Part 32

CONCLUSION

With the Philosophy of the practical terminates the exposition that we had proposed to give of the Philosophy of the Spirit; and the exposition of the whole of Philosophy also terminates, because the Spirit is the whole of Reality.

Here at the end, this proposition has no need of such proof or verification as is customary in calculation. Because the proof of Philosophy is intrinsic to it and consists of the reciprocal confronting of the development of thought and its demands, between the System and Logic. And Logic, as we know, if it be in a certain sense the whole of Philosophy (philosophy in brief or in idea or in potentiality), is also a part among the parts of the philosophical system; so that the confrontation of the System and of Logic, of thought in act and thought in idea, between thought and the thought of thought, has been continuously present and active in the course of the exposition, and the coincidence of the two processes and their confluence into one has been clearly demonstrated.

Logic affirms the thinkability of the real and the inconceivability of any limit that could be put to thought, of every excogitation of the unknowable. And Philosophy, examining every part of the real, has not found any place in which to lodge the unknowable in thought. Logic posits as the ideal of the concept, that it should be universal and not general, concrete and not abstract; that it should be pure of intuitions such as those of mathematics and differ from them in being necessary and not conventional; fruitful in intuitions like those of the empirical sciences, but differing from them by its infinite fecundity which dominates every possible manifestation of the real. And the system has effectively shown that this desideratum of Logic is not a chimæra and that the Spirit is indeed that concept which corresponds to the ideal of the concept: there is nothing that is not a manifestation of the Spirit (an effectual manifestation, not conventional or metaphorical). Logic, rejecting all dualism or pluralism, wills that the philosophical concept shall be a unique concept or of the One, and does not suffer heterogeneous concepts at its side. And the system has confirmed that the concept of the Spirit alone fulfils the logical condition of the concept; and that the concept of Nature, far from being a concept of something real, is the hypostasis of a manner of elaborating reality, not philosophical but practical; thus the concept itself of Nature, in so far as it is effectual, is nothing but the product of a function of the Spirit.

On the other hand, the Logic of the idea of the concept deduces that it must be a synthesis of itself and of its opposite. For its opposite, far from being heterogeneous and different, is flesh of the flesh and blood of the blood of the concept itself, as negation is of affirmation. And the system has led us before the Spirit or Reality as development, which is the true reality of the real and synthesis of opposites. Logic deduces that the concept is synthesis of itself and of the distinct from itself, of the universal and of the individual, and that therefore Philosophy must flow into History, and mediate its comprehension. And the system shows the capacity of its principles for interpreting the complex reality of History, and above all the history of philosophy itself, by solving its problems. Logic does not admit other distinctions of the concept than those that are the outcome of its own nature, such as the relations of subject-object and of individual-universal; and the system has confirmed these distinctions, duplicating itself as Philosophy of knowledge and Philosophy of action, of theory and of practice; subdividing itself as to the first, into Æsthetic and Logic; as to the second, into Economic and Ethic. And since the demand of the concept has been entirely satisfied, when these divisions have been exhausted, we have not found the possibility of new subdivisions, for example into various æsthetic or into various ethical categories among the particular sub-forms of the Spirit.

Some are seized as with a sense of dissatisfaction and delusion when they arrive at the end of the philosophical system and at the result that there is no reality save the Spirit and no other Philosophy save the Philosophy of the Spirit; and they do not wish to resign themselves to accepting that and nothing else as Reality, although obliged to do so by logical necessity. A world beyond which there is no other seems to them poor indeed; an immanent Spirit, trammelled and far inferior by comparison with a transcendental Spirit, an omnipotent God outside the world; a Reality penetrable by thought, less poetical than one surrounded with mystery; the vague and indeterminate, more beautiful than the precise and determined. But we know that they are involved in a psychological illusion, similar to his who should dream of an art so sublime that every work of art really existing would by comparison appear contemptible; and the dreamer of this turbid dream, should not succeed in achieving a single verse. Impotent are those poets most refined; impotent those insatiable philosophers.

But precisely because we know the genesis of their psychological illusion, we know that there is in it (and there could not fail to be) an element of truth. The infinite, inexhaustible by the thought of the individual, is Reality itself, which ever creates new forms; Life is the true mystery, not because impenetrable by thought, but because thought penetrates it to the infinite with power equal to its own. And since every moment, however beautiful, would become ugly, were we to dwell in it, so would life become ugly, were it ever to linger in one of its contingent forms. And because Philosophy, not less than Art, is conditioned by Life, so no particular philosophical system can ever contain in itself all the philosophable; no philosophical system is definite, because Life itself is never definite. A philosophical system solves a group of problems historically given and prepares the conditions for the posing of other problems, that is, of new systems. Thus it has always been and thus it will always be.

In such a sense, Truth is always surrounded with mystery, an ascending to ever higher heights, which are without a summit, as Life is without a summit. At the end of one of his researches every philosopher just perceives the uncertain outlines of another, which he himself, or he who comes after him, will achieve. And with this modesty, which is of the nature of things themselves, not my personal sentiment; with this modesty, which is also confidence that I have not thought in vain, I bring my work to a conclusion, offering it to the well disposed as an instrument of labour.

THE END