philosophical categories, the formulæ of flexions, the ruled or
tangential spaces, and sigh for their unborn sons and for the husband
that they have not found. Is this distortion of natural habits useful?
Generally speaking, it is not. It is a doing and an undoing, a despisal
of the riches wisely accumulated and capitalized by Reality in the
course of its evolution.
[Sidenote: _Temperament and character. Indifference of temperament._]
Certainly the disposition natural or acquired is not virtue, and
the _temperament_ (since temperament is nothing but the sum of
habits and aptitudes) is not _character._ But virtue and character
presuppose habits and passions, of which they give the rational and
volitional synthesis: they are the form of that matter. And as matter
considered in the abstract is neither good nor bad, so the habits and
the passions (as has been very well observed) are not in themselves
either virtues or vices: they are facts. And it is necessary to take
account of facts; otherwise, they revenge themselves. On the other
hand, habits and passions certainly change; but not all of a sudden
and capriciously, rather, little by little, and always on the basis of
existing habits and passions.
[Sidenote: _The discovery of the proper self._]
The first duty of every individual who wishes to act effectively,
consists, therefore, in seeking for himself, in exploring his own
dispositions, in establishing what aptitudes have been deposited in
him by the course of reality, both at the moment of his birth, and
during the development of his own individual life: in knowing, that
is to say, his own habits and passions, not in order to make of them
a _tabula rasa,_ but to use them. The search is not easy and the
preparatory part of life, namely youth, is spent upon it. Few are the
fortunate individuals who have at once a clear and certain knowledge
of their own being and of their duty; the majority seek and find
it after many wanderings; and if such wanderings sometimes (as is
written in the dedication of the _Scienza nuova_) "seem misfortunes
and are opportunities," at others they are but a fruitless moving to
and fro; hence those that are undecided during the whole of their
lives, the eternal youths, those who aspire to all or to many of the
directions of human activity and are incapable in all. But when our own
being unveils itself and we see our path clearly, then to disordered
agitation succeeds the calm of sure and regular work, with its defeats
and victories, its joys and sorrows, but with the constant vision of
the Aim, that is, of the general direction to be followed. Vainly will
he who is endowed and prepared for guiding mankind in political strife
and has a clear and lively perception of human strength and weakness,
of what can and of what cannot be done, and is furnished, so to speak,
with practical sense (with the sense of complications and slight
differences), will try (save in the rarest and most exceptional cases,
and this reserve is to be understood in all that we are saying here) to
acquire a place among those who cultivate the abstract and universal,
operations demanding almost opposite aptitudes; vainly will he who was
born to sing attempt to calculate; vainly will he whose mind and soul
were made to accentuate dissensions in their bitter strife bend himself
to be a conciliator and a peacemaker. It is worse than superfluous, it
is stupid to weep over one's choleric or phlegmatic temperament. There
have been choleric saints that have even used the stick, and phlegmatic
saints who have succeeded admirably in patient persuasion: the mild
Francis, "all seraphic in his ardour," and the impetuous Dominic "whose
blows fell on the boughs of heresy." Reality is diversity and has need
of both, and each is praiseworthy if he do that well to which he has
been _called._
[Sidenote: _The idea of "vocation."_]
This concept of the _vocation_ has a mystical and religious origin and
preserves that form; but it is clear that by means of the previous
considerations we have divested it of that form and reduced it to a
scientific concept. The individual is not a "monad" or a "real," he
is not a "soul" created by a God all in a moment and all of a piece;
the individual is the historical situation of the universal spirit at
every instant of time, and, therefore, the sum of the habits due to
the historical situations. Those modes of conceiving and talking of
one _and the same_ individual in two _different_ situations, or of two
_different_ individuals in the _same_ situation, are to be avoided,
because individual and situation are all one. But when the individual
has been thus defined, it remains none the less true that each
individual must direct his life according to pre-existing habits and
personal dispositions, and thus we discover the true meaning of the
mythologies and religions that have been mentioned, and the struggles
to find the suitable employment can be expressed with the words that
religion has taught us when we were children: the "vocation" and the
special "mission" that is allotted to us in life, until the last giving
of accounts and the words of dismissal and repose: _Nunc dimitte servum
tuum, Domine!_ We are the children of that Reality which generates us
and knows more than we, the Reality of which religions have caught a
glimpse and called it God, father, and eternal wisdom.
[Sidenote: _Misunderstandings as to the rights of individuality. Evil
individuality._]
The affirmation of the rights that belong to individuality in the
practical field has several times assumed and still assumes (in our
time, more than in the past, owing to materialism and naturalism) a
form, no longer symbolical and mystical, but wrong and irrational, that
it is desirable to remark upon here, always in order to avoid possible
equivoques. Indeed many look upon the respect due to their own beings
as due to their caprice, that is to say, to what is on the contrary
the negation of being: the right of the individual as the right to
commit follies, or to a disaggregate individuality. The declared
necessity of temperament for character is exchanged for admiration of
temperament considered in itself, which, as such, is neither admirable
nor blameworthy; but when separated from character becomes vice and
folly. Hence the admiration that has even become a literary fashion,
for the dissolute, for the violent, for homicides, for the criminals of
the public prisons, illustrated by a few courageous and energetic souls
among them, whereas they are as a rule weak, vile, and turbid.
[Sidenote: _False doctrines as to the connection of virtues and vices._]
Various theories are also erroneous, in which it has been sought to
establish the relation between the passions and the will, temperament
and character, passions and temperament being understood as vicious
passions and evil temperament; that is, not in themselves, but in
their antithesis to the rational will: hence the vain and paradoxical
attempts to join together and harmonize virtue and vice. Thus it has
been maintained that in certain vices are foreshadowed the virtues
which will or can be developed from them; for instance, military
valour in ferocity, industrial capacity in greed; whereas ferocity
and greed are wilful acts and contradictions incapable of generating
any virtue, as is seen in the customary cowardice of the ferocious
and the ineptitude of the greedy and covetous. Such a connection of
virtues and vices has on other occasions been presented as a mixture
or co-temperament, and it has been affirmed that the vices enter into
the composition of the virtues, as do poisons into the composition
of medicines. Finally, virtue and vice have been placed in causal
relation, and the causes of civil progress have been found in human
vices. But the vices, as they are not the antecedents, so are they
neither the ingredients nor the causes of the virtues. These are
strength, those the lack of strength. It is generally affirmed that
in every individual the virtues are accompanied by their correlative
vices, but if this possess some approximate value as an empirical
observation, strictly speaking it has none, because men can be
conceived and are actually found, whose virtue, far from yielding to
excesses and to vices, is eurythmic and temperate. But perhaps that
common saying aims at something else that it fails of explaining
well; namely, that every power has its impotence and every individual
his limit; but this does not mean vice or defect; it is nothing but
the tautological affirmation that the part is not the whole and the
individual not the universal.
[Sidenote: _The universal in the individual and education._]
But if the individual do not exhaust the universal, the universal
lives in individuals; Reality in each of its particular manifestations.
Therefore the affirmation of the right of individuality does not deny
the right of universality; or it denies it only in that abstract form
in which, to tell the truth, it is by itself denied. The individual
is under the obligation to seek himself, but in order to do this he
has also the obligation of cultivating himself as man in universal. A
school that represented simply a cultivation of individual aptitudes,
would be a training, not an education, a manufactory of utensils, not
a nursery of spiritual and creative activities. The true specialism
is universalism, and inversely, which means that if the universal do
not act without specializing itself, yet specialization is not really
specialization if it do not contain universality. If the two terms that
are by nature indissoluble be divided, there remains only fruitless
generalization or stupid particularization, and if our times have
sinned in this latter respect, other times have sinned in the opposite.
He is well-balanced who between these two forms of degeneration both
knows and fills his own proper and individual mission so perfectly
that he fulfils at the same time with it and through it the universal
mission of man.
V.
DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRESS
[Sidenote: _Multiplicity and unity: development._]
The demonstration hitherto developed, that evil is negativity or
contradiction, and that this contradiction takes place owing to the
multiplicity of the desires in respect to the singleness of character
of the volitional act, gives rise to the further question: Why should
there be such a multiplicity, concurrent with the demand for unity, and
thus be generated strife and contradiction? Here it would be fitting
to observe that we must have filled our mouths very uselessly for a
century with the word evolution, if such a question as this be renewed,
or we remain bewildered and embarrassed before it. For the reason of
that fact, which seems without a reason, is to be found precisely in
the concept of _"evolution."_ This concept resumes most ancient views,
and has been substituted in modern times for that of an immovable
Reality, of a God who exists perfect and satisfied in himself, and
creates a world for his own transitory pleasure; or for a complex of
beings, eternally the same, with variations that are only apparent.
The concept of evolution has entered so profoundly into the blood and
bones of modern man that even those repeat it who would be incapable
of analyzing and understanding it; even the least acute of all, the
positivist philosophers who like to call themselves "philosophers of
evolution."
[Sidenote: _Becoming as synthesis of being and not-being._]
But before it acquired, as a vague and confused formula, so great a
publicity as quite to amount to popularity, a philosopher of genius had
analyzed and synthetized it, induced and deduced it in an unsurpassable
manner, with the speculative formula of reality as _becoming_; that
is, as synthesis of being and not-being, being and not-being being
thus unthinkable separately, and only thinkable in their living
connection, which is becoming and _development_ (evolution). Reality is
development, that is, infinite possibility that passes into infinite
actuality and from the multiplicity of every instant takes refuge in
the one, to break forth anew in the multiple and produce the new unity.
The inquiry into the dialectic of the volitional act enters in this
way into the very heart of reality. In order to deny multiplicity,
contradiction, evil and not-being, it would be necessary to deny at
the same time unity, coherence, good and being.
[Sidenote: _Nature as becoming. Its resolution in the spirit._]
But if by the theory that has been recorded we have explained the
necessity of evil for good, or the necessity of the not necessary for
the necessary in the volitional act of man, the identification of the
volitional act, which is man's, with reality which is of the universal
whole, might seem to be too audacious. For (it will be said) the
complex of other beings, that we are wont to separate from the complex
of human beings and to oppose to it as nature, either is motionless
and does not develop, or develops without any consciousness of good
and evil, of pleasure and pain, of value and disvalue. Both theses
have been maintained and nature has been represented, now as _without
history, now as developing itself in an unconscious or mechanical
manner._ But the contradictions and absurdities of both theses have
been together perceived. "Motionless beings" is a phrase without
meaning, to such a degree that even empirical science has everywhere
pushed its way into history, and has talked of the evolution of animals
and vegetables, of the chemical elements, and even of a history of
light and heat. The other expression, "unconscious beings," is not
less empty, because being and activity are not otherwise conceivable
save in the way that we know our being, which is consciousness;
and although empirical science certainly points to more and more
rudimentary and tenuous forms of consciousness in beings, always
differently individualized, yet it has never been able to demonstrate
the absolutely unconscious. If so-called nature be, it develops, and if
it develop, cannot do so without some consciousness. This deduction is
not a matter of conjecture, but a logical and irrefutable consequence.
What is there, then, that persists in men's souls, as an obstacle to
the acceptance of this consequence, in accordance with the profound
belief of humanity in a community of all beings with one another and
with the Whole, as manifested in philosophies and in religions, in
the speculations of the learned and in ingenuous popular beliefs? A
scholastic prejudice, an idol of the intellect, the hypostasis of
that concept of "nature" that Logic has taught us is nothing but the
abstract, mechanicizing, classifying function of the human spirit; a
prejudice arising from the substitution of the naturalistic method for
reality, by which a function is changed and materialized into a group
of beings. Those idealists were also slaves of the error of a like
hypostasis, who, though they thought everything as an activity of the
spirit, yet stopped when face to face with _Nature,_ making of it an
inferior grade of the Spirit, or, metaphorically, a spirit alienated
from itself, an unconscious; consciousness, a petrified thought, and
creating for it a special philosophy (as though all the other did
not suffice), entitled precisely, _Philosophy of nature._ But modern
thought knows henceforth how man creates for his use that skeleton or
_mannequin_ of an immobile, external mechanical nature, and he is no
longer permitted to fall back into equivoque and substitute this for
entity or for a complex of entities. Nor should he find any difficulty
in discovering everywhere activity, development, consciousness, with
its antitheses of good and evil, of joy and sorrow. Certainly the stars
do not smile, nor is the moon pale for sorrow: these are images of
the poets. Certainly animals and trees do not reason like men; this,
when it is not poetry, is gross anthropomorphism. But nature, in her
intimate self, longs for the good and abhors the evil, she is all wet
with tears and all a-shiver for joy; strife and victory is everywhere
and in every moment of universal life.
[Sidenote: _Optimism and pessimism; critique._]
This conception of reality, which recognizes the indissoluble link
between good and evil, is itself beyond good and evil, and consequently
surpasses the visual angles of optimism and pessimism--of optimism
that does not discover the evil in life and posits it as illusion, or
only as a very small and contingent element, or hopes for a future
life (on earth or in heaven) in which evil will be suppressed; and
of pessimism, that sees nothing but evil and makes of the world an
infinite and eternal spasm of pain, that rends itself internally and
generates nothing. It confronts the first with the fact that evil is
truly the original sin of reality, ineliminable so long as reality
exists, and therefore absolutely ineliminable as a category: the
second, with the other category the good, equally ineliminable, for
without it evil could not be. And it is easy to show how the optimist
declares himself a pessimist, the pessimist an optimist, out of
their own mouths. The setting free from individuality and from will,
which the pessimist proposes as a radical remedy, is the remedy that
reality itself applies at every moment, for we free ourselves from the
contradiction of individuality and of wilfulness by the affirmation
of the rational will, with which the same pessimist cannot dispense,
for the effectuation of his programme of ascesis or of suicide, which,
according as it is understood, is either not a programme, or a
programme altogether capricious and without universal value. In truth,
there is no need to oppose a eulogy of Life with a eulogy of Death,
since the eulogy of Life is also a eulogy of Death; for how could we
live, if we did not die at every instant?
[Sidenote: _Dialectic optimism._]