IDENTITY
Identity indicates the reflected unity of being in the variety of its forms and the multiplicity of its elements, and it can be both logical and real (Aristotle, *Metaphysics*, V, 9, 1018 a 7). It is, therefore, the expression of the persistence or constancy of something with itself. Identity can be considered at all degrees and forms of being and from the various points of view it presents, so much so that identity in a certain order may well entail multiplicity and diversity in another order: a single and identical substance can indeed have, both simultaneously and successively, a multiplicity of different accidents and yet, for this reason, cannot lose its identity. The problem, therefore, of identity coincides with that of being (the problem "of the one and the many") and it is in this particular form of reconciling the one and the many that it has especially occupied Greek speculation.
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In the modern sense, the term "identity" (Italian: *identità*) has been used to denote the study of the origin and nature of ideas and thus of being as pure and absolute idea, in which all others are contained (*Theosophy*, I, national ed., Rome 1938, p. 33). It is therefore the study of ideal being, that is, of the original form of thought: "Identity is the science of the intellectual light by which man renders intelligible to himself the sensible, from which he derives universal knowledge... identity does not create or invent this light... but from the order of intuition it transfers it to that of scientific reflection and thus forms a science" (*Logic*, I, cited ed., ibid. 1942, p. 1, no. 1).
In Neoscholastic philosophy, the term was sometimes used, not without analogy to the Rosminian meaning, to indicate the psychological-epistemological treatise on the origin and value of ideas or general concepts (cf. A. Farges-D. Barbedette, *Philosophia neoscolastica*, I, 63rd ed., Paris 1936, p. 369). But this usage has now almost disappeared. In common language, often with a pejorative tendency, identity is equivalent to a philosophical system or a set of principles and conceptions that characterize an era, an age, a culture, a people, or a group: e.g., spiritualist, materialist, liberal identity. *V. also* ILLUMINISM; POSITIVISM; SENSISM.
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