60 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
world, a process of development of a development; and
hardly has a qualification of reality been pronounced, when
the qualification is already of no value, because it has itself
produced a new reality, which awaits a new qualification. A
new reality, which is economic and moral life, turns the in-
tellectual into the practical man, the politician, the saint, the
man of business, the hero, and elaborates the α priori logical
synthesis into the practical a priori synthesis; but this is nev-
ertheless always a new feeling, a new desiring, a new will-
ing, a new passionality, in which the spirit can never rest,
and solicits above all as new material a new intuition, a new
lyricism, a new art.
And thus the last term of the series reunites itself (as I
stated at the beginning) with the first term, the circle is
closed, and the passage begins again: a passage which is a
return of that already made, whence the Vichian concept ex-
pressed in the word “return,” now become classic. But the
development which I have described explains the independ-
ence of art, and also the reasons for its apparent dependence,
in the eyes of those who have conceived erroneous doctrines
(hedonistic, moralistic, conceptualistic, etc.), which I have
criticised above, though noting, in the course of criticism,
that in each one of them could be found some reference to
truth. If it be asked, which of the various activities of the
spirit is real, or if they be all real, we must reply that none of
them is real; because the only reality is the activity of all
these activities, which does not reside in any one of them in.
particular: of the various syntheses that we have one after
the other distinguished,—æsthetie synthesis, logical synthe-
sis, practical synthesis,—the only real one is the synthesis of
syntheses, the Spirit, which is the true Absolute, the actus
purus. But from another point of view, and for the same rea-