Rosmini. ANTONIO ROSMINI-SERBATI, one of the most original philosophers of the 19th century, was born of noble family at Roveredo in the Italian Tyrol, 25th March 1797. He grew up a pure and beautiful child, and after a stainless youth of devotion and study decided for the priesthood against his parents' wishes, and began the course at Padua in 1817. Three years later his father's death gave him an ample estate. He was ordained priest in 1821, and devoted the next five years at home with a serene but profound enthusiasm to study, meditation, and prayer. He read widely in philosophy alike ancient and modern, and already revolved within his mind a comprehensive and coherent system to serve as a basis for the truths of revelation, while on the practical side he planned a new institution for the training of teachers and priests in wisdom and holiness. From 1826 to 1828 he lived mostly in Milan, next thought out the rule of his new Order in a period of retirement and severe mortification at Domodossola in the Piedmontese Alps, visited Rome, gained the approval of Pius VIII. both for his special studies and for the institution of his Order, and published his New Essay on the Origin of Ideas (4 vols. 1830), which at once carried his name over the Catholic world. After a few years of labour at Trent, hampered by the jealousy of the Austrian government, which feared his Italian patriotism and his papal sympathies, he settled in 1837 at Stresa on the western shore of Lago Maggiore, and two years later received from Gregory XVI. the formal approval of his Institute. The next few years were the happiest and most fruitful of his life. Surrounded by loving and devoted friends, he sent volume after volume to the press; overpowered by his logic noble opponents to his philosophy like Vincenzo Gioberti and Count Mamiani, as well as no less able writers from the rationalistic and anti-Catholic side; and foiled the restless intrigues of Jesuit enemies, who saw in his enterprise possible dangers to the supremacy of their Order. His dream in politics, as expressed in his Constitution according to Social Justice (1848), was a confederation of the states of Italy under the pope as perpetual president; but his heart sank within him when the pope declared his intention to take no part in the war of liberation against Austria.
For a brief period he basked in the papal favour, and was promised by Pius IX. a cardinal's hat; while for seven weeks he served as the envoy of Piedmont at the papal court, and it was he whom the Romans asked for as their Liberal minister in the period between the murder of Rossi and the pope's flight to Gaeta. He followed the pope, but now found his mind poisoned against him by the malign suspicions of Antonelli and the reactionary party, and never afterwards regained his confidence. His Constitution and The Five Wounds of Holy Church (Eng. trans. ed. by Canon Liddon, 1883) were next prohibited by an irregular meeting of the Congregation of the Index called at Naples. Rosmini submitted without a word of protest, and returned to Stresa to spend the remaining seven years of his life in even more absolute devotion than before to his Institute and to the composition of works intended to complete and consolidate his system of philosophy. His enemies still continued to pursue him with wicked calumnies and charges of heresy in doctrine and unfaithfulness to the Holy See. But their malignity overshot its mark, and at length the pope, his eyes opened to see how he had wronged Rosmini by his haste, granted him a fair hearing, first enjoining silence on his traducers, and next subjected his whole published works to a careful scrutiny, in relation to the more than three hundred charges brought against them. The process lasted nearly four years (1851-54), but at its close the Congregation of the Index, the pope presiding, declared Rosmini's writings to be entirely free from censure, and enjoined perpetual silence on all his accusers. But he did not long survive a triumph for which he had waited with saintly patience, dying at Stresa, not without suspicion of poison, 1st July 1855. It was only in 1888 that Rosmini's restless traducers succeeded in getting forty propositions from his posthumous works condemned by the Holy Office.
The 'Institute of the Brethren of Charity' survived its founder, and among the Rosminian Fathers, who are mostly Italians or Englishmen, are to be found at the present day some of the ablest and most devoted sons of the Roman Church. Its fundamental idea is the principle of passivity, its aim holiness or the moral perfection of the soul. Moral perfection consists in justice or the practical recognition of each being, seen in the idea, according to the beingness that is in it. The elective or contemplative part of the discipline prepares for the assumptive or active part, whose constant aim is the well-being of others. The brethren, who include both clerical and lay members, undergo a two years' novitiate and take the three ordinary vows, but wear no distinctive dress and conform to the laws of the country in which they happen to be. The Institute of Charity was a large-minded attempt to adapt the monastic system and Catholic Christianity generally to the needs of the present day, and its comparative lack of success is only due to the enormous force of interested opposition brought to bear against it by the obscurantist party in the church, whose chief end is desperate power for itself and blind obedience from the people. In England it has foundations at Ratcliffe, Loughborough, Cardiff, Wadhurst, Rugby, and established in 1876 its central House at St Etheldreda's, Holborn, once the domestic chapel of the palace of the Bishops of Ely.
The foundation of Rosmini's philosophy is being considered as the form of the intelligence—an elemental intuition of which is implanted by Nature herself. He begins by pointing out, as an essential characteristic of cognition, a distinction between the impersonal object known and the personal subject or knower. Human cognitions are intuitions and affirmations, and the former necessarily precede the latter, since they regard things in their possibility, rather than merely formulate assertions as to whether they subsist or do not subsist. Intuition then gives us possible objects—ideas; affirmation, things subsistent. Of ideas we may affirm (1) that they are not nothing; (2) that they are not ourselves; (3) that they have a mode of existence of their own, entirely different from that of real or subsistent things, and independent of the bodily sense. Their two essential characteristics are universality and necessity; for real objects and sensations are always particular, instead of being universal and generic, and every object which involves no contradiction is necessarily possible. These two characteristics involve two others, infinity and eternity; the origin of the ideas comes from God, for man does not receive them from the things themselves. The one indeterminate and wholly universal idea is that of being or existence; we cannot determine the subsistence of an object until we first have the idea of it, therefore perception involves the idea which is further isolated from all the other elements of the perception by the process of universalisation, through which it may be realised an indefinite number of times. When the ideas are all fully or perfectly determined, they are called concrete; when they remain to a certain extent indeterminate, they are abstract. The determinations of the ideas are sensations; these are merely the occasions of its discovery by the intelligence, which can admit that to be possible which the sensation represents as real. By the process of universalisation then we form those ideas which are completely determined; by abstraction, those which are determined only to a certain extent. It is this idea of being which makes intelligence possible: it is the necessary form of human reason, the indispensable condition given by nature herself, the parent idea which generates all others. It is cognisable by itself, as otherwise there is nothing else that could make it known; the idea of being gives us itself the essence of the thing. Herein is secured the objectivity of truth—the faculty of recognising the essence of things, the foundation of the divine imperative of duty in the conscience of man, the logical foundation on which faith and charity may be supernaturally built. Being is incorporeal, independent of space, spiritual, and therefore incorruptible and immortal. It is independent of time; as being in its essence is always being, and as it would be a contradiction in terms for being to cease to be being, it is eternal. But since it was united to the soul in time, it must have existed before it, and be independent of it. And thus we reach an Intelligence anterior to human intelligence—an Eternal Mind. This eternal mind is God's, and therefore God exists, and his existence and the immortality of the soul remain the true foundation of morals. But being as intuitively seen by nature merely gives the certainty that God exists; it cannot make God known to us until we are illumined by a new faculty—an influx of objective light, the Light of Grace. Thus a necessary place for revelation is found in the essential limitations of man's nature, and this revelation of God is contained in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which alone can harmonise all the contradictions of the universe.
Rosmini's most important work was his contribution to Ideology; his masterpiece is his New Essay on the Origin of Ideas (1830; Eng. trans. 3 vols. 1883-84) or his Psychology (1846-48; Eng. trans. 3 vols. 1884-88), both of which belong to the classics of philosophical literature. Death overtook him before he had completed his great projected work, the Theosophy (5 vols. 1859-74). A complete Bibliography of his writings, ninety- nine in number, is prefixed by Thomas Davidson to his admirable translation (1882) of the Sistema Filosofico (1845), grouped under the heads of Ideology and Logic, Metaphysical Sciences, Philosophy of Morals and Right, Education and Methodology, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of the Supernatural, Ecclesiastical Prose, and Miscellaneous. The last section includes two volumes of Correspondence, but as many as 15,000 Letters are said to be still unprinted. In Mr Davidson's work will be found, besides a brief Life and a lucid Introduction, a list of books relating to Rosmini's Life and Philosophy. Here we may name the studies by Tommaseo (Turin, 1855), Franc. Paoli (Turin and Rovereto, 1880-84), and Father Lockhart (2d ed. complete, 2 vols. 1886). Rosmini's own Sketch of Modern Philosophies and of his Own System has been translated, with an admirable Introduction, by Father Lockhart (1882; 2d ed. 1890).