The evolution of life has taken three divergent directions, the vegetative, the instinctive, and the intelligent or rational. These are not successive stages, but divergent lines of evolution. In stinct is a faculty of using organic instruments ; intelligence is a faculty of making and using inorganic tools. Instinct is a kind of unconscious practical knowledge of things ; intelligence is conscious thought about relations. Owing to its original function of making tools out of inert matter, intelligence when it develops its theoretical side tends to regard the whole of reality as though it were a dead mechanism. This can be corrected by means of intuition, which is instinct become self-conscious and capable of reflecting upon its objects. It is the function of philosophy to seize, expand and unite such fleeting intuitions which reveal the spiritual life. But intuition must not be divorced from in tellection, nor science from philosophy. They must be brought into close relationship if we are to avoid chill mechanism, on the one hand, and illusory mysticism, on the other. For Bergson, not perception but memory is typical of the spiritual or conscious. Perception is simply incipient or nascent action, not consciousness. Memory is real duration, in which the past "gnaws into the future." (See BERGSON.) B. Croce (1866– ) sets out from the Cartesian, or rather Augustinian, contention that thought is what we are most sure of, and then proceeds, like the German idealists, to maintain that it is the only reality that need be assumed. By thought, how ever, he does not mean merely the thought of finite individuals. Like most idealists he posits a universal mind which is more than any finite individual thoughts can be but which is immanent in them. And whereas Hegel conceived of the dialectic of uni versal thought as essentially logical in character, though he could not avoid conveying the impression that he also regarded it as a process in time, Croce definitely conceives the cosmic thought process as a process in time, and identifies reality or philosophy (for the two are essentially the same in such an idealistic scheme) with history. Like Bergson and James, Croce rejects the concep tion of a static, unchanging Absolute, a "block universe" com plete once for all. Ultimate reality, as he conceives it, is in cessantly changing, ever active, always creative. This cosmic activity has no beginning and no end, but proceeds in cycles. The objects to which thought is always directed are themselves the creations of thought. In fact, the process of thinking, the object of thought, and the distinction between the act and the object of thought, are all of them parts of the same total ex perience, and it is only by a kind of abstraction that a world of objects is set up as an independent world over and against the world of thought.
In reality the whole universe is just Mind or Spirit, and all differences and distinctions are within it. Of the activities of mind there are two main types, namely, theoretical and practical activities. Theoretical activity is of two principal varieties, namely, intuition and conception. Intuition is the act of creating the materials of thought, and is exemplified most clearly in the creative imagination of the artist. There is no sense material supplied to the mind from outside, according to Croce; the mind just has intuitions which constitute the material on which conceptual thought operates. Conception or conceptual thinking is the activity which creates and traces relations between intui tions. But the two, intuition and conception, are only distinguish
able, not separable. Intuition without conception would be blind ; conception without intuition would be empty. The practical ac tivities are all of them volitional processes or functions, for there can really be no "physical" activities in a purely spiritual uni verse. And like the theoretical functions they also have two aspects or components, namely, a particular or individual aspect and a universal aspect, which are distinguishable but not separable. (See CROCE IDEALISM NEO-HEGELIANISM.) Alexander (1859-1938) was the first British philosopher to attempt a system of philosophy; and that after the prophets had confidently asserted that there would be no more system building in philosophy. His Space, Time and Deity (2nd ed., 1928) develops a philosophy which incorporates the new conceptions of space-time, and of emergent evolution, and leads up to a kind of pantheism not altogether unlike that of Spinoza. Ultimate reality is Space-Time, of which space alone and time alone are mere ab stractions. Space-Time is a kind of ocean whose whirlpools con stitute particular objects. Things, in other words, are differen tiated complexes of motion within the one comprehensive system of motion. Space-Time has certain pervasive or "categorical" properties (existence, universality, relation, order, substance, quantity, number, motion, etc.) which characterize everything.
Besides these there are various empirical qualities which distin guish different classes of objects, and which emerge only under special conditions. They form a hierarchy. What happens is this.
Space-Time spontaneously differentiates into finite collocations of point-instants. The simples of these consist of motions of dif ferent velocities and extents of motion. When these objects form certain patterns there emerges the quality of materiality; when certain other conditions are added, there emerges colour; and so on.
When certain physicochemical complexes arise, life emerges; out of certain configurations of living complexes consciousness emerges. In this hierarchy of objects, those that have the higher qualities also have the lower qualities. But they experience them differently—they "enjoy" their highest quality immediately and inwardly, but only "contemplate" the lower qualities more or less externally. By reasonable extrapolation we may assume that there are higher qualities than consciousness. And the highest of such conceivable qualities is "deity." As consciousness is the highest quality of man so "deity" is the highest quality of God, whose "body" is the whole universe. God is the whole universe as evolv ing the quality "deity." As time is never complete, higher qualities continue to emerge, and so God is never complete. The world with its nisus towards deity stirs in us a longing for God with Whom we are in communion. And practical religion consists in doing our duty so as to advance the progress of the world towards deity. The triumph of good over evil in human affairs is one of the con ditions of the emergence of deity, and deity is on the side of goodness. The right attitude towards life is that of intellectual acquiescence coupled with practical efforts towards its ameliora tion, even though the springs of pain may never be sealed. As to the relation of the finite many to the infinite One, "the One is the system of the many in which they are conserved, not the vortex in which they are engulfed." (See QUALITIES : Primary, Secondary and Tertiary.)