Antonio Aliotta

“ If reality then be a network of eternal relations, present in their totality to the Absolute Consciousness; if even a human person be but a fragmentary group of those relations, does it not become impossible to explain the evolutionary motion of things, their incessant transformation, and everything which is most spontaneous, living, and fruitful in the concrete development of our inner life? In the eternal immobility of the idea, time with its efficacious rhythm, and the world as a whole, become, to quote Bradley, merely an illusory appearance. ”

“ If, on the other hand, we understand by the term “knowledge” not merely logical reflection, but also the immediate life of the real, nothing is unknowable, since everything which we regard as real becomes a content of our consciousness the very moment we recognise its reality. Try as it may, thought cannot call its own objective value in question, and, while endeavouring to prove its own relativity, posits as the absolute term of reference something made of like substance with itself! ”

“ The Absolute, as a mere identity of permanence, is something the reality of whose existence is beyond our power of thought. Moreover, even if we admit that it is possible to think of it as a limited concept, it will still be incomprehensible how such perfect identity can give birth to the illusion of multiplicity, or an inviolable law of permanence to the phantasmagoria of a world in process of evolution. ”

“ How can mechanics, the science of eternal types, mirror the transient life of the real? It is not to the motionless ideas of reason that we must turn if we would sound the depths of being and grasp it in the productive moment of its generation, but rather to the free creations of imagination and energy. ”

“ The action of the mind does not consist in abstracting certain attributes from things as presented to us by experience, thus mutilating experience and rendering it barren; it is rather thought itself which constitutes the attributes and makes them into objects by colligating them with one another. Knowledge does not pass from the concrete to the abstract, from rich and full perception to poor and empty conception ”

“ Change is in no way contradictory to the principles of human intellect; it is true that the birth of the new amid the unceasing flux of experience eludes the grasp of our abstract concepts, which are constrained to sacrifice the wealth of mind and nature on the altar of their universality and identity, but even if concrete becoming cannot be adequately transcribed into terms of abstract thought, it does not follow that it is illogical. The contradiction vanishes when we substitute intuited reality in its fulness for incomplete abstract terms. ”

“ The living spirit of history, which had animated the idealistic speculation of the beginning of the century, finding its way with Darwinism into the domain of positive research, whilst thus endeavouring to find itself a place in the schemes of science, breaks down their mechanical rigidity, and exposes the tremendous gaps left by empty formulas in the sphere of experience. The scientific method is thus proved to be inadequate not only in the field of speculation, but also in that of phenomena itself. ”

“ Truth and knowledge are then but illusory appearances, like everything else which implies the separation of idea from fact, and they tend to transcend the bounds of intellect, and to become fused in a form of intuition and universal life of which we can hardly form an abstract idea, an immediate concrete experience, in which all the elements — sensation, emotion, thought, and will — are fused into one comprehensive feeling. ”

“ The pain which I feel at a given moment is an actual fact, known by me to be such, though I may not be able to subject it to law, classify it in a system of concepts, or explain it scientifically; real too is the world of colour, sound, and form in its unending variety. The error of abstract rationalism, in its scientific and speculative forms alike, lies in its claim to be able to reduce reality in its entirety to a system of relations, since there exists an individual aspect of things which cannot be expressed in its concreteness by means of abstract relations. ”

“ Thought originates in the separation of the what, the ideal meaning, the predicate, from the that, immediately felt existence, the subject; error, falseness, lies in uniting a what and a that which do not correspond to each other. In the harmony of the whole, each what will find its proper that, and every illusion will consequently vanish; the ideal will coincide with the existent, the intelligible with the thing given. This is impossible to our finite consciousness, which develops in time and has its being in the world of appearances derived from the separation of idea from fact ”

“ In the interpretation of the great book of nature, in which the Thought of God is revealed to the soul of man, the same thing occurs which each one of us may observe when reading a sentence or phrase; single words succeed one another by means of a process developing in time, but the thought that the whole sentence or phrase must have a meaning is present with us from the moment we begin to read, and, when we have reached the end, this meaning is present to our consciousness as a simultaneous whole, not as a series of successive elements. ”

“ If objects exist only by virtue of their relations, relations in their turn are possessed of no consistency apart from the harmonious system of all relations, towards which of its very nature thought must tend. The consciousness of a unique system of relations at once universal and coherent is the criterion of truth and reality to which we unconsciously look even in our most elementary acts of judgment: a relation is real and true when it is in logical agreement with the whole manifold of known and knowable relations, and is false when it contradicts them. ”

“ We cannot conceive of a consciousness which is not life, development, perennial creation, and fruitful activity, nor of a thought which cannot be enriched by new relations, whilst preserving the coherency and identity of its fundamental laws; nor of any form of spirituality without qualitative development, or which is not manifested in original actions which cannot be foreseen. Pan-logism aims at the absorption of everything into a system of eternal relations, and must therefore inevitably end in denying the reality of that which is most vital and most concrete in the world of consciousness. ”

“ In Hegel reason strives to break away from the motionless formulas of the old logic and to comprehend within the triad of a higher dialectic that concrete development which eluded the schemes of mathematical intellectualism, but for all its gigantic efforts it fails to dominate the manifold complexity of experience, or to absorb into the idea the productive wealth of intuition and the vivid glow of feeling ”

“ Science is no longer the standard by which every form of knowledge is gauged, as was the case in the days of the old positivism; it is no longer the eternal mould into which human consciousness must be forced if it would attain to certainty ”

“ The indefinite consciousness of which Spencer speaks becomes the fundamental organ of philosophy in Bergson’s intuitive system. If it be this indefinite consciousness surrounding logical thought which presents to us the absolute, the culminating point of every reality, according to the opponents of intellectualism, has it not a cognitive value far beyond the limited, phenomenal consciousness of the intellect? But Spencer is still too much under the influence of the old mathematical prejudice to draw these bold conclusions from his own premisses ”

“ Nothing but the continuous presence of the subject can bridge over the gulf between one term and another, and enable the intellect to grasp the relation between an antecedent which has ceased to exist and a certain consequence which has not yet come into existence. ”

“ Knowledge in its ultimate analysis consists of relations, and experience, when all is said and done, is but a manifold of thought relations. If it be impossible to derive thought from sensation, as the empiricists do, the inverse procedure is equally unjustifiable, because, just as there is no such thing as pure sensation, there is no such thing as pure thought: these two phrases merely stand for abstractions to which there exists no corresponding reality either in the facts of the world or in the consciousness to which these facts stand in relation. ”

“ If Kant, Hamilton, and Mansel pronounce the Absolute to be unknowable, it is because they wrongly restrict the circle of knowledge to abstract intelligibility; yet at bottom they too grant the possibility of a revelation of this reality in the mind of man. ”

“ The reduction of the Absolute to the eternal contemplation of ideas eternally present to its consciousness amounts to the same thing as turning it into a caput mortuum, like the impassive deities of Epicurus in their blissful ease. ”

“ We can form no conception of objective reality as a system of relations, complete, fixed, and unchangeable from all eternity, since every new form which makes its appearance, every individual in his concrete physiognomy, becomes the centre in cosmic evolution of a fresh network of countless relations which tend to become more widely extended, more interwoven, and more complicated in successive moments. ”

“ Spencer’s system with its theory of the Unknowable appealing to a belief, a feeling beyond conception, with its doctrine of the evolutionary intuition of the universe, discrediting, as it does, the traditional mathematical attitude, and putting science at the service of biological adaptation, is not only pregnant with the crisis of scientific intellectualism, but enfolds the first germs of that reaction whose development we shall follow as it strives in various ways to escape from the difficult position in which agnosticism has placed it. ”

“ If everything be eliminated which can be expressed in terms of relations, no reality will remain. If we divest our knowledge of a thing of every relation, that is to say of every thought, not even simple consciousness is left, since consciousness cannot exist where change and difference cannot be noted, and where there is no relation of sequence and intensity between the sensation experienced at the moment and those preceding it. ”

“ The uniformity and unity of nature become more and more evident the more closely we enquire into it, but, on the other hand, we cannot investigate it without believing it to be already uniform and one, and without implicitly admitting that nature constitutes in itself a unique system of relations which condition each other ad infinitum, presuppose and imply one another ab aeterno, of which individual objects are but the ultimate consequences and combinations, that is to say, without presupposing that nature has a significance present in its totality to Absolute Thought. ”

“ The researches of psycho-physiology and more especially the analyses of perception, which proved the subjective character of those sensory elements which the mechanical theory had raised to the rank of ultimate reality, contributed largely to the change in the conception of science and of knowledge in general. Are not resistance, space, and time presentations no less dependent on the special physiological structure than sounds, colours, tastes, and smells? What right have we to regard the one class as objective and primary, the other as subjective and secondary? ”

“ Spencer admits no other knowledge than that which subjects fact to law, classifying it, resolving it into its abstract relations, determining in what respects it resembles other facts or differs from them; but side by side with this form of mediate knowledge which seeks the intelligible element in the phenomenon brought to its notice, there exists that immediate knowledge which consists in the direct life of conscious reality as manifested in its individual physiognomy. Any form of consciousness, however embryonic and rudimentary, is already a knowing of the content which is manifested in it. ”

“ The over-depreciation of scientific intellectualism and of mechanical and abstract mathematicism, which is characteristic of all idealistic speculation, and its claim to take the place of science and to substitute for it a fantastic system of natural philosophy are followed by a fresh glorification of the physical mathematical method, which in its turn, in the exaggerated reaction which set in, laid claim to the place of philosophy, thus invading the realm of the mind. ”

“ In the case of the single concrete idea, there is but one actual or possible impression, determined by a network of relations which are extremely numerous, and which have been noted more or less vaguely from the first; whilst simpler and more general relations may be equally well verified by a large number of relations without determining any one of them. A perfectly adequate conception of the conditions of a phenomenon would therefore in no way differ from its reality, since it would of necessity include amongst those conditions the relation that the phenomenon can be and is felt. ”

“ This intuition, which must embrace and harmonise the various phenomenal aspects of consciousness, will, intellect, imagination, which, considered separately and postulated as absolutes, give rise to contradictions, although it possesses the immediacy of feeling, is nevertheless not subject to the limitations of every kind of distinction and relation as feeling is, but transcends all distinctions and relations, and therefore contains them in a higher unity within itself. ”

“ Science, too, has its history, and if we would know the meaning of that history we must seek it, not in the tendency of speculation to grasp the absolute truth of the rational order which is immanent in things, but rather in the needs of life and action. This biological conception of knowledge will pass through the writings of Avenarius and Mach into almost every form of reaction from intellectualism, and will act more especially as the motive power of pragmatism. ”

“ Our thought refuses to admit that if the law of things is a perfect identity the manifold content of consciousness with its unceasing transformations can be derived therefrom without the imperturbable inflexibility of being undergoing any change. Either it is unrelated to phenomenal occurrences and abstract, lifeless unity remains immovable to all eternity in its ataraxy, in which case it is a caput mortuum with which the world of phenomena can readily dispense ”