SECTION SEVEN

THE FORCES PRESENT IN A PRIORI REASONING

CHAPTER 2

The starting point of human knowledge
according to some thinkers of the German school

1381. A priori reasoning is reasoning carried out on the idea of being in all its universality without the introduction of any other element (cf. vol. 1, 378 ss.). It is called 'a priori' because this idea is the first idea, independent of all others.
However, before we begin the difficult examination of the question, 'What reasoning can we carry out on this pure, universal idea, and where will such reasoning take us?', it will be helpful to confirm and defend the right of this idea to be the starting point of all human knowledge. I will therefore defend its primacy against the ingenuity of contemporary systems, all of which have their origin in Germany, a truly intellectual nation.

I have shown that Kant's many forms are infected with the original sin of subjectivism. Their only use is that they can all be reduced to the single objective form I have established. They are simply modes of application of this unique, true form which, when determined in a general way, results in Kant's particular forms. These, contrary to their appearance, are not pure, because they each contain something restrictive and partial (cf. vol. 1, 368-384).

1382. After Kant, some thinkers reduced the number of first forms of intelligence. But I must oppose these also and show that there cannot be more than one form.

First, however, it will be helpful if I indicate again the common, characteristic difference which separates the forms suggested by some modern thinkers from the unique form I have suggested. All the great minds, especially in Germany, who discussed the question, 'What is the principle of knowledge?', placed this principle not in the object of the spirit but in its act, and limited themselves to the analysis of the latter rather than the former. But their ignorance of the nature of human potencies, especially the intellective potency, contributed to their failure. I have attempted to establish that the nature of the potencies consists 'in a stable union with a term or object, called "form", which, as object and essential for the potency, draws the subject into the act terminating in the object'. This is the case of the intellect (cf. vol. 2 1005 ss.). I found the nature of the intellective potency to consist in an essential, first act which terminates in an object also essential to the act and its form (truth). In other words, the act terminates in something to which it is itself receptive, and is determined and necessitated to this reception. The act does not move spontaneously, nor act upon an object passive in its regard.

I began from the analysis of the essential object of the intellect. Such a procedure was recognised as necessary by antiquity, but modern thinkers, as far as I can verify, have not risen to the same heights; they start solely from the act of the spirit, unaware that the object must precede this act, which is known only through the object, not vice versa, the object through the act.

1383. Let us now examine these systems. We will begin with Kant, in order not to interrupt the sequence of ideas.
Kant imagined that everything the spirit conceives has to be clothed with forms by the spirit itself. In this his research had indeed taken him a step further than his modern predecessors.
Descartes, for example, had begun from the minor of a syllogism, but had unknowingly presupposed the major (cf. vol. 2, 979 ss.).
Locke presupposed more than Descartes without giving any explanation. Because he did not divide mixed knowledge into its form and matter, his starting point was its matter - he completely presupposed its form and did not mention it.(264)

Condillac makes his statue reason from the very first sensations it receives. He fails to notice that principles are necessary for reasoning. His starting point therefore is also the material, not the formal element of knowledge. Consequently he does not even suspect the need for an explanation.

Kant, stimulated by the work of some English thinkers after Locke, and more so by the Scots, noted clearly the highest element of knowledge, its form, and believed it should be explained. His starting point therefore is higher than that of all the other modern philosophers.

1384. But, as I said, in order to explain the form of knowledge, he had recourse to the act and nature of the intelligent spirit. He should have gone further and reached the essential object of the spirit. This defect prevented him from discovering the supreme form of reason; he stopped at inferior, mixed, restrictive and subjective forms which depend on the first. He said that the spirit, in its act of understanding, operates according to its own laws, and applies these laws to whatever it conceives. This argument is based on analogies(265) taken from sensations. In short, the principle on which he based his system was: 'What is offered to the senses must be determined by our sensitivity according to certain dispositions of the spirit. The same must be true of the object offered to the intelligence: it must be determined according to concepts belonging to the spirit itself.'(266)

According to Kant, therefore, things in themselves, which he calls 'noumena', remain completely unknown to us. The experience of the senses offers us only 'phenomena', that is, appearances, and the intelligence offers us only an ideal order, which does not present any real being as such.
In many places he speaks about our absolute ignorance of things in themselves and concludes his Metaphysical Elements of Physics with these words:

Hence metaphysical teaching about bodies terminates in thinking a void, that is, the incomprehensible. In this sense its destiny is the same as that of all the other efforts made by reason. In its return to principles it investigates the first causes of things, but it can understand only what is determined under certain conditions,(267) because nature presents it this way. On the one hand therefore it cannot be content with that which depends on conditions,(268) and on the other it cannot understand that which lacks all conditions. The only action left to it, when stimulated by the longing to know, is to withdraw from objects and return to itself where, instead of the final limits of things, it can examine and determine the final imprisonment of its faculty when left to itself.

1385. Although Kant had clearly admitted an absolute ignorance of the noumena, it seems that many people did not understand him sufficiently. Others, after him, were certainly not happy in admitting an unknown area, and went on to deny that anything existed outside the confines of human experience. In Germany, where mysterious, obscure expressions tend to replace solid knowledge, much was said about the great nothingness beyond the knowable, as if this were a sublime discovery. Others apparently attempted to do the opposite: dissatisfied that humanity should be subject to limits, and declaring, or at least doubting, that there could be a completely unknown region beyond what is knowable, they laboured to penetrate this region and made everything issue from the human spirit. Kant himself drew much from the human spirit, but finally declared that nevertheless beyond all we could possibly imagine there was perhaps something non-deducible from our spirit (the noumena).

How strange that he was able to know this secret(269) and reveal it to his fellow human beings, while his own spirit never attained these regions; nor, if his theory is true, has any human being ever attained them - we could not even suspect their existence! But, as I have said, Kant does not speak like an ordinary human, but like an immortal who, far removed from the restrictions of human nature, assesses this prison, and smiles or weeps over the poverty and captivity of unhappy nature.

1386. Allow me now to explain further my reason for saying that Kant began from an intermediate point without attaining the true principle of philosophy. I showed that this was caused by his defective analysis of human knowledge, with its consequent defective ignorance of the different kinds of knowledge. But if we consider this cause carefully, we see in it the origin of the other defect in his theory, namely, his exclusion of the noumena from all human knowledge whatsoever, and his declaration that such knowledge is entirely unknown to us.

The French sophists, the Encyclopedists, had destroyed the levels of human knowledge, and put on a show of believing that there was no middle term between understanding and not knowing. Relative to this vain presumption, I noted that there is undoubtedly a kind of middle knowledge having many levels between comprehension (which means knowing perfectly) and total not knowing; we sometimes know with a degree of knowledge without knowing perfectly. Voltaire, and many other pedants of that period, in their hatred of Christianity abused their ignorance, whether real or affected; they wanted us to believe that because God was incomprehensible, he was so unknown that we could neither speak nor think of him. Kant, perhaps unconsciously, came under the influence of these writers, and through the same lack of observation denied to human beings the possibility of all knowledge of the noumena, that is, of substances.

1387. This error can be refuted by the degrees observable in human knowledge.
Substance 'is that act by which the abstract specific essence exists in an ens' (cf. vol. 2, 657).
In order to have knowledge of a substance therefore we must think 1. being and 2. the abstract specific essence of something.
But the essence of anything is known in different ways and to different degrees, as I have shown elsewhere (cf. vol. 2, 646- 656). These ways and degrees, according to which we know the essence of anything, correspond to the ways and degrees of our knowledge.

I call 'known essence' that which we know about anything; it is only about this essence that we can speak.(270) Sometimes, all that we know about anything is simply a relationship with other things better known to us. This relationship certainly distinguishes the thing from all others, but only gives negative knowledge, of which I have spoken at length.

Kant therefore 1. did not understand the nature of being in all its universality, which makes us know things objectively, that is, in themselves, in their essences; 2. did not observe that in addition to what sensations proffer us, there are other modes with which we are able to know the determinations of entia and have a secure sign of their subsistence. I am speaking of the application of reasoning to sensible things, that is, the application of the principle of cause, which is simply the very idea of being in all its universality. But because Kant saw that this principle gave us no representations or positive qualities of things, he believed the principle to be valueless outside the sphere of the phenomena. He did not notice that this principle is as objective as being, of which it is an application. When therefore we conclude by means of this principle that an unperceived ens necessarily subsists, our conclusion is efficacious, and the ens sufficiently determined by the negative idea or relationship to prevent its confusion with any other.

1388. Fichte, a follower of Kant, tried to draw everything from the subject ego, and would accept as subsistent only what he had drawn from it. This explains why Kant himself refused to acknowledge such teaching as his own, and declared that his learned follower had badly misunderstood him.

Kant had divided the spirit's activity into different forms or partial activities. He had also admitted some passivity in thought (I am not sure whether he himself was aware of this), from which he had excluded the noumena, that is, things as they are in themselves. Fichte pin-pointed the action of thought, considered it in its unity, and claimed that all thought was pure activity. In such a system the activity of the ego was the starting point, the means and the purpose of the philosophy called 'transcendental idealism'.

1389. According to Fichte, the ego posits itself, which is equivalent to saying that it creates itself. But this first act, carried out by the ego in positing itself, although unique, is composite. The ego does not posit itself without positing the non-ego in opposition to itself. This identical act which renders the ego conscious of itself, also makes it conscious of the external world, and of everything outside itself, grouped under the title non-ego; or better expressed, the act which makes the ego conscious of something different from itself, also makes it conscious of itself. Thus, in this system, being conscious of oneself is the same as being; Fichte's ego is essentially conscious of itself. Before being conscious, therefore, the ego does not exist; its essence is its being conscious, and with the act of its own consciousness it posits and creates itself.(271)

However, according to Fichte, the act of its own consciousness, which constitutes the ego, is carried out only with the act by which it knows the external world or what is different from the subject ego, that is, the non-ego. By a first act (the first act by which the ego feels itself), the ego also feels or - to use Fichte's way of speaking - thinks and posits the external world.(272)

The only things human beings know are the ego and the non-ego. The non-ego exists not before, but contemporaneously with the ego. Thus the activity of thought that posits the ego, also posits the non-ego. Hence the existence of all thinkable things originates from the primitive activity of the ego.

Among thinkable things is God, who according to Fichte appertains to the non-ego. This explains Fichte's strange and extraordinary promise to his listeners that in his next lecture 'He would apply himself to creating God'. Thus, he arrived at the ultimate expression of pride on the part of an intelligent creature, and the shortest, most elegant formula of the sin of the fallen angel. Those few words contain a deep, essential struggle: a kind of necessity and impossibility of destruction, an everlasting annihilation. Hence, the human being, unable to acknowledge a God, an infinite being, infinitely superior to himself and source of everything, decides to make God originate from himself and with an essential lie declares himself the creator. I have no wish to attribute to Fichte such extreme malice, which appertains solely to the principle of evil. My intention is to indicate what is contained in the way he expresses himself, which would be a perpetual and fearful monument to the century that gave it birth if posterity had not known the shallowness with which the most bizarre oddities were uttered at that time without serious reflection and deep conviction.

1390. Reinhold, who attempted to regulate Kant's philosophy, which lacked any single, apparent principle as its base, had started from the fact of consciousness. But the expression, 'the fact of consciousness', itself contains many uncertainties which give rise to interminable arguments concerning Reinhold's own principle. His argument can be stated as follows: I think that which takes place in my consciousness; I therefore think the fact of consciousness. Let us suppose that this first act of the spirit and the fact of consciousness is the first thing I think. Reinhold certainly does not mean that I have begun from the fact of consciousness with the first act of my spirit, but rather that I have terminated in the fact of consciousness with the first act of my thought. Fichte rightly says therefore that the act of my spirit precedes the fact of consciousness; we must move, not from the fact of consciousness, but from the activity of thought which bends back on itself, that is, on its own consciousness. Fichte had thus placed the starting point of philosophy in thought's reflection on itself, and in so doing believed he had located it further back than Reinhold.

1391. But equivocation is clearly present here. The starting point of reasoning is one thing, the starting point of the human spirit is another. Reasoning can start only from the fact of consciousness, because reasoning, especially philosophical reasoning, begins not from what we know, but from that to which we advert or from that which we know we know. The chronological order of advertences or reflections is the opposite of the order of direct knowledge, as I have often said. We first reflect on the fact of our own consciousness, and then on the act with which we reflect. Only later do we advert to this reflective act of the spirit, although the act exists before advertence to the act of consciousness. The first thing to which the philosopher adverts, therefore, when he meditates upon himself, is the fact of consciousness, which is thus the starting point of reasoning. But the philosopher asks himself: 'How was I able to observe the fact of my consciousness?', and replies: 'With an act of reflection upon it.' This act of reflection is a starting point of thought higher, therefore, than the fact of consciousness known through reflection.

1392. Note that I said 'a starting point of thought', not 'a starting point of the spirit', a distinction which escaped Fichte. He began from the reflection of thought upon itself as the first, radical act with which all facts of the human spirit can be explained. He thus reduced everything to thought, and even confused feeling with thought, although feeling differs greatly from thought, as I have shown. His confusion indicates how deeply sensism has left its mark in transcendental idealism. If he had avoided this confusion, he would not have used the formula 'the activity of thought which reflects upon itself' to indicate the starting point of the spirit. He would then have come face to face with another formula: 'the activity of thought occupied with feeling'. He could not possibly have made this formula the starting point of the spirit, because he would have seen immediately that feeling must exist before the act of thought that he had observed. On the other hand, the formula 'thought reflecting on itself', taken as starting point of the spirit, necessarily expresses a contradiction in terms by identifying thought which reflects, with thought on which reflection takes place. The formula concentrates and confuses in a single essence that which is passive and active, or rather makes what is passive active, and viceversa, which is a contradiction.

1393. This intrinsic contradiction in Fichte's principle is, in my opinion, largely responsible for the contradictions encountered in his system. An acute thinker, he tried to answer the contradictions by saying that 'in order to rise to the conception of the first act of thought where his philosophy began, a particular feeling is necessary, which is not given by nature to everybody. Anyone not given this feeling cannot understand his philosophy'. Such a reply indicates a kind of philosophical desperation. I grant that a supreme effort is required of us to rise to, and fix our gaze on the first act of reflection; indeed, I maintain that Fichte himself was unable to rise to this level or, perhaps more accurately, had indeed risen to the contemplation of that act but was unable to observe its true nature with the necessary attention. Consequently he conceived his bizarre opinion about the creative force of the act, and thus became the author of an enthusiasm which was not what it ought to be, that is, humble joy at the sight of truth. In fact, it was a kind of insolent audacity which human beings feel when some exaggerated power is imparted to their spirit by a combination of intellective imagination and a base desire for the superiority they have usurped. This is a condition permanently damaging the foundation of culpable humanity.

If Fichte had really known the act of reflection, he would have been aware that an act does not truly turn back on itself, but always on a pre-existing act which becomes its object. If we take any act of reflection as an example, we see that it turns back on another act which, if we wish, can itself become reflective. But we must come finally to the act of first reflection, which must turn back on a direct act of thought; if not, we continue ad infinitum, which is absurd. The direct act of thought is intuition and perception. Perception is an act of thought which unites two affections, 1. corporeal sensation, and 2. the intuition of being in all its universality. Prior to any reflection, therefore, feeling and intuition, that is, 1. an intellective intuition, and 2. a corporeal feeling, are the basis of everything. The two affections, united by the unique activity of the spirit, form a totally simple perception upon which the reflection of thought begins to act. Fichte however omitted this analysis and consequently, in my opinion, fell into error.

1394. When we perform an act with our thought, we thereby know the object in which our act terminates, although the act itself remains unknown. We have to perform another reflective act on the first, if the first act is to become object of the second act and thus be known; the second reflective act, however, itself remains unknown. If we then reflect on this second act, we carry out a third act which lets us know the second. This second act has now become the object of the third act, which however we cannot know. We can continue like this for as long as we wish. The following great law therefore can be determined concerning our way of thinking: 'Any act whatsoever of our understanding makes us know the object in which it terminates, but not the act itself.' Granted this, we must ask: 'Surely we are conscious of the act with which we know an object?' The question, we must note, is not the same as: 'Do we have any feeling of the act with which we know an object?' To be conscious is to know our act as our own, that is, to know our act and at the same time know that it is ourselves who do it. But we cannot have this knowledge except by means of another act of reflection. Contrariwise, feeling, although never absent from our actions, is blind. People in general, however, cannot be persuaded that we perform an act without being aware of it. The reason people think like this is that when we carry out an act with our spirit, we can immediately reflect on, and advert to the act, or certainly think we can, while not observing the other act with which we carry out our reflection and advertence. Thus, we easily think that an act of our spirit is adverted to and known through itself, not through some other act added by ourselves. But the act is unknown and unnoticed, although by reflecting on or adverting to it at any moment, we are able, or apparently able, to make it known to ourselves at will. Fichte was acutely aware of this error common to mankind, and to avoid it fell into the opposite difficulty. He was not satisfied with saying that we do not advert to or reflect upon the act of our spirit as such. He said that the act did not exist at all. He thus granted to the spirit's reflection a kind of activity to produce the act which, as I have said, he tried to identify with reflection itself.

1395. In my opinion, however, every act of the spirit, even before we reflect on it or know it, exists in us, but only as a pure feeling. In every act of the intelligent spirit therefore we find an idea and a feeling. The intuited, illumined object is called 'idea'; the act with which we perceive an object in our consciousness is simply a blind feeling. But, because nothing is known without an idea, we truly know nothing as long as we have only feelings. In particular, it is impossible, as I have so often said, to observe our state prior to reflection upon ourselves. It seems therefore to have no real existence, although in reality it is simply unknown to us.

Fichte confused not-knowing with not-existing, and said that the ego, through its own reflection, posits itself with the same act with which it posits the non-ego. To insist that the essence of the ego lies in knowledge, in thought, is useless: the ego is not originally a thought of oneself but a feeling. Fichte however had made thought absorb feeling without noticing the gap between them. This led him into extraordinary, profound errors.

It may be objected that although the intelligent ego has an intellective feeling, it does not finish within itself along with this feeling but terminates in being in all its universality. This, however, cannot be taken for Fichte's reflection: this elementary thought contains nothing reflective; it is the unmovable, permanent part of the human being.
Nevertheless, Fichte seems to have come near to the truth and caught some distant glimpse of it when he uttered these memorable words 'although thoughts are transient, there is in the human being a part which contemplates unmovingly'.

1396. It seems that Schelling had glimpsed Fichte's error of reducing everything to determinate thought and failing to note the existence of feeling in the human being prior to thought. Consequently Fichte did not see that the ego can have its own root-existence with its direct act as an animal feeling intuiting being before any reflection upon itself. Schelling therefore placed the starting point of the spirit in the ego as a feeling, making the ego the absolute element, from which he drew everything more or less as Fichte had done. In doing this, he followed the same path as Fichte except that in place of thought he substituted feeling, which is always presupposed by thought. He made his ego the root and source of Fichte's ego and non-ego. Thus he denied the kind of duality introduced by Fichte, claiming that the ego and non-ego, which Fichte had made contraries, possessed a common seed which made them perfectly identical. Hence, he called his teaching the system of 'absolute identity'.

In this final root of all things he placed the mystery of life, and called this first, radical life 'dynamic', because it was a primitive force from which all limits are removed. He seems to have substituted 'ideal' for Fichte's ego, and 'real' for the non-ego. Schelling's primitive, infinite ego harmonises and, within itself, creates of itself the ideal and the real; from the ego, according to Schelling, a sublime, wonderful trinity in unity emerges [App., no. 18].

1397. I must explain why Schelling imagined a limitless ego. Fichte had made the non-ego the opposite of the ego and defined the former as the term of the latter. In a word, in his system, it was the ego that limited itself, and the limitation was the non-ego. This was the basic fact of Fichte's philosophy, which he neither demonstrated nor could demonstrate. But Shelling rightly noted that neglect to demonstrate the fact was a defect, not because everything had to be demonstrated, but because everything that was not evident, that is, undemonstrable, had to be demonstrated. Schelling denied that Fichte had fulfilled his declared intention of finding for philosophy an evident principle which would remove all contradictions.(273)

Schelling's objection was certainly reasonable, because there is something contradictory in the kind of ego which limits itself necessarily. If the ego necessarily limits its own nature, a law or a necessity is imposed on it. In this case, the ego has the nature to receive, but not impose the law of limitation. An unbreakable law of nature, something stronger than the ego is present, which the ego obeys, not by limiting itself but by being limited.

To understand the force of this objection, we have to concentrate our observation interiorly upon ourselves. As we do so, we realise that whatever we do, we do willingly, and that what takes place in us through a necessary limitation of nature is not done by us but happens in us, that is, is done in us without us. If in fact the imposition or non-imposition of limits depended on us, we would certainly not impose them; every limit restricts our power and diminishes our strength, and we could never want that. Perhaps the only reason for willingly setting limits to our power and strength would be to avoid some greater limitation, which would be imposed on us against our will if we did not impose it upon ourselves, as we do in the free, moral order. Limitation as such can never come from ourselves; it is imposed on us by something superior to us. This superior, limiting element, whatever it may be, cannot itself be limited; the absolute necessity of nature is such that nothing can be superior to it. Even if we thought that the thing limiting us had its own limits, we could apply to it the same argument that we apply to ourselves. Hence the necessity of coming finally to an absolute, limited by nothing. Once Schelling had come to this, he believed he had found the ultimate principle of philosophy, beyond which it was impossible to go.

1398. Schelling's absolute is therefore the product of Fichte's non-ego. But to show more clearly the link between the philosophies of these two men, I must say a word about the practical part of Fichte's philosophy, where the germ of Schelling's philosophy is more clearly seen.

Fichte's non-ego includes a sensible world, a first, intelligible world, and a suprasensible order proper to the same. The activity of the ego which has produced the non-ego outside itself (that is, all these worlds) gives us faith in these worlds. This faith makes the world subjectively real, that is to say, the ego firmly believes in the world and considers it real. According to Fichte, the possibility of human freedom lies in this faith; the supreme activity by which the ego believes in the reality of the non-ego causes an efficacious persuasion of capacity for action for a purpose in keeping with the suprasensible order. And in conforming itself to this order, the ego sees its happiness. This faith or persuasion is the free power itself of human beings; the suprasensible order of the world is the moral limit, the obligation, the absolute duty of human beings. It is the nature of the ego, constituted in this way, to have this order, obligation and duty among the things it opposes to itself and with which it limits itself. Moreover, by virtue of its intimate activity, the ego believes it is free relative to this moral limitation; this belief, as I have said, actuates human freedom. But free activity actuated and created in this way by means of faith is only satisfied with itself when it has adapted itself fully to the suprasensible order called 'obligation' and 'absolute duty'. Free activity, in order to be completely satisfied and therefore happy, must believe in the reality of this order. Hence the soul applies itself energetically to realising the order through the activity it manifests under the form of faith and belief.

The soul, therefore, by putting its faith in the moral order of the universe, makes this order real for itself. But in making this effort, the soul finds the concept of God, which is necessary for the perfect realisation of the moral order, generated for it. This is Fichte's God, who takes his origin from the practical reason in the way I have explained.

Such a way of deducing a concept of God led to accusations of atheism against Fichte, which caused him much anguish, although his justifications do not seem to have fully satisfied public opinion. In various writings he tried to reconcile other opinions with his. One of his last works was 'on the last state of the world deduced from the first', where, as idealist and realist in his own way, he begins at one point from the activity of the ego as the only reality, and at another from the divine absolute as the only reality which, manifested in the image or idea, becomes consciousness.

In Germany, this explanation was taken as a modification he had made to his system to make it more conformable to common thinking. To me, however, it seems simply a new explanation of the same system; and for anyone who has gone to the root of the matter, the apparent contradiction disappears. Fichte admitted that the activity by which the ego posits the non-ego manifests itself in two ways: through the representation of the non-ego, and through faith in the non-ego. The faculty for positing and representing the non-ego is theoretic reason. The faculty for having faith in the non-ego is practical reason, the source of obligation, morality and rights. In theoretic reason the only thing real is the activity of the ego; everything comes from this activity. In practical reason the only thing real is divine being; everything comes from this being - the very origin and dependence of everything on this being is the moral order and source of obligation.

In such a system reality is clearly given two different meanings. The genuine reality, that which is understood and causes everything, is the activity of the ego, but the believed reality, that is, real for our faith, is the divine Being alone.(274)

Anyone wishing to present this system in the most favourable way would, I think, have to express it like this: 'The intrinsic exigency of human nature requires absolutely (that is, independently of demonstrations) faith in the supreme reality of the divine Being.' In this way, belief in the reality of such a Being is truly necessary because belief arises from the supreme exigency of human nature. However, human beings believe themselves to be free in this. Hence, their first duty is to accept God. This thought is similar to Seneca's: 'The first duty towards God is to believe in his existence,'(275) and it contains some truth, if we suppose that God's existence can at least be proved by reason. But it becomes valueless when we suppose that a single, blind necessity of nature, a single, fatal illusion and self-interest (even if a noble interest) leads us only and inevitably to such a belief.

1399. We can see that the germ of Schelling's system was already contained in the moral part of Fichte's philosophy. Schelling based his system on the absolute order of the non-ego, the only reality available for the necessary faith of human nature. However, he posited the absolute as real in itself. According to him, this absolute was not made real solely by the faith of human nature, and therefore did not come from the activity of Fichte's ego. Rather everything came from the other absolute ego which is the source of all activities and power. Schelling thus hoped to have brought philosophy to the point of evidence. In his opinion, the absolute needed no proof. Everything else, in order to be, needs the absolute, which itself needs nothing, and is intuited directly; without the absolute, things would be inconceivable. The certainty of everything is therefore conditioned by the certainty of the absolute, in which things are possible and whose certainty they share. This reasoning is solid enough, but Schelling did not stop here; the activity impelling him to know everything, even the unknown, led him into error. Whenever a human being obstinately seeks to know what he cannot know, he must necessarily fabricate with his imagination the forbidden region where no mortal can truly penetrate. Let us see how this happened to Schelling.

1400. Three great entia are represented to human thought: the material universe, the subject ego, and God. Kant said (wrongly, as I have shown in volume 2) that these representations of objects have power to make known only themselves, not the things in themselves, their objects. To have faith in the representations is a free act constituting what Kant was the first to call 'practical reason'. Nevertheless, in his system, they can exist, provided they emanate from the spirit in regard to their formal part. How they lack subjective forms remains unknown, but some kind of matter in general can be admitted relative to the universe, and an ultimate root of things relative to God.

The representations are called phenomena; the things in themselves, noumena. We are conscious of the phenomena, but completely in the dark regarding the noumena. The darkness irritates, and both Fichte and Schelling tried to dissipate it. Fichte said that only what emanated from the ego existed; this emanation was the universe, God and generally speaking the representation of the noumena indicated by the word 'nonego'. The ego puts faith in this representation, and thus makes its representations real. For Kant, therefore, a phenomenal ego is the source of all that is knowable and, as knowable, consists of appearances and phenomena. Whether there is anything beyond appearances and phenomena, he neither affirms nor denies - for him, these are the limits of the human mind. According to Fichte, however, the ego is real, and therefore presupposed as a noumenon or kind of postulate which of itself produces what exists. There were no more unknown regions, no more noumena other than those which the practical reason creates for itself with faith in the representations proffered by the ego. Schelling, on the other hand, claims to rise to a noumenon which could produce the ego and a phenomenal world. His firm ground is his noumenon, known through intuition, not by demonstration. He posits it as the necessary base of all phenomena; it is therefore more certain than the phenomena and per se evident - it is his God.

This is the only noumenon; it alone is endowed with its own proper activity; outside of it there is no other real activity. Consequently, its activity is the activity of all the things in nature, as well as of the subject ego. The only thing that these things have as proper to them is what is phenomenal; only the infinite essence subsists, and the being of all phenomena is in this essence. The subject, the object, the ideal, the real, the representations, the parts, etc., all are identified in this one essence, because their being is precisely the being of the absolute which transforms itself phenomenally into them all. The differences present in them are only quantitative, not qualitative, because the same being is in them all. In this way the soul and material nature have the same state, equally phenomenal in their individual existence and, relative to their real existence, grounded in the great all, the absolute. The individual is thus absorbed and perishes in the immense nature of God, more or less as human beings are after death, according to the Stoics. The reasoning underlying the whole of this system, which is difficult to defend from the accusation of pantheism, is the following: 'The arguments of critical philosophy lead us to doubt the reality of all things (the noumena). But the reality of an absolute cannot be doubted, because it is the condition on which the possibility of all the phenomena is acknowledged by critical philosophy itself. This reality therefore is more certain than any other, and from it must issue all things recognised as parts, emanations and transfigurations of the absolute.'

1401. But many observations can be used to refute this reasoning:
1. Critical philosophy itself used reasoning to deny knowledge of the noumena. By so doing it has acknowledged the validity of reasoning. But if reasoning correctly used leads to undoubted consequences, why is it accepted only in part? Why is it used to deny, but not to admit knowledge of the noumena. Critical philosophy contradicts itself and cannot be accepted.

2. If critical philosophy did not contain this intrinsic contradiction, or make it so blatant, it could defend itself in the following way against Schelling's objection, from which he deduced his system: 'You say that the phenomena or representations suppose a real absolute. You must undoubtedly deduce this by reasoning. But critical philosophy admits, among the phenomena and representations, the laws of thought, which according to this philosophy are subjective or, as it were, phenomenal. Thus these laws have no other force than to conclude subjectively and phenomenally. Hence the laws of thought certainly demand the absolute, and Kant himself found the absolute to be the supreme effect of thought when he spoke about reason. The absolute therefore, although admitted as real and certain by human need for it (this is practical reason), can be only a phenomenal or uncertain absolute.

3. Even if we suppose that Schelling's real absolute is reliably verified and evident of itself, and that with the use of reasoning nothing else can be acknowledged as real, it does not follow that nothing else can be real; the most we can suppose is that we cannot know anything else real. In this case there will indeed be an unknown region, as Kant supposed, a region more limited than his, however, because from it Schelling draws and makes real the absolute. But it is not sound logic to conclude: 'Because I know nothing else real, nothing else real exists or can exist.' If, however, Schelling had supported his reasoning with the pantheistic argument that 'what is infinite must include everything, nor can anything exist outside the infinite', he would have lost his case; this kind of pantheistic argument has been refuted throughout history.

1402. Examining Schelling's ideas, we see a desire to reduce everything to a systematic unity, the same desire which had previously guided Fichte. These thinkers did not try to conform their philosophy to the nature of things, but to conform things to their philosophy, to a form preconceived in the spirit and cherished as the most elegant of all forms. It was a science with a single principle where everything had a place, as if nothing could be hidden from us. It was intended as an effort to allow us to broaden our gaze, as it were, and make ourselves more like God. It was in fact an imitation and continuation of that initial, tragic deed by which our first parent was seduced to attempt to possess divine intelligence by following his own desire and tasting the forbidden fruit. But do we not recognise easily enough and experience that unassailable limits have been placed on us, on our power and knowledge? At these limits our pride has to be broken; it avails nothing to rant and rage. One of these limits is precisely the line dividing the finite from the infinite, the creature from the creator. Schelling vainly exerts himself to combine these two objects into one, in the way a drunk mixes two drinks in a glass. But they are separated by an abyss; Schelling cannot isolate or imagine or know such a single object.

I firmly believe that Schelling would never have attempted to mix everything together and define God more or less in the words of Bruno Giordano: Est animal sanctum, sacrum et venerabile, mundus [He is a holy animal, sacred and venerable; he is the world],(276) if, instead of plunging immediately into such extreme speculation, he had tried to understand and solve the most elementary problems of human knowledge.(277)

If his patience first of all had been sufficient to analyse all human knowledge, investigate its sources and distinguish its various species, he would undoubtedly have discovered that it has unpassable limits. He would have known that, although we have a positive notion of ourselves and of sensible things, our notion of God can be only negative, that is, we can know the supreme being only as some essence, determined by relationships (cf. 1237 ss.). He would have discovered that the notion of nature and of God can never be confused or reduced to a single notion. Furthermore, the positive notion of nature is endowed with essential characteristics that contradict the notion of God. Thus it would be absurd to attribute these characteristics to the divine essence.

1403. The first difference between the notion of nature and that of God (that is, the former is positive; the latter, negative) shows that the attempt to reduce God and nature to a single principle or substance is rash and reckless. In attempting to do so, we are simply uniting something known with something unknown, arbitrarily making them a single whole. We thus pronounce on, and dispose of what is beyond our knowledge.
The second difference between our knowledge of nature and our knowledge of God (that is, the former has characteristics essentially opposed to and contradicting the latter) renders absurd and void of meaning any attempt to unite them, because such a union can no more be thought than nothing.

1404. But in order not to pursue the argument endlessly, I will confine myself to stating and answering the various points made by Schelling apropos the first of the two reasons.

He claims that an absolute is necessary, because without it nothing can exist or be known. Moreover, we know the absolute from the moment we are aware of its existence; as our means of knowing other things, it must itself be even more known to us than they are. However, Schelling grants the difference between knowing the existence of an object and knowing the object itself only in the sense that the existence of the object cannot be known without some knowledge of the object. But he does not understand that knowledge of the existence of an object may be negative knowledge.

Negative knowledge depends upon a natural or artificial sign which prevents confusion between the thing signified and all other things. This sign is called the nominal essence, or essence of relationship, of a thing. For example, if someone in authority tells me that an object exists to which a particular name has been given, the name would make me understand only two things about the object: 1. its existence, and 2. the name by which it was called. This would be a negative idea; I would know nothing about the object itself. Existence, which is common to all subsistent things, does not make me know things themselves; they are what they are in so far as they have distinct essences, not in so far as they have being in common. According to Schelling this teaching cannot be applied to the absolute, which he says is not known through an authority that reveals its name, but deduced by means of the necessary conclusions of reasoning.

This objection can be answered by clarifying further the meaning of negative knowledge, that is, knowledge of the nominal essence. I spoke, for example, of an arbitrary name, that is, of an artificial sign of an object. It is true that properly speaking this example does not conform to Schelling's absolute which is known by a natural, not an arbitrary sign or name. However, it makes no difference whether the name or sign determining the object is arbitrary or natural; what is in our mind concerning the object is simply the essence of its relationship to something else we know. The knowledge, therefore, remains negative, and the real, positive essence of the object is entirely unknown to us. This is the only kind of knowledge that Schelling's reasoning on the absolute can bring us.
Schelling himself, however, is unaware of this, and we need to show why this is so.

First, he would admit that we attain our knowledge of the absolute because we cannot think of any existing finite thing without an infinite absolute: if something exists, the absolute must exist. He would also admit that it is the senses and consciousness of self that tell us something exists. But he maintains that consciousness of self and the senses are not enough to provide us with the perception of the absolute; we must also have the intuition of the absolute.

He accepts that all individual human experience and consciousness is a sure sign, even a manifestation, of the existence of something absolute, something infinite, in the same way that anything showing traces of intelligence - a geometric figure or a statue, for example - is immediately recognised as a sure sign of the intelligent being who caused it. It is also a natural sign, the natural name of the thing, as it were; as the effect of the thing it shows us something that must be present in the thing.
It is this sign or natural name which provides Schelling with his knowledge of the absolute. In fact, according to him, we know the absolute as a result of some effect which designates the absolute as a cause distinct from all other things, without however telling us anything of the cause's mode of action or mode of being.

All we know, therefore, is the nominal essence of the absolute, nothing more, although the sign revealing it to us is not only conventional, but natural (if we can refer to it in this way) and hence helpful in allowing us to know some real relationships of the absolute, but nothing more. There is no other intuition (if we wish to call it that) than of this necessity and relationship.

The conclusion must therefore be that the proper nature of the absolute is unknown, that Schelling cannot base any system of emanations on this nature, and that he cannot declare the things of the universe to be forms or parts (or anything else we may choose to call them) of the absolute.

Schelling's teaching strikes us as odd because we know that the two ideas of absolute and non-absolute are as contrary as 'yes' and 'no'. For him, however, they are not contradictory, but different. Evidently he can think of something as simultaneously having and not having limits; in this case, the same thing as limited is non-absolute, and as unlimited is absolute. But in reality the absolute is void of limits; the non-absolute has limits.

Schelling's teaching supposes that limited things can become unlimited. In such a case, the absolute would begin to be, although previously it was not; and for this very reason it would no longer be absolute. Moreover, what moves limited things, which formerly were not absolute, to become absolute? There is an essential contradiction between their essence in their first state and in their second; duality admitted in this sense is inevitable. Any reasoning which confuses all things together, making them into transformations and modifications of a single being, must be rash and absurd - the same being cannot be conceived as subject to limitation and partiality, and then as subject of entirely contrary characteristics, that is, as subject to internal opposition and repugnancy.
I cannot see how Schelling can answer these objections in any meaningful way.

1405. We can reasonably say therefore that Schelling was led into error by his failure to premiss his other speculations with an accurate analysis of the forces present in reasoning. He was unaware that regions almost entirely unknown to human understanding existed, for example, all those entia not perceived with feeling or its modifications. This explains, as I have said, why he fell into the contrary error to Kant. Kant denied knowledge of the existence of suprasensible, per se existing entia (noumena); Schelling claimed to reason as if we could intuit the real essence itself of these entia. It is worth noting the direction taken by these philosophical ideas in Germany.

1406. The starting point was material nature. Then by degrees German philosophy rose to concentrate on the human spirit. Kant himself left the existence of material nature in doubt, or in a state of perfect concealment from human understanding; Fichte absorbed it into the spirit itself.
But the human spirit in which the universe was said to be concentrated, was much too small for the human being; the human spirit was insufficient for itself. It seemed natural therefore that if one thinker had arrived at the spirit from matter, others could arrive at God, the absolute and infinite, from the human spirit. This was the intention, but their powers were unsuited to the task.

The effort and the will to reach the infinite was present, but if the aim had really been achieved, thought would have found itself in an unknown and inaccessible region; the philosopher, prostrate before such incomprehensible nature, would have adored. But he did not want adoration and profound self-effacement before God; all he wanted was systems! The human being wanted to explain the forces present in his understanding, not gather and offer them in sacrifice to the Incomprehensible. In his philosophical journey he was guided by the desire to cast light outside himself on all the regions he could reach. So, he had to reconcile the following two intentions: 1. to attain the infinite; and 2. to attain it as something known. But the infinite is incomprehensible, and the only thing left was to bring his imagination to the aid of uncertain, defective thought! With his imagination he formed an infinite, an absolute, a God, composed of everything his imagination could design, mould and know. But the only thing known by human beings and their imagination is the world and themselves. Hence, the philosophers' absolute was, and could only be nothing more than a composition and re-shaping of the world and of human beings. This was the God or rather the idol of philosophy, the work of human hands, which os habet et non loquetur [has a mouth but shall not speak].

1407. It is however more important for us to show how the absolute, the starting point of Schelling's philosophy, cannot be the true starting point of human philosophy. I say human, because we must not forget that we are human; if we were God, we could undoubtedly start from another point, but as human we must begin with the examination of the human mind, and from that principle which has been given to us as light. Even at the time of Kant, thinkers acknowledged that the examination of reasoning must precede all ontology. Kant himself produced the Critique of Pure Reason for this reason. Fichte was the first to leave this path in order to start from the activity of thought. He should have asked himself how he could justify reasoning about the activity of thought before demonstrating that his reasoning had some authority. This would have been enough to make him turn back and realise that his reasoning was totally gratuitous without the presumption that reasoning (which he himself used to convince others of his system) was valid.

After Fichte, the need to resolve this problem of thought before undertaking the philosophy of real things was lost sight of even more. Instead of beginning from the great problem of the validity of reasoning, and placing cognitions in their correct order, a bold attempt was made to order the subsistent objects of cognitions. In such a case the absolute would certainly be the first in order of all the subsistent objects of cognitions; all other objects depend on it, and are, and can only be, through it. But how do we know that the complete, absolute being subsists; how do we know that the first, supreme ens, the source of all others subsists? What leads us to it? To say 'intuition' (as Schelling does) is to begin from a gratuitous affirmation, an arbitrary statement. This was his greatest fault, condemned by the whole of Germany, and particularly by Hegel.

It must be reasoning alone, our sole guide, that leads us to the absolute. If such a guide were essentially powerless, and even erroneous (as Kant claimed), nothing at all would be gained by following it; we would only be deceiving ourselves with the belief that by following it we had found the absolute. It is true that both we and our reasoning depend in a sense on the absolute, but this dependence is in the order of real entia, not in the order of human cognitions. The absolute must indeed be, if we are to be, or to have the ability to reason. But it is by no means true that we can as a consequence know all this, including the absolute, without using the faculty of knowledge, that is, of reason, with which we are endowed. We must distinguish therefore between the order of cognitions and the order of real things. Real objects are not in our mind without knowledge of them. Hence the order of cognitions and ideas precedes the order of real objects. We must therefore begin from the question of the validity of cognitions before reasoning about any real object whatsoever, even the absolute itself.

1408. Friedrich Bouterweck realised that Schelling, instead of ascending to a higher starting point of philosophy, had descended from the order of cognitions to feelings, and ultimately to the order of real entia which, relative to our understanding, belong to a later order. Bouterweck's objection to Schelling was: 'You begin from a real (that is, subsistent) thing, the absolute. But how do you demonstrate that there is something real? Such a demonstration requires that you first of all prove there is a faculty of knowledge designed to perceive the reality of things. This demonstration is particularly necessary after everything Kant said in order to demonstrate the impossibility of such a faculty.' And indeed it is true that Schelling's argument, which makes the absolute evident of itself and the necessary condition for anything to be thought or be, is valid only if we presuppose that our reason judges correctly and extends its judgments validly to real things.

When Bouterweck made this objection to Schelling, he also refuted the pure idealists: 'It is impossible to reduce real ens to ideas. The analysis of ideas tells us that real entia precede ideas as cause of our cognitions, and that because a real end is more than its idea, real entia are more than ideas; we cannot therefore reduce everything to futile ideas. We have to distinguish ideas from real entia and explain both, as well as their relationship and union.' Substantially, both Fichte and Schelling had tried to do this, but only by identifying entia and thoughts, or better, by making all entia issue from thought.(278)

1409. Bouterweck also noted that there can be no knowledge without an object or ens, and that being is indefinable; no philosopher can ask the meaning of being in all its universality. He concluded that being is essential to thought, and although different from thought, is given with it. Hence we must begin from an absolute faculty of knowledge as from a first, evident and fundamental fact; such a faculty consists precisely in the perception of absolute existence. The following proposition therefore can be considered fundamental to his system: 'Every feeling and thought has for its true and, therefore, absolute foundation an ens which has no other foundation, but is itself the foundation.'

1410. Bouterweck glimpsed a part of the truth, but confused absolute existence with existence considered in all its universality, or (which is the same) with most common being. If he had said that intelligence was essentially bound and formed with being in all its universality which in its application is called most common, he would have entered our system. But because he took absolute being in place of the simple notion of being, he lapsed unwillingly with the others into pantheism. He made a mixture, a kind of unique substance, of real, actual being and thought, as he himself said. However, in order to save the existence of the individual in this singular system, he imagined a special force that constituted the individual, a special act in the substance, which he called virtuality. But initially we have only a practical knowledge of this force, a knowledge of feeling and experienced fact, which constitutes the individual, and is known only by conceiving the difference between the subject which acts and its resistant objects. We do not have theoretic knowledge of the force, we do not immediately see its intrinsic necessity.

The absolute faculty of knowledge is applied to virtuality, which it changes into an absolute reality. My understanding of what Bouterweck is saying is therefore the following: the absolute faculty of knowledge sees absolute being and sees this being in everything - it raises everything to the level of this being. Bouterweck thus considers the individual force itself, or virtuality (as it is called), in its absolute being. This gives rise to the concept of an infinite existence and an infinite action.

1411. The error in his system therefore is the following:
1. He begins from the act of our spirit, when he should have begun from an accurate analysis of the object thought. He neglected to verify and determine the nature of the essential object of thought. He was uncertain, and confused possible being with subsistent being; he did not see that the former alone, not the latter, is the object of thought. Nor did he see that subsistent being with all it embraces is even less the object of thought than subsistent being as such. By making the object of thought the absolute subsisting being, he posited a full comprehension of God. But anyone who comprehends God is God. We are now in pantheism.

2. This error was facilitated by the fact that Bouterweck did not give enough attention to determining the distinction between feeling and thought. If he had carried out these elementary investigations before plunging into the sea of the most abstruse questions, he would have seen that only thought, not feeling, needs being as its object and foundation. Thus he would have been aware that with the abolition of every object of thought, thought itself and the faculty of thought would have been abolished. But the subject would not be completely annihilated, because our animal part would remain and we would simply be degraded to a brute state. This observation would have been sufficient to convince him of the essential limitation of human beings whose foundation, as it were, is animal nature. Animal nature, in order to subsist, does not need the vision of subsistent entia, much less the vision of the absolute ens; it becomes rational simply with the vision of ideal being.

1412. Thus two reasons prevented Bouterweck from finding the first, simple starting point of human cognitions: 1. he began from an absolute faculty of knowledge, and therefore supposed the idea and subsistent being as previously given and as the matter of the faculty; but all this needed to be demonstrated because it depended on the principle of demonstration, prior to the faculty; 2. absolute, subsistent being is not known positively by us; therefore the concept of Bouterweck's absolute faculty includes what in fact it does not contain.

1413. Bardilli, like Bouterweck, knew that the only starting point of philosophy was thought. He therefore posited the use of thought as a postulate, although in my opinion it is not only a postulate but a fact. On this basis, he then attempted a new analysis of thought to discover the very first thought per se,(279) in other words, the starting point of philosophy.

1414. Like Schelling, he took as the first thought that which in reality is the last, in other words, the absolute.(280) It is useless to say that the absolute is the condition on which all certainty and existence depends. Even if this were true, I would not need a positive idea of the absolute to make me certain of things. Prior to this idea I can have something which gives me certainty about finite, conditioned things. Hence, the absolute is implicitly understood and supposed in my certainty. Moreover, by reasoning about the absolute, I can discover explicitly its necessity. Human reasoning itself has in fact truly progressed in this way. In order to be certain of things, we need know only the necessity of the truth of what we see mentally. As I have shown, we conceive this necessity by means of possible being without need of recourse to the concept of the subsistent, absolute being. We come to this concept afterwards as the absolute condition of all certainty and of all the entia of which we are certain. This necessary progress made by our developing reasoning is due to the nature of possible being, and I have called it the integrative faculty of the understanding (cf. vol. 2, 624 and fn. 95).

The following observation will strengthen the argument. We come to possess knowledge of a first necessary, primal absolute in this way alone: such an absolute is the condition of all my certainty and of all that I know to exist. But if this is the case, can it be said that it is 1. only through knowledge of the absolute I can be sure of and provide a foundation for all my previous cognitions or 2. that philosophy has to start from the absolute? This is certainly not the case because the necessary existence of the absolute is a condition of the certainty of my cognitions. If this certainty did not exist, the absolute would no longer be necessary: if we remove what is conditioned, we remove the condition. The certainty and necessity of my cognitions renders the absolute certain and necessary, not vice versa. I induce the necessity of the absolute from the necessity of my cognitions; if my cognitions about what exists is doubtful, the absolute is doubtful. Hence the certainty and necessity of my knowledge is, relative to the human mind, prior to and presupposed by the certainty and necessity of the absolute, subsistent being. Philosophy therefore cannot begin from the absolute; it must terminate in it. Prior to the knowledge of the absolute, subsistent being (God), I must have some means, a principle, which makes me know or produces the certainty of my knowledge. This means or principle is the idea of indeterminate being in all its universality, continually present to my spirit.

1415. Bardilli was so far from seeing the step that had caused the downfall of many contemporary philosophers in his own country that he systematised their error and sealed it. The result of my previous observations shows that those who came after Kant erred by supposing 'that the human being could have positive ideas about unperceived realities, and that consequently there was nothing of which he could not have positive ideas; this identified the sphere of human knowledge with the whole complex of subsistent things'. Such a supposition is implicit in all these systems, and surreptitiously directs them. Thus, on the basis of this supposition, an ens can present itself of which we can have only a negative (I would say, an empty) concept, not an adequate or positive concept (of God, for example); our imagination would then come to our aid and do its best to fill the emptiness by making the concept positive and real. But to do this, our imagination can use only the materials it possesses, that is, it can make the concept positive only by substituting it with that which it perceives. To make the concept of God positive, the imagination has to fill it and, as it were, pour into it, everything known positively, that is, nature and human beings. This error was precisely the error of all idolaters: unable to find satisfaction in a negative concept of God, they artificially formed a positive concept of him for themselves; they replaced God, whose real essence they did not know, with what they had perceived.

This intemperate desire to know everything, this repugnance to accepting and admitting one's own ignorance, in short, this basic pride which prevents us from acknowledging that we do not know what we do not know is the source of pantheism, which in the last analysis is simply idolatry perfected and clothed as it were in philosophical forms. In recent times worldly philosophy rushed headlong into universal pantheism, expounded in many different forms. This clearly demonstrates how much human beings, when abandoned to themselves, have a perpetual tendency to sink into paganism. Even in the clear light of the Gospel they have seen themselves move towards paganism where they would certainly be ruined and irredeemably lost, if it were possible to annihilate Christianity by insane, human action and by diabolical wickedness.

1416. The principle maintaining the distinction between God and nature, between creator and creature, is that which establishes two kinds of human knowledge,^: negative and positive. In negative knowledge we think what I have called a 'nominal essence';(281) in positive knowledge we think a real essence. With negative knowledge we think an x, whose positive, generic or specific, real essence is unknown to us. Any knowledge of this kind can in a way be called an empty idea or empty knowledge. Positive knowledge gives us either the specific, or at least the generic, real essence of things. Any knowledge of this kind is called an apprehending idea. A person who confuses these two distinct series of ideas and claims that all our ideas are apprehending, must fall into pantheism and innumerable other errors. Such a person is forced to compose imaginary and false imitations of entia of which he has only empty ideas; he is forced to create his own fabrications, and amongst them a God composed of the characteristics and properties of our limited spirit and of matter; he creates a God made of foreign elements put together in a thousand different ways, and does so without following any law because the ceaseless wandering of a disordered phantasy has no law. Here we have an inexhaustible source of the most weird, ingenious and complex systems which, although they awe and bewitch us for the moment, are as short-lived as falsehood and illusion.(282)

1417. Bouterweck had made the following proposition the start of his philosophy: 'An ens is the foundation of every feeling and every idea'. In doing this, he had upset the two established orders, and rejected the order of empty ideas. His two predecessors, Schelling and Fichte, had fallen more seriously into the same error; they had made being so dependent on thought that thought was the only source of being. Empty ideas could no longer exist, because thought contained all being in its very source. Although Bouterweck found something more in being than in empty thought, he considered the foundation of real, absolute being essential to every thought, and so excluded the existence of negative ideas.

1418. Bardilli, pursuing the same path, openly pronounced the abolition of the distinction between empty ideas and apprehending ideas. After this confusion, he claimed to have found the source of the errors of ancient philosophies. The basic difficulty, he said, was logic, and consisted in the false restriction given to the value of logical principles:

Logic was considered as the simple law of the forms of thought, an investigation restricted solely within the limits of the thinking subject, and isolated from metaphysics and the knowledge of beings. It was possible to draw up a code of rules, but in the end it was a frame without its picture.

This is clearly the source on which Hegel drew.

Bardilli's attempt to reduce metaphysics to logic is itself nothing more than the development and clearest expression of preceding systems. And in France some thinkers, influenced by the same error and the same spirit, now say 'that all philosophy is method'. Thus, on the one hand, everything is reduced to abstract ideas, which only establish method; on the other, because empty ideas are not permitted, imagination has to be brought in to make what is abstract concrete, and to fill up what is empty.(283) This is muddle-headed philosophy at its worse and the source of total confusion. Great creative activity is employed in interchanging and counterfeiting ideas, but such activity is false and evil.(284)

1419. It is even more extraordinary to see Bardilli, who reduces all thought to a first source identical with the source of being, designate being in itself with the quaint formula B-B, meaning simply nothing.(285) With the substitution of nothing for being, we have come to the very opposite term of what was sought. The intention was to realise and complete all thought, but instead, nothing has been revealed as the foundation of all thought. Once again we see the source of Hegelianism.

1420. Moreover, Bardilli began from the application of thought; without this he knew we could not know pure thought. But pure thought was the term he sought. He therefore asked: 'How can thought as thought, in its application as application, be referred to thought itself as thought?' In other words, 'How can applied thought be referred to pure thought prior to any application?'(286)

Bardilli's thought as thought is void of subject, object, and relationship between subject and object; it is expressed with an infinitive, 'to think', which is determining and determinate. But this kind of thought can only be an abstract, never experienced or known to exist in reality. Truly, thought can only be an act, and no act can exist unless someone performs it, and it has a term where it ends and comes to rest. Bardilli acknowledges that such thinking cannot be known in itself, but only in its application. However, like Schelling, he presents it without any proof, as if it were something subsistent and totally active.

1421. Here we should note how much philosophers of the German school abuse abstraction. It seems to be a principle of common sense that 'if a part of something is removed, the thing becomes smaller', and generally speaking, 'if a perfection is removed from a thing, the thing is more imperfect'. The object of thought is certainly a perfection of thought. And the extent and perfection of thought is in direct proportion to the number of its objects: if I diminish the objects of thought, I restrict the knowledge available to thought by reducing it and rendering it less active. If I reduce the objects of thought to a very small number and to insignificant things, I greatly impoverish it. If finally I remove all its objects, real thought no longer exists; all that exists is an abstract concept of thinking, of the possibility of thought. Good sense, and common sense, will certainly agree that once thought has been reduced to this, we have brought it to its most imperfect state and made it a mere potency without act. This kind of abstract thinking, empty of every object, is an extremely tenuous abstraction. But not according to Bardilli! Following the steps of Schelling, he remains totally unaware of all this, and claims to have attained maximum activity of thought with this kind of abstraction. He denies that this thought is empty; instead, we must call it pure thought. This is all very strange; we must see what led these philosophers to such a novel error.

1422. We should first note that when thinking is stripped of all its modes, only essential thought remains, in other words, that which forms the essence of thinking activity. But at this point it is easy to suppose that this essence exists of itself, instead of recognising it as a simple mental abstraction. To fall into this equivocation and transform a mental and abstract activity into a real activity, it is sufficient to ignore the nature of our abstract conception (which is not a conception of anything, but a beginning of conception). The confused essential thinking, therefore, as we conceive it abstractly and initially (where it has no real, proper existence), with complete, subsistent thinking, and supposed that human thought, separated by the power of the mind from its objects and contemplated in itself, provides a concept of some activity of essential, and hence infinite thought.

They were not sufficiently conversant with the nature of our conception, which (in the order of nature) does not see the essences of subsistent things in themselves, but only in so far as sense submits them to it. The only thing our conception knows that is not submitted to it by sense is most common being, which does not constitute any real essence, that is, the essence of any subsistent thing. Our philosophers confused two meanings of the Latin word infinitum, which can be understood to denote either: 1. that a thing is not finished and lacks its necessary end and determinations - in a word, it is most imperfect; or 2. that it lacks any limits and restrictions, that is, it is most perfect. They took as most complete and most perfect that which is indeterminate, and hence so imperfect that it cannot exist. With their phantasy they saw in this indetermination the infinite, but in the opposite sense to that in which they should have seen it. There is indeed a negative infinite, an infinite in potency, which is a proper object of our intelligence, and which, because our intelligence is not determined to anything, can receive all forms and determinations; but it is not a positive infinite. Hence, instead of seeing in the negative infinite a great void to be filled, they were content to see an infinite activity created by their phantasy. But even so, they could only acknowledge nothing, that is, the absence of everything in the negative infinite. Schelling says: 'The ego' (he means the primitive ego) 'is in no way a being or some thing; this negative property is its only attribute. The first problem of philosophy is to discover that which can be known absolutely as a being.'(287) They admit therefore that everything is created from nothing; they turn to nothing to discover our activity! If this is not an obvious contradiction, I don't know what is! God, it seems to me, has done justice to them by confusing their language in this way. They say: 'To philosophise about nature is the same as creating nature.'(288) God allowed them to attempt to create nature, and let them confess that they looked for and discovered in nothing all the creative activity in their power! As new creators, these philosophers had thus pronounced sentence on themselves. Their speculations were magnificent and laborious. But in the end the human being is discovered to be the creating activity. From him they removed everything not attributable to this creating activity. The only thing that remained after this removal was the activity they were looking for. And what was this activity? In their own words, it was nothing, perfect nothing.

1423. From this came the erroneous belief that the simple concept of thought, stripped of its objects, contained something infinite, an infinite activity. The real, positive objects of our thought are limited, and were taken as limitations of thought. Consequently, our philosophers believed that if all the limitations were removed, there would be an infinite thought. But to think that the limitations would be removed from thought if the finite objects were removed is an error. This would be true if thought had per se an infinite, complete object limited by finite objects. But thought has per se an infinite object, being in all its universality, which is only initially, not completely infinite - we should call it indeterminate rather than infinite taken in the positive sense; 'Being which we see is the act of being at its inception but lacking the terms by which the act is completed and finalised'. Furthermore, when finite, determinate objects are received into the mind, being in all its universality does not cease to shine there. Such being remains immutable, and is only partially determined, completed and perfected in the limited objects presented to it. Limited objects are 'the partial perfections of the idea of being in all its universality'. This idea remains permanently in the mind, but if its partial perfections, that is, its determinations, are removed, it remains in the state of its original, maximum imperfection, as it was when it first became present to us. With the conception of particular objects the mind is drawn from potency to act. These objects of thought, that is, essences or ideas, are therefore forms (as the ancient thinkers clearly knew), not matter of the intellect which the forms perfect by drawing it to a more perfect act (cf. vol. 2, 1005 ss.).

1424. If I take a limited object and remove its limits, it becomes in some way unlimited for me. Although this reasoning can be applied to objects of thought, it cannot be applied to thought itself in the way that Bardilli and some other Germans apply it. They do not distinguish in the objects 1. what is positive, and 2. limitation, but suppose that the objects themselves are simply the limitations of thought. This is because they do not distinguish precisely enough the act of thought from its object. Instead of beginning from the object, they begin from the act, as I said above (cf. 1338 ss.); they attribute to the act of thought what is true only of its object.

1425. Moreover, we can see how the materialism of our times has penetrated such abstract speculations, which seem directed to an exaggerated spiritualism. Because materialists always direct their thoughts to what takes place in feeling, they speak of the understanding in a way applicable solely to feeling. They see matter in feeling, and therefore suppose that all the objects of the understanding, which according to them are similar to matter, restrict and limit the understanding; they do not know the being of the objects as form. By removing the objects from the understanding, they think they are ridding it of some material restriction.(289)

Nevertheless, they sometimes fall into the contradiction mentioned above: they put what is greatest and positive into what is negative. They are unable to see that once the understanding is despoiled of its objects, it is weakened and diminished, and finally becomes nothing.

1426. Bardilli says that thought, stripped of every object and subject, is purified, leaving only thought as thought, in other words, leaving essential thought. But, he says, this thought precisely as thought is the possibility of things. Here we find once more that ambiguity I have so often indicated: the attribution to the act of thought of what appertains only to the object of thought. As I have shown, possibility is merely a property of the essential object of thought, that is, of being in all its universality, but Bardilli, however, finds it in thought as thought, not in the object of thought. He has thus transferred to the act of thought that which is proper to the object.

1427. Moreover, Bardilli expresses this possibility with a negative quantity.(290) But possibility is far from being a pure negation of reality; a negative quantity is less than nothing, and cannot exist in the mind without a relationship to a positive quantity.

Nevertheless possibility, which for him on the one hand is a negative quantity, and on the other the foundation of reality, is thought as thought, the supreme activity, God himself!

Possibility is therefore less than nothing, and Bardilli's God is less than nothing; not only nothing, but less than nothing is divinised! This possibility, however, is thought as thought and therefore present in the human being: human thought, which is declared to be less than nothing, is now declared to be God himself!

1428. According to Bardilli, reality is only a new determination of possibility; it is therefore simultaneously a determination of less than nothing and a determination of God. Matter brings about this determination, but matter itself exists through thought and with thought, which multiplies itself by turning back on itself. Evidently, possibility and reality are factors present in every object; they are the components of nature which is simply a manifestation and determination of the God who is less than nothing!
These are not simply the delerious ramblings of sick people; they are the sellf-inflicted torments of rash human beings.

(264) In the chronological order of our acts of knowledge, we observe, or better, advert first to the matter and then the form. The chronological order of our advertence is the opposite of that of our direct knowledge. Locke's strongest argument against innate ideas is founded in a lack of observation: 'But, since no proposition can be innate unless the ideas about which it is be innate, this will be to suppose all our ideas of colours, sounds, tastes, figure, &c., innate, than which there cannot be anything more opposite to reason and experience.' (Bk. 1). The absurdity that Locke finds in the opinion that some statements are innate is false. Not all statements are about colours, sounds and other sensible things; some are entirely suprasensible. Furthermore (and this is our case), in the ideas of sensible things intellective perception is as much present as sensible things. Locke failed to observe the presence of intellective perception, which is the form of ideas. His starting point therefore was the matter of knowledge - he did not note the form, and gratuitously presupposed it.

(265) Analogy is indeed a fertile mother of errors!

(266) Speaking about movement, he says: 'The representation' (that is, the intellective thought) 'of movement cannot become experience' (that is, perceived by the senses) 'unless the object is determined according to the representation in the subject' (Elementa Metaphysica Physicae, c. 4).

(267) On the contrary, I have shown that the great, essential property of the intellect consists in its conceiving what is perfectly indeterminate.

(268) This surely is a clear sign that it has the notion of what is unconditioned.

(269) How in fact could Kant have named the noumena if he had had no concept of them? How could he know that the phenomena did not embrace everything, if previously he had no idea of all that is, an idea essentially universal which includes within itself all possibilities? His distinction therefore between phenomena and noumena shows that our understanding is not limited solely to the phenomena, or to his forms, but embraces everything possible. A person truly limited to the phenomena would not know that there could be noumena beyond the phenomena; he would in no way conceive either their existence or even their possibility.

(270) Hence, when I wished to indicate the part of bodies unknown to us, I called such essence 'corporeal principle', not 'body'.

(271) Fichte's error here consists in his failure to observe that the first act by which the ego exists, and generally speaking the first act by which a thing exists, is certainly an act of the thing, but an act created by a cause prior to the thing. The thing has begun to be with its act, which simply means that it was created in act by God. This defect in Fichte's philosophy opened the way for Schelling's system.

(272) The confusion arises from the fact that there is something passive and active in the acts of our spirit, as I have shown (cf. vol. 2, 662 ss.). Fichte noted the active element, and reduced everything to it alone, forgetting to consider passivity, just as certain sensists have considered the passive element and neglected activity.

(273) In his well-known Wissenschaftslehre and other writings Fichte assures us that his philosophy was intended to destroy scepticism! This is the intention of all modern philosophy, but the effect is the ever greater confirmation of scepticism. Modern philosophy, which claims to be moving towards the light, is in fact going the other way.

(274) Fichte's God becomes real in his own way through the reality of the faith that produces God. But isn't this reality always relative?

(275) Ep. 95.

(276) De immenso, bk. 5. Cf. also, among Schelling's many works, Von der Weltseele, eine Hypothese der Höhern Physik zur Erläuterung des allgemeinen Organismus, Hamburg, 1798.

(277) It seems to me that in the case of method, the general weakness of German philosophy is to examine the most abstruse and difficult problems without first investigating the most obvious, the solution of which would open the way for a serious understanding and discussion of the most difficult.

(278) Schelling did not sufficiently distinguish feeling and thought. He imagined a first thought indifferent to anything objective and subjective. This is essentially contrary to the nature of thought, as I have already observed.

(279) The same investigation was undertaken by the Italian, Pini, in his Protologia, a work which, if printed in Germany rather than Italy, would probably have caused a furore.

(280) Bardilli fell into the same error as Schelling through supposing that the human spirit can by nature have a positive idea of God. This error led to false enthusiasm and bestowed on the human being a grandeur of intellective power which he does not have. Seeing this power as something sublime, human imagination rejoices arrogantly, and runs away with itself, the essence of enthusiasm. The subsequent suggestion that the human perception of God matches God results in irredeemable pantheism, as I have often mentioned. This is a rock on which confident and great minds easily founder, and Italy is not lacking in modern examples of such intellectual shipwreck.

(281) For me, nominal essence is always a generic essence, as I have said (cf. vol. 2, 620 ss.). Nominal, generic essence contains two elements, 1. universal essence (that is, being in all its universality, which forms part of all ideas), and 2. the relationship to us of something known positively, which determines the unknown thing, and determines and individualises the universal essence.

(282) In antiquity many kinds of Platonism, such as that of the Valentinians, fell into a kind of idolatry precisely because they claimed to make the idea of God positive. Their idea was so homogeneous with human, positive ideas of finite creatures that they could without contradiction imagine creatures as an emanation of the divine substance. The Manichaeans fell into the same error; St. Augustine accused Faustus of idolatry: Ita convinceris innumerabiles deos colere [Thus you are convicted of worshipping innumerable gods] (Contra Faustum, 15, 6). For this reason we can refute the errors of the German school with the same principles used by the Fathers to refute the different heresies derived from Platonism and the Cabala of the Hebrews. Finally, I would like to confirm factually what I have said above: 'Any system in which human beings imagine and persuade themselves that they can form, and have formed a positive concept of God, must produce a false enthusiasm, that is, an extraordinary exaltation of spirit'. Ancient thinkers observed this effect in all the philosophical schools which claimed to have gained entry into the divine nature and to possess the secrets which that nature contains. The Gnostics or 'Those who know', as they were called, were such: the tone of the Valentinians was unutterably superior and proud. St. Irenaeus says of them: Perfectos semetipsos vocantes, quasi nemo possit exaequari magnitudini agnitionis ipsorum, nec si Paulum aut Petrum dicas, vel alterum quendam Apostolorum sed plus omnibus se cognovisse, et magnitudinem agnitionis illius, quae est inenarrabilis virtutis, solos ebibisse [They call themselves perfect as if no one, Peter or Paul, or any of the Apostles, can encompass the extent of their knowledge. They know more than all others, and they alone have imbibed to the full that knowledge which is of unspeakable virtue] (Bk. 1, c. 9). And what kind of life did these perfect people lead? No vice of course could stain their holiness; infinite wisdom was sufficient for them. But if we wish to see what monstrous and repulsive things they did, we need only read St. Irenaeus himself (loc. cit.) and Epiphanius (Haer., 31) to learn about the nature of the perfection of these philosophers to whom the whole divine nature was manifest!

(283) I have already indicated the Platonists' error; they change God into an abstract idea of the human mind, or change an abstract idea into God. Thus, the human mind is divinised; an idea becomes a real being, the first amongst beings. Such confusions and distortions indicate the philosophical chaos veiling the great nothingness of the Buddhists.

(284) The holy Fathers recognised a great activity of spirit in the Valentinians and in other astute heretics. St. Jerome says that a person cannot invent such errors, nisi qui ardentis ingenii est, et habet dona naturae quae a Deo artifice sunt creata [unless he is extremely astute and has gifts of nature created by God, the maker of all things]. He adds: Talis fuit Valentinus, talis Marcion, quos doctissimos legimus [Valentinus was such a man, and Marcion too, and according to what we read, they were very learned men] (In Os., c. 10).

(285) The letter B, in Bardilli's system, indicates reality, that is, the characteristic which results from thought applied to its matter. The sign -B indicates thought present in its application. But how can thought present in its application to matter ever be a simple negation of matter?

(286) In Bardilli's system it seems that this absolute, pure thought is last, rather than first, because he starts from the application of thought and then refers everything to pure thought. It would seem therefore that our criticism of Bardilli at the beginning of this Article applies rather to Schelling. But if we examine Bardilli's system carefully, we will see that it deserves the same comment. He placed the foundation of all reasonable knowledge in the referral of everything to the absolute (thought as thought). Hence there is no knowledge, no certainty, before the referral of knowledge to the absolute. In such a system knowledge and human certainty begin only from the absolute. Bardilli's arguments for discovering this absolute are all gratuitous and hypothetical. Hence his system lacks a solid base on which to rest; it starts from a necessary supposition, as indeed Hegel claims.

(287) System des transcendentales Idealismus, 1800, vol. 3, pp. 48, 49.

(288) Naturwissenschaft, p. 3.

(289) But St. Thomas taught that the object of thought perfected thought: Species enim intelligibilis principium formale est intellectualis operationis, sicut forma cuiuslibet agentis principium est propriae operationis [The intelligible species is the formal principle of intellectual action, just as the form of any agent whatsoever is the principle of its own action] (C.G., I, c. 46). And in chapter 48, he says: Intellectum est perfectio intelligentis: secundum enim hoc intellectus perfectus est quod actu intelligit [What is understood is the perfection of the one who understands. The intellect, you see, is perfect because it understands in act].

(290) According to Bardilli, -B is a sign expressing possibility.