FRANCESCO BONATELLI. - Spiritualist philosopher, born in Iseo on 25 April 1830, died on 13 May 1911 in Padua where he taught at the University. He opposed positivism and idealism. He may be linked to the Italian spiritualists of the first half of the century, although he noted in their doctrine significant residues of that vague subjectivity against which they themselves rebelled, and reacted against II. He refers to the psychological current and especially to that of Lotze. His psychologism was in truth a reaction to transcendentalism, which he considered the source of universalistic and subjectivistic error. In his investigation, which is not lacking in acuteness and depth even if it lacks systematic coherence, he sought the new foundation of true objectivity, which for B. is rooted in consciousness and cannot be separated from the absolute positing of eternal values. In God indeed, «perfect ideality, maximum reality, and absolute necessity are indissolubly unified».
The activity of the spirit and the process of reality that follows from it culminate in the knowledge and absolute knowledge of God, posited by the orthodox faith of B., and knowable through the theoretical process of potential or implicit thought and actual or explicit thought, which proceeds by analogy from the simple to the composite and by a law of idealization of the self from the finite to the infinite. It is a particular merit of B. to have brought the problem of the objectivity of knowledge back within the sphere of consciousness and to have perceived the danger that arises when the gnoseological process unfolds and is exhausted subjectively. Cognitive activity is fundamentally an activity of judgment, but the concept does not fully realize objectivity, which, beyond the knowing intellect, is an activity of consciousness; this is actualized in the idea, which many have interpreted in a Platonic sense. In truth, the idea is constitutive of the real, is the content of consciousness itself, and is transcendent with respect to it insofar as it leads us back to the action and consciousness of the Creator. It is only in this sense that one may speak of the originality of B.'s dualism, since it stems from the position of divine transcendence, the duality of man and God, the finite and the infinite. A duality of functions and processes rather than of substance, since B. himself concludes that «duality disappears entirely when the mind recognizes that in absolute ideality and reality, precisely because both are absolute and original, they are identified».
This conclusion is even more legitimate when one considers that for B., above theoretical knowledge—which reveals only one aspect of the real—there is the evaluative or estimative judgment that integrates the concept of reality. It is an assertion of values that establishes a decisive primacy of practical reason and a clear prevalence of moral and religious interests as the integral and unifying criterion of the science of the real.