ABSTRACT
After an apology for the double outrage he meditated committing on the fine structure at once of the Italian language and the Italian philosophy, Bosanquet quotes as the keynote of Carlini's book, La Vita dello Spirito, the statement on p. 130 that "Nature, the universe, in a word the object of sense experience is a factual reality which we think of as already so constituted that we are with regard to it in the position of spectators and as it were contemplators, not indeed indifferent to it, but with the consciousness that the deeper meaning (le ragioni più profonde) of our life is not to be found there." Leaving aside for the moment the implications of the phrase "already constituted," he confines himself in the first instance to the statement itself. Can we really accept it? By forcing the word "sensible" it might be possible to agree, but if we take it in its natural scope it is far from the truth. To cut man off from the world of sense as we have it in land and sea and their living contents would be to separate him from the springs of his mind's life. Even to insist on the alienness of external nature to ourselves is misleading. "The interest of man" we are told "is man; not natural history but human history." So interpreted man ceases to be man. Mere internality spells mere externality. Human history in the fertile sense is not the history of the human species; it is the story of the universe of experience. 1
