This the the concluding part of review by Julius Evola that originally appeared in Bilychnis, volume XXVI, September, 1925. In this section, he discusses the book L’idea e il mondo by R. Pavese, while comparing it to the ideas previously discussed about Bhagavan Das. I know nothing of Pavese and he does not seem to have made any impact on subsequent philosophy. Nevertheless, the review brings up good points. In particular, there is the insistence that speculative thought is vague and useless without a spiritual practice to bring such thought into realization.

Regarding what we just said about the Pranavavada, the reader will have observed by himself—as Bhagavan Das did not fail to observe—the many analogous points that oriental views share with what has been developed in recent European speculative thought. One would almost be tempted to think of a sort of great cycle of culture, at whose end some themes proposed at the beginning would be reintroduced, although on another octave. It is, for example, surprising how close to the Pranavavada is the conception constructed by R. Pavese. In his own way, starting from gnoseological idealism, as opposed to which he reaffirms the legitimate requirement that it is not sufficient to return to the so-called “transcendental I” and to a priori logic, but rather it is necessary to determine a conception of these, which takes into account our concrete experience, reality, and physical discoveries in which it has developed. Otherwise, one might just as well exile philosophy into a world of vague and useless abstractions.

The meaning of the conception he proposed is, approximately, the following. God cannot be conceived as absolute transcendence unless in reference to a contrasting, absolute immanence, as eternity is in contrast to temporal becoming. Therefore by showing effectively the process that generates this opposition in order to then reconcile it in a higher inspiration, we have approximately the same idea condensed in the sacred word AUM. Although for Pavese, one pole is the idea as “logical comprehensiveness”, the other is matter as physical extension and energetic field. The two poles correspond to each other (that which ideally is concept logically comprehending the various known things, objectively is the “nucleus” that dominates a “certain energetic field”, and vice versa) and they convert into each other. It is like a cyclic flux of “precipitation” and “sublimation”. On the one hand there is the idea that realizes itself and, in that way, engenders physical extension, existence in space and time, from that logical comprehensiveness: such is the “practical” or natural phase that implies a beginning of relative unconsciousness, since the idea is immersed in it, it loses itself in its act, making itself brute power.

On the other hand, there is the nature that reconverges, the idea that reclaims itself from that multiplicity and that existence into which it had degraded itself, and it reincludes it in a new spiritual unity, that is proper to the concept and knowledge in general. Such is the conscious, “theoretical” phase opposed to the natural unconscious process. But the two moments, as was said, are simultaneous and recurrent: it is a flux that rises from one place and descends from the other without interruption, according to an unending vortex that makes spirit from matter and matter from spirit. The two directions, intersecting each other, give rise to nodes or “inflection points”, in which the eternal cycle is reflected in miniature and which would correspond to individual beings. The identity, the absolute adequation of idea and reality, of comprehension and extension, nucleus and field, simple form and plural matter, is found only in God, the eternal “concept” of cosmic becoming, to become what is His “conception” or content, in which He circulates with alternating rhythms. In finite individuals, identity is instead a “having to be”, something to which they tend, since the order of nature is precisely defined by an eternal imbalance of the two moments from which its becoming arises.

Pavese’s originality lies in his bold placing in reciprocal conversions the logical comprehension of a concept with the extension of an energetic field understood as its objective correlative. That gives him a way to graft onto a dialectic scheme, that reminds us of Proclus and Spinoza, the views of recent physics and mechanics, and thereby extends the speculative penetration right into the very heart of the concreteness established in science. In the second place, in the effort of dynamizing, of making “fluid”, of gathering in simultaneity the moments of the process, it results in a type of classificatory system of other conceptions. Opposed to that, there is the lack of an organic and systematic exposition and a certain obscurity and convolutedness of expression.

In similar oriental and occidental conceptions, one must nevertheless ask up to what point is it critically justifiable to place oneself at the Absolute, in order to deduce all the rest from that. A Cartesian argument attempted by Pavese is, to tell the truth, inadequate. Similarly for Bhagavan Das, it is true that he first proceeds inductively starting from the analysis of the nature of human experience; but when he then tries to explain the result of that analysis with a deduction, even he makes, and cannot help but make, a leap: the two methods cannot be joined together. Deduction can offer only probable explicative principles in order to interpret the data of fact and, as such, they are deprived of necessity and convertibility. It is therefore necessary to note that the criterion of certainty for the Oriental is not criticism and logic, but rather that of a “transcendental experience”. It is, for example, said that the Vedas are the expositions of what the rishis have seen. For the rishi, meaning those who have realized themselves up to the level of Brahman, the deductive procedure of their knowledge could have in itself the character of intrinsic evidence and a justification, that cannot appear to those who look at it from the level of finite existence.