The Unity of Mind & the Multiplicity of Things | Giovanni Gentile’s “The Theory of Mind as Pure Act”

This is a reading of chapter three from Giovanni Gentile’s “The Theory of Mind as Pure Act.” “When we present the concept of our consciousness to ourselves we can only conceive it as a sphere whose radius is infinite. Because, whatever effort we make to think or imagine other things or other consciousnesses outside our own consciousness, these things or consciousnesses remain within it, precisely because they are posited by us, even though posited as external to us. The without is always within; it denotes, that is to say, a relation between two terms which, though external to one another, are both entirely internal to consciousness. There is for us nothing which is not something we perceive, and this means that however we define it, whether as external or internal, it is admitted within our sphere, it is an object for which we are the subject. Useless is the appeal to the ignorance in which, as we know by experience, we once were, and others may now be of the realities within our subjective sphere. In so far as we are actually ignorant of them, they are not posited by consciousness and therefore do not come within its sphere. It is clear that our very ignorance is not a fact unless at the same time it is a cognition. That is to say, we are ignorant only in so far either as we ourselves perceive that we do not know or as we perceive that others perceive what we do not. So that ignorance is a fact to which experience can appeal only because it is known. And in knowing ignorance we know also the object of ignorance as being external to the ambit of a given knowing. But external or internal it is always in relation to, and so within, some consciousness. There exists no means of transcending this consciousness.” (pg. 28-29) Here is a copy of “The Theory of Mind as Pure Act:” https://www.google.com/books/edition/...