Giovanni Gentile

“ These thoughts have in them the power to develop, to organise themselves and become a discourse. From the simple sentences and the nursery rhymes of the primer, they grow into an ever-richer significance. From the sowing to the harvesting, from the green stalk to the sturdy trunk, it is one life and one sole process. The mind that will soar over the dizzy heights of thought begins its flight in the humble lowlands. And it first becomes conscious of its power to rise, when the life of thought is awakened by the words of the spelling book. ”

“ Science is no longer conceived to-day as the indifferent pure matter of the intellect. It is an interest which invests the entire person, extols it and with it moves onward in the eternal rhythm of an infinite development. Science is not for us the abstract contemplation of yore; it is self-consciousness that man acquires, and by means of which he actuates his own humanity. And therefore science is no longer an adornment or an equipment of the mind, considered as diverse to its content; it is culture, and the formation of this very mind. ”

“ Language may or may not be in the formation of a man’s nationality. What however must be ever present is the Will by which man every moment of his life renovates his own personality. Can the Will, by which each one of us is what he is, be his own Will, exclusively his own? Or is the Will itself, like language, not perhaps a national heirloom, but surely a common act, a communion of life, in such a way that we live our own life while living the life of the nation? ”

“ In history, thus comprehended, we to-day are but one person with the men who thought before us, with the poets, the philosophers, the spiritual creators of the past. With them we are a person that grows and develops, ever acquiring, never losing; a single being that apprehends and recalls and constantly makes all his past bear fruit in the present. Our childhood has not completely passed away into nothing: it keeps returning to the ever-busy phantasy that tenderly fondles it, cherishes it, idealises it into poetry. ”

“ And this Will, this State is Italy, which has fought and won; which has struggled for a long time amid errors and sorrows, hopes and dejection, manifestations of strength and confessions of weakness, but always with a secret thought, with a deep-seated aspiration which sustained her throughout her entire ordeal, now exalting her in the flush of action, now, in the critical moment of resistance, confirming and fortifying her by the undying faith in ultimate triumph. ”

“ Things lose their individuality, and men their physiognomies. This scepticism robs man of his own faith, of his character and personality. The fundamental aim of education ceases to exist. Abstract education is no education at all. It is not even instruction. For it does not teach the alphabet as it really exists, as something inseparable from the sound, and from the word, and from the human soul! All it gives is a new materialised and detached abstraction.
The alphabet is real and concrete, not abstract; it is not a means but an end; it is not mere form but also content. ”

“ But the past, if we really mean to grasp it, if we want to see it close by as something that is and not merely as an abstraction, the past itself, becoming the present, made into that actuality which we call living memory, is history,—history constructed by us, meditated by us, re-created by us, in accordance with our abilities;—and with our powers of evocation we awaken the past from its slumber and breathe into it the life of the spiritual interests, of the ideas, of the sentiments that are, after all, the living substance in which the past really survives, in which it is real. ”

“ It should be our purpose to construct, not to destroy. The school, this glorious inheritance of human experiences, this ever-glowing hearth where the human spirit kindles and sublimates life as an object of constant criticism and of undying love, may be transformed, but cannot be destroyed. Let the school live, and let us cling to the teacher and maintain his authority, which limits the spontaneity and the liberty of the pupil. ”

“ For he who would read all books need have a leaking brain like the perforated vessel of the daughters of Danaus,—a leak through which all ideas, all joys, all sorrows, and all hopes, everything that man may find in books, would have to flow unceasingly, without leaving any traces of their passage, without ever forming that personality which, having acquired a certain form or physiognomy, reacts and becomes selective, picks what it wants out of the congeries, and chooses, out of all possible experiences, only what it requires for the life that is suited to it. ”

“ Should we deny freedom, and consequently abandon man to the determinism of the causes acting upon him, we should deny the possibility of distinguishing between good and evil, between true and false. The materialist, therefore, when he rejects freedom, is compelled to affirm that the value which moral conscience attributes to goodness is devoid of any real grounds, and what is worse, that his very statement is thereby stripped of all the value of truth. For he must be inwardly convinced that what he thinks has no reason to be thought and therefore cannot be thought. ”

“ If in the bloom of physical health he were to reveal himself stupid and insensate, endowed with mere instinctive sensuality and bestial appetites, this son would cease to be the object of his mother’s fondness, nay, he would arouse in her a feeling of loathing and revulsion. It is this sense of loathing that we feel towards the brutes, to the extent that we never can be sympathetically drawn to them, and that we also feel for the human corpse from which life has departed; for life is the basis of every psychological relation, and therefore of every possible sympathy. ”

“ But his soul pours out none the less over the infinity of harmonies and of thought. And the blind man who once saw, in the consciousness of his sightlessness, cherishes the boundless image of the world once seen, and magnifies it indefinitely by the aid of the imagination. He even heals the wounds and soothes the pain of blindness by making it objective through reflection; and the personality, at any event, always victoriously breaks out of the narrow cell in which it might seem to be confined. ”

“ But humanity could not rest satisfied with a world conceived in such a manner; with a world which, whether we call it nature or idea, is at bottom always nature. For by nature we understand not only that reality which is in space and time, but also every reality which is not the product of our will, nor the result in general of that spiritual activity, which in a manner peculiar to all human acts reveals a diversity of values, extending from the sublimity of heroism and of genius to the lowest depths of cowardice and to the gloom of sloth. ”

“ It is not possible to tear art from the spirit’s life, in as much as it could not be the synthesis it actually is without being subjectivity. It is equally impossible for the spirit to be completely devoid of religiosity. The mystic flower of faith grows out of the bosom of art,—a faith in an object which draws the soul to itself and conquers it. The life of the spirit is an eternal crossing from art to religion, from the subject to the object. ”

“ Now I shall add something that clashes even more violently against the laws which govern our image-making; and I shall do so in order to make it very clear that the spirit does not live in the world of things which is swept over by our imagination. I shall now call the spirit a gazing motion. The spirit’s acting—its eternal process, its immanent becoming—is not an escort to thinking, but the very thinking itself, which is neither cause nor effect: neither the antecedent nor the consequent, nor yet the concomitant of the action by which the spirit goes on constantly impersonating itself. ”

“ For humanity, we are told, lives in those volumes to which the teacher must somehow link himself if he intends to advance properly, to live the life which our forefathers have generously endowed for us, and to protect our spiritual inheritance from dispersion. In this atmosphere he must live; he must plunge in that spiritual sea which rolls limitless across the centuries. The pupil looks out upon this ocean which allures every man who is born to the life of culture. ”

“ According to this transformed point of view, then, reality, which in the first instance appeared to be natural, that is physical or material, has now become ideal. But even thus it remains extraneous to thought, and unconcerned with the presence or the absence of it; transcending the entire life of the human spirit, and incessantly subject to the danger of error. Whereas the idea as a complexus of all ideas that can be thought (but have not been thought, or rather have not all been thought) is the beacon of light that guides the way of man in the ocean of life; it is Truth pure and perfect. ”

“ The nation therefore is as intimately pertinent and native to our own being as the State, considered as Universal Will, is one with our concrete and actual ethical personality. Italy for us is the fatherland which lives in our souls as that complex and lofty moral idea which we are realising. We realise it in every instant of our lives, by our feelings, and by our thoughts, by our speech and by our imagination, indeed, by our whole life which concretely flows into that Will which is the State and which thus makes itself felt in the world. ”

“ As we look about us, we find the horizon peopled with thousands and millions and infinite quantities of objects, which may one by one attract our attention, and may be gathered up in the vast, unbounded picture surveyed by the eye as it moves on from thing to thing, incessantly, without ever reaching the last. The world which we first discover is the world of matter, of things which strike our senses. This world rushes impetuously into our mind at the beginning of our natural experience. ”

“ As each one has a different path to follow in this world, each one will accordingly have his own education. But all paths converge to one point, where we all gather to lead in common that universal life which alone makes us men. And as we meet at this centre, we must understand each other, and should be able therefore to speak the same language, the language of the spirit. We are compelled by an irresistible need to live this common life, and together to constitute one sole spirit. ”

“ This then is the all-important solution,—that the book or the word of a teacher arouse our souls and set them in motion; that it transform itself into our inner life; that it cease to be a thing, special and determinate, one of the many, and become transfused into our personality. And our personality in its act, in the act, I say, and not in the abstract concept which we may somehow form of it,—is absolute unity: that moving unity to which education can in no wise be referred, unless it is made identical with its movement, and therefore entirely conformant to its unity. ”

“ Why insist on thinking its life? Why demand a head, so to speak, as a hood for the head? But there is a drawback, and a serious one, as a result of the fact that this life itself of thought does not now, never will in the future, come before us as that irreflective life which it is claimed to be: it comes to us as a philosophy which recommends it and advocates it as the only possible life of thought. ”

“ We may indeed have a very keen and lively sentiment of the subjectivity, and inwardness, and newness or originality of our culture, in which, for example, Dante, Dante himself, is our Dante, is “We.” But yet this “We” looms before us as a truth which transcends our particular “we.” It is truth; it is science. And before this divine Truth, before this Science, we too fall on our knees, because it is no longer a mythology, but—our experience, our life. ”

“ For each one of us, according to this point of view, has his own being within himself, his own particular destiny. Every man makes of himself the centre of his world, of that universe which he has created with deeds and thoughts: a universe of ideas, of images, of concepts, of systems, which are all in his brain; a universe of values, of desirable goods and of abhorred evils, all of which are rooted in his own individual will, in his character, and originate from the peculiar manner in which he personally colours this world and conceives the universe. ”

“ No! they are rooted in that true “us” by which we think, and agree in one same thought, while thinking all things, including ourselves as opposed to things. And he who fails to reach this profound source, this root from which all reality receives its vitalising sap, may indeed get a blurred glimpse of a blind, inert, material mechanism, but he cannot even fix and determine this mechanism. He cannot upon further reflection stop at the conviction that it is in truth, as it appears in semblance, something real, for it reveals itself to him as so absurd as to become unthinkable. ”

“ For all bodies, as psychologists say, are perceived in so far as they modify ours and are somehow related to it. Or to put it in a different and perhaps better way, all other bodies, which we possess as contents of our experience, form a system, a circle, which has its centre; and this centre is our body. These first of all occupy space, but a space which no one of us can think of or intuit otherwise than as a radiating infinity, the centre of which we occupy with our body. So that before we can speak of bodies, we must first cognise our own. It is the foundation and groundwork of all bodies. ”

“ It is taken for granted that Education, properly so called, will result from the ensemble of these particular educations—physical, intellectual, moral, etc.,—each one of which contributes its share to the final result, and is therefore a part of the entire education. And each field produces certain peculiar results which it would be idle to demand of another section, just as we never expect an olive grove to yield a crop of peaches. Every part, self-contained and quite distinct from the rest, absolutely excludes all other parts from itself. ”

“ Nature, which alone he knows, becomes the object before which the subject, Man, disappears. But as science progresses, the need of shaking the principle of authority makes itself felt; the accepted truths of nature are subjected to criticism; the power of doubting is reintroduced, and the subject again reasserts itself. So the advancement of natural science has gradually turned humanity away from the shrines of naturalistic science. When naturalism opposed the claims of religion, it ceased to be the science of nature, and became philosophy. ”

“ Will he with the realists believe in a reality which must be observed and verified? Or will he as an idealist trust that the only world is the one which is to be constructed by him; that in all this task he can rely only on the creative activity of the spirit that moves within us, ever unsatisfied with what is, incessantly aspiring for what does not yet exist, for what must come to be as being the only thing which deserves to exist and to fulfil life?
There are then these two ways of conceiving culture, the realistic and the idealistic. ”

“ We may not be capable of encompassing all of them in one single thought; but whenever we try to fix any one of them in our mind, it presents itself to us as a knot in which many other ideas are interlaced, twisted, and entangled. They form an infinite chain, in which it is not possible to think the first link or the last one, because the beginning is welded to the end, and we turn and turn and never reach the last. Is not this the nature of the ideas as we see them, as they constitute the field from which we must harvest all our possible thoughts? ”

“ Averse to the common will and to the law of the land, I decide to proclaim over the boundless expanse of my thought the proud independence of my ego, as a lone, inaccessible summit rising out of the solitude. Up to a certain point this hypothesis is verified constantly by the manner in which my personality freely becomes actual. But even then I do not act as a particular being: it is the universal power that acts through my personal will. ”

“ The school to the realist presupposes the library. The teacher needs books, plenty of books in order to increase his knowledge and thus become better acquainted with that world through which he has to pilot his pupils. In the books, then, in the long shelves, culture lives: in the innumerable volumes that no one ever hopes to read; in the shelves which contain a world of beautiful things, and so valuable that man, as Horace says, should spend sleepless nights in order to acquire them, should endure cold and heat, fatigue and sacrifice. ”

“ The Divine Comedy has been written and no longer awaits its Dante. But this lore of the past, as we for brevity’s sake call it, is nothing else than what we think as such. History, as it unfolds itself from century to century, is never compressed within a past which because of its completeness might be made to exist beyond the present and in opposition to it; but it exists in a past which is in the present as a plant that grows or an animal that lives, never adding anything new to the old, always transforming the old into the new ”

“ Truth, lofty, pure, motionless, and unchangeable, was to them the fixed goal toward which the human mind moved, but completely severed from it and transcendent. This concept, after two thousand years of speculation, was to reveal itself as abstract and therefore fallacious,—abstract from the human mind, which at every given instance mirrors itself in such an image of truth, ever gazing upon an eternal ideal but always intent on reshaping it in a new and more adequate form. ”