BONATELLI, FRANCESCO. - Spiritualist philosopher, b. at Iseo on 25 April 1830, d. on 13 May 1911 at Padua, where he taught at the University. He opposed positivism and idealism. He can be connected to the Italian spiritualists of the first half of the century, although he pointed out in their doctrine notable residues of that subjectivity to which they themselves were opposed, and reacted against it. He refers to the German psychological current and especially to that of Lotze. His psychologism was in truth a reaction to transcendentalism, which he considered the source of the universalistic and subjectivistic error. In his inquiry, which is not lacking in acuteness and depth even though it is devoid of systematicity, he sought the new foundation of true objectivity, which for B. is placed in consciousness and cannot prescind from the absolute positing of eternal values. In God, in fact, «perfect ideality, maximal reality and absolute necessity are indissolubly unified».
The activity of the spirit and the process of reality that follows from it culminate in knowledge and in the absoluteness of God, posited by B.'s orthodox faith, and knowable through the theoretical process of potential or involved thought and of actualized or explicit thought, which proceeds by analogy from the simple to the composite and, by a law of idealization of the I, from the finite to the infinite. It is B.'s chief merit to have brought the problem of the objectivity of knowing back within the sphere of consciousness and to have perceived the danger that arises when the gnoseological process unfolds and exhausts itself subjectively. Cognitive activity is fundamentally an activity of judgment, but the concept does not fully realize objectivity, which, above the knowing intellect, is an activity of consciousness; this is actualized in the idea, which has been interpreted Platonically by many. In truth the idea is constitutive of the real, is a content of consciousness itself, and is transcendent with respect to it insofar as it leads us back to the action and the consciousness of the Creator. It is only in this sense that B.'s dualism can be called original, insofar as it goes back to the positing of divine transcendence, to the duality of man-God, finite and infinite. A duality of functions and of process rather than substantial, because B. himself concludes that «the duality disappears entirely when the mind recognizes that in the absolute, ideality and reality, precisely because the one and the other are absolute and original, are identified».
This conclusion is still more legitimate when one considers that for B., above theoretical knowledge, which reveals only one aspect of the real, stands the appreciative or estimative judgment that integrates the concept of reality. It is a vindication of values that establishes a decided 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.