[50] Compendio di Etica, pp. 48, 96, 284-285.
[CONCLUSION]
The Philosophy of the Spirit as the whole of Philosophy.
With the Philosophy of the practical terminates the exposition that we had proposed to give of the Philosophy of the Spirit; and the exposition of the whole of Philosophy also terminates, because the Spirit is the whole of Reality.
Here at the end, this proposition has no need of such proof or verification as is customary in calculation. Because the proof of Philosophy is intrinsic to it and consists of the reciprocal confronting of the development of thought and its demands, between the System and Logic. And Logic, as we know, if it be in a certain sense the whole of Philosophy (philosophy in brief or in idea or in potentiality), is also a part among the parts of the philosophical system; so that the confrontation of the System and of Logic, of thought in act and thought in idea, between thought and the thought of thought, has been continuously present and active in the course of the exposition, and the coincidence of the two processes and their confluence into one has been clearly demonstrated.
Correspondence between Logic and System.
Logic affirms the thinkability of the real and the inconceivability of any limit that could be put to thought, of every excogitation of the unknowable. And Philosophy, examining every part of the real, has not found any place in which to lodge the unknowable in thought. Logic posits as the ideal of the concept, that it should be universal and not general, concrete and not abstract; that it should be pure of intuitions such as those of mathematics and differ from them in being necessary and not conventional; fruitful in intuitions like those of the empirical sciences, but differing from them by its infinite fecundity which dominates every possible manifestation of the real. And the system has effectively shown that this desideratum of Logic is not a chimæra and that the Spirit is indeed that concept which corresponds to the ideal of the concept: there is nothing that is not a manifestation of the Spirit (an effectual manifestation, not conventional or metaphorical). Logic, rejecting all dualism or pluralism, wills that the philosophical concept shall be a unique concept or of the One, and does not suffer heterogeneous concepts at its side. And the system has confirmed that the concept of the Spirit alone fulfils the logical condition of the concept; and that the concept of Nature, far from being a concept of something real, is the hypostasis of a manner of elaborating reality, not philosophical but practical; thus the concept itself of Nature, in so far as it is effectual, is nothing but the product of a function of the Spirit.
On the other hand, the Logic of the idea of the concept deduces that it must be a synthesis of itself and of its opposite. For its opposite, far from being heterogeneous and different, is flesh of the flesh and blood of the blood of the concept itself, as negation is of affirmation. And the system has led us before the Spirit or Reality as development, which is the true reality of the real and synthesis of opposites. Logic deduces that the concept is synthesis of itself and of the distinct from itself, of the universal and of the individual, and that therefore Philosophy must flow into History, and mediate its comprehension. And the system shows the capacity of its principles for interpreting the complex reality of History, and above all the history of philosophy itself, by solving its problems. Logic does not admit other distinctions of the concept than those that are the outcome of its own nature, such as the relations of subject-object and of individual-universal; and the system has confirmed these distinctions, duplicating itself as Philosophy of knowledge and Philosophy of action, of theory and of practice; subdividing itself as to the first, into Æsthetic and Logic; as to the second, into Economic and Ethic. And since the demand of the concept has been entirely satisfied, when these divisions have been exhausted, we have not found the possibility of new subdivisions, for example into various æsthetic or into various ethical categories among the particular sub-forms of the Spirit.