Spiritual Reality | Giovanni Gentile’s “The Theory of Mind as Pure Act”

This is a reading of chapter two from Giovanni Gentile's "The Theory of Mind as Pure Act." “To understand, much more to know, spiritual reality, is to assimilate it with ourselves who know it. We may even say that a law of the knowledge of spiritual reality is that the object be resolved into the subject. Nothing has for us spiritual value save in so far as it comes to be resolved into ourselves who know it.” (pg.10) “Whoever conceives [the spiritual world], if he has truly conceived it as spiritual, cannot set it up in opposition to his own activity in conceiving it. Speaking strictly, there can be no others outside us, for in knowing them and speaking of them they are within us. To know is to identify, to overcome otherness as such. "Other" is a kind of stage of our mind through which we must pass in obedience to our immanent nature, but we must pass through without stopping. When we find ourselves confronted with the spiritual existence of others as with something different from ourselves, something from which we must distinguish ourselves, something which we presuppose as having been in existence before our birth and which even when we are no longer there to think will always remain the possession, or at least, the possible possession, of other men, it is a clear sign that we are not yet truly in their presence as spiritual existence, or rather that we do not see the spirituality of their existence.” (pg.13) Here is a copy of “The Theory of Mind as Pure Act:” https://www.google.com/books/edition/...