CHAPTER IX

GIOVANNI GENTILE

The difference between the philosophies of the two greatest thinkers now flourishing in Italy is due to the natures of their minds. Croce always starts from a distinct problem, from a particular question, and rises to speculative heights partly through the vigour of his own genius and partly through his constant intercourse with Gentile, to whom any particular problem always presents itself from the outset _sub quadam specie Æternitatis_. On the other hand, Gentile starting thus, is led to pursue his researches on the central problem into all its particular and practical applications by a sense of reality so strong that he has been thought to recall Thomas Aquinas, by his vast erudition not only in the history of philosophy, but in the whole historical world. Yet, even apart from this, and from his special interest in all the problems of Law and pedagogy, the influence of Benedetto Croce always compels Gentile to keep in touch with actual reality. Their mutual criticism is perhaps the best example in philosophical history of the creative power of the critic. For except in one instance—where Croce insists upon seeing in his friend’s Actual Idealism the latest form of mysticism—the critic is always continuing the work which he is engaged in reviewing and revealing to the author the germs of truth that lie as yet undeveloped in his theory.

The import of Croce’s work is certainly more easily grasped than Gentile’s ideas as they present themselves in his theoretical world. Many Italians are acting on these ideas of Gentile’s who would be unable to formulate them; and that is the most remarkable thing about them. He became a professor at the age of twenty-one, exactly thirty years ago, and as Professor Wildon Carr truly says in his introduction to his own translation of Gentile’s Pure Act—which will be here constantly quoted—he has become famous not only on account of his historical and philosophical writings, but also by the number and fervour of the disciples he has attracted. A born teacher, he loves teaching, and in teaching has acquired much of his knowledge of mind. He never divorces theory from the concrete ground of life; and when he addresses people between 17 and 60 years of age he is constantly forcing them to test in their own actual life the truth of what he is saying.

He strongly dislikes the taking of notes; for he does not want the students to repeat his own words on the day of their examination. The lectures are only meant to help them to take their bearings, to enlighten them; they must read their set books by themselves and interpret them by their own wits. His words must be taken as an invitation to think out their own problems for themselves; he wants to spur them on, not to solve problems for them. Thousands of schoolmasters are actually following his pedagogy which so perfectly meets the requirements of the present generation, that it is admirably acted upon in the remotest villages and by people whose philosophy is that of commonsense and good-will. Gentile has produced not only a system of philosophy, but determined a current of spiritual life which partakes both of theory and practice—blending them perfectly.

Just as Bruno, Bacon and Descartes opened the era of subjectivism, individualism and liberty, so now Gentile opens a new era which is a synthesis of law and liberty since he postulates the individual as the relation of the empirical self to the transcendental self, since his subjectivism becomes concrete and capable of realising the object. This sounds somewhat abstruse and a few illustrations of the point at issue may be useful.

Fuel is not fire, and in order to warm myself, fire is the thing I need. But the fuel is necessary to the fire. The fire, indeed, _is_ only so far as it consumes the fuel. Both are necessary; yet it is the fire which makes the fuel; since the coal, wood, or charcoal is fuel merely because the fire can destroy it as such. But the fire does not exist before it starts to consume the fuel. Now in knowledge the thing man knows is not knowing, it is known; therefore, the principle of knowledge is man. But can man know, in the absence of that which he knows? Obviously not. Shall we then go back to the old dualism and take man and the world, the subject and the object, as standing in opposition again? No; a thing is an object of knowledge because the subject postulates it as such and is therefore only in the act by which the subject knows it. The one single source of _spiritual_ reality is man; but he realises the world only in so far as he realises himself as a knowing subject. And just as fire is fire as long as it destroys the fuel; so man is really man, a spiritual being, a subject as long as he acts as such. The point is often explained by practical illustration to quite tiny children, to whom no one would try to state it, as I have just done, theoretically.

Master: Why do you come to school?

Pupil: Because my mother sent me (—or—to learn to read and write.)

Master: If you come because your mother sent you, that is quite right; but until you see for yourself why you should come to school, you will get very little good out of it.

Pupil: But since I have got to come, I want to learn.

Master: And what do you suppose all the others come for?

Pupil: Why, sir, to learn.

Master: And tell me, what must I do if you are all to learn?

Pupil: I suppose you must teach us.

Master: Well now, what is a school?

Pupil: This is a school.

Master: You mean the building?

Pupil: Yes, of course.

Master: Don’t you think I could teach and you could learn in a field?

Pupil: Well, I suppose we could.

Master: Would that be a school? (No answer). It would. You see the building and the writing over the door have nothing to do with it. _We_ make the school. For if to-morrow the authorities were to send us to a barn and put some poor people here——

Pupil (interrupting): Sir, I know, it would be a poorhouse.

Master: And the barn where we went?

Pupil: It would be the school.

Master: Right. Then who makes the school?

Pupil: The teacher and the pupils.

Master: Right. But let us go on talking about the same case. The authorities say that this place must be given up to house poor old people. Now I think that a lot of strong boys like you could carry the benches, blackboard and so on to the barn.

Pupil: Of course we could.

Master: And I might say to you: “Come this afternoon, all of you, and let us do it.”

Pupil: Very well, we would come, at least those who live near.

Master: And we would start teacher and pupils together, carrying the things.

Pupil: Yes, sir.

Master: Would that be a school?

Pupil: Of course not, sir.

Master: Then it is not enough to have pupils and teacher together to make a school.

Pupil: No, sir.

Master: What is missing, then?

Pupil: Why, sir, we carry benches and things, and that is not a school.

Master: Well, what exactly is a school?

Pupil: ... I don’t know.

Master: I’ll tell you. It is my teaching and your learning that makes a school. Do you see?

Pupil: Oh, yes.

Master: But if it is actual teaching and learning that make a school, what happens if the master is a bad master and does not actually teach anything?

Pupil: Well ... I suppose it is not a real school ...

Master: It is not a school at all.

Pupil: I see.

Master: Now if a boy does not want to learn at all——

Pupil: He is a bad pupil.

Master: He is not a pupil at all, as long as he persists in not learning.

Pupil: Of course he is not.

Master: And if he makes a noise and prevents the others from learning, what then?

Pupil: He oughtn’t, sir.

Master: I know he oughtn’t. But if he does not see that he oughtn’t, and goes on doing it, what happens?

Pupil: He prevents the others from learning and the master from teaching.

Master: Very good, and what is the result for the school, if, as you see, it is the actual teaching and learning which makes the school?

Pupil: It is just as before, when the Master was bad, it stops being a school.

Master: Now supposing you didn’t mind being punished rather than keep still, could you start singing or jumping about just to be funny?

Pupil: Well, no, not even if I did not mind being sent out, I couldn’t.

Master: Do you know why?

Pupil: Because I should spoil your teaching and their learning.

Master: And you would destroy the school.

In such a discussion, which may occupy several days or weeks, the child has obviously learnt some rules of life derived from highly speculative notions. The reality of any relation depends on two acts directed towards a common aim; therefore, the rights of the two parties are dependent upon their actual efficiency in the pursuit of the common aim. A master who does not teach must be dismissed; a pupil who does not learn loses the right of being a pupil. Similarly, if a landowner allows the ground to lie waste, he is not discharging his duties as a landowner and his rights to his property are not actual. This stands in complete contrast with the “Rights of Man” which could assert man’s liberty to use his property as he chose, the state only calling upon its citizens to pay taxes—and fight in war, because the state was understood as something external to the citizens. The relation between employer and employed is clearly parallel to that between master and pupil; in it the common aim is to realise as much profit as possible out of the enterprise. As soon as one of the parties diminishes the productivity of the enterprise, he forfeits his right to damage himself, the other party and the commonwealth. The state, though having no direct shares in the profit is enriched or impoverished according to the increased or decreased productivity of private enterprises.

In this is stated for the first time since Christ preached and lived the Gospel, the true equality of men that had been asserted in it. So thoroughly does Christianity realise that rights are correlative to duties, that before spiritual citizenship can be bestowed on a child in most Christian churches sponsors are required to take a pledge in its name, and upon its coming to adult state the young Christian must confirm that pledge and acknowledge the duties on which its rights depend.[10] This is the reason why the Roman Catholic Church is at once democratic and hierarchical. A shepherd can become Pope, an Emperor can be deprived of his spiritual citizenship. The view of citizenship as a birthright is a relic of Paganism when slavery might be the predestined fate of some and citizenship of others. Political reality finally becomes spiritual reality; man is a citizen exactly in so far as he realises the state, through the act of consciousness by which, transcending the empirical element in his own will, he postulates such a will in religious objectivity, thereby making it law.

The little boy, in realising that his purpose in going to school is to learn, transcends everything in his will that is merely individual or private. His will ceases to be subjective, it becomes greater than the little boy, it becomes school life, it becomes objective and transcending the little boy, it is to him _Law_ in all the majesty and imperativeness of the term. Again, boys become members of a football team because they want to play and eventually win matches. They want this freely and this choice, together with their individual skill in the game, produces the team as a unit for the purposes of play. But the team once formed, the captain chosen for his fitness to command the team in such a way as to increase its efficiency, and each member called to perform the part in which he can best serve the team’s interest, the act of will by which each member in perfect liberty wants to win a match transcends itself, become the team’s will, and as such, objective, sacred, inviolable law. The instances in which members of a team, disregarding the orders of the captain (in whom the eleven wills in all their liberty fuse into one and become law), play to show off their personal skill illustrate clearly enough by their effect on the score, the inviolableness of such collective will.

To realise the full force of this relation between liberty and law, the state and the citizen, is not easy, if one looks for it exclusively in Gentile’s philosophy of law; but his pedagogy makes it far easier and his lectures perfectly easy. There is something religious about it which pervades the whole of his philosophy as it pervades Fascism.

The child is brought to realise what he is by looking at the various societies which co-operate in making him what he is. Being asked what he would say, If somebody meeting him in America asked him what he was and who he was, what would he say? He usually answers to such a question that he would say: “I am so-and-so,” but he is then asked: “What does that mean?” which brings the child to realise that the meaning of his name is that he is the son of his father and mother, he is what he is first of all as belonging to his particular family. Again: “I am so-and-so” conveys but little to a perfect stranger. What would he say next. “I am an Italian.” Very well, and “what kind of man in Italy?”... The child here usually pauses in great perplexity. It takes some time before he comes to speak of a possible profession and of his religion; and for this last point it is necessary to point out to him that there are several religions. Once he has got there, however, he realises so fully all that is implied in this kind of definition that one can hardly help being astonished by the readiness with which children or older boys work out Gentile’s ideas. The author has had the opportunity of noting how easily children grasped the true nature of their relation to family, country, religion, and school, and the fact that what they were depended on their consciousness of being a living member of such societies. The child thus acquires a religious attitude towards them. He realises the sacred character of the family, as based solely upon his own moral realisation of his relation to the members of his family. The family blood running in his veins, he is told has nothing to do with that relation. His father is his father in the spiritual way which alone binds them together, because he calls him his son and acknowledges paternal relationship to him with all the duties and claims that it involves. Gradually he comes to realise that he draws all his importance—his reality—from his conscious relation to the societies to which he belongs and which together make up the not-self; and that such societies are merely the various consciousness of single members transcending their poor, limited, empirical little selves and calling into existence their better and greater, transcendental selves. Man as a thing-in-itself is nowhere to be found; mankind vanishes like a phantom as soon as you try to meet it. If every man and boy in the world discharged his duty as a member of a family, of a school, of a club, of a calling, and finally of a church and of a state, mankind would certainly know peace and well-being, for man then would consider his relations, school, club and trade fellows, religious brethren and fellow citizens as belonging to his own self. But no man can do so perfectly, and it is as much as can be expected from him if he does what, in the sincerity of his soul, he knows to be the very best he can do and loves his neighbour merely so far as he realises him to be part of his greater self. The speculative ground of such a conception of life must be briefly stated before coming to the idea of Liberty and Law, and to that of citizen and state.

Spiritual reality is not Mind plus some spiritual fact; it is purely and simply Mind as subject, since any spiritual fact must be resolved in the real activity of the subject, who knows it. Common language expresses this by saying that to know something thoroughly we must make it our own. Strictly speaking we know no others. If we know them and speak of them they must be within us. To know is to identify, to overcome otherness as such. As long as we feel ourselves confronted by the spiritual existence of others as different from ourselves, something from which we must distinguish ourselves, something which we presuppose as having been in existence before our birth, it is merely a sign that we are not yet realising the spirituality of their existence. To us they are still nature.

This doctrine would be absurd if it were not considered in the light of Gentile’s notion of the transcendental and empirical selves, both meeting in man, as a concrete person in whom the infinity of the transcendental individualises itself through the finiteness of the empirical. The transcendental ego being one and the empirical egos being multiplicity itself, it is obvious that the _differences_ are as necessary to the identity as the fuel to the fire. It is, indeed, through the process of transcending empirical differences that man asserts the transcendental character of mind.

Obviously all the difficulties of moral problems arise from an empirical conception of man and his relations to others. Empirically I am an individual, and as such in opposition not only to all material things, but equally to all the individuals to whom I assign a spiritual value, since all objects of experience, whatever their value, are not only distinct but separate from one another in such a way that each, by its own particularity absolutely excludes from itself all the rest. All moral problems arise from experience and arise precisely because of the absolute opposition in which the ego, empirically conceived, stands to other persons tormented by the supreme moral aspiration of our being that longs for a harmony in which we should become one with all others and with the whole world. This means that moral problems arise in so far as we become aware of the unreality of our being, as an empirical ego, opposed to other persons and surrounding things, and in so far as we come to see that our own life is actualised in the things opposed to it. But though this is the situation in which moral problems arise, they are solved only when man comes to feel another’s needs as his own, and thereby finds that his own life means that he is not closed within the narrow circle of his empirical personality, but is ever expanding in the activity of a mind superior to all particular interests and yet immanent in the very core of his personality. It must never be forgotten, however, that the reality of the transcendental ego, far from destroying the empirical ego, implies it.

Passing to the essential characteristics of what might be opposed as spiritual to what is natural, we find Gentile working out the distinction from the fact that anything natural, such as a stone, _is_ whilst anything spiritual, mind, a work of mind, a political constitution _becomes_. Mind and being are opposite terms. A plant _is_, an animal _is_, in so far as all the determinations of the plant or animal are a necessary and _pre-ordained consequence_ of its nature. All the manifestations by which their nature is expressed are already there, existing implicitly. The empirical manifestations of their being come to be conceived, therefore, as closed within limits already prescribed as impassable boundaries. In the natural world everything is pre-ordained according to the law of Nature, or, to use Gentile’s own words, everything _is by Nature_. In the spiritual world nothing _is by Nature_, but it becomes what it becomes through the activity of mind. Nothing is ever ready-made; nothing can be finished and complete. The social position of a family, the political system of a country can never be settled once for all; the members of the former and the citizens of the latter must go on creating it day by day and hour by hour. So is it with moral life. All the noblest achievements of the past do not diminish one whit the sum of duties still to be performed. The minute man stops realising in the inmost recesses of his consciousness what he must do for his family, for his country, or even for the firm to which he belongs, the family will be decadent, the country will begin to lose what his predecessors had painfully won, the firm will feel the incipient decay of a credit acquired through work and sacrifice. Nothing is ever done once for all; morally, intellectually, politically, socially, economically, everything is always to be done.

A hard gospel to preach when man is accustomed as he is now to hear only the proclamation of his rights. Sacrifice, self-denial is here pointed out as the way to greater conquests and to the assertion of a nobler and more powerful self. To find spiritual reality man must seek it and, seeking it, create it. This means that it never confronts him as an external reality. If man wants to find it he must work to realise it. So long as it is sought it is found, so long as it is being conquered or constructed it is to be found, so long but no longer. Empires show signs of incipient decay the moment the Empire builders stop building them, stop wanting to build them. Yet from this austere conception of life springs a beautiful notion of liberty, a splendid conception of man’s creativity.

Gentile has had the courage to study closely, very closely, the old scholastic Doctors, thereby acquiring a deep and almost unerring sense of Christianity; whilst his familiarity with the problems of law and the works of the Humanists and the Renaissance, have marked him with characteristics that sometimes cause his hearers to hail in him a Father of the Church. All this notwithstanding there are many points of doctrine upon which he stands in contrast with the theologians.

* * * * *

Where Gentile speaks of thinking he invariably refers both to the act of the will and to the act of the intellect; for he considers their distinction as having been abolished when through the work of modern psychology the very notion of a multiplicity of faculties was rejected. The mind is not now intellect and now will; but is known now as intellect and now as will. It should be observed, however, that the creative will does not create a world that issues from it and exists independently of it; it is self-creative just as any judgment is first of all self-assertive. No act of man’s will is ever directed to something already realised; man always wants to do an action. For instance, wanting a new pair of shoes merely means wanting to buy, to have, to get, a new pair of shoes; and since we have seen that any action is self-assertion, man in any act of will is wanting to realise his own self. In consequence of the unity existing between him and the world, man’s purpose is never external to him. Man realising his own self: such is the nature of mind, dynamic and dialectic at once.

This notion of dialectic enables us to meet law and liberty on their common ground, morality; spiritual reality is endowed with a life that is best called dialectic, inasmuch as it is never either completely positive or purely negative. Anything spiritual from the most intimate religious experience, down to any political form, family arrangement, or business establishment _is_ so long as, not yet being, it strives to realise, to assert, to establish itself. Anything spiritual let us say, human, the moment it _is_, that is to say the moment it is accomplished, the moment it ceases to develop or establish itself, is dead or dying. Gentile uses even stronger language: he says outright, _as a reality it is absolutely_ annihilated.

For him, as for Kant, the law of man’s will is the end that determines each act of will; since to be moral the will must have in itself its own law and its own end. The word moral can here have but one equivalent, namely, spiritual, that is to say _possessing value_. Morality so understood is an attribute of the entire life of mind, which must have an absolute value—be it truth, beauty, or goodness—such value being meaningless if it does not correspond to an ought to be, imperative _hic et nunc_ as a consequence of liberty. Moreover, this binding imperativeness is universal—for imperative means necessary, and there can be no necessity without universality.

The good is, in conclusion, the value of man’s spirit in its dialectical actuality; it may be termed the most concrete form of spiritual reality. Any spiritual act is moral in so far as it is mind’s realisation; consequently the negation of morality cannot be understood without understanding this realisation, which is the spiritual process or development of mind as society. The good is development; and as such it implies evil as its negativity.[11] Light and shadow, good and evil; in both cases the second term is the negative of the first. And herein lies all the tragedy of mind. Spiritual life is a complex of light and shadow, a constant struggle of the particular with the universal. Negativity opposes itself to positivity, evil to good, as the _particular_ to the universal. Yet it is through their conflict and opposition that spiritual life realises itself, and this realisation is entrusted to the individual, who in and through his very particularity is the agent of the universal will.

Obviously, if we take man, the individual man, in his pure empiricalness, he can do nothing without superhuman help. But this notion of man, which is the ground of all the abstract forms of egoism, individualism and anarchy, is a mere fancy. No single man can so be deprived of the divine light of intelligence as not to know of his own existence as a person, as a self, and in the very act of knowing himself as such to assert what is universal in him. Man in short is universal in so far as he does not belong to nature, a pure object of knowledge, but is a subject. So that his moral law is nothing superadded to him _ab extra_, it is the life granted to him by Providence realising itself.

This is a far cry from ordinary selfishness. From this point of view the _bellum omnium contra omnes_ appears as the materialistic fancy of a man whose idea of the world was inferred from the idea of the body. Man’s body is in fact one among many. But man’s will in his opposition to other wills reveals his universality. That opposition which had been taken as proof of the plurality and radical particularity of subjective will is insisted upon by Gentile as a proof of the unity and radical universality of such will. Men’s wills collide with each other, it is true, but they do so in the very attempt to enforce the claims of that in them which is universal. For will has not realised itself as long as it stands as one will face to face with another will or so many other wills. In such a position it appears as one among many, as accidental and particular, as having a law differing from that of the others; whereas it always claims to be Will, against which there can be no other will—experience shows us daily that nothing can be done when diverging wills are exerting themselves—and such is the characteristic of the moral will.

The statement of this problem, the moral problem, is very difficult indeed, and from a misrepresentation of the relations between _my_ will and _your_ will and _his_ will, arise conflict and war; but our conception of war is not complete if we consider it apart from the conception of peace. War is nothing but the realisation of peace, which is the reconciliation of a duality or plurality of wills in the Will. This is why war exists and why there are private interests conflicting in the plurality of wills. Such war and conflict, however, are due to the particularity of the wills and last as long as each of these wills insists on realising itself as universal, ceasing when they compose their differences and accept as the common will that which has manifested its universality through the conflict. A peace without war cannot be conceived, since peace is the life of will and will cannot live but in a self-assertion which is nothing but the eternal resolution of the conflict through which it comes into being. Thus will is, and ever must be, _concordia discors_.

Whatever the social unit taken as an example—family, school, state, church—the reality of it is always in development and is intelligible only as a process. It never _is_, and always is, but only in so far as it realises itself in perfect liberty. This free realisation does not permit of the separation of its negativity from its positivity. In such a way, though realising itself as universal, the family or state can be thought of as a spiritual reality only in so far as it contains the particular element which offers an endless resistance to the process of universalisation. A society that perfectly unifies its spiritual diversity, abolishing every sign of variety, has inevitably gone to pieces since it loses all the spiritual forces that made it alive. Gentile goes so far as to say that in fact it is already dead. It is the eternally recurring opposition of interests and wills that permits the dialectic and dynamic unity of life to pulsate in any social constitution. Consequently the particularity of the will—to be resolved in the universal—consists in its negativity, without which the assertion of the universal could not exist as an act, for it would be a mere fact, not something due to the act of man but just something which _is_ by nature.

There is no assertion of will which is not exclusion, suppression of its own negation. Thus society is empirically the agreement of individuals, and speculatively the realisation of will through an eternal process. Universal value is thereby identified as a process realising itself through the suppression of what is particular and negative. Society is not _inter homines_, but _in interiore homine_ and it can exist between men inasmuch as all men are spiritually one man, with one single interest: the eternal _increment_ of the patrimony of mankind.

Now _society_ implies _authority_, a superior will imposed on the associated wills to unite them under a common law. Rousseau had conceived the state, the people as a passive body, reserving activity for the sovereign. Gentile having raised to speculative form the brilliant intuition that lies in the Contract, after having fully recognised it as Rousseau’s idea, now rejects his conception of the distinction between sovereign and subjects. What he actually denies is the passivity ascribed to the people, and the school is, as usual, the experimental ground of his notion.

School is a form of spiritual association implying a teacher, lawgiver to his pupils. It is not the teacher, however that, through his authority, brings the pupils to accept truth; on the contrary it is truth that confers authority on the teacher. The _Ipse dixit_ implies a great knowledge of the master’s familiarity with science. Whatever the ground on which we acknowledge an authority, the authority is such as a consequence of our _acknowledging_ it; and all the theories and inquiries concerning the source of a higher authority are to Gentile vain prattling. For him it is quite obvious that, however high such an authority may be it will never be higher than the height to which it has been raised by the people subject to it. Through this agency and this agency alone authority _becomes_ law.

Authority is invested in the spiritual self, the universal person, ultimately the only sovereign. This transcendental self is the transcendental law of which we have spoken as moral law, the transcendental sovereign which has brought Gentile to reject Rousseau’s distinction between passive citizenship and active sovereignty because it throbs in every man’s breast and is the one law and sovereign that can impose laws and make them acknowledged.

* * * * *

It is now easy to realise that, although Gentile was first known as a Hegelian, by the time he wrote his philosophy of law he had fully developed the more realistic tendencies of his Idealism which link him to Thomas Aquinas, Kant and above all to Vico. The real difference between Gentile’s notion of political reality and that of Hegel—the likeness is too obvious to require pointing out—is a consequence of their different ways of working out their respective notions of reality.

In spite of his brilliant conception of dialectic Hegel’s intuition of Reality is not dialectical but intellectualistic, and therefore static. He realised that we do not conceive reality dialectically unless we conceive it as itself thought. But he distinguished the intellect which conceives things from the reason which conceives mind and his dialectic was in consequence a dialectic of thought, thought however being understood as the result of the act of thinking. Whereas to have a real dialectic, corresponding to the throbbing reality of life, what is wanted is a dialectic of thought, understood as the act of thinking. What has already been thought is as static as a stone. Hence the necessity in which Hegel found himself of separating thought and action, which led him to declare in the introduction to his philosophy of Right that Philosophy was a twilight bird, whose activity began at dusk when the day’s work was done. For Hegel a law in order to be imperative must be pronounced by something that is already in existence. But Reality in existence is nature. Hegel’s state belonging thus to static reality, being a fact, not an act, the citizen is nothing in himself; all his reality come to him from the state. This does not mean that he is annihilated (both in Imperialism and Communism he is very highly cultivated), but is as the little wheel of a huge engine which is carefully oiled so that the machine may go the better for it. His end is the state’s end.

Not so with Gentile. Reality, being really dialectical does not admit of a distinction between will and intellect. You do not act and then think about it. For life, natural or spiritual, is the reality: if theory, the activity of the intellect, is merely a contemplation of it, such theory is not even real. How can one think of something added to the real world? What could such an addition be? There is no way of conceiving knowledge except as a creation of the spiritual reality which is itself knowledge. If Reality is spiritual, in realising itself it creates both the will and the intellect. It is only through the empirical consideration of their manifestations that they can be distinguished; speculatively they are one and the same thing.

The difference between the idea of a good action and a good action itself is a difference between two ideas. In the first case we mean the idea which is a content or abstract result of thought, but not the act by which we think it, and in which its concrete reality truly lies. And in the second we mean the idea, not as an object or content of thought, but as the act which realises a spiritual reality.

The state can not be a fact, something already realised. It is the eternal process, the _instauratio regnum boni_ always becoming, and dying to be realised by the consciousness of the individual in its own process of self-realisation. The state is indeed the moral reality of the individual, who to become a citizen realises himself transcending his empirical subjectivity. The state exists only in the hearts of men; it is the intellectual and practical activity of men realising themselves as spiritual reality. It is always being altered through the positive and negative manifestation of man’s moral will. Man is not and cannot be subject to the state, except in so far and in so far only as he is its creator. And creation means liberty no less than self-realisation means realisation of the not-self and therefore the law.