INTRODUCTION
The author of this book has been working in the same field with me for over a quarter of a century, ever since the time when we undertook—he a very young man, and I somewhat his senior—to shake Italy out of the doze of naturalism and positivism back to idealistic philosophy; or, as it would be better to say, to philosophy pure and simple, if indeed philosophy is always idealism.
Together we founded a review, the Critica, and kept it going by our contributions; together we edited collections of classical authors; and together we engaged in many lively controversies. And it seems indeed as though we really succeeded in laying hold of and again firmly re-establishing in Italy the tradition of philosophical studies, thus welding a chain which evidently has withstood the strain and destructive fury of the war and its afterclaps.
By this I do not mean to imply that our gradual achievements were the result of a definite preconcerted plan. Our work was the spontaneous consequence of our spontaneous mental development and of the spontaneous agreement of our minds. And therefore this common task, too, gradually becoming differentiated in accordance with the peculiarities of our temperaments, our tendencies, and our attitudes, resulted in a kind of division of labour between us. So that whereas I by preference have devoted my attention to the history of literature, Gentile has dedicated himself more particularly to the history of philosophy and especially of Italian philosophy, not only as a thinker but as a scholar too, and as a philologist. He may be said to have covered the entire field from the Middle Ages to the present time by his works on Scholasticism in Italy, on Bruno, on Telesio, on Renaissance philosophy, on Neapolitan philosophy from Genovesi to Galluppi, on Rosmini, on Gioberti, and on the philosophical writers from 1850 to 1900. And though his comprehensive History of Italian Philosophy, published in parts, is far from being finished, the several sections of it have been elaborated and cast in the various monographs which I have just mentioned.
In addition to this, Gentile has been devoting special attention to religious problems. He took a very important part in the inquiry into and criticism of “modernism,” the hybrid nature of which he laid bare, exposing both the inner contradictions and the scanty sincerity of the movement. His handling of this question was shown to be effective by the fact, among others, that the authors of the encyclical Pascendi, which brought upon Modernism the condemnation of the Church, availed themselves of the sharp edge of Gentile’s logical arguments, prompted by scientific loyalty and dictated by moral righteousness.
Finally, and in a more close connection with the present work, it will be remembered that Gentile has done away with the chaotic pedagogy of the positivistic school, and has also definitely criticised the educational theory of Herbart. As far back as 1900 he published a monograph of capital importance, in which he showed that pedagogy in so far as it is philosophical resolves itself without residuum into the philosophy of the spirit; for the science of the spirit’s education can not but be the science of the spirit’s development,—of its dialectics, of its necessity.
Indeed, we owe it to Gentile that Italian pedagogy has attained in the present day a simplicity and a depth of concepts unknown elsewhere. In Italy, not educational science alone, but the practice of it and its political aspects have been thoroughly recast and amply developed. And this, too, is due pre-eminently to the work of Gentile. His authority therefore is powerfully felt in schools of all grades, for he has lived intensely the life of the school and loves it dearly.
In addition to these differences arising from our division of labour, others may of course be noticed, and they are to be found in the form that philosophical doctrines have taken on in each of us. Identity is impossible in this field, for philosophy, like art, is closely bound up with the personality of the thinker, with his spiritual interests, and with his experiences of life. There is never true identity except in the so-called “philosophical school,” which indicates the death of a philosophy, in the same way that the poetical school proclaims death in poetry.
And so it has come about that our general conception of philosophy as simple philosophy of the spirit—of the subject, and never of nature, or of the object—has developed a peculiar stress in Gentile, for whom philosophy is above all that point in which every abstraction is overcome and submerged in the concreteness of the act of Thought; whereas for me philosophy is essentially methodology of the one real and concrete Thinking—of historical Thinking. So that while he strongly emphasises unity, I no less energetically insist on the distinction and dialectics of the forms of the spirit as a necessary formation of the methodology of historical judgment. But of this enough, especially since the reader can only become interested in these differences after he has acquired a more advanced knowledge of contemporary Italian philosophy.
I am convinced that the translation and popularisation of Gentile’s work will contribute to the toilsome formation of that consciousness, of that system of convictions, of that moral and mental faith which is the profound need of our times. For our age, eager and anxious for Faith, is perhaps not yet completely resigned to look for the new creed of humanity there where alone it may be found, where by firm resolve it may be secured—in pure Thought. Clear-sighted observers have perhaps not failed to notice that the World War, in addition to every thing else, has been a strife of religions, a clash of conflicting conceptions of life, a struggle of opposed philosophies. It is surely not the duty of thinkers to settle economic and political contentions by ineffective appeals to the universal brotherhood of man; but it is rather their duty to compose mental differences and antagonisms, and thus form the new faith of humanity—a new Christianity or a new Humanism, as we may wish to call it. Such a faith will certainly not be spared the conflicts from which ancient Christianity itself was not free; but it may reasonably be hoped that it will rescue us from intellectual anarchy, from unbridled individualism, from sensualism, from scepticism, from pessimism, from every aberration which for a century and a half has been harassing the soul of man and the society of mankind under the name of Romanticism.
Benedetto Croce.
Rome, April, 1921.
CHAPTER I
EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY
Participation on the part of elementary school teachers in the work and studies of the Universities has always seemed to me to constitute a real need of culture and of primary education. For the elementary school, by the very nature of the professional training of its teachers, is exposed to a grave danger from which it must be rescued if we mean to keep it alive.
The training of the elementary school teacher tends to be dogmatic. True it is that vigilant individuality and passionate love for his exquisitely spiritual calling impel the school teacher to an untiring criticism of his methods, of his actual teaching, and of the life of the school which he directs and promotes. But nevertheless in consequence of those very studies by which he has prepared himself to be an elementary instructor, he is led to look upon that learning which constitutes his mental equipment and the foundation of all his future teaching, as something quite finished, rounded out, enclosed in definite formulas, rules, and laws, all of which have been ascertained once for all and are no longer susceptible of ulterior revision. He looks upon this learning not as a developing organism, but as 4 something definitely moulded and stereotyped. From this the conclusion is drawn that a certain kind of knowledge may serve as a corner stone for the whole school edifice. Since his discipline and his teaching consist mainly of elements which because of their abstractness miss the renovating flow of spiritual life, the teacher slowly but surely ends by shutting himself up in a certain number of ideas, which are final as far as he is concerned. They are never corrected or transformed; in their mechanical fixity they cease to live; and the mind which cherishes and preserves them loses its natural tendency to doubt. Yet what is doubt but dissatisfaction with what is known and with the manner of knowing, and a spur to further inquiry, to better and fuller learning, to self scrutiny, to an examination of one’s own sentiments, one’s own character, and an inducement to broadmindedness, to a welcoming receptiveness of all the suggestions and all the teachings which life at all moments generously showers on us?
The remedy against this natural tendency of the teacher’s mind is to be found in the University, where in theory, and so far as is possible, in practice too, science is presented not as ready-made, definitely turned out in final theories, enclosed in consecrated manuals; but as inquiry, as research, as spiritual activity which does not rest satisfied with its accomplishments, but for ever feels that it does not yet know or does not know enough, aware of the 5 difficulties which threaten every attained position, and ready unrestingly to track them, to reveal them, and meet them squarely. This life, which is perpetual criticism, and unceasing progress in a learning which is never completed, which never aspires to be complete, is the serious and fruitful purpose of the University. Here we must come, to restore freshness to our spiritual activities, which alone give value to knowledge, and wrest it from deadening crystallisation, from mechanical rigidity. For this reason, it seems to me, special provision should be made in the University to satisfy the needs of school teachers. It is not a question of merely furnishing them with additional information which they might just as well get out of books. The University must act on their minds, shake them, start them going, instil in them salutary doubt by criticism, and develop a taste for true knowledge.
The following chapters contain a series of University lectures, in accordance with these criteria, and delivered originally to the elementary teachers of Trieste, now for the first time again an Italian city. They constitute a course which aims not to increase the quantity of culture, but to change its character. It is an attempt to introduce the elementary teacher into those spiritual workshops which are the halls of a University, to induce him to take part in the original investigations which constantly contribute to the formation of our national 6 learning; which forever make and reshape our ideas and our convictions as to what we should want Italian science to be, the Italian concepts of life and literature; as to what constitute the heirloom of our school, that sacred possession bequeathed to us by our forefathers which makes us what we are, which gives us a name and endows us with a personality, by which we are enabled to look forward to a future of Italy which is not solely economic and political, but moral and intellectual as well.
And thus, because of the time, the place, the audience, and the subject, we are from the start brought face to face with a serious question,—a question which has often been debated, and which in the last few years, on account of the exasperation of national sentiment brought about by the World War, has become the object of passionate controversies. For if it has been frequently argued on one side that science is by nature and ought to be national, there has been no lack of warning from the other side as to the dangers of this position. For war, it was said, would, sooner or later, come to an end and be a thing of the past; whereas truth never sets, never becomes a thing of the past; it is error alone that is destined to pass and disappear. We were reminded of the fact that what is scientifically true and artistically beautiful is beautiful and true beyond no less than within the national frontier; and that only on this condition is it worthy of its name. 7 This question therefore presents itself as a preliminary to our investigation, and it is for us to examine it. We shall do so in as brief a manner as the subject will allow.
We shall first point out the inutility of distinguishing science from culture, education from instruction. Those who insist on these distinctions maintain that though a school is never national in virtue of the content of its scientific teaching, it must nevertheless be national in that it transforms science into culture, makes it over into an instrument with which to shape consciousness and conscience, and uses it as a tool for the making of men and for the training of citizens. Thus we have as an integral part of science a form of action directed on the character and the will of the young generations that are being nurtured and raised in accordance with national traditions and in view of the ends which the state wants to attain. Such distinctions however complicate but do not resolve the controversy. They entangle it with other questions which it were better to leave untouched at this juncture. For it might be said of questions what Manzoni said of books: one at a time is enough—if it isn’t too much.
We shall therefore try to simplify matters, and begin by clarifying the two concepts of nationality and of knowledge, in order to define the concept of the “nationality of knowledge.” What, then, is the nation? A very intricate question, indeed, over which violent 8 discussions are raging, and all the more passionately because the premises and conclusions of this controversy are never maintained in the peaceful seclusion of abstract speculative theories, but are dragged at every moment in the very midst of the concrete interests of the men themselves who affirm or deny the value of nationalities. So that serious difficulties are encountered every time an attempt is made to determine the specific and concrete content of this concept of the nation, which is ever present, and yet ever elusive. Proteus-like, it appears before us, but as we try to grasp it, it changes semblance and breaks away. It is visible to the immediate intuition of every national consciousness, but it slips from thought as we strive to fix its essence.
Is it common territory that constitutes nationality? or is it common language? or political life led in common? or the accumulation of memories, of traditions, and of customs by which a people looks back to one past where it never fails to find itself? Or is it perhaps the relationship which binds together all the individuals of a community into a strong and compact structure, assigning a mission and an apostolate to a people’s faith? One or the other of these elements, or all of them together, have in turn been proposed and rejected with equally strong arguments. For in each case it may be true or it may be false that the given element constitutes the essence of a people’s nationality, 9 or of any historical association whatsoever. All these elements, whether separately or jointly, may have two different meanings, one of which makes them a mere accidental content of the national consciousness, whereas the other establishes them as necessary, essential, and unfailing constituents. For they may have a merely natural value, or they may have a moral and spiritual one. Our birth-land, which nourished us in our infancy, and now shelters the bodies of our parents, the mountains and the shores that surround it and individualise it, these are natural entities. They are not man-made; we cannot claim them, nor can we fasten our existence to them. Even our speech, our religion itself, which do indeed live in the human mind, may yet be considered as natural facts similar to the geographical accidents which give boundaries and elevation to the land of a people. We may, abstractly, look upon our language as that one which was spoken before we were born, by our departed ancestors who somehow produced this spiritual patrimony of which we now have the use and enjoyment, very much in the same way that we enjoy the sunlight showered upon us by nature. In this same way a few, perhaps many, conceive of religion: they look upon it as something bequeathed and inherited, and not therefore as the fruit of our own untiring faith and the correlate of our actual personality. All these elements in so far as they are natural are evidently extraneous to our personality. 10 We do dwell within this peninsula cloistered by the Alps; we delight in this luminous sky, in our charming shores smiled upon by the waters of the Mediterranean. But if we emigrate from this lovely abode, if under the stress of economic motives we traverse the ocean and gather, a number of us, somewhere across the Atlantic; and there, united by the natural tie of common origin, and fastened by the identity of speech, we maintain ourselves as a special community, with common interests and peculiar moral affinities, then, in spite of the severance from our native peninsula, we have preserved our nationality: Italy has crossed the ocean in our wake. Not only can we sunder ourselves from our land, but we may even relinquish our customs, forget our language, abandon our religion; or we may, within our own fatherland, be kept separate by peculiar historical traditions, by differences of dialects or even of language, by religion, by clashing interests, and yet respond with the same sentiment and the same soul to the sound of one Name, to the colours of one flag, to the summons of common hopes, to the alarm of common dangers.
And it is then that we feel ourselves to be a people; then are we a nation. It is not what we put within this concept that gives consistency and reality to the concept itself; it is the act of spiritual energy whereby we cling to a certain element or elements in the consciousness of that collective personality to which we 11 feel we belong. Nationality consists not in content which may vary, but in the form which a certain content of human consciousness assumes when it is felt to constitute a nation’s character.
But this truth is still far from being recognised. Its existence is not even suspected by those who utilise a materially constituted nationality as a title, that is, an antecedent, and a support for political rights claimed by more or less considerable ethnical aggregates that are more or less developed and more or less prepared to take on the form of free and independent states and to secure recognition of a de facto political personality on the strength of an assumed de jure existence.
This truth, however, was grasped by the profound intuition of Mazzini, the apostle of nationalities, the man who roused our national energies, and whose irresistible call awakened Italy and powerfully impelled her to affirm her national being. Even from the first years of the Giovine Italia he insisted that Italy, when still merely an idea, prior to her taking on a concrete and actual political reality, was not a people and was not a nation. For a nation, he maintained, is not something existing in nature; but a great spiritual reality. Therefore like all that is in and for the spirit, it is never a fact ready to be ascertained, but always a mission, a purpose, something that has to be realised—an action.
The Italians to whom Mazzini spoke were not the 12 people around him. He was addressing that future people which the Italians themselves had to create. And they would create it by fixing their souls on one idea—the idea of a fatherland to be conquered—a sacred idea, so noble that people would live and die for it, as for that sovereign and ultimate Good for which all sacrifices are gladly borne, without which man can not live, outside of which he finds nothing that satisfies him, nothing that is conducive to a life’s work. For Mazzini nationality is not inherited wealth, but it is man’s own conquest. A people can not faint-heartedly claim from others recognition of their nation, but must themselves demonstrate its existence, realise it by their willingness to fight and die for its independence: independence which is freedom and unity and constitutes the nation. It is not true that first comes the nation and then follows the state; the nation is the state when it has triumphed over the enemy, and has overcome the oppression, which till then were hindering its formation. It is not therefore a vague aspiration or a faint wish, but an active faith, an energetic volition which creates, in the freed political Power, the reality of its own moral personality and of its collective consciousness. Hence the lofty aim of Mazzini in insisting that Italy should not be made with the help of foreigners but should be a product of the revolution, that is, of its own will.
And truly the nation is, substantially, as Mazzini saw and firmly believed, the common will of a people which affirms itself and thus secures self-realisation. A nation is a nation only when it wills to be one. I said, when it really wills, not when it merely says it does. It must therefore act in such a manner as to realise its own personality in the form of the State beyond which there is no collective will, no common personality of the people. And it must act seriously, sacrificing the individual to the collective whole, and welcoming martyrdom, which in every case is but the sacrifice of the individual to the universal, the lavishing of our own self to the ideal for which we toil.
From this we are not, however, to infer that a nation can under no circumstances exist prior to the formation of its State. For if this formation means the formal proclamation or the recognition by other States, it surely does pre-exist. But it does not if we consider that the proclamation of sovereignty is a moment in a previously initiated process, and the effect of pre-existing forces already at work; which effect is never definite because a State, even after it has been constituted, continues to develop in virtue of those very forces which produced it; so that it is constantly renewing and continually reconstituting itself. Hence a State is always a future. It is that state which this very day we must set up, or rather at this very instant, and with all our future efforts bent to that political 14 ideal which gleams before us, not only in the light of a beautiful thought, but as the irresistible need of our own personality.
The nation therefore is as intimately pertinent and native to our own being as the State, considered as Universal Will, is one with our concrete and actual ethical personality. Italy for us is the fatherland which lives in our souls as that complex and lofty moral idea which we are realising. We realise it in every instant of our lives, by our feelings, and by our thoughts, by our speech and by our imagination, indeed, by our whole life which concretely flows into that Will which is the State and which thus makes itself felt in the world. And this Will, this State is Italy, which has fought and won; which has struggled for a long time amid errors and sorrows, hopes and dejection, manifestations of strength and confessions of weakness, but always with a secret thought, with a deep-seated aspiration which sustained her throughout her entire ordeal, now exalting her in the flush of action, now, in the critical moment of resistance, confirming and fortifying her by the undying faith in ultimate triumph. This nation, which we all wish to raise to an ever loftier station of honour and of beauty, even though we differ as to the means of attaining this end, is it not the substance of our personality,—of that personality which we possess not as individuals who drift with the current, but as men who have a powerful 15 self-consciousness and who look upward for their destiny?
If we thus understand the nation, it follows that not only every man must bear the imprint of his nationality, but that also there is no true science, no man’s science, which is not national. The ancients believed, in conformity with the teachings of the Greeks, that science soars outside of the human life, above the vicissitudes of mortals, beyond the current of history, which is troubled by the fatal conflicts of error, by falterings and doubts, and by the unsatisfied thirst for knowledge. Truth, lofty, pure, motionless, and unchangeable, was to them the fixed goal toward which the human mind moved, but completely severed from it and transcendent. This concept, after two thousand years of speculation, was to reveal itself as abstract and therefore fallacious,—abstract from the human mind, which at every given instance mirrors itself in such an image of truth, ever gazing upon an eternal ideal but always intent on reshaping it in a new and more adequate form. The modern world, at first with dim consciousness, and guided rather by a fortunate intuition than by a clear concept of its own real orientation, then with an ever clearer, ever more critical conviction, has elaborated a concept which is directly antithetical to the classical idea of a celestial truth removed from the turmoil of earthly things. It has accordingly and by many ways reached the conclusion that reality, lofty 16 though it be, and truth itself, which nourishes the mind and alone gives validity to human thought, are in life itself, in the development of the mind, in the growth of the human personality, and that this personality, though ideally beyond our grasp, is yet in the concrete always historical and actual, and realises itself in its immanent value. It therefore creates its truth and its world. Modern philosophy and modern consciousness no longer point to values which, transcending history, determine its movement and its direction by external finalities: they show to man that the lofty aim which is his law is within himself; that it is in his ever unsatisfied personality as it unceasingly strains upward towards its own ideal.
Science is no longer conceived to-day as the indifferent pure matter of the intellect. It is an interest which invests the entire person, extols it and with it moves onward in the eternal rhythm of an infinite development. Science is not for us the abstract contemplation of yore; it is self-consciousness that man acquires, and by means of which he actuates his own humanity. And therefore science is no longer an adornment or an equipment of the mind, considered as diverse to its content; it is culture, and the formation of this very mind. So that whenever science is as yet so abstract that it seems not to touch the person and fails to form it or transform it, it is an indication that it is not as yet true science.
So we conclude thus: he who distinguishes his person from his knowledge is ignorant of the nature of knowledge. The modern teacher knows of no science which is not an act of a personality. It knows no personality which admits of being sequestered from its ideas, from its ways of thinking and of feeling, from that greater life which is the nation. Concrete personality then is nationality, and therefore neither the school nor science possesses a learning which is not national.
And for this reason therefore our educational reforms which are inspired by the teachings of modern idealistic philosophy demand that the school be animated and vivified by the spiritual breath of the fatherland.
CHAPTER II
EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY
It is essential at the very outset to understand clearly what is meant by concrete personality, and why the particular or empirical personality, as we are usually accustomed to consider it, is nothing more than an abstraction.
Ordinarily, relying on the most obvious data of experience, we are led to believe that the sphere of our moral personality coincides exactly with the sphere of our physical person, and is therefore limited and contained by the surface of our material body. We consider this body in itself as an indivisible whole, with such reciprocal correspondence and interdependence of its parts as to become a veritable system. It seems to us also that this system moves in space as a whole when the body is displaced, continuing to remain united as long as it exists. We look upon it as though it were separated from all other bodies, whether of the same or of different kinds, in such a manner that it excludes others from the place it occupies, and is itself in turn excluded by them. One body then, one physical person, one moral personality—that moral personality which each one of us recognises and affirms by the consciousness of the ego.
And in fact when I walk I am not a different person from when I think. My ego remains the same whether my body moves through space or whether my mind inwardly meditates. Impenetrability, which is possessed by matter, seems to be also a property of human individualism.
From my ego every other ego is apparently excluded. What I am no one else can be, and I in turn cannot be confused with another person. Those of my fellow beings that are most intimately, most closely related to me seem yet as completely external to me, as thoroughly sundered from my spirit, as their bodies are from mine. My father, my brother are dead. They have vanished from this world in which I nevertheless continue to exist; just as a stone remains in its place and is in no way affected when another stone near by is removed; or as a mutilated pedestal may still remain to remind the onlooker of the statue that was torn away.
Hundreds of individuals assemble to listen to the words of an orator. But no necessary ties exist between the various persons; and when the speaking is over, each one goes his way confident that he has lost no part of himself and that he has maintained his individuality absolutely unaltered.
Our elders lived on this planet when we had not yet arrived. After we came, they gradually withdrew, one after the other. And just as they had been able to 20 exist without us, so shall we continue to live without them, and away from them develop our personality. For each one of us, according to this point of view, has his own being within himself, his own particular destiny. Every man makes of himself the centre of his world, of that universe which he has created with deeds and thoughts: a universe of ideas, of images, of concepts, of systems, which are all in his brain; a universe of values, of desirable goods and of abhorred evils, all of which are rooted in his own individual will, in his character, and originate from the peculiar manner in which he personally colours this world and conceives the universe.
What is another man’s sorrow to me? What part have I in his joys? And how can the science of Aristotle or of Galileo be anything to me, since I do not know them, since I cannot read their books, and am totally unfamiliar with their teachings? And the unknown wayfarer who passes by, wrapped in his thoughts, what does he care for my loftiest conceptions, for the songs that well forth from the depths of my soul? The hero’s exploit brings no glory to us; the heinous deed of the criminal makes us shudder indeed, but drives no pangs of remorse through our conscience. For every one of us has his own body and his own particular soul. Every one, in short, is himself independently of what others may be.
This conception, which we ordinarily form of our 21 personality, and on which we erect the system of our practical life in all our manifold relations with other individuals, is an abstract concept. For when we thus conceive our being, we see but a single side of it and that the least important: we fail to grasp that part which reveals all that is spiritual, and human, and truly and peculiarly ours. I shall not here investigate how the human personality has two aspects so totally different one from the other; and in what remote depths we must search for the common root of these two contrasting and apparently contradictory manifestations. Our task for the moment is to establish within ourselves through reflection the firm conviction that we are not lone individualities: that there is another and a better part of us, an element which is the very antithesis of the particular, that one, namely, which is the deep-seated source of our nature, by which we cease, each one of us, to be in irreducible opposition to the rest of humanity, and become instead what all the others are or what we want them to be.
In order to fix our attention on this more profound aspect of our inner life, I shall take as an example one of those elements which are contained in the concept of nationality, Language. Language it must be remembered does not belong per se to nationality; it belongs to it in virtue of an act by which a will, a personality, affirms itself with a determined content. We must now point out the abstract character of that 22 concept by which language, which is a constituent element of our personality, is usually ascribed to what is merely particular in it.
That language is a peculiar and constituent element of personality is quite obvious. Through language we speak not to others only, but to ourselves also. Speaking to ourselves means seeing within ourselves our own ideas, our soul, our very self in short,—it means self-consciousness, as the philosophers say, and therefore self-control, clear vision of our acts, knowledge of what stirs within us; it means, therefore, living not after the manner of dumb animals, but as rational beings, as men. Man cannot think, have consciousness of himself, reason, without first expressing all that to himself. Man has been defined as a rational animal; he may also be defined as the speaking animal. The remark is as old as Aristotle.
Man, however, this animal endowed with the faculty of speaking, is not man in general who never was, but the real man, the historical man, actually existing. And he does not speak a general language, but a certain definite one.
When I speak before a public, I can but use my language, the Italian language. And I exist, that is I affirm myself, I come into real being, by thinking in conformity with my real personality, in so far as I speak, and speak this language of mine. My language, the Italian language. Here lies the problem. Were 23 I not to speak, or were I to speak otherwise than I know how, I would not be myself. This manner of expressing myself is then an intrinsic trait of my personality. But this speech which makes me what I am, and which therefore intimately belongs to me, could it possibly be mine, could I use it, mould it into my own life-substance, if, mine though it be, it were yet enclosed within me in the manner that every particle of my flesh is contained within my body, having nothing in common with any other part of matter co-existing in space? Could my language in short really be my language, if it belonged exclusively to me, to what I have called my particular or empirical personality?
A simple reflection will suffice to show that my language, like a beacon of light, inwardly illumines my Thought, and renders visible to me every movement and every sense, only because this language is not exclusively my own. It is that same language through which I grasp the ancient authors of Italy. I read about Francesca da Rimini and Count Ugolino, and find them within me in the emotion of my throbbing soul. I read of Petrarch’s golden-haired Laura, of Ariosto’s Angelica, fair love of chivalrous men and the unhappy friend of youthful Medoro. I read of the cunning art whereby the Florentine secretary, in his keen speculative discourses, sought to establish the principalities and the state of Italy. I read of the many loves, sorrows, discoveries and sublime concepts 24 which did not blossom forth from my spirit, but which, once expressed by the great men of my country, have, because of their merits, continued to exist in the imagination, in the intellect, in the hearts of Italians, and have thus constituted a literature, a light-shedding history which is the life of language, varied indeed and restless, but ever the same. This is the language which I first heard from the dear lips of my mother, which gradually and constantly I made my own by studying and reflecting on the books and on the conversations of those who for years, or days, or instants, were with me in my native town and exchanged with me their thoughts and their sentiments; the language which unites to me all those who, living or dead, together constitute this which I call and feel to be my own people.
Yet I might want to break away with my speech from this glorious communion. I might try to demonstrate to myself that my speech is exclusively mine, and surely I would thus accomplish something. I would produce an exception which in this case too would serve to confirm the rule.
For surely a man may devise a cryptic language, a cipher, a jargon. Secret codes and conventional cants are resorted to by individuals who have some reason to conceal their meaning from others. Such individuals, however, can form but very small groups, and because of the artificial character of their communications never may constitute a nation. An artificial jargon of 25 this sort is however a language of some kind: it must be, since art imitates nature. It complies with the law that is immanent in the peculiar nature of language, namely, that there be nothing secret or hidden in it, for speech and in general every form of spiritual activity invests a community and aims at universality. The jargon is possible only because of the key by which it may be translated back into the common language. Give a ciphered document to the cryptographer; by study and ingenuity—that is by the use of that very intelligence which arbitrarily combined the cipher—he discovers the key; thus he too breaks up the artificial form, and draws from it the natural flow of a speech that is intelligible to all those who speak the same national tongue. And again, words as they flow from the inspired bosom of the poet, when they first appear in the freshness of the new artistic creation, do have something that is cryptic. That language is the poet’s own; it never had been used by another; a jargon before it is deciphered may be and is the language of a particular personality. But if we look more attentively, we shall see that in both cases the language is the language of the community. The inspired poet does indeed speak to himself, but with the consciousness of a potential audience, he utters a word to himself which must eventually be intelligible to others because it is by its nature intelligible. In the conditions in which the poet finds himself when speaking, he must 26 use that word and no other, and any other person in those same spiritual conditions would use, could not help using, the same word. For his word is the Word, the one that is required by the circumstances. And since he is a poet, a serious mind uttering a word which needs no translation, it will be the word of his own people first and then of humanity at large, in so far as its beauty will inspire men of different nations and of diverse speech with the desire of learning the poet’s own intimate language.
All this is true because the spirit is universal activity, which, far from separating men, unites them. It realises historically its universality in the community of the family, of the city, of the district, and of the nation, and in every form of intimate aggregation and of fusion which history may call into being.
Language may or may not be in the formation of a man’s nationality. What however must be ever present is the Will by which man every moment of his life renovates his own personality. Can the Will, by which each one of us is what he is, be his own Will, exclusively his own? Or is the Will itself, like language, not perhaps a national heirloom, but surely a common act, a communion of life, in such a way that we live our own life while living the life of the nation?
Of course, in the abstract, as I have explained above, my will is particular. But we must be reminded that Will is one thing, and faint wishing another. There 27 is such a thing as real effective volition, and there is something which strives to be such and fails; this latter we might call “velleity.” Real will does not rest satisfied with intentions, designs, or sterile desires; it acts, and by its effectiveness it reveals itself, and by its value shows its reality. And our being results not from velleities but from the real will. We are not what we might conditionally desire to be, but what we actually will to be. A velleity we might say is the will directed to an end which is either relatively or absolutely impossible; will is that which becomes effective.
But, then, when is it that my will really is effective, really wills? I am a citizen of a state which has power; this power, this will of the state expresses itself to me in laws which I must obey. The transgression of laws, if the state is in existence, bears with it the inevitable punishment of the transgressor, that is, the application of that law which the offender has refused to recognise. The state is supported by the inviolability of laws, of those sacred laws of the land which Socrates, as Plato tells us, taught his pupils to revere. I, then, as a citizen of my country, am bound by its Law in such a manner that to will its transgression is to aim at the impossible. If I did so, I should be indulging in vain velleities, in which my personality, far from realising itself, would on the contrary be disintegrated and scattered. I then want what the law wants me to will.
It makes no difference that, from a material and explicit point of view, a system of positive law does not coincide throughout with the sphere of my activity, and that therefore the major part of the standards of my conduct must be determined by the inner dictates of my particular conscience. For it is the Will of the State that determines the limits between the moral and the juridical, between what is imposed by the law of the land and what is demanded by the ethical conscience of the individual. And there is no limit which pre-exists to the line by which the constituent and legislative power of the State delimits the sphere subject to its sanctions. So that positively or negatively, either by command or by permission, our whole conduct is subject to that will by which the State establishes its reality.
But the Will of the State does not manifest itself solely by the enactments of positive legislation. It opens to private initiative such courses of action as may presumably be carried on satisfactorily without the impulse and the direct control of the sovereign power. But this concession has a temporary character, and the State is ever ready to intervene as soon as the private management ceases to be effective. So that even in the exercise of what seems the untrammelled will of the individual we discern the power of the State; and the individual is free to will something only because the sovereign power wants him to. 29 So that in reality this apparently autonomous particular will is the will of the state not expressed in terms of positive legislation, there being no need of such an expression. But since the essence of law is not in the expression of it, but in the will which dictates it, or observes it, or enforces the observance of it, in the will, in short, that wills it, it follows that the law exists even though unwritten.
In the way of conclusion, then, it may be said that I, as a citizen, have indeed a will of my own; but that upon further investigation my will is found to coincide exactly with the will of the State, and I want anything only in so far as the State wants me to want it.
Could it possibly be otherwise? Such an hypothesis overwhelms me at the very thought of it. For it would come to this,—that I exist and my state does not:—the state in which I was born, which sustained and protected me before I saw the light of day, which formed and guaranteed to me this communion of life; the state in which I have always lived, which has constituted this spiritual substance, this world in which I support myself, and which I trust will never fail me even though it does change constantly. I could, it is true, ignore this close bond by which I am tied and united to that great will which is the will of my country. I might balk and refuse to obey its laws. But acting thus, I would be indulging in what I have called velleities. My personality, unable to transform the 30 will of the state, would be overcome and suppressed by it.
Let us however assume for a moment that I might in the innermost depths of my being segregate myself. Averse to the common will and to the law of the land, I decide to proclaim over the boundless expanse of my thought the proud independence of my ego, as a lone, inaccessible summit rising out of the solitude. Up to a certain point this hypothesis is verified constantly by the manner in which my personality freely becomes actual. But even then I do not act as a particular being: it is the universal power that acts through my personal will.
For when we effectively observe the law, with true moral adhesion and in thorough sincerity, the law becomes part of ourselves, and our actions are the direct results of our convictions,—of the necessity of our convictions. For every time we act, inwardly we see that such must be our course; we must have a clear intuition of this necessity. The Saint who has no will but the will of God intuitively sees necessity in his norm. So does the sinner in his own way: but his norm is erroneous and therefore destined to fail. Every criminal in transgressing the law obeys a precept of his own making which is in opposition to the enactments of the state. And in so doing he creates almost a state of his own, different from the one which historically exists and must exist because of certain 31 good reasons, the excellence of which the criminal himself will subsequently realise. From the unfortunate point of view which he has taken, the transgressor is justified in acting as he does, and to such an extent that no one in his position, as he thinks, could possibly take exception to it. His will is also universal; if he were allowed to, if it were possible for him, he would establish new laws in place of the old ones: he would set up another state over the ruins of the one which he undermines. And what else does the tyrant when he destroys the freedom of the land and substitutes a new state for the crushed Commonwealth? In the same manner the rebel does away with the despot, starts a revolution and establishes liberty if he is successful; if not, he is overcome and must again conform his will to the will of that state which he has not been able to overthrow. So then, I exercise my true volition whenever the will of my state acts in my personal will, or rather when my will is the realisation of the will of a super-national group in which my state co-exists with other states, acting upon them, and being re-acted upon in reciprocal determinations. Or perhaps better still, when the entire world wills in me. For my will, I shall say it once again, is not individual but universal, and in the political community by which individuals are united into a higher individuality, historically distinct from other similar ones, we must see a form of universality.
For this reason, then, we are justified in saying that our personality is particular when we consider it abstractly, but that concretely it realises itself as a universal and therefore also as a national personality. This conception is of fundamental importance for those of us who live in the class-room and have made of teaching our life’s occupation, our ultimate end, and the real purpose of our existence. For in this conception of human activities we find the solution of a problem that has been present in the minds of thinking men ever since they began to reflect on the subject of education, or, in other words, from time immemorial. Education, we must remember, is not a fact, if by fact we mean, as we should, something that has happened, or is wont to happen, or must inevitably take place in virtue of the constancy of the law which governs it. We teachers are all sincerely convinced that education, as we speak of it, as it draws our interests, for which we work, and which we strive to improve, is not now what it was before. For there is no education that works out in conformity with natural laws. It is a free act of ours, the vocation of our souls, our duty as men. By it more nobly than by any other action man is enabled to actualise his superior nature. Animals do not educate: even though they do raise their young ones they yet form no family, no ethical organism with members differentiated and reciprocally correlated. But we freely, by an act of our conscience, recognise our children, 33 as we do our parents and our brothers; and we discern our fellow-beings in ourselves and ourselves in others; and by the growth of our own we unconsciously develop the personality of others; and therefore in the family, in the city, in any community, we constitute one spirit, with common needs that are satisfied by the operations of individual activity which is a social activity.
Man has been called a political or a social animal. He might therefore be considered also as an educating animal. For we do not merely educate the young ones, our young ones. Education being spiritual action bearing on the spirit, we really educate all those that are in any way and by any relations whatsoever connected with us, whether or not they belong to our family or to our school, as long as they concur with us in constituting a complete social entity. And we not only train those of minor age, who are as yet under tutelage, and still frequent the schools and are busily intent upon developing and improving their skill, their character, their culture. We also educate the adults, the grown-up men and women, the aged; for there is no man alive who does not daily add to his intellectual equipment, who does not derive some advantage from his human associations, who could not appropriately repeat the statement of the Roman emperor—nulla dies sine linea. Man always educates.
But here, as in every other manifestation of his spiritual activity, man does not behave in sole conformity 34 with instinct; he does not teach by abandoning himself, so to speak, to the force of natural determinism. He is fully aware of his own doings. He keeps his eyes open on his own function, so that he may attain the end by the shortest course, that he may without wasting his energies derive from them the best possible results. For man reflects.
It is evident then that education is not a scheme which permits pedagogues and pedants to interfere with their theories and lucubrations in this sacred task of love, which binds the parents to the children, brings old and young together, and keeps mankind united in its never ceasing ascent. Before the word came into being, the thing, as is usually the case, already existed. Before there was a science and an incumbent for the chair, there existed something that was the life of this science and therefore the justification of the chair. There was the intent reflectiveness of man, who in compliance with the divine saying, “Know thyself,” was becoming conscious of his own work, and therefore, unwilling to abandon his actions to external impulses, began to question everything. What the lower animal does naturally and unerringly through its infallible instinct, man achieves by the restless scrutiny of his mind. Ever thoughtful, always yearning for the better, he searches and explores, often stumbling in error, but ever rising out of it to a higher station of learning and of art. Our education is human, because 35 it is an action and not a fact; because it is a problem that we always solve and have to keep solving for ever.
This intuitive truth is demonstrated experimentally to us by the very lives we live as educators. As long as the freshness of our vocation lasts, as long as we can remain free from mechanical routine and from the impositions of fixed habits; as long as we are able to consider every new pupil with renewed interest, discover in him a different soul, unlike that of any other that we have previously come in contact with, and differing within itself from day to day; as long as it is still possible for us to enter the class-room thrilled and throbbing in the anticipation of new truths to reveal, of novel experiments to perform, of unexpected difficulties to overcome, in the full consciousness of the rapid motion of a life ever renewed in us and around us by the incoming generations, that flow to us and ebb away unceasingly towards life and death; so long shall we really live and love the teacher’s life, so long shall we demonstrate to ourselves and to others the truth I have already affirmed.
We teachers should be constantly on our guard against the dangers of routine, against the belief that we have but to repeat the same old story in the same class-room, to the same kind of distant, blank faces, staring at us in dreary uniformity from the same benches. We shall continue to be educators only as 36 long as we are able to feel that every instant of our life’s work is a new instant, and that education therefore is a problem that insistently stimulates our ingenuity to an ever renewed solution.
Now the most important of all tasks, ancient and modern, in the field of education is this,—the task of the teacher to represent the Universal to his pupils, the Universal, of course, as historically determined. Scientific thought, customs, laws, religious beliefs are brought before the pupil’s mind, not as the science, the laws, the religion of the teacher, but as those of humanity, of his country, of his period. And the pupil is the particular individual who, having entered upon the process of education, and being submitted, so to speak, to the yoke of the school, ceases to enjoy his former liberty in the pursuit of a spiritual endowment and in the formation of his character, and, in consequence of this educational pressure, bends compliantly before the common law. Hence the world-old opposition to the coercive power of the school, and the outcry raised from time to time against the privilege demanded by the educator, who on the strength of the assumedly higher quality of his beliefs, his learning, his taste, or his moral conscience, claims to interfere with the spontaneous development of a personality in quest of itself.
On one side education undoubtedly assumes the task of developing freedom, for the aim of education is to 37 produce men; and man is worthy of this name only when he is a master of himself, capable of initiating his own acts, responsible for his deeds, able to discern and assimilate the ideas which he accepts and professes, affirms and propagates, so that whatever he says, thinks, or does, really comes from him. Our children are said to be properly raised when they give evidence of being able to take care of themselves without the help of our guidance and advice. And we trust that we have accomplished our task as educators when our pupils have made our language their own and are able to tell us new things originally thought out by them. Freedom then must be the result of education.
But on the other hand, teaching implies an action exercised on another mind, and education cannot therefore result in the relinquishment and abandonment of the pupil. The educator must awaken interests that without him would for ever lie dormant. He must direct the learner towards an end which he would be unable to estimate properly if left alone, and must help him to overcome the otherwise unsurmountable obstacles that beset his progress. He must, in short, transfuse into the pupil something of himself, and out of his own spiritual substance create elements of the pupil’s character, mind, and will. But the acts which the pupil performs in consequence of his training will, in a certain measure, be those of his teacher; and education will therefore have proved destructive 38 of that very liberty with which the pupil was originally endowed. Is it not true that people constantly attribute to early family influences and to environment—that is, to education—the good and the bad in the deeds of the mature man?
This is the form in which the problem usually presents itself. The mind of the educator is therefore torn by two conflicting forces: the desire zealously to watch and control the pupil’s growth and direct his evolution along the course that seems quickest and surest for his complete development; and, on the other hand, the fear that he may kill fertile seeds, stifle with presumptuous interference the spontaneous life of the spirit in its personal impulses, and clothe the individual with a garment that is not adapted for him,—crush him under the weight of a leaden cape.
The solution of this problem must be sought in the concrete conception of individual personality; and this will be the theme of the next chapter. But I must at the very outset utter an emphatic word of warning. My solution does not remove all difficulties; it cannot be used as a key to open all doors. For as I have repeatedly stated, the value of education consists in the persistence of the problems, ever solved and yet ever clamouring for a new solution, so that we may never feel released from the obligation of thinking.
My solution must be simply accepted as affording a guidance by which different people may, along more 39 or less converging lines, approach their particular objectives. For the problem presents itself under ever-changing forms, and demands a continuous development, and almost a progressive interpretation of the concept which I am going to offer as an aid to its solution. No effort of thinking, once completed, will ever exonerate us from thinking, from thinking unceasingly, from thinking more and more intensively.
CHAPTER III
THE FUNDAMENTAL ANTINOMY OF EDUCATION
A more precise determination must now be given to the problem, touched upon in the preceding chapter, which might be called the fundamental antinomy of education, understanding by “antinomy” the conflict of two contradictory affirmations, either one of which appears to be true and irrefutable.
The two contradictory affirmations are (1) that man as the object of education is and must be free, and (2) that education denies man’s freedom. They might perhaps be better re-stated in this way: (1) Education presupposes freedom in man and strives to increase it. (2) Education treats man by ignoring the freedom he may originally be endowed with, and acts in such a way as to strip him entirely of it.
Each of the two propositions must be taken, not as an approximate affirmation, but as an exact enunciation of an irrefutable truth. Therefore freedom here means full and absolute liberty; and when we speak of the negation of freedom, we mean that education as such, and as far as it is carried, destroys the freedom of the pupil.
Let us first see precisely what is meant by this freedom which we attribute to man. Each one of us firmly even though obscurely possesses some conception of it. Every one of us, even though unfamiliar with the controversies that have raged for centuries on the question of free will, must have sometimes been compelled by the conditions of human life to face the difficulties that beset the concept of man’s freedom, and must have been led to question, if not to deny outright, the proposition that man is free. But on the other hand, every one of us has to admit that the experience of life has confirmed the belief in our freedom which for a moment had been shaken by doubt and perplexity; and that faith, instinctive and incoercible, outlives every time the onslaughts of negation.
By liberty we mean that power peculiar to man by which he moulds himself into his actual being and originates the series of facts in which every one of his actions becomes manifest. In nature, all facts, or, as they are called, all phenomena appear to us to be so interrelated as to constitute a universal system in which no phenomenon can ever be considered as absolutely beginning, but can in each case be traced back to a preceding phenomenon as its cause, or at any rate as the condition of its intelligibility. The condensation of the aqueous vapour in the cloud produces rain; but vapour would not condense without the action 42 of temperature, nor again would temperature be lowered without the concurrence of certain meteorological facts which modify it, etc.
But we believe on the other hand that man derives from no one but himself the principles and the causes of his actions. So that whenever we see in his conduct the necessary effects of causes that have acted on his character or momentarily on his will, we cease to consider such acts as partaking of that moral value through which man’s conduct is really human and completely sundered from the instinctive impulses of the lower animal, and even more so from the behaviour of the forces of inanimate matter.
We may in certain moments deny a man’s humanity, and see in his conduct only brutal impulse, fierce cruelty, and unreasoning bestiality. In such moments we cannot stop either to praise or to blame him. We do not even strive to reason with him, for we feel that arguments would produce no impression on his obdurate consciousness. Only through force can we defend ourselves from his violence; against him we must use the same weapon that we rely upon in our struggle with the wild beasts and the blind forces of nature. We then become aware that our soul refuses to recognise such an individual as a man. We esteem man to be such only when we believe that we can influence him by words, by arguments that are directed to reason, which is the birthright of man, and when 43 we are able to prevail upon those sentiments of his which, as peculiarly human, appear to be almost the foundation and the understructure of rational activity. This reason and these sentiments it must be remembered are the peculiar constituents of human personality. They cannot be imparted to man from the outside. They are in him from the very start even if only as germs which he must himself cultivate, and which will, when developed, enable him to act consciously, that is, with full knowledge of his acts. This knowledge is twofold, for he knows what he is doing, and he knows also how his actions must be judged. And so all the causes that bear on him are practically of no weight in determining a course which he will take, if he is a man, only after the approval of his own judgment. What is more natural than to avenge an insult, and to harbour hatred against an enemy? And yet from the viewpoint of morals, man is worthy of this name only in so far as he is able to resist his overpowering passions and to release himself from that force which compels him to offset harm with more harm, and meet hatred with hatred. He must pardon; he must love the enemy who harms him. Only when a man is capable of understanding the beauty of this pardon and of such love, only when, attracted by their beauty, he acts no longer in compliance with the force of instinctive nature, does he cease to count as a purely natural 44 being, and lift himself to a higher level into that moral world where he must progressively exhibit his human activities. Whether man is equal to this task or not, we must demand that he satisfy this requirement before we admit him into the society of mankind. He must have in himself the strength to withstand the pressure of external forces which may act on his will, on his personality, on that inner centre from which his personality moves towards us, speaks to us, and thus affirms its existence. We make these demands on him; and as we extol him when by his deeds he shows sufficient capacity for his human rôle, so we also blame him every time we find him through weakness yielding to these forces. And the import of our blame is that he is responsible for not having the power which he should have had.
It is of no importance that out of compassion, or through sympathy for human frailty, we lighten or even entirely remove the burden of our censure. Our disapproval of the deficiency, even though unexpressed, remains within us side by side with the conviction that the delinquent may do a great deal, nay, must, aided by us in the future, do everything in his power to meet successfully the opposing forces of evil. We surely cannot abandon the unfortunate wretch who through moral impotence—whether it be the craven submissiveness of the coward, or the undaunted violence of the overbearing brute—commits an evil deed. We feel it 45 our duty to watch over him and help him on the road to redemption, because of our firm conviction that he will eventually redeem himself; for he is after all a man like the rest of us, and possesses therefore within himself the source and principle of a life which will raise him from the slough in which he lies immersed.
There is, however, a pseudo-science which, on the basis of superficial and inaccurate observations, dogmatically asserts that certain forms of criminality give evidence of original and irremediable moral depravity; and that therefore persons tainted with it are fatally condemned never to heed sufficiently the voice of duty and ever to yield to their perverted instinct, which presses unrestrained from the depths of their being at the slightest provocation and on the occasion of the most insignificant clash with other human beings.
This is the doctrine of the modern school of criminal anthropology which has spread throughout the world the fame of some Italian writers. Though their influence is now on the wane, their observations on the pathological nature of criminal acts have contributed to establish the need of a more humane treatment of offenders,—more humane because rational and effective.
Their doctrine falls in with a series of systems which at all times, and always for materialistic motives,—materialistic even though disguised under religious and 46 theological robes,—have denied to man that power which we call liberty, compelling him therefore to bend down under the stress of universal determinism, and to behave as the drop that forever moves with the motion of the boundless ocean, an insignificant particle of the entire watery mass. What force intrinsic to this drop could ever stop it on the crest of the wave which hurls it forward? Man, they say, is no different from this drop: from the time of his birth to the instant of his death, hemmed in by all the beings of nature, acted upon by innumerable concurrent causes, he is pushed and dragged at every moment by the irresistible current of all the forces of the entire mass of the universe. At times he may delude himself into believing that he has lifted his consciousness out of the huge flood, that it is within his power to resist, to stop it as far as he is concerned, and to control it; that, in short, it rests with him to fashion his own destiny. But alas! this very belief, this illusion is the determined result of the forces acting upon him: it is the inevitable effect of the play of his representations,—representations which have not their origin in him, but have been impressed upon him by outside forces. So that the illusion of independence is but a mocking confirmation of the impossibility of escaping the rush of fatal currents.
I shall not here give a critical presentation of the arguments by which systems such as these have established the absence of freedom in man. In our 47 present need, a single remark will suffice, and will permit us, I believe, to cut the discussion short. A great German philosopher, who had conceived science and reality, which is the object of science, in such a way as to preclude the possibility of finding in reality a place for man’s freedom, noticed that freedom, in spite of all the difficulties which science encounters in accounting for it, corresponds and answers to an invincible certitude in our soul, invincible because a postulate of our moral conscience. That is to say, that whatever our scientific theories and ideas, we have a conscience which imposes a law upon us,—a law which, though not promulgated and sustained by any external force, or rather because of it, compels us in a manner which is absolute. This law is the moral law. It requires no speculative demonstration. The scrutiny of philosophers might not be helpful to it. It rises spontaneously and naturally from the intimate recesses of our spirit; and it demands from our will, from the will of the most uncouth man, an unconditional respect. What sense would there be in the word duty, if man were able to do only those things which his own nature, or worse still, nature in general, compelled him to do? The existence of duty implies a power to fulfil it. And the certitude of our moral obligations rests on the conviction that we have within us the power to meet them. We can answer the call of duty because we are free.
This consideration, important as it is, cannot however be considered as sufficient. For this moral conscience, this certitude with which the moral conscience affirms the existence of an unavoidable duty, might also be an illusion determined in us by natural causes. Nothing hinders us from thinking thus, and surely there is no contradiction implied in this explanation, which in fact because of its possibilities is offered by the philosophers of materialism.
But the need of liberty is not solely felt when we strive to conceive our moral obligations; freedom is not only the ground for existence, the raison d’être of moral law, as Kant thought—for he is the philosopher to whom I alluded above;—no! freedom is the condition of the entire life of the spirit. And the materialist who, having destroyed liberty as a condition of moral conduct, believes that he is still able to think, that his intellectual activity can proceed undisturbed after his faith in the objective value and in the reality of moral laws has been abandoned, such a materialistic thinker is totally mistaken. For without freedom, man not only is unable to speak of duty, but he cannot speak at all,—not even of his materialistic views. This is the same as saying that the negation of liberty is unthinkable.
A brief reflection will make this clearer. We speak to others or to ourselves in so far as we think, or say something or make affirmations. Let us suppose that 49 ideas be present to our minds (as people have sometimes imagined) without our looking at them, without our noticing them. Such ideas would have offered themselves in vain, in the same way that many material objects remain unseen before us, because we do not turn our gaze toward them. Every object of the mind, that is, every thought, can only be thought because in addition to it we too are in the mind: our mental activity is there, the ego of the thinking man, the subject which is ready to affirm the object. And thought proper consists in this affirmation of the object by the subject. Now, the subject, that is, man, must be as free in the affirmation of his thought, by which he thinks something, as he must be free in every one of his actions in order that his action be truly his, and really human. In fact, we demand of man that he give an account of his thoughts as well as of his deeds. We evaluate not only what he does, but also what he thinks; we praise him or we disapprove of him because of his sayings, that is, his thoughts, and we call upon him to correct those thoughts which he should not entertain. In this way we indicate our conviction that the thought of each one of us is not simply a logical consequence of its premises, not an effect determined by a psychic mechanism set in motion by the universal mechanism of which our individual psyche is a part; we are convinced that thought depends upon man, upon his capacity, upon 50 his personality, which is not controlled by any mechanical forces, nor subject to premises which he may no longer modify once he has accepted them. We are the masters of our thinking; and if the vigour of the human personality is indeed shown by the steadfast constancy whereby in practical life we pursue a hard and toilsome course toward an arduous goal, it is revealed just as much by the quickness, the readiness, the assiduousness, the lack of prejudice, the love which we manifest in our search after truth.
It has therefore been said that cognition in man has moral value, and that on the other hand the will is operative in the act of the intellect. Such distinctions are dangerous. But whether we call it will or intellect, the activity which makes us what we are, by which we actualise our personality, also by thinking, it is certain that it is a conscious and discriminating activity, through no force of gravity precipitating on its object, but approaching it with selective freedom of determination. And in the manner that every action aims at the good, because it seems good, and appears in contrast with evil, so every cognition is the affirmation of what to us is or seems to be a truth in opposition to error and falseness. Without the antithesis of good to evil there would be no moral action: without the antithesis of the true to the false there would be no cognition. But the existence of this antithesis implies a choice and therefore the liberty of choosing.
Should we deny freedom, and consequently abandon man to the determinism of the causes acting upon him, we should deny the possibility of distinguishing between good and evil, between true and false. The materialist, therefore, when he rejects freedom, is compelled to affirm that the value which moral conscience attributes to goodness is devoid of any real grounds, and what is worse, that his very statement is thereby stripped of all the value of truth. For he must be inwardly convinced that what he thinks has no reason to be thought and therefore cannot be thought.
The negation of freedom leads to this absurdum, to this impossible thought, which is the Thought that is being thought as such, and yet does not admit of being thought. Man, in so far as he thinks, affirms his faith in freedom, and every attempt on his part to uproot this faith from his soul is but a glaring confirmation of its existence. This observation, properly grasped, is sufficient to establish human freedom on a solid ground.
Freedom, moreover, which man needs in order to be human, cannot be, as some have supposed, a relative liberty, limited and restricted by certain conditions, for conditional liberty does not differ from slavery. Here indeed is the very crux of the problem. Every one would readily admit the existence of a limited freedom, and the divergence would then be reduced to a question of degree. But the fact is that freedom 52 must be absolute or not be at all. Matter, that is, every material object, is not free for the very reason that it is limited; whereas the spirit—every spiritual act—is free because it is infinite, and as such not relative to any thing, and therefore absolute.
Any limitation of the spirit would annihilate its liberty. The slave is such because his will is constrained within the bounds imposed upon it by the master’s volition. The human spirit is not free in the presence of nature because nature envelops it and enfolds it within narrow confines, which allow only a certain development; and this development therefore cannot be looked upon as a grant of nature but rather as a condemnation, in that it marks out boundaries which cannot be trespassed. The lower animal is not free because even if its actions seem to imply a rationality not very different from that of man, yet in reality its acts, differently from the doings of man, follow the straight line pre-established by instinct, which admits of no original power and allows no individual creation. If there is a limit, there must be something limiting and something limited; there must be a necessary relationship of one to the other, so that the thing limited can in no way free itself from the consequences of this relationship. These consequences are summed up in the impossibility of being all, or in other words in the necessity of remaining within limits, and to obey therefore the untransgressable laws set by one’s own nature. 53 This necessity which binds every natural being to the laws of its own nature, this impossibility of being aught else than what is appointed by nature, to be a wolf of necessity, and of necessity to be a lamb; this is the hard lot of natural beings, this is the destiny from which man is ransomed by the power of his freedom.
The sculptor in the fervour of his inspiration, which proceeds from the image that lives in his phantasy, searches eagerly for the marble with which, as though from the very bosom of nature, he may call to life the phantom of his mind. He fails in his search, and his chisel remains, must need remain, inactive. The artist then in the utmost intensity of his creation is baffled by an external impediment, by an obstacle of nature which therefore seems to have the power of limiting his creative power. But when we consider what the artist has created in the statue itself, in this living image of marble, we find nothing that is material. The artist has transfused into the stone an idea, a sentiment, a soul, which we, under the influence of the ravishing power of artistic beauty, are able to seize to the exclusion of all material attributes; as though we no longer possessed eyes for the whiteness of the marble and were deprived of the muscle which gives us the impression of its physical weight. When we are able thus to spiritualise the statue—and we do so every time we get to know it as a work of art—then all limitations that might be imposed on the creative power of 54 the artist disappear. For we see no longer the artist’s phantasy, and then his arm, and then his hand, his chisel, the block which he is carving; all we see is the phantasy soaring untrammelled in the infinite world of the artist, with his arm, his hand, his marble, his universe which is totally different from the universe in which the men live who quarry the marble and move it and sell it.
There is a point of view from which we see the spirit limited and enslaved by the conditions in which its life is unfolded. But there is a higher point of view to which we must ascend if we are bent on discovering our freedom. If we say, as the psychologists do, this is a soul and this is a body, here are sensations, there is motion, this is thought within us and that is the world outside of us, then we are obliged to consider the spirit as conditioned by physical happenings to which in some manner our internal determinations correspond. It is not possible to see without eyes and without the light that strikes them. It is equally impossible not to see when we have eyes and are surrounded by light, and according to the greater or lesser velocity of the luminous waves, we shall of necessity discern now one colour and now another. And the objects thus seen by us will determine our thoughts; and in turn our volitions will depend upon these thoughts; and our characters will be shaped accordingly, and we shall be this or that man in conformity with the determination of 55 circumstances. Man, according to this conception, will be the result of time, of place, of environment, of everything except of his own self.
But there is a higher point of view than the one I have just described, and to it we must rise, if we mean to understand our nature,—this marvellous human nature which was first disclosed to our consciousness at the advent of Christianity and in the course of time made more and more manifest, until it now loudly proclaims in us our human dignity exalted above the forces of nature, and is empowered by its cognitive faculty to dominate these forces, which must bend to man’s purposes without ever blocking or obstructing his progress. Whosoever says: here is a body and there is a soul—two things, one outside of the other—such a man does not consider that these two things are two terms distinguished and differentiated by thought in the bosom of thought, that is to say, of the soul: of that soul which is truer than the other for the obvious reason that the latter thinks and therefore reveals its soul-nature by its own acts, whereas the former is the object of thinking, is a thing thought, and may therefore be a fallacious entity, an idolon, and a simple ens rationis, like so many other things that are thought and are subsequently found to have no kind of subsistence. In speaking of sensation and of motion which generates or somehow conditions sensation, we lose sight of the fact that sensation is 56 truly enough a determination of consciousness, but in the same manner as the motion which is encountered in consciousness when the latter, in thinking, among other things thinks the displacement of objects in space.
For everything is within consciousness, and no way can be devised of issuing forth from it. We say that the brain is external to consciousness, and that the cranium encloses the brain, which in turn is enveloped by space luminous and airy, space filled with beautiful plants and beautiful animals; yet the fact remains that brain and skull and everything else are the potential or actual object of our thinking faculty, and cannot but remain therefore within that consciousness to which for a moment we supposed them to be external. We may start thinking, keeping in mind this indestructible substance of our thought; and as we proceed from this centre in which we have placed ourselves as subjects of thinking, and advance towards an ever-receding horizon, do we ever come in sight of the point where we must pause and say: “Here my thought ends; here something begins that is other than my thought”? Thought halts only before mystery. But even then it thinks it as mystery, and thinking it, transforms it, and then proceeds, and so never really stops.
Such being the true life of the spirit, rightly have we called it universal. At every throb it soars through the infinite, without ever encountering aught else than its own spiritual actualisations. In this life, such as we 57 see it from the interior when we do not fantastically materialise it with our imaginations, the spirit is free because it is infinite.
Education then posits this liberty in the pupil, for it presupposes in him a susceptibility of development,—educability, as we may call it. The learner could not possibly be educable, that is, susceptible of receiving instruction, unless he were able to think. But thinking, we have already seen, signifies freedom. And not only is freedom presupposed by the educator, but it is the very thing he is aiming at in his work. As a result of his teaching, liberty must be developed in the same manner that the capacity for thinking and all modes of spiritual activity are developed. For the development of thought is a development of reflection, a constant increase of control over our own ideas, over the content of our consciousness, over our character, over our whole being in relation to every other being. And this growth of power is what we mean when we speak of the development of our freedom. It has been said, in fact, that education consists in liberating the individual from his instincts. Surely, education is the formation of man, and when we say man we mean liberty.
Here we stumble upon our antinomy. How are we to reconcile this presupposition and this aim of the educator with his interference in the personality of the pupil? This interposition surely signifies that the disciple 58 must not be left to himself and to his own resources; that he has to clash with something or somebody that is not his own personality. Education implies a dualism of terms, the teacher and the learner; and it is this dualism which destroys the freedom, which sets a limit, and therefore annihilates infinity in which freedom consists. The disciple who encounters a stronger mastering will, an intellect equipped with a multitude of ideas, with an experience which forestalls his own powers of observation, and his innate zeal for investigation, sees in this more potent personality either a barrier obstructing his progress towards a goal which he spontaneously would attain; or else a goad which hurries him along the way which he would have indeed chosen of his own accord, but along which he would have liked to advance freely, calmly, joyously, as our Vittorino da Feltre would have it, and without any unwelcome compulsion. This pupil then would want to be left alone in order that he might be free, as free as God when as yet the world was not and he created it out of nothing by his joyous fiat, symbol of the loftiest spiritual liberty.
For these reasons we have come to believe that the most serious problem of education is the agreement between the liberty of the pupil and the authority of the teacher. Therefore great masters who meditated on the subject of education, from Rousseau to Tolstoi, have exalted the rights of liberty, but have fallen into 59 the opposite extreme of denying the duty to authority, and have pursued in their abstractions a vague and unrealisable ideal of negative education.
But we must not cling to negatives. It should be our purpose to construct, not to destroy. The school, this glorious inheritance of human experiences, this ever-glowing hearth where the human spirit kindles and sublimates life as an object of constant criticism and of undying love, may be transformed, but cannot be destroyed. Let the school live, and let us cling to the teacher and maintain his authority, which limits the spontaneity and the liberty of the pupil. For this limitation is only apparent.
Apparent, however, when we deal with true education. For the school has for centuries been the victim of a grave injustice. People have been led to consider the classroom as a place of confinement and of punishment, and teachers have been cruelly lashed by the scourge of ridicule cracked in the face of pedantry. Through this injustice, the school has been burdened with faults that are not its own, and teachers, genuine educators, have been confused with the pedantic drill-masters that are the negation of intelligent education and of inspired ethical discipline. In order to see whether education really limits the free activity of the pupil, we must not consider abstractly any school, which may not be after all a school. We must examine an institution at the moment and in the act which 60 realises its significance—when the instructor teaches and the pupils are learning. Such a moment should at least hypothetically be granted to exist.
Let us take a concrete example and consider a teacher in the act of giving lessons in Italian. Where is this something which I have called the Italian language? In the grammar, perchance? Or in the dictionary? Yes, partly. Provided grammar can invest its rules with the life of the individual examples that together constitute the expressive power of the living language; and provided the dictionary does not wither up all words in the arid abstraction of alphabetical classification; does not hang each of them by itself as limbs torn from the living body of the speech in which they had so often resounded and to which they will be joined again in the fulness of life and expressiveness; but does instead incorporate, as every good dictionary should, complete phrases, living utterances of great authors or perhaps of that nameless many-souled writer that somewhat confusedly is called the people.
But more than in the grammar and more than in the dictionary, the word is and exists in the writers themselves. The teacher should there point it out, as he guides his pupils through the authors who were able to express most powerfully our common thoughts. To his students who are striving to learn the language—that is the writers—he reads for example the poems of Leopardi. The poet’s word, his soul hovers over the 61 classroom, as the master reads. It penetrates into the minds of the pupils, hushes every other sentiment, removes every other thought, and throbs within them, stirs them, arouses them. It becomes one with the soul of each pupil, which speaks to itself a language of its own, using, truly enough, the words of Leopardi, but of a Leopardi who is peculiar to each of the listeners. Under this spell, the pupil who hears the poet’s word echoing in the depths of his being, will he stop to reflect that this word is the echo of an echo? That he is under the influence of something repeated after a first utterance? Our own experience answers: No! But if any of the audience become absent-minded, if they should lose the rapt delight of poetical exaltation communicated to their soul by the teacher’s voice, and should say that the word they hear is not their own but the master’s, or rather, the poet’s, then they would commit a serious blunder. For the word they intently listen to in their soul is their own, exclusively their own. Leopardi does not impart any poesy to him who, through his love, his study, and the intensity of his feelings, is unable to live his own poetry. And Leopardi (or the teacher who reads him) is not materially external to the enraptured listener; he is his own Leopardi, such as he has been able to create for himself. The master, as St. Augustine long ago warned us, is within us.
He is within us even if we see him in front of us, away from us seated in his chair. For in so far as he 62 is a real teacher, he is ever the object of our consciousness, surrounded and uplifted in our spirit by the reverence of our feelings and by our trustful affection. He is our teacher, he is our very soul.
The dualism then is non-existent when we are educating. We do notice it before, and we are thus brought to examine the antinomy; but the difficulty is removed by the very act of education itself, by the first word that comes to the pupils’ ears from the lips of the teacher. The dualism however cannot be resolved if the master’s word fails to reach the pupils’ soul, but then under those circumstances there is no education. But even in such cases, if the teacher is not sluggish, if he displays a real spiritual power, the abiding existence of the barrier between the two minds proves helpful to the spiritual growth of the learner, who, because of his incoercible freedom, is impelled by the insufficiency of the master to affirm his personality with increased vigour. So that the school is a hearth of liberty, even in spite of the intentions of the teacher. A school without freedom is a lifeless institution.
CHAPTER IV
REALISM AND IDEALISM IN THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE
We found it necessary in the previous chapter to pass from the abstract to the concrete in order to arrive at the truth. The universality of the individual was made clear when for the empirical concept of the individual, abstractly considered, we substituted the deeper and more speculative one of the individual himself in the concreteness of his relationships. In like manner, the fundamental antinomy of education was resolved as soon as we replaced the abstract idea of the dualism of teacher and pupil, by the idea of their intrinsic, profound, unseverable unity as it gradually works out and is actualised in the process of education. We were enabled therefore to conclude that the real teacher is within the soul of the pupil, or, better still, the teacher is the pupil himself in the dynamism of his development. So that, far from limiting the autonomy of the disciple, the master, as the propulsive element of the pupil’s spontaneity, penetrates his personality, not to suppress it, but to help its impulses and facilitate its infinite development.
The same method of resorting to the concrete now 64 leads us to the determination of a third essential element in the process of education. We have spoken of the master, and we have spoken of the pupil,—of the latter as becoming actual as universal personality, of the former as becoming identical with this same personality. We must now take up the connecting link between the two, that is, culture. By culture we mean the content of education, the presupposed heirloom which in the course of time must pass from the teacher to the pupil. This spiritual content, in being apprehended, appears under different aspects: as erudition and information; as formation of personal capacities and training of spiritual activities; as art and science; as experience of life and as concept and ideal of existence; as simple cognition and as a norm of conduct. It includes everything that comes within the scope of teaching, and from whose value education derives its peculiar worth.
Culture, so defined, may be conceived of in two ways; and in as much as their differences are highly significant in the sphere of education as elsewhere, we must now somewhat carefully consider them.
These two ways correspond to two opposite conceptions of reality, and as such they pertain to philosophy. But men in general constantly have recourse to them, and so it happens that people frequently indulge in philosophic speculations without knowing it; and much philosophising goes on outside of the schools of the 65 specialists, who are few compared to the great number of those who in their own way handle genuine concepts of philosophy.
Let us begin from the most obvious of these concepts, from the one which is fundamental and original to the human mind. Our whole life, if we consider the data of experience, seems to unfold itself on the substratum of a natural world, which therefore, far from depending on human life, represents the very condition of it. In order to live, to act, to produce, or in any way to exercise an influence on the external world, we must, first of all, be born. Our birth is the effect of a life which is not our life, which step by step rises and grows and spreads until it gathers all nature within itself. This nature existed before we were born, it will continue to be after we are all dead. Men draw their life from an organic and inorganic nature which had to exist in order that they might come into being. When nature will cease to provide these conditions, human life, according to this point of view, will come to an end; but nature, transformed, chilled, darkened, dead, will yet continue to be.
On this living trunk of nature our own life is grafted; animals come into existence, and among animals the human species. Each of us, as he comes into the world, finds this nature, developed, abundant, diversified in millions of forms, traversed by innumerable forces, organised up to the most highly developed structures, 66 man included. We find this nature, and we begin to study it. We examine its parts one by one, their complexity, and the difference of their functioning. For each one of them has its peculiar way of being and of acting; it has its “laws.” The aggregate of these laws, mutually corresponding, and integrating one another, constitutes the natural world—reality—as it stands before us. With this external reality we strive to become acquainted; and in order that we may live in it we either adapt ourselves to it, or adapt its conditions to ourselves. In this reality too we acquire the knowledge of the needs of our organism and of the means by which they may be satisfied,—the ratio, so to speak, between natural desires and controlled resources.
We are also told that our organism is in constant change and hurries on to its destination, to our death, which we abhor as passionately as we cherish life, but which we accept because such is the law of human life, fatal and inexorable; for reality is what it is, and we must adapt ourselves to it.
But if reality appears as constituted before us, as therefore conditioning our existence, and as existing independently of us; if it is indifferent to reality whether we be in it or not; if we are truly extraneous to it, the conclusion must then be drawn that we, from the outside, presume to know reality and to move about it without being this reality itself or any part of it. For 67 all reality is thought by us as a connected whole, though indeed vaguely; in its totality it is regarded as an object known to us, but existing in utter independence of this knowledge of ours. Its whole process is therefore complete in objective nature, which conditions our spiritual life, and this in turn can mirror reality but can never be a part of it.
This then is the primitive and fundamental concept that the human mind forms of reality. In consequence of it man feels that he is enclosed within himself: he knows he is producing the dreams and the fair images of art; that he can construct inwardly abstract geometrical figures and numbers; that he can generate ideas. But he also feels that between these ideal creations of his own, and the solid, sound, real living forms of nature, there is an abyss. He must, indeed, fall in with nature, in the process of generating other living beings of flesh and blood. He must avail himself of nature by first submitting to its unfailing laws, if he intends to give body, that is, real existence, to the ideal conceptions of his intelligence. On one side then we have thought; on the opposite side reality,—that reality, Nature.
This conception at a certain moment is transformed but not substantially changed. As we begin to reflect, we notice that this nature, as known to us, is not the real external nature, the nature which is unfolded in time and space, which we see before our eyes, an object 68 perceptible by our bodily senses. We conclude then, that nature as known to us is an idea; that Nature is one thing and the idea of nature another. And if we think this perceptible nature and have faith in its reality and in the reality of its determinations, this nature in which reality is made to consist is the nature which is within our thought,—the idea of nature; or in other words, thought considered as the content of our mind. This thought is the aim of all the inquiries by which we strive to become thoroughly acquainted with nature, and which we finally discover or at least ought to discover when we succeed in attaining true knowledge. We say that we know nature only when we are able to recognise an idea in nature: that is, an idea in each of its elements, and a system of ideas in the whole of nature. So that what we know is not really nature as it presents itself to our senses, still less nature as it is, before it has impressed our senses; but nature as disclosed to us by thought, as it exists in thought—i.e., the idea. And this idea must be real, otherwise nature, which has its truth in the idea, could not be real. Not only is it real, it is that reality itself which a moment ago we were led to think of as consisting in external perceptible nature.
This reality makes the life of our thought possible, but it is not a product of this life. It is a condition and a prerequisite of thought, and as such it does not exist because we think it: but rather we are able to 69 think it because it exists. It is eternal truth, at first unknown to man, then by him desired. In quest of it he gradually lifts on all sides the veil which hides it from his eyes, without however hoping that it will ever entirely disclose to him its divine countenance.
According to this transformed point of view, then, reality, which in the first instance appeared to be natural, that is physical or material, has now become ideal. But even thus it remains extraneous to thought, and unconcerned with the presence or the absence of it; transcending the entire life of the human spirit, and incessantly subject to the danger of error. Whereas the idea as a complexus of all ideas that can be thought (but have not been thought, or rather have not all been thought) is the beacon of light that guides the way of man in the ocean of life; it is Truth pure and perfect.
This idea evidently must not be confused with the purely subjective ideas which we spoke of above, and which as such are extraneous to reality. This idea is reality itself idealised. It is to this idea, for instance, that we all appeal when we affirm the existence of a justice superior to that of which man is capable, of a justice in behalf of which man is in duty bound to sacrifice his private interests, and even his life. This idea we have in mind when we speak of a sacred and inviolable right, whereas in daily practice there is perhaps no right which is not more or less trampled upon. This idea 70 is before us when we consider truth in general: truth which is indeed real, even though it may not be seen or felt, much more real than physical nature, for nature comes to life and dies and constantly changes, while truth is motionless, impassible, eternal. In its bosom then we must try to find everything that we want to accept as not illusory.
But in substituting the conception of an ideal reality for the conception of a material one, reality as a whole continues to be something contradistinguished from us, an object indeed of our thoughts, but one which cannot be conceived as it is in itself except by abstracting it from our own thought.
We, then, who open our eager eyes in the endeavour to discover, to know, to orient ourselves, to live in the midst of a known and familiar world; we, thinking beings, and not simply things of nature, beings who as such affirm our personality in the very act of saying We, we then are of less account than the earthworms which crawl along until they die unknown to the foot that crushes them. We are nothing because we do not belong to reality; we deceive ourselves into believing that we are doing something on our own account, but in truth we renounce every desire of doing or creating something original, something we might really call ours; and we abandon ourselves, we drift away confused with external reality and submerged under the irresistible current of its laws.
This conception of life, which I have given only in its barest outline, is a very common one. For thousands of years it has persisted in the philosophical field, the nourishment and the torment of the greatest intellects of humanity. But humanity could not rest satisfied with a world conceived in such a manner; with a world which, whether we call it nature or idea, is at bottom always nature. For by nature we understand not only that reality which is in space and time, but also every reality which is not the product of our will, nor the result in general of that spiritual activity, which in a manner peculiar to all human acts reveals a diversity of values, extending from the sublimity of heroism and of genius to the lowest depths of cowardice and to the gloom of sloth. Nor can it be considered as the product or result of a process; for it is immediate reality, original and immutable. In a world which is Nature, man is an intruder, a stranger without rights, without even real existence. As a being, he is destined to be suppressed; nay, he does not even exist. And his life, with all his aspirations, his needs, his claims, is but a fallacious illusion which will sooner or later collapse. Man cannot help succumbing in a world where there is no place for him. Therefore a more or less cloudy gust of pessimism lowers over the consciousness that has stopped at this conception of reality. Leopardi is the most eloquent expression of the intense misery to which 72 man is condemned in such circumstances, or to which rather he condemns himself. He condemns himself because he has it in his power to conceive reality otherwise. For let him ponder seriously and he will succeed in convincing himself that the naturalistic conception of reality is absurd. Philosophy has so demonstrated this truth, that he who now strives eagerly to attain a moral point of view in harmony with established principles can no longer repeat that note of pessimism, can no longer assert that the world is nature, or that it is the eternal idea from which nature is derived and by which it is made intelligible. Such views are no longer tenable.
The teacher who, because of his lofty mission, claims the right of forming souls, of arousing those powerful moral energies which alone empower man to live as a human being, may not, must not be ignorant of the fact that the contention of naturalism, which makes of the world an abstract reality, presupposed by the human spirit and therefore anterior and indifferent to it, is a belief that has been superseded and surpassed by modern thought. The teacher too can easily grasp this view, for in gathering all the arguments by which, along different lines, the new conception of reality has been attained, we find that the whole matter reduces itself to a simple and very easy reflection. Very easy in itself, though it may seem difficult to the greater part of us,—to the superficial thinkers, to the absent-minded, 73 to those who lack the strength necessary to face the great responsibility imposed upon us by the truth which is derived from this reflection.
For naturalism reduces itself to the affirmation that we think nature, but do not ourselves exist; nature alone exists. We do not exist and yet we think, and we think of nature as existing. We do not exist and yet nature exists, of whose existence we have no other testimony than our thoughts. And if thought is a shadow, what will reality then be? The “dream of a shadow,” in the words of the Greek poet. Is it possible for us to stop at this conclusion? Is it possible for an inexistent thing to vouch for the existence of something which we know only from its attestations? Such is the absurd position we are forced into when we assume that Thought, in equipoise with reality, remains outside of it and leaves it out of its own self.
We give the name of realism to that manner of thinking which makes all reality consist in an external existence, abstract and separate from thought, and makes real knowledge consist in the conforming of our ideas to external things. By idealism on the other hand we mean that higher point of view from which we discover the impossibility of conceiving a reality which is not the reality of thought itself. For it reality is not the idea as a mere object of the mind, which therefore can exist outside of the mind, and must exist there in order that the mind may eventually have the means 74 of thinking it. Reality is this very thought itself by which we think all things, and which surely must be something if by means of it we want somehow to affirm any reality whatsoever, and must be a real activity if, in the act of thinking, it will not entangle itself in the enchanted web of dreams, but will instead give us the life of the real world. If it is not conceivable that such activity could ever go forth from itself and penetrate the presumably existent world of matter, then it means that it has no need of issuing from itself, in order to come in contact with real existence; it means that the reality which we call material and assume to be external to thought is in some way illusory; and that the true reality is that which is being realised by the activity of thought itself. For there is no way of thinking any reality except by setting thought as the basis of it.
This is the conception, or, if you will, the faith, not only of modern philosophy, but of consciousness itself in general, of that consciousness which was gradually formed and moulded under the influence of the deeply moral sentiment of life fostered by Christianity. For it was Christ that first opposed to nature and to the flesh a truer reality,—not the world in which man is born, but that world to which he must uplift himself: that world in which he has to live, not because it is anterior to him, but because he must create it by his will: and this world is the kingdom of the spirit.
In accordance with this conception there is, properly speaking, no reality: there is a spirit which creates reality, which therefore is self-made and not the product of nature. The realist speaks of external existence, of a world into which man is admitted and to which he must adapt himself. But the idealist knows only what the spirit does, what man acts. A nature, ever at work in the progress of the spirit, throbs in the soul of man, who with his intellect and his will re-creates it by its restless, unceasing motion. It is a world which is never created, because the entire past flows and becomes actual in that form which is peculiar to it and in which it exists, namely, the present,—history in the incessant rhythm of its becoming, in the ever-living act of self-production.
On what side of the controversy should the teacher stand who means to absorb into his soul the life of the school? Will he with the realists believe in a reality which must be observed and verified? Or will he as an idealist trust that the only world is the one which is to be constructed by him; that in all this task he can rely only on the creative activity of the spirit that moves within us, ever unsatisfied with what is, incessantly aspiring for what does not yet exist, for what must come to be as being the only thing which deserves to exist and to fulfil life?
There are then these two ways of conceiving culture, the realistic and the idealistic. By the former we are 76 led to imagine that man’s spirit is empty, and that no nourishment can come to it except from the outside world, from those external elements which he can acquire because they exist prior to the activity by which he assimilates them. The latter, admitting only what is derived from the developing life of the spirit, can conceive of culture solely as an immanent product of this very life, and separable from it only by abstraction.
It is evident that the ordinarily accepted view of educators to-day is realistic rather than otherwise. The ideal and therefore the historical origin of the school itself is intimately connected with the realistic presupposition. For the school begins when man for the first time becomes aware of the existence of a store of accumulated culture which should be protected from dispersion. Grammar, for instance, exists before the notion of teaching it arises. Men already possess a language when they make up their minds to teach it to their children. Self-taught and inventive genius, by new observation and discoveries, gives rise to new disciplines; and men, discovering the value of such disciplines, determine to institute a school where they may be cultivated and handed down to the coming generations. In general then, first comes knowledge; then the school as a depository of it. It may be granted that the progress of learning is made possible or at least accentuated by educational institutions; but the fact remains 77 that the school is founded on pre-existing knowledge. Science, arts, customs must exist before they can be taught to others, and they do exist, but not in the spirit of the one who is to acquire them, who must appropriate them as they are in themselves. The Iliad exists: Homer sang: the poems attributed to him were collected into an epic from which we learn of the beliefs, of the aspirations, and of the memories that were dear to the ancient Greeks, and every cultivated person to-day must derive from them his own spiritual substance. The teacher shows to his pupils how best to read, how to understand that epic which is a treasure of the past bequeathed not only to the modern Greeks but to humanity in general. For we all profit from this inherited spiritual wealth in the same manner that every man that comes into the world enjoys the light and the heat of the sun which he surely did not kindle in heaven.
The fact that culture, as the subject matter of education, exists before the exercise of that spiritual activity which can be educated only through its means, seems to the realist a condition without which the school cannot arise. Only as culture develops and spreads does the school grow and expand; and, in the progress of civilisation, as culture becomes specialised, the school is correspondingly differentiated into institutions of ever-growing specialisation. For the school can but follow and reflect the advance of science, of letters, of art,—of 78 humanity in general in all it strives to perpetuate.
All this evidently can be maintained only from the point of view of the realist. For him the school is concerned not with those that already know and therefore have no need of it, but for those who are still ignorant. For them it is instituted; it ministers to their needs, and is therefore adjusted in the direction in which it believes their spirit should be oriented. In the school of physicians, there is not medicine but the learning of it, for if the art of healing were already mastered as it seems to be in the case of the professors, there would be no need of a medical school. There is indeed the professor in the lecture room; but he is there only for the learners, and his rôle has no meaning except in relation to their needs. He is the possessor of science, and as such he teaches and does not learn. The school then is not the possession of culture, but the development of a spiritual life aspiring to this possession; and this aspiration is possible because of the existence of the teacher who has already mastered it, who possesses it, not as his own property, but as social wealth entrusted to him for the use of everybody. He himself is only an instrument of communication. Culture antedates him; it does so even when he is the author of it. For it is not possible for him to impart it to others until he has first elaborated it himself, and not until the merits of his contributions have been in part at least recognised by the world.
The school to the realist presupposes the library. The teacher needs books, plenty of books in order to increase his knowledge and thus become better acquainted with that world through which he has to pilot his pupils. In the books, then, in the long shelves, culture lives: in the innumerable volumes that no one ever hopes to read; in the shelves which contain a world of beautiful things, and so valuable that man, as Horace says, should spend sleepless nights in order to acquire them, should endure cold and heat, fatigue and sacrifice. For humanity, we are told, lives in those volumes to which the teacher must somehow link himself if he intends to advance properly, to live the life which our forefathers have generously endowed for us, and to protect our spiritual inheritance from dispersion. In this atmosphere he must live; he must plunge in that spiritual sea which rolls limitless across the centuries. The pupil looks out upon this ocean which allures every man who is born to the life of culture. At first he clings to the shore, dreads the water, and asks to be helped until he has at least become familiar with the element. Who will encourage the beginner to leave the dry land and plunge into the deep where he would meet sure destruction? He must first be trained in some sheltered cove, where protected from the violence of the tumultuous surf, from the might of the indivisible mass of the ocean, he may gradually learn the ways of the deep.
The student must accordingly begin with a definite book; he must be saved from the haunting power of the library, which draws the youthful mind towards every volume, towards every subject. In the multitude of books, not all of them read, not all of them readable, thought founders, sees nothing, thinks nothing, is unable to rest in any of the things which he imagines exist in the vast library shelves. He must choose. Let him select, say, Dante. He reads the Divine Comedy, the poem written by that great Italian who has been dead these six centuries and now rests at Ravenna, no longer mindful of his Francesca, of his magnanimous Farinata, of his kindly master Brunetto, or of Beatrice. Dante created his miraculous world, he breathed life into his characters, wrote the last line of his last canto, smiled in rapture at the divine beauty of his creation, now complete and perfect, and died. His manuscript was copied thousands of times; and after the discovery of printing, millions of copies were made. In one of these we now are able to find it, this divine poem, just as it was written,—for we want it exactly as it flowed from his pen without the change of a letter, without the omission of a comma. And this volume is an example of what exists in a library,—of the culture that teachers strive to find there, and thence communicate to their pupils!—something that belongs to the world, something which is a part of reality, which men therefore can grasp, if they want to, 81 just as they can get to know the stars and the plants, and all things of nature. The Divine Comedy can be realistically conceived in respect to us who open the volume and prepare to read it, for the reason that it already exists and arouses our desire. If we had left it on the shelf where it was resting, it would have had exactly the same existence. What we find in the volume, as we read of that land of the dead which is much more living than all the living beings who surround us in our daily life, would all of it have been in that book, would have continued to be there, even if we had never opened it.
But is it really so? If we reflect a while we shall see that this is not the case. The book contains exactly what we find there, what we are capable of finding there, nothing more, nothing less. Different persons discover in it different things, but it is nevertheless obvious that for each individual the book contains only what he finds in it; and in order to be able to say that the book contains more than what a given reader discovers in it, it is necessary that some other person should find that something more; and that the text contains this additional beauty is only true for him who discovered it and for those who seek it after him.
Dante waited for centuries for De Sanctis[1] to appear and to disclose the meaning of Francesca’s words. 82 Therefore it has been said that to understand Dante is a sign of greatness. Abstractly considered, of course, the poet is what he is, but only in the abstract. In the concrete, Dante is the author whom we admire and appreciate proportionately to our power. For as we read the poem in accordance with our training, and the development of our personality, Dante is grafted on a trunk which did not exist before us, which, on the contrary, is our very life; and before this life is realised, evidently none of those things can be found there which actually come into being in the process of its realisation. So that if we had not read the book, far from its being true that everything we found in it would still continue to be there, nothing would remain of what we find in it, absolutely nothing.
We have said nothing of “what we find.” But if we consider the matter we shall see that what we find is everything; everything for me; everything for everybody. Only that can come out of a book which the reader with his soul and with his labours is capable of getting out of it; and in consequence of these labours and in virtue of his soul he is able to say that a certain book has a content. In fact, to return to our example, the Divine Comedy which we know, the only one which we can know, the only one which exists, is the one which lives in our souls, and which is a function of the criticism that interprets it, understands it, and appreciates it. That Divine Comedy therefore did not 83 close the circle of its life on the day when Dante wrote the last line of the last canto; it continued to live, still continues to exist in the history, in the life of the spirit. Its life never draws to a close. The poem is never finished.
This is true of the poem of Dante; it is true of everything which we conceive of as inherited from our great predecessors, from those who built up the patrimony of human culture. Culture then is not before us, a treasure ready to be excavated from the depths of the earth, awaiting to be revealed to us. Culture is what we ourselves are making; it is the life of our spirit.
Abstract culture, on the contrary, is merely as realistically conceived. It slumbers in the libraries, in the sepulchres of those who lived, who passed away and created it once for all. It belongs to the past, to the things that have died. But the past, if we really mean to grasp it, if we want to see it close by as something that is and not merely as an abstraction, the past itself, becoming the present, made into that actuality which we call living memory, is history,—history constructed by us, meditated by us, re-created by us, in accordance with our abilities;—and with our powers of evocation we awaken the past from its slumber and breathe into it the life of the spiritual interests, of the ideas, of the sentiments that are, after all, the living substance in which the past really survives, in which it is real. In the same way the only culture that can be bestowed 84 upon the spirit, the only one that admits of being concretely taught and learned, the only one that can be sought, because it is the only one that really exists, is idealistic culture. It is not in books, nor in the brains of others. It exists in our own souls as it is gradually being formed there. It cannot therefore be an antecedent to the activity of the spirit, since it consists in this very activity.
This must be the faith of all those who cannot bring themselves to believe that they are strangers in this world, and that they have come here to exercise a function which is not their own. For the world in general, and the sphere of culture in particular, is not completed when we arrive upon the scene. This is why human life has a value, why education is a mission.