synthesis of being and not-being, can certainly be termed optimistic,
but in a very different signification to that of abstract optimism. The
synthesis is the thesis enriched with its antithesis, and the thesis is
the good, being, not the bad or not-being. But who will wish seriously
to oppose this logical consequence? Is it not a fact that men hope and
live, although in the midst of their sorrows? Is it not a fact that the
world is not ended and does not appear to have any intention of ending?
And how would that be possible, if the moment of the good did not
prevail, just because the positive prevails upon the negative and Life
constantly triumphs over Death?
[Sidenote: _Concept of cosmic progress._]
This continuous triumph of Life over Death constitutes _cosmic
progress._ Progress, from the point of view whence we have hitherto
regarded it, that of individualized activity, is identical with
activity; it is the unfolding of this upon passivity. Every volitional
act, like every theoretical act, is therefore to be considered in
itself, that is, only in relation to the given situation from which it
breaks forth. In every new situation the individual begins his life
all over again. But from the cosmic point of view, at which we now
place ourselves, reality shows itself as a continuous growing upon
itself; nor is a real regress ever conceivable, because evil being
that which is not, is irreal, and that which is is always and only the
good. The real is always rational, and the rational is always real.
Cosmic progress, then, is itself also the object of affirmation, not
problematic, but apodictic.
[Sidenote: _Objections and critique of them._]
The difficulties that can be and are opposed to this thesis all arise
from the confusion of the truly rational with that which is falsely so
called, between the true real and that which improperly assumes this
name, that is, between the real and the unreal. Thus will be remembered
the instance of the end of the great Græco-Roman civilization, without
adequate parallel in universal history, followed by the return of
barbarism in the Middle Ages; or the common example of the shipwreck
of noblest enterprises; or (to remain in the field that more nearly
interests us) the philosophic decadence, owing to which, a mean
positivism was able to follow the idealism of the beginning of the
nineteenth century, which stands to the former as the eloquence of
an Attic orator to the stuttering of an ignorant school-boy. Did the
Middle Age, then, represent an advance upon that Rome, whose memory
lingered in the fancy as an image of lost dignity during that same
Middle Age? Was the victory of European reaction over the citizen
civilization of the Revolution and of the Empire progress? and in
Lombardy, the new Austrian domination following upon the Kingdom of
Italy? or in the Neapolitan provinces the Bourbon restoration after the
Republic of 1799 and the French Decanate? Was Comte an advance upon
Kant, Herbert Spencer upon Hegel? But different points of view are
confused under the same name in these questions, and, therefore, we do
not succeed in immediately arranging those facts beneath the principle
that has been established. It is therefore necessary to analyze. It
will then be immediately seen that ancient civilization, in what it
possessed of truly real, did not die, but was transmitted as thought,
institutions, and even as acquired aptitudes; hence it kept reappearing
in the course of the centuries and still keeps reappearing: it
certainly died in what it had of unreal, that is to say, in its
contradictions, for instance, in its incapacity to find political and
economic forms answering to the changed conditions of spirits. In like
manner, the Middle Age, which was evidently in part progress, because
it solved problems left unsolved by the preceding civilization, posed
others that it did not solve and that were solved in the succeeding
centuries; but if the posing of these new problems, which, while
destroying the old, failed to substitute provisionally anything, was
apparently not progress, neither was it regress, but the beginning of
new progress. The same is to be said of precursors, conquered in their
time, but conquerors in history, of the restorations and reactions
that are so only in name, because they contain in themselves that with
which they contend, if for no other reason, then for the very reason
that they contend: of heroes and initiators, who were conquered and
martyrized, yet knew that they were triumphing and did triumph in
dying; the cross and the pyre will become symbols of victory: _in hoc
signo vinces._ And finally, if the positivism of the second half of the
nineteenth century seem as a whole so greatly inferior to idealism,
that comes from its not being philosophy at all, but a hybrid jumble
of natural sciences and metaphysic, thus intensifying an error that
already existed in germ in idealism, and fecundating the problem
for a better solution. Many philosophers living to-day are inferior
to Socrates, because they have not even risen to the knowledge of
the concept; but those who in our day have attained to the level of
Socrates, are superior to him, because besides his thought they contain
in themselves something that Socrates had not; and those philosophers
who are logically on a level with Protagoras, surpass him, just because
they are the Protagorases of the twentieth century. There is therefore
never real regression in history; but only contradictions that follow
upon solutions given, and prepare new ones.
[Sidenote: _Individuals and History._]
The solutions, once attained, are acquired for ever; the problems that
have once been solved, do not again occur, or, which is the same thing,
they recur in a different way to those of the past. The web of History
is composed of such labours, to which all individuals collaborate;
but it is not the work and cannot be the purpose of any of them in
particular, because each one is exclusively intent on his particular
work, and only in _rem suam agere,_ does he also do the business of
the world. History is happening, which, as has been seen, is not to
be judged practically, because it always transcends individuals, and
to these and not to history is the practical judgment applicable.
The judgment of History is in the very fact of its existence: its
rationality is in its reality.
[Sidenote: _Fate, Fortune, and Providence._]
This historical web, which is and is not the work of individuals,
constitutes, as has been said, the work of the universal Spirit, of
which individuals are manifestations and instruments. In this way are
implicitly excluded those views which attribute the course of things
to Fate, to Fortune, or to Chance, that is, to mechanism or caprice,
both of them insufficient and one-sided, like determinism and free
will, each one invoking the other when it becomes aware of its own
impotence. The idea of mechanical origin, of an evolution that takes
place by the addition of very minute elements, is now being abandoned,
even for that fragment of history called _History of Nature_ (the
only true and possible Philosophy of Nature), in which is beginning
to reappear the theory of successive crises and revolution, and the
idea of freedom, whose creations are not to be measured or limited
mathematically. But the supreme rationality that guides the course of
history, should not, on the other hand, be conceived as the work of a
transcendent Intelligence or Providence, as is the case in religious
and semi-fanciful thought, which does not possess other value than that
of a confused presentiment of the truth. If History be rationality,
then a Providence certainly directs it; but of such a kind as becomes
actual in individuals, and acts, not on, but in them. This affirmation
of Providence is not conjecture or faith, but evidence of reason.
Who would feel in him the strength of life without such intimate
persuasion? Whence could he draw resignation in sorrow, encouragement
to endure? Surely what the religious man says, with the words "Let us
leave it in God's hands," is said also by the man of reason with those
other words: "Courage, and forward"?
[Sidenote: _The infinity of progress and mystery._]
The Spirit, which is infinite possibility passing into infinite
actuality, has drawn and draws at every moment the cosmos from chaos,
has collected diffused life into the concentrated life of the organ,
has achieved the passage from animal to human life, has created and
creates modes of life ever more lofty. The work of the Spirit is not
finished and never will be finished. Our yearning for something higher
is not vain. The very yearning, the infinity of our desire, is proof
of the infinity of that progress. The plant dreams of the animal, the
animal of man, man of superman; for this, too, is a reality, if it be
reality that with every historical movement man surpasses himself. The
time will come when the great deeds and the great works now our memory
and our boast will be forgotten, as we have forgotten the works and the
deeds, no less great, of those beings of supreme genius who created
what we call human life and seem to us now to have been savages of
the lowest grade, almost men-monkeys. They will be forgotten, for the
documents of progress is in _forgetting_; that is, in the fact being
entirely absorbed into the new fact, in which, and not in itself,
it has value. But we cannot know what the future states of Reality
will be, in their determined physiognomy and succession, owing to the
"dignity" established in the Philosophy of the practical, by which the
knowledge of the action and of the deed follows and does not precede
the action and the deed. _Mystery_ is just _the infinity of evolution_:
were this not so, that concept would not arise in the mind of man,
nor would it be possible to abuse it, as it has been abused by being
transported out of its place, that is to say, into the consciousness
of itself, which the spiritual activity should have and has to the
fullest degree, that is, the consciousness of its eternal categories.
[Sidenote: _Illegitimate transportation of the concept of mystery from
history to philosophy._]
The neglect of the moment of mystery is the true reason of the error
known as the _Philosophy of history,_ which undertakes to portray the
plan of Providence and to determine the formula of progress. In this
attempt (when it does not affirm mere philosophemes, as has very often
happened), it makes the vain effort to enclose the infinite in the
finite and capriciously to decree concluded that evolution which the
universal Spirit itself cannot conclude, for it would thus come to deny
itself. In Logic that error has been gnoseologically defined as the
pretension of treating the individual as though it were the universal,
making the universal individual; here it is to be defined in other
words as the pretension of treating the finite as though it were the
infinite, of making the infinite finite.
[Sidenote: _Confirmation of the impossibility of a Philosophy of
history._]
But the unjustified transportation of the concept of mystery from
history, where it indicates the future that the past prepares and does
not know, into philosophy, causes to be posited as mysteries which
give rise to probabilities and conjectures, problems that consist of
philosophical terms, and should therefore be philosophically solved.
But if the infinite progress and the infinite perfectibility of man
is to be affirmed, although we do not know the concrete forms that
progress and perfectibility will assume (not knowing them, because now
it imports not to _know,_ but to _do_ them), then there is no meaning
in positing as a mystery the immortality of the individual soul, or the
existence of God; for these are not _facts_ that may or may not happen
sooner or later, but _concepts_ that must be proved to be in themselves
thinkable and not contradictory, or to determine in what form they are
thinkable and not contradictory. Their thinkability will indeed be
a mystery, but of the kind that it is a duty to make clear, because
synonymous with obscurity or mental confusion. What has so far been
demonstrated has been their unthinkability in the traditional form.
Nor is it true that they correspond to profound demands of the human
soul. Man does not seek a God external to himself and almost a despot,
who commands and benefits him capriciously; nor does he aspire to an
immortality of insipid ease: but he seeks for that God which he has in
himself, and aspires to that activity, which is both Life and Death.
VI
TWO ELUCIDATIONS RELATING TO HISTORIC AND ÆSTHETIC
[Sidenote: _The relation of desires and actions; and two problems of
Historic and of Æsthetic._]
From the consideration of the practical activity in its dialectic, and
in particular from the theory relating to desire and to action, shines
forth, if we mistake not, the full light that has hitherto perhaps been
invoked in vain upon certain capital points of Historic and Æsthetic,
which, when treating of those disciplines, we were obliged either
hardly to touch upon, or to develop in a manner altogether inadequate.
The reason of this was that an adequate development, to be convincing,
demanded as presupposition, a minute exposition as to the nature, the
relations and the constitution of the practical activity, all of them
things that could not be treated incidentally.
[Sidenote: _History and art._]
History or historical narrative is, as we know, very closely related
to art, in contradistinction to the abstract sciences, since both
art and history do not construct concepts of class, but represent
concrete and individuated facts. History, however, is not art pure and
simple, but is distinguished from it, because artistic representation
is in it continually illuminated with the critical distinction
between the real and the possible, what has happened and what has
been imagined, the existing and the inexisting, with the consequent
determinations connected with them, as to this or that particular mode
of reality, event, and existence, that have taken place. In every
historical narrative are always to be found, understood or implied, the
affirmations that the narrative is real, that a different narrative
would be imaginary, that the reality of the event in question properly
belongs to this or that concept of politics, rights, war, diplomacy,
economy, and so on. All this is quite absent from art, which is by
nature ingenuous and free of critical discernment; so much so, that
hardly have its representations become objects of reflection, than they
are dissolved as art, to reappear with a changed appearance (no longer
youthful, but virile or senile), as history.
[Sidenote: _The concept of existentiality in history._]
But if this distinction between art and history be precisely determined
gnoseologically, when it has been said that in history the predicate
of existentiality is added to mere representation (and, therefore,
all the other predicates connected with the case, referring to the
various forms of existence), and that therefore, the representative
and artistic form of history contains in itself rational and
philosophical method as precedent, yet there always remains the
ulterior philosophical problem: What is the origin of that predicate
of reality or existentiality on which all the others lean? We have
already demonstrated that it was altogether inadmissible to derive it
from a mysterious faculty called _Faith,_ or to consider it as the
apprehension of something extraneous to the spirit in universal, as _a
datum or position._ And we also stated that if the spirit recognize
its existence, yet it cannot attain to the criterion elsewhere than
from itself; which criterion was nothing but the first reflection of
the spirit upon the practical activity itself, giving rise to the
duplication of reality that has happened and reality only desired, or
of reality and irreality, of existing and inexisting.
[Sidenote: _Its origin in the Philosophy of the practical: action and
the existing, desires and the unexisting._]
All this now becomes a simple consequence of the connection that
has been made clear between desire and action. The cognoscitive
spirit, when it apprehends and ideally remakes this connection, has,
in enunciating it, also enunciated for the first time the couples
of terms that we have already mentioned and that variously express
the criterion of existence. To distinguish desires from actions is
tantamount to distinguishing the unreal from the real, the existing
from the unexisting, and to think the practical act is tantamount
to thinking the concept of existence and of effectual reality. For
the determination of the relation between desire and action, and
only for that, the criterion of existence is not necessary, because
that relation is itself that criterion. To say "this is a desire"
means, "this does not exist"; to say "this is an action" means, "this
exists." The desires are possibility; the resolutive and volitional
act or action, is actuality. And it is also evident that existent
and inexistent are not separable, as though the inexistent were
heterogeneous to the existent; the inexistent exists in its way, as
possibility is possible reality; the phantasm exists in the fancy and
desire in the spirit that desires. Thus the posing of the one term is
also the posing of the other, as correlative. What is repugnant and
contradictory is the introduction of the one term into the other. This
takes place, for instance, when in narrating the history, reality that
has happened is mingled as one single thing with reality dreamed of or
desired, and history is turned into _legend._
[Sidenote: _History as distinction between actions and desires, and art
as indistinction._]
It can be said that history always represents actions, and in this is
implicit that it represents at the same time also desires, but only in
so far as it distinguishes them from actions: history, therefore, is
perception and memory of perception, and in it fancies and imaginations
are also perceived as such and arranged in their place. And it would
also be possible to say that art represents only desires, and is
therefore all fancy and never perception, all possible reality and
never effectual reality. But since to art is wanting the distinctive
criterion between desires and actions, it in truth represents actions
as desires and desires as actions, the real as possible, and the
possible as real; hence it would be more correct to say that art is
on the near side of the possible and the real, it is pure of these
distinctions, and is therefore pure imagination or _pure intuition._
Desires and actions are, we know, of the same stuff, and art assumes
that stuff just as it is, careless of the new elaboration that it will
receive in an ulterior grade of the spirit, which is indeed impossible
without that first and merely fantastic elaboration. Likewise when art
takes possession of historical material, it removes from it just the
historical character, the critical elements, and by this very fact
reduces it once more to mere intuition.
[Sidenote: _The purely fantastic and the imaginary._]
It must further be noted that the purely fantastic, which is the
representation of a desire, must not be confounded with the mechanical
combination of images, that can be made idly, for amusement, or for
practical ends. This operation (analogous to that of the intellect upon
the pure concepts and representations, when it arbitrarily combines
them in the pseudo-concepts), is secondary and derivative; and it
presupposes the first, which provides it with the material that it cuts
up and combines. Nothing is more extraneous and repugnant to poetry
than this artificial _imagining,_ precisely because it is external and
repugnant to reality. Hence his would be a vain objection who should
coldly and capriciously combine the most different images and ask for
an explanation of the whole, with desire as the fundamental principle.
Such combinations as these, since they do not belong to poetry, are
void of real psychical content.
[Sidenote: _Art as lyrical or representation of feelings._]
But if the relation between desire and action be the ultimate reason
for the distinction between art and history, and this distinction be
the theoretical reflection of that real relation, the conception of
art as representation of volitional facts, taken in their quite general
and indeterminate nature, in which desire is as action and action as
desire, reveals why art affirms itself as _representation of feeling,_
and why a work of art does not seem to possess and does not possess
value, save from its _lyrical_ character and from the imprint of the
artist's personality. The work of art that reasons or instructs as
to things that have happened, and finds a substitute for intimate
and lyrical connections in historical reasonings and connections, is
justly and universally condemned as cold and ineffectual. We do not
ask the artist for a philosophical system nor for a relation of facts
(if all this is to be found in his work it is _per accidens),_ but
for a dream of his own, for nothing but the expression of a world
desired or abhorred, or partly desired and partly abhorred. If he
make us live again in this dream the rapture of joy or the incubus of
terror, in solemnity or in humility, in tragedy or in laughter, that
suffices. Facts and concepts, and the question as to the metaphysical
constitution of reality and how it has been developed in time, are all
things that we shall ask of others.
[Sidenote: _Identity of ingenuous reality and feeling._]
It may seem that in this way the field of art has been much restricted
and the ingenuous representation of the real excluded from it. But
this ingenuous representation is just the representation of reality as
dream. For reality is nothing (as we henceforth know) than becoming,
possibility that passes into actuality, desire that becomes action,
from which desire springs forth again unsatiated. The artist who
represents it ingenuously, produces the lyric for this very reason. For
him there is no necessity to reach it from without, as a new element:
if he do this, he is a bad artist, and will be blamed as a hunter of
emotions, emphatic, convulsive, wearisomely sentimental, forcedly
jocose, an introducer of his own caprice into the coherence of the
work, a confounder of his empirical with his artistic personality,
which exists in the empirical individual, but is not equivalent to it.
The feeling that the true artist portrays is that of things, _lacrymae
rerum_; and by the identity of feeling and volition, of volition and
reality already demonstrated in the Philosophy of the practical, things
are themselves that feeling. The characteristic that Schelling and
Schopenhauer noted in music, of reproducing, not indeed the ideas, but
the ideal rhythm of the universe, and of objectifying the will itself,
belongs equally to all the other forms of art, because it is the
essence itself of Art, or of pure intuition.
[Sidenote: _Artists and the will._]
An obvious confirmation of this theory is also the empirical
observation often made, that the men who lose themselves in desires
are rather poets than men of action, dreamers rather than actors; and
in respect to this, that poets who seem to have the soul overflowing
with energetic plans, magnanimous loves, and fierce hatreds are the
most incapable in the field of action, and the worst of captains in
practical struggles; because those plans, those loves and hates, are
not will, but desires, and desires already weakened as such, because
they are no longer in process of volitional synthetization, but have
become the objects of contemplation and of dream. He who reads the
biographies of artists, or has dealings with artists in daily life,
almost always has the impression that their gusts of passion are
nothing but poetry _about to break forth,_ as a green bud that opens
and breaks the brown sheath. And if this process be painful, that
is because every travail of birth is painful. One sees, indeed, how
everything generally ends _par des chansons._ A fine poem and the
sufferer is calm again.
[Sidenote: _Actions and myths._]