Schools of Philosophy
[From Brownson’s Quarterly Review for January, 1854.]
The author of the first named of these works is a French Sulpitian of rare merit, formerly Professor of Philosophy at Clermont, now, we believe, at Issy. He is a young man, but he has made good philosophical studies, and is animated by a noble philosophical spirit. His work, which might, perhaps, gain by condensation and vigor of style, is certainly one of great value, and, saving the part which treats of ethics, one of the best manuals of philosophy we are acquainted with. It strikes us as a very great advance, as to its principles, we say not as to the ability of the author, on the Lugdenensis, the popular work of Bouvier, the manuals of Liberator, Dmowski, and even Rothenflue. The author, perhaps, adheres too closely to Malebranche, but he rejects Cartesianism and modern psychologism, and bases his system on sound ontological principles. If we should object at all to his metaphysics, it would be to his having failed to adapt his method to his principles. But we are so thankful to find a philosophical work, in these days, generally sound in its fundamental principles, that we can overlook minor faults, and give it a most hearty welcome, although we may not regard it as perfect. The philosophical student will not fail to prize the author's Prolegomena very highly, and his refutation of pantheism is decidedly the best we have ever seen, and leaves on that head, as far as we can judge, nothing to be desired.
The author, undoubtedly, departs in some respects from the philosophical system of our more generally used manuals, and many will regard him as an innovator; but if he innovates, he innovates antiquity, for the school to which he inclines is older than the school which will oppose him. The ontological school, both among the Gentiles and among Catholics, is older than the psychological or Peripatetic school, as it was formerly called. The latter school hardly makes its appearance in the Catholic world till the Middle Ages, and owes its introduction in a great measure to the influence of the Mahometan schools in the East, on the coast of Africa, and in Spain. If its adherents can produce a catena of great saints and doctors from the twelfth or thirteenth century down to our times, their opponents can produce a catena of no less eminent saints and doctors from the Apostolic age down to our own. If the school which would charge the author with innovating can plead in its favor an Abelard, an Alesius, an Albertus Magnus, a St. Thomas, an Occam, a Suarez, he can plead in his favor a St. Augustine, and nearly all the fathers, St. Anselm, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, St. Bonaventura, a Duns Scotus, a Gerson, a Ficinus, a Malebranche, a Thomassin, a Vico, a Gerdil, and a Bossuet and a Fe"nelon, who were Cartesians only in name. If it comes to the authority of great names, our author has nothing to fear; for if the single name of St. Thomas is a host, that of St. Augustine is not inferior to it, nor to any other name in philosophy; besides, it is evident to the student of the works of the Angelic Doctor, that, if he adopted the Peripatetic philosophy, it was not so much because he preferred it as because he found it generally received, and because he would use it against the enemies of religion, who for the most part professed it, and compel it as a slave to serve the cause of revealed truth. Wherever he breaks from the old Stagirite, and philosophizes freely, so to speak, on his own hook, he accepts and defends ontological and realistic principles.
The second work named at the head of this article is from the modern psychological school, and is a very successful attempt to turn the shafts of wit and ridicule against those who have the temerity to defend the principles and method of the ontological school. As a jeu d'esprit we can read and enjoy it, but as an argument we cannot respect it so highly as we could wish, for it confounds the bastard ontology of the heterodox with the views of the so-called ontologists among Catholics, and concludes against the truth of the latter from the absurdity of the former. We are sorry to see this mode of warfare adopted by any philosophical school, because it presents a false issue to the public, and is calculated to arouse passions in poor human nature anything but favorable to the cause of truth. We are ourselves as strongly opposed to that bastard ontology as is the writer of L'Autocrazia delP Ente, and it is not pleasant to be held up to the public as embracing it, because we do not happen to embrace the psychological school. There is an ontological school as far removed from the heterodox German ontological school, or the Rosminian ensingenere, as from the school defended by the Civilta Cattolica.
We like earnestness, we like zeal in the defense of what one holds to be truth, but we should not dare to defend even dogmatic truth by unfairness towards its opponents, much less mere philosophical opinions. Two schools of philosophy, it is well known, exist among Catholics, each aspiring to the throne of the philosophical world. These schools, under different forms and different names, have subsisted among us for a long time, and both are tolerated by the Church, which leaves each free to maintain its own opinion in Christian charity, and to dispute that of the other, so long as it does not advance its opinion as Catholic dogma, or maintain any thing repugnant to the decisions and definitions of Popes and Councils, and the unanimous teaching of the Fathers. Undoubtedly this does not imply that both schools are equally sound, that their respective opinions are equally probable, and that there is no ground for preferring one to the other; but it does prove that one may belong to either without imperiling the salvation of his soul, and therefore that the differences between the two schools may be discussed without heat or passion on either side. These matters of difference lie in that sphere where the Church wills us to be free, and where, as long as we advance nothing immediately against faith, or that immediately tends to weaken its defenses, she leaves us to follow our own reason and will, as she does in political or domestic economy. We say immediately, because, no doubt, every error even in the natural order has some bearing, more or less remote, on revealed truth, since the revealed order presupposes the natural. But to tolerate no error of reason, however remote from the revealed dogma, would be to deny to man all free intellectual activity, which is contrary to the uniform practice of the Church. Her authority is full and universal as representing the Divine authority on earth, but her uniform practice is to leave men in philosophy, in government, in social and domestic economy, all the freedom compatible with the end for which she has been instituted; for her wish is to rear, not a race of mere slaves, but free and loyal worshippers of God.
The philosophy more generally taught in our schools is what we term the psychological, though of course free from the glaring defects of the psychologism which obtains in the schools of the heterodox. But though permitted to be taught, there is a wide and growing feeling among earnest and devout Catholics, that it does not afford that strong defense to religion and society, and those facilities for the refutation of modern heresies, which we have the right to demand of a philosophy taught to Catholic youth. That we, to some extent, share this feeling, we have no disposition to deny, but we are not very warm on the subject, and we guard against blaming, in any degree, our professors. That philosophy may have, in our opinion, remote bearings injurious to faith; but it is not heretical, and may be held without any impeachment of one's orthodoxy. Moreover, it is not the professor's business to construct a new or revive an obsolete system of philosophy; his business is to teach a system already constructed, and approved by his superiors. The introduction of new, or the revival of old systems, by individual professors, each on his own responsibility, would produce no little confusion in philosophical teaching, and tend to generate that skepticism in the minds of youth which it is so important to guard against. It is always dangerous to disturb the settled order of things, even though that order may not answer to the highest and most perfect ideal. If the hostility of kings and princes to the Pope, and their desire to possess themselves of the goods of the Church, had the principal share in preparing the revolt of the sixteenth century, the quarrels of the Schoolmen, the attempt to dislodge Aristotle and enthrone Plato as the philosopher, had no little to do in detaching the minds of men from the theology of the Church, and preparing the way for the Protestant heresies. When the whole method of public teaching was adjusted to the scholastic philosophy, it was not easy to attack that philosophy without seeming in the minds of many to be attacking the Church, who had permitted her theology to be cast in its mould, and some of whose most revered saints had professed it.
However objectionable many may regard the philosophical system embodied in our more generally used textbooks, it must be conceded that the objections which might be urged against it are to no inconsiderable extent modified and practically obviated by the manner in which it is applied; and even if it were not so, what have we to take its place? Its modern opponents have criticized it, and written able essays on the principles and method of philosophy, but we are not aware that there is any better system of philosophy drawn out in that systematic order and completeness which fit it for the professor's use. Suppose, for a moment, that the ontological principles and methods insisted on by Gioberti are sound, what is the professor to do with them before his class? They are not systematized; there is no philosophy based on them drawn out in all its parts and adjusted to the general system of public teaching. What is the professor to do? Is he to interrupt his lessons till he has constructed all the parts of philosophy in harmony with them, — a work demanding years of patient study and labor, and that high order of metaphysical talent and genius scarcely to be found in one man in a century. Whatever changes may be demanded in the public teaching of philosophy, the time has not yet come for them, as the professor before us, as well as Father Rothenflue, fully proves, for while he adopts in his Prole gomena the principles of the ontological or synthetic school, he has not dared to depart from the language and method of the scholastic psychologists.
With these feelings towards the school with which we do not wholly agree, we cannot enlist with much zeal in any controversy against it; or in an animated defense of a rival school; and if we take part now and then in the controversy between them, it is more through our love of fair play than through any strong feeling of the absolute necessity of dispossessing one school and establishing another in its place. On certain questions we undoubtedly sympathize with the so-called Ontologists, but properly speaking, we have for ourselves no philosophical system, belong to no school, and swear by no master, neither by Gioberti nor by Father Curci. We regard, as we often say, philosophy simply as the rational element of supernatural theology, never capable by itself alone of being molded into a complete system even of natural truth, and never worthy of confidence when it aspires to disengage itself from revelation, and to stand alone as a separate and independent science. All we aim at is, to make a right use of reason in discussing those questions pertaining to reason which come in our way when defending Catholic faith and morals. Indeed, logic is the only part of philosophy we set much store by, and if we enter into the discussion of the higher metaphysical problems, it is chiefly for the sake of logic, because we cannot otherwise make sure of a logic which conforms to the real order of things. It is with a view to defend such a logic, not for the sake of one or another school of metaphysics, that we ask our readers to follow us a little into the question in dispute between the two schools respectively represented by the authors of the works we have cited, and perhaps, after all, we shall end by showing them that these two schools can much more easily be made to harmonize with each other than is commonly supposed.
The difference between the ontological and the psychological schools is perpetuated by the very general adoption in our schools of the Aristotelian logic, and what we regard as the errors of the psychological school we think have obtained among Catholics in consequence of that adoption. Aristotle's logic partakes of the general error of his philosophy. We wish to speak with all becoming respect of one whom the great St. Thomas terms the Philosopher; but he was, after all, a Gentile. He went, perhaps, as far as a Gentile could go; but we must remember that all Gentile philosophy was incomplete and fragmentary. The whole Gentile world had lost or corrupted the dogma of creation, and resolved creation into emanation, generation, or formation. They had broken the unity of the primitive language of mankind, had lost the integrity of the primitive tradition, and lacked the light which supernatural theology sheds on the great problems of human science, and hence, whatever their genius, their talent, or their industry, they were utterly unable to construct a complete and self-coherent system of philosophy. Ignorant of the dogma of creation, and holding the doctrine of formation in its place, it was not in Aristotle's power to construct a logic that should correspond to the order of things. He might have a wide and varied knowledge of phenomena, he might have a marvelous sagacity and great subtlety, he might reason powerfully and justly on many aspects of things, but he could never explain the syllogism, or render a just account of reasoning. The fundamental vice of his logic is, that it does not conform to the real order of things, whether taken subjectively or objectively. It does not bring us face to face with reality, although no man ever labored harder to find a logic which would do so; it always interposes a mundus logicus between the reason and the real world, and deals with the lifeless forms of abstract thought, instead of the living forms of things. Always is there interposed between the cognitive subject and the intelligible object a world of phantasms and intelligible species, which are neither God nor creature, neither nothing nor yet something, but a tertium quid, by means of which in some unintelligible way the cognitive subject comes into relation with the cognizable object. A little meditation on the fact that God has created all things by his own power from nothing, would speedily have made away with these intermeddling phantasms and intelligible species, annihilated this mundus logicus unnecessarily interposed between subject and object, by showing that whatever is not thing is nothing, that whatever thing is not God is creature, and that whatever thing — entity in scholastic language — is not creature is God, and that his intelligible light, indistinguishable from him, is the only medium between the cognitive faculty and its object, that can be asserted or conceived.
The old Scholastics, of course, knew and held the dogma of creation, and vindicated it whenever it was an express thesis; but, unhappily, when that dogma was not immediately in question, they adopted without modification the Aristotelian logic, and attempted like him to explain the facts of human cognition and reasoning without its light. Hence their everlasting abstractions, their subtile distinctions of forms of mere thought, not of things, and their unreality, which have so hurt their reputation, and so vitiated a no small portion of their philosophical labors. Of course we speak of the Scholastics as philosophers treating freely rational questions, not as theologians treating Catholic dogmas, or even rational questions in their immediate relation to faith. This same Aristotelian logic has served as the model of that still in use, and hence we find in the present scholastic philosophy traces of the original vice. In all that immediately touches dogma, it conforms to the dogma of creation, and is, as we should say, ontological, while in all else it conforms to the Aristotelian notion of formation, and thus is not in harmony with itself.
The psychological school is divided into two principal branches, the Cartesian and the Scholastic. It is possible that the modern Scholastics will object to being termed psychologists, but we see not how they can with propriety. The characteristic of the psychologist is to assert the soul, a contingent existence, as the starting-point of all philosophy, and that the necessary, the absolute, as real and necessary being, is not apprehensible in immediate intuition, and is attained to only by a logical induction from intuition of the contingent, that is, intuition of creatures. The Scholastics of our time, as well as those of mediaeval times, assert this, contend that the contingent only is immediately known, and that God in the natural order is known only logically, as a logical induction, and therefore are really psychologists. We shall so call them, not to offend, but to distinguish them. They differ from the Cartesians as to evidence or the criterion of certainty, and especially as to the methodical doubt, real or feigned, recommended by Descartes. They profess to commence with a certain truth or fact, and to proceed from the known to the unknown, by demonstration, which rests for its certainty on the principle of contradiction; the Cartesians profess to begin by doubting or questioning everything, and they place evidence or certainty in clearness and distinctness of ideas. The Scholastics regard philosophy as demonstrative; the Cartesians as inquisitive.
The Scholastics have certainly as to method the advantage over their Cartesian brethren. Descartes lays it down that a man should begin by doubting all that he has been taught or hitherto believed, and believe henceforth only what he is able to prove by bringing it to the test of clear and distinct ideas. But this method, which is precisely the Protestant method of examination and private judgment, is obviously inadmissible, for the doubt, if real, is in a Catholic impious and forbidden; if unreal, it is no doubt at all, and amounts to nothing. To begin in a feigned doubt is to begin in a fiction, in falsehood; to begin in a real doubt is to begin in uncertainty, and there is no logical alchemy by which certainty can be extracted from pure uncertainty, or truth from pure falsehood. Descartes himself proves this, for he gets out of the doubt he places as his starting-point only by a shallow sophism, Cogito, ergo sum, "I think, therefore I exist," — which is a sheer begging of the question. We know that, when hard pressed by his opponents, Descartes denied that he intended this as an argument to prove his existence, and maintained that he only gave it as a statement of the fact in which he became conscious of existing. But if so, only so much the worse for him, for it was precisely an argument to prove his existence that he needed. It is true that he might allege that proof in his system consists in clearness and distinctness of ideas; but in the act of thinking he has a clear and distinct idea or conception of his existence, and therefore he really does prove his existence. But that evidence is in clear and distinct ideas he does not anywhere prove, and that always, in thinking, one has a clear and distinct idea of his own existence, is not true, for ordinarily we have only an obscure and indistinct conception of ourselves as existing. Moreover, reasoning is always from premises, and if these be uncertain, so must be the conclusion.
But if the Scholastics are right against the Cartesians in adopting the demonstrative instead of the inquisitive method, they seem to us to fall into a very grave error as to the province of demonstration itself. They assume that demonstration proceeds from the known to the unknown, and enables them to conclude beyond the matter intuitively presented. The whole question between them and us lies precisely in this assumption. They deny all intuition or direct cognition of real and necessary being, and yet they contend that real and necessary being is legitimately concluded from the cognition of contingent existences. They must hold, then, that they can conclude more than they have in their premises, contrary to the well-known rule of logic: —
"Latius hunc quam pracmissiB conclusio non vult."
If they contended that the demonstration simply distinguishes real and necessary being from the contingent in the intuition in which it is presented only in an obscure and indistinct manner, their conclusion would not be broader than their premises, and there would be no essential disagreement between them and the Catholic ontological school. But they do not admit this; they deny that we have any direct apprehension of real and necessary being at all, and then either they conclude what is not contained in their premises, and their conclusion is invalid, or the necessary and absolute which they conclude is a mere logical abstraction formed by the mind itself. Their God, then, whom they profess to demonstrate, would be only an abstract God, and they would have no right to laugh at Fichte,who remarked to his class as he concluded one lecture, "In our next lecture, gentlemen, we will make God."
Demonstration is the work of reflection, and reflection is never primary. The Italians happily express it by the word ripensare, to re-think, or to think again, and surely the mind must have thought before it can re-think; it must have had the matter of reflection presented before reflecting on it . Reasoning, the syllogism, demonstration, is only the instrument of reflection, whose sole office is to distinguish, clear up, systematize, and verify our immediate intuitions, and though it may and usually does contain less, it can never contain more than the matter presented in our direct cognitions, or by faith, human or divine, in things natural or in things supernatural. As to the reality contained in it, our science begins and ends where begin and end our immediate intuitions or direct cognitions; all beyond is not science, but faith, and can never be legitimately included in our philosophy.
We do not deny that the mediaeval Scholastics — the Peripatetics, we mean — have the air of asserting that the syllogism is an instrument by which we advance from the known to the unknown; but this is to be understood of knowledge under a reflective and scientific form, not as to its matter, and their own expression is from the better to the less known. Reality simply presented or merely apprehended in intuition they do not regard as known, because known only in an obscure and indistinct manner; but they never suppose that in formal science they ever advance beyond the reality thus presented. Their real doctrine is not readily seized, because they do not admit, precisely in our sense, immediate intuition. We know according to them only by means of phantasms and intelligible species; but when we have penetrated to the real fact which they mean to assert, we shall find that the phantasms are simply the means by which we actually cognize sensible or corporeal things, and the intelligible species are the means by which we really apprehend intelligibles or incorporeal things. The sensitive faculty does not, according to St. Thomas, terminate in the phantasms, but by them attains to their objects, and the intellective faculty does not terminate in the intelligible species, but through it attains to the intelligible reality. The phantasms and species present to the intellect their respective objects, and St. Thomas expressly teaches that nothing can be known by us not so presented. But as so presented, the reality is only the materia informis of science, and becomes science only as abstracted from the phantasms and species in which it is presented. It is easy to understand, then, why the Angelic Doctor regards the syllogism as the instrument of advancing science; he does so because on his principles it is by it that the intellect impresses on our simple apprehensions the form of science, and it is the form that gives actuality to the matter; but he was too good a logician to hold that the matter concluded can exceed the matter apprehended.
The scholastics followed Aristotle, and held that all cognition begins in sense, quod principium nostra cognilionis est a sensu; but we must beware how we suppose that such scholastics as St. Thomas held that only objects of sense are really apprehended in the phantasms or sensible species. They held that the intelligible is really apprehended in the phantasms, but under a sensible form, and is distinctly known only as abstracted or distinguished from them by the reflective intellect; and as nothing is really scientifically known except under an intelligible form, we see again how they could assert that the syllogism, the instrument of reflection, is a means of extending knowledge. But they do not represent it as extending knowledge beyond the matter apprehended, for their meaning is not that the intelligible is obtained from the sensible by a strictly analytic judgment, but that the intelligible is presented in the phantasms, or along with the sensible. That is, in our own language, what is called simple apprehension is simultaneously the apprehension or intuition of the sensible and intelligible as conjoined one with the other.
Under a certain point of view we are disposed on this last point to agree with the Peripatetics in opposition to the Platonists, or at least in opposition to Platonism as represented by Aristotle and understood by St . Thomas after the Neo-Platonists. Aristotle represents Plato as teaching that we have immediate intuition of intelligibles as separate from all apprehension of the sensible. We are far from being satisfied that Plato held this, and certainly, though we have been a somewhat diligent student of his works, we have never found it in them. Plato's problem, as we understand it, was not so much how we know, or by what faculty we are first placed in relation with reality, as what we must know in order to have real science. He placed science in the knowledge of the essences of things, which he called ideas, not in the knowledge of their exterior or sensible forms, which are variable and corruptible. But that these ideas are apprehensible in themselves without apprehension of the sensible to which they are joined, we have not found him teaching. But be this as it may, St. Thomas, after Aristotle, argues, and justly, that the intelligible is to the sensible as the soul is to the body, and that as man is in this present life always soul united to body, he can perform no operations which are not conjointly operations of both. Not being a pure spirit, but spirit united to matter, — not being a pure intelligence, like the angels, but intelligence united to sense, — he can apprehend the intelligible only as united to the sensible, the spiritual only as united in some way to the material. We apprehend the intelligible indeed, — the idea in the language of Plato, — but only in conjunction with the sensible, and therefore God never as separate from his works. Thus far we agree with the Peripatetics, and hold that every intuition of the intelligible even includes the sensible.
But we do not accept the doctrine that our cognition begins in sense, or the sensible species. The argument from the union of soul and body admits a double application, and if it proves that we can have no intellections without sensations, it proves equally that we can have no sensations without intellections, no sensible intuition without intelligible intuition. Indeed, it proves more than this. The intellective is to the sensitive, the intelligible is to the sensible, what the soul is to the body. But the soul is forma corporis, the form of the body. The intelligible, therefore, is the form of the sensible, intellect the form of sense. The principium is in the form, not in the matter, for the matter is potential, simply in potentia ad formam, and is made actual by the form. Therefore it is the intellect that gives to sensation its form of cognition, or that renders it actual perception of the objects of sense. Without intelligible intuition, sensation is a mere organic affection, and no actual perception at all. Cognition is the basis of all sensible perception, for whatever the objects or conditions of knowledge, the cognitive faculty is one and the same. We have not, as Aristotle perhaps held, one faculty called sense by which we know particulars, and another called intellect, by which we know universals. We know both corporeals and incorporeals, sensibles and intelligibles, by the intellective faculty, the former through sensible affection, and the latter on the occasion of such affection, or more simply, in conjunction with the former. Properly, then, though both the universal and the particular, the intelligible and the sensible, are presented 'simultaneously in one and the same intuition, the principium of our cognition is in the intellect, not in the senses, for till the intellect is reached there is no commencement of cognition. The Scholastics were misled by Aristotle, who, denying creation and asserting an eternal matter extra Deum, in which he placed the possible of determinate things, was obliged to place the principium in matter, that is, in the potential, which, since not actual, should be regarded as nothing at all. The Scholastics, knowing perfectly well the dogma of creation, ought not to have fallen into this error, for they were not ignorant that the possibility of things is in the Divine essence, and that the potential in that it is simply potential is a nullity. To say of anything that it is potential, is simply saying that it does not exist, but that God has power, if he chooses, to create it. God is the creator and the creability of all things, is both their formal and their material cause, in so far as material cause they have, and therefore the potential regarded as extra Deum is, as we have said, simply nothing. To place the principium in the potential is then a simple absurdity, and in the Scholastics wholly uncalled for, an inconsequence. To place the principium of cognition in sensation, which is only in potentia ad cognitionem, were as absurd as, after having declared the soul forma corporis, to pretend that the principium of the soul is in the body, or that the soul derives its life and actuality from the body, as pretend our modern materialists, instead of the body being made an actual and living body by the soul, and being, when separate from the soul, not a body, but a carcass.
The Scholastics, having placed the principium of our cognition in sense, were obliged to assume intelligibles or universal only as abstracted from the phantasmata or sensible species in which they are originally presented. This abstraction they suppose the intellect is competent to make by its own powers, and does make, as St. Thomas says, dividendo et componendo, or by ratiocination. Hence we find them uniformly, after Aristotle, and like all our modern inductionists, reasoning in a vicious circle. They tell us all knowledge begins a sensu, and that through the senses we know only particulars, and universals, genera and species, are obtained by reasoning, abstracting them from the particulars. Experience furnishes the particulars, and reason by way of induction obtains from them the universals, which, reapplied to particulars, give sapientia, or wisdom, the end of all philosophy. But they also tell us that all reasoning, all demonstration, proceeds from universals to particulars! So they assume universals in order to get particulars, and particulars in order to get universals. They prove their particulars by their universals, and their universals by their particulars. The universals are obtained by reasoning, and yet there is no reasoning without universals. And we are to be held up to ridicule and made the butt of Italian wit, because we cannot accept this as sound logic! Nay, denounced as pantheists, as enemies of religion, and as laboring only to destroy the defences of the Catholic faith! Yet no man who has made himself even superficially acquainted with the Aristotelian logic, can deny that it involves this vicious circle.
The mistake of Aristotle was not so much in denying the distinct intuition of universals, as it was in supposing that reflection originally obtains them by abstraction from the sensible species. The intellect does not, and cannot, so obtain them, for the reasons already assigned to prove that we never have intuition of the intelligible without the sensible. Intellect is joined to sense in the reflective order as much as it is in the intuitive, and therefore it cannot in reflection, any more than in direct cognition, apprehend the purely intelligible. As in intuition it is sensibly presented, so in reflection it must be sensibly represented. Here is a point which, as far as we have seen, neither Aristotle nor even St. Thomas sufficiently elucidates, and in the elucidation of which we must find the method of escaping from the Peripatetic circle. This sensible representation is not furnished by the sensible species or phantasms, for in them the intelligible is presented, not represented,— presented to the intuitive, not represented to the reflective understanding. It is impossible for man himself to furnish the medium of sensible representation, and it cannot be furnished by the objects themselves, for the precise work to be done is to separate the purely intelligible from the sensible species, or the sensible, in the intuition or apprehension of objects themselves. The Creator then must himself furnish it, and he does furnish it in language, which is the sensible sign, symbol, or representation of the intelligible. And hence man cannot reflect, or perform any operation of reasoning, without language, as has been so ably proved by the illustrious De Bonald, although his arguments would have been more conclusive, if he had taken pains to distinguish between reflective and intuitive thought. Intelligibles or universals are intuitively presented, as we say, — presented in the intelligible species, as the Schoolmen say; but they are objects of reflection, of distinct apprehension, or reflex cognition, only as sensibly represented in language. So represented, they are supplied to the mind prior to the intellectual operation of abstracting them from the sensible species or intuitions, and therefore may be legitimately used in reasoning before they are thus obtained. Consequently, by language, which sensibly represents the universals, we can get out of the Peripatetic circle. It is, in fact, by means of the word, of language, that Aristotle himself escapes from that circle; for he very nearly identifies logic with grammar, places the elements of the syllogism in verbal propositions, and makes the explanation of reasoning little else than the explanation of the right use of words. He avails himself of the fact of language, but he does not render a proper account of it, or legitimate the usage he makes of it. His practice was truer than his theory. This fact of the divine origin of language, and its necessity as the sensible representation of the intelligible in the reflective understanding, is one of vast importance, and, if attended to, would save philosophy from that too rationalistic tendency objected by the respectable Bonnetty and others, and teach our scholastic psychologists that to their demonstrative method they must add tradition or history, and prove to the heterodox that true philosophy can be found only where the primitive tradition and the unity and integrity of language have been infallibly preserved, therefore only in the Catholic Society or Church. Outside of that society there is no unity of speech, no integrity of doctrine; the primitive tradition is broken, and there are only fragments, disjecta membra, even of truth pertaining to the natural order. Alas! heterodoxy, whether in the natural order or the supernatural, is that wicked Typhon of Egyptian mythology, who seized the good Osiris and hewed him in pieces, and scattered his members far and wide over the land and the sea. So deals it with the fair and lovely form of Truth, and no weeping Isis, however painful her search, can gather them up and mould them anew into a living and reproductive whole!
It is these mistakes into which our Scholastics fall in their laudable efforts to avoid, on the one hand, the pure materialism of old Democritus, and the pure spiritualism or incorporealism of the Platonists on the other, that have induced them to deny all immediate intuition of the intelligible, and to maintain that the necessary is obtained only by induction from the contingent. Correcting these mistakes, dismissing their vexatious phantasms and intelligible species, and understanding that we stand face to face with reality, whether corporeal or incorporeal, spiritual or material, intelligible or sensible, with nothing but the intelligible light of God between as the medium of both intelligible and sensible intuition, they might easily find themselves in accord with the Catholic ontologists, and their philosophy corresponding to the order of things. They might then easily perceive that their principal objections to the ontological method are founded in misapprehension, and that they, though formally denying, do virtually admit all that we ourselves contend for. Their objections to the ontologists are based on the supposition that they assert pure and distinct intuition of God by our natural powers, or clear and distinct intuition of the necessary and intelligible prior to and without the contingent and sensible; but this, though true of the heterodox or bastard ontologists, such as we find among non-Catholics, is by no means the case with all who reject the psychological and assert the ontological method. The alternative presented is not, either that the necessary and intelligible must be concluded, by an analytic judgment, from the intuition of the contingent and sensible, or that the contingent and sensible must be concluded from the necessary and intelligible. These are two extremes alike false and dangerous, the one leading to nihilism through atheism, the other through pantheism. We have already explained that the intelligible is never presented alone, or separate from the sensible, but that both are in this life presented together, in one and the same intuition, and therefore that we have no simple intuitions or apprehensions, but that every apprehension, intuition, or thought is a complex fact, including both the intelligible and the sensible. As the sensible always represents the subject, it follows that there is never intuition of the object without intuition or apprehension of the subject, and none of the subject without the object, and therefore that there can be no intuition of God, real and necessary being, without the apprehension of the soul, contingent and relative being, or existence. Then the primum philosophicum can be neither the necessary, the absolute, theprimum ontologicum alone, as maintain the German ontologists, or rather pantheists, nor the contingent, the relative, the primum psychologicum, as maintain the scholastic psychologists, but must be the simultaneous presentation of the two in their real synthesis or union. In this real and necessary being, or God, is really presented in the intuition, not separately, but in relation with the soul, or the contingent, not as clearly and distinctly known, but, as in all direct cognition, as known only in an obscure and indistinct manner.
This view, which we may call the synthetic, is opposed, as our readers cannot fail to perceive, alike to those who make the intuition of real and necessary being their starting-point, and profess to descend, by way of deduction, to contingent existence or to creatures, and to those who profess to start with the soul alone, and to be able from intuition of the contingent to rise by induction to necessary being, that is, to God. When by ontologists are meant the former, we must disclaim the name, for deduction is simple analysis, and attains to no predicates but such as lie already before the mind in the subject, and from the single conception of being can be obtained only being and its attributes. Here is, in our judgment, the principal fault of the work of the excellent Father Rothenflue. Father Rothenflue represents real and necessary being — God — as first in the order of intuition, but he does not take note of the fact that the necessary is never, in this life, presented to us without the contingent; for we never, in this life, see God as he is in himself, and at all only as he is related to us, or in his relation ad extra, as the theologians call it, of Creator. We see not, then, how Father Rothenflue's intuition of real and necessary being is to be distinguished, save in degree, from the intuitive vision of the blest; nor do we understand how he contrives to include in his philosophy contingent existences, or, in other words, after having assumed the primum ontologicum as his primum philosophicum, how he can by any legitimate process escape pantheism. He can relieve himself from this objection only by taking note that along with the necessary, as that on which it depends as its principium, is always presented the contingent in the same complex intuition, and therefore that the primum philosophicum cannot be being alone, any more than it can be the soul or contingent existence alone.
On the same principle, we object to those who profess to rise from the contingent discursively to the necessary, because, if they have only the ens contingens, they can conclude only the contingent and its phenomena. The scholastic psychologists teach that the first object of the intellect is ens reale et actu, a real or actual ens, but they deny that this is ens necessarium, and pretend that it is simply the soul or ens contingens. From this ens contingens they profess to be able to conclude ens necessarium, or God. But this is not possible by deduction, or analytic reasoning, which requires the predicate to be already in the subject, because the ens necessarium is not in or a predicate of, ens contingens; since if it were the contingent would not be contingent, but necessary, — a manifest contradiction in terms. It is equally impossible by synthetic reasoning, which adds to the subject a predicate not contained in it; for the judgment cannot join to the subject an unknown predicate, or a predicate not intellectually apprehended, as Kant has sufficiently proved in his Critic der reinen Vernunft. And here it is denied that the predicate ens necessarium is apprehended, since the very object of the process is to find it. In all synthetic or inductive reasoning, the conclusion is invalid if it goes beyond the particulars enumerated or the reality observed, and in the case before us it is contended that the ens necessarium which is to be concluded escapes all observation, and is wholly unknown. How, then, is the mind, in its judgment, to add it, bind it, to the subject, ens contingens ?
The fact is, that our Scholastics do really assume the necessary to be apprehended by the intellect, although they imagine that they do not. They hold that God can be demonstrated by way of induction from contingent existences, and this argument holds a prominent place in their ontology. We do not question, nay, we maintain, the validity of this argument when properly understood. But what is their process? The contingent is known to exist, but, as its very name implies, it does not suffice for itself, has not the reason of its existence in itself, and cannot stand alone, and therefore it is necessary that there be something else on which it depends for its existence, which has caused it to exist, and sustains it. This something, since what is not real cannot act, and since we cannot suppose an infinite series of causes, must be real and necessary being, or the eternal and self-existent God. That is, in the apprehension of ens contingens they apprehend or have intuition of the necessity of ens necessarium et reale. The intuition of this necessity must be conceded, or the argument is good for nothing, and the conclusion cannot be asserted as necessary, and, indeed, cannot be asserted at all. Now this necessity of real and necessary being which is apprehended in apprehending the contingent, and which is the principle of the conclusion, what is it? The Scholastics, no doubt, regard this necessity as something really distinct from the necessary being itself. Otherwise they could not assert a progress in their argument from the known to the unknown, or deny the immediate intuition of real and necessary being. But is it something distinct? And does not their mistake lie precisely in supposing that it is?
This necessity is either something created or uncreated. It is not something created, for if it were it would be the contingent itself, and a contingent necessity is not admissible. If uncreated, it is either ens or non-ens. If nonens, a nonentity, it is simply nothing, and can be no medium of concluding the necessary from the contingent . If ens, then it is ens increatum, and ens increatum is God, real and necessary being. Consequently, the distinction contended for, between the apprehension of the necessity of real and necessary being, and the apprehension of real and necessary being itself, does not and cannot in reality exist, and the apprehension of the necessity is ipso facto apprehension of real and necessary being, of God himself, although we may not always do, and certainly not always advert to it.
The Scholastics have been misled on this point by their devotion to Aristotle, who was obliged, in his theory, to explain the production of things and human knowledge without the fact of creation. Their error, if they will pardon us the word, lies precisely in supposing a logical necessity distinct from necessary being, and that from the apprehension of the necessity of real and necessary being to the judgment such being is, there is a progress. Hence why we began by insisting so strenuously on the recognition of the fact of the creation of all things from nothing, as essential to the construction of a sound logic, or a logic that conforms to the order of things. It is not till we learn that God has created all things out of nothing, that we are able to say that whatever is not God is creature, and that whatever is not creature is God. God and creature comprise all that is or exists, and what neither is nor exists is simply nothing, and is and can be no object of thought, as both St. Thomas and Aristotle teach. "Ens namque est objectum intellectus primum," says the Angelic Doctor, "cum nihil sciri possit, nisi ipsum quod est ens actu, ut dicitur in 9 Met. Unde nee oppositum ejus intelligere potest intellectus, non ens." * Yet Aristotle, who confounds creation with formation, and makes the essences of things consist partly in the form and partly in the matter, imagined a sort of tertium quid, neither God nor creature, not precisely something, nor yet absolutely nothing. Corresponding to this tertium quid, he imagines a sort of ens logicum distinct from ens physicum, a sort of middle term between ens and non ens. Hence a mundus logicus distinct from the mundus physicus, and a logical necessity distinguishable from physical necessity, or necessary being. Our Scholastics will not say the necessity of necessary being which the mind apprehends is literally nothing, nor yet will they admit it is a real being or entity. They regard it as an ens logicum, or as a logical relation between two terms; but relation apart from the related is inconceivable, for it is a sheer nullity. It exists and is apprehensible only in the related. Nothing exists in abstructo; all reality is concrete, and it is only in the concrete that things are or can be apprehended.
The Scholastics forget this, and, as they agree that only what is ens aliquo modo can be an abject of the intellect, they clothe their abstractions with a sort of entity, and imagine them apprehensible extra Deum, and apart from their concretes. It is only by so doing that they can pretend that the necessity they apprehend in apprehending the contingent is distinguishable from real and necessary being. All conceivable necessity is in God, is God, for there can neither be necessity out of being, nor necessity in a non-necessary being. Necessity is in being, not in non-being. The necessity that there should be God is not any other necessity than the necessity of his own being; and the necessity of his being, which we assert when we say he is necessary being, is in him, not out of him, necessitating him to be. It is a necessity in him to be, and to be precisely what he is, and simply implies that his being is itself its sole and sufficient cause or reason of itself. When we say this or that is necessary or unnecessary, we have reference always to his Divine Essence, and the real meaning is, that this or that is or is not necessary in the eternal and immutable nature of God. God is himself, in his own essence, the eternal reason, nature, or fitness of things, of which philosophers speak, that is, in so far as it is necessary, and in his power, in so far as it is contingent. But all this is obscured by the Aristotelian logic, which places the necessary as well as the possible in some sense extra Deum. Indeed, an assumption of this sort runs through all Gentile philosophy. Hence the fatum of the Stoics, and the Destiny of the Poets, which binds alike gods and men in the invincible chain of an inexorable Necessity. Neither Greek nor Roman philosophy ever succeeds in steering wholly clear of Oriental Dualism. Pythagoras and Plato assert the eternity of matter, and place in it the origin of evil; and Aristotle finds in this same eternal matter a limitation of the power of God. The Scholastics struggle bravely against this Dualism, and to harmonize their Gentile logic with their Catholic theology, but perhaps not always with complete success. They define the possible as that in which there is no repugnance between the subject and predicate, and the impossible as that in which there is such repugnance; but they are not uniformly careful to inform us that the subject is the Divine Essence, and that the possible or impossible is what is or is not repugnant to that, and that both have their reason, not out of God, but in the fulness and perfection of his own being. The same remarks are applicable to the necessary and the unnecessary. Not being ordinarily given as predicates of the Divine Being only, they are not seldom regarded, even by men who pass for philosophers, as predicates, either of no subject, or of an unknown subject, which is neither God nor creation, neither something nor yet nothing.
We do not, say the Scholastics, in apprehending the contingent, apprehend ens necessarium et reale, but the necessity there is that there be ens necessarium et reale. But can you apprehend the necessity of a thing which you do not apprehend? You apprehend the imperfect, but can you apprehend that it is imperfect, and that it needs something which it has not, if you have not the apprehension of the perfect in which it can find its complement? Not without conceiving the perfect, it is answered, but without apprehending the perfect. Without apprehending or knowing the perfect perfectly, we concede, but without knowing that it is, we deny. We do not pretend that our intuition of real and necessary being gives us a full and comprehensive knowledge of what it is, for our knowledge, at best, whatever its sphere or its object, is extremely imperfect, and hardly deserves the name of knowledge. We do not comprehend real and necessary being, we only apprehend it; and we apprehend it only in its relation to created existences, never in itself. We do not apprehend it at all, say the Scholastics, we apprehend only its necessity. But its necessity is not distinguishable from itself, for necessity can be apprehended only in necessary being, since the abstract apart from the concrete is a mere nullity, and no object of thought. Surely the necessity must be either something or nothing. If nothing, it is nothing, can do nothing, and nothing can be made of it. If something, it is either absolute being, or created existence, for created existence is the only medium between absolute being and nothing. It cannot be created existence, for that would imply a contradiction in terms, and because creation is, on the part of God, a free, not a necessary act. Then it must be absolute being. Then it is God, and then whoever apprehends necessity apprehends God. Then all who accept the argument from the contingent to the necessary, since the reasoning is synthetic, not analytic, do really assume, whether they are aware of it or not, that we have in the apprehension of creature the apprehension of that which is not creature, therefore, of God, the creator. The argument from entia contingentia is a good argument, when properly explained, and is objectionable only when presented as an analytic argument, or as a synthesis, which adds to the subject an unknown and unapprehensible predicate.
Every thought, intuitive or reflective, is a judgment, for, as we have seen, we have and can have no apprehension which is not simultaneously apprehension of both subject and object, the mind and that which stands opposed to it and is really distinguishable from it. In every thought, as in every enunciable proposition, there are three terms, subject, predicate, and copula. The subject is ens necessarium et reale, real and necessary being; the predicate is entia contingentia, or contingent existences. The copula, then, must be the relation of the necessary and contingent. This relation, the nexus that unites subject and predicate, can be nothing else than the creative act of God, which produces the predicate from nothing. We know this is so, from the dogma of creation, and we know furthermore, that entia contingentia can exist only inasmuch as they are created, and that the act by which they are created is and must be solely the act of God, for prior to their creation they are nothing, and nothing cannot concur in making itself something. It is of the nature of contingents not to have their cause or the reason of their existence in themselves, and therefore they cannot exist separated or disjoined from the creator. Consequently, the predicate existence can begin or continue to exist only as really joined to the subject, real and necessary being, by the creative act of God. This act must be an actus perdurans; for though an existence could be conceived to have been created, it can be conceived as continuing to exist only in its continuing to be created. Suppose the creative act of God to cease, or to be suspended, with regard to any particular existence, — and we may so suppose, because the act is, on the part of God, a free act, — that existence ceases at once, and is literally annihilated. It is only on condition, then, that the creative act is actus perdurans, that existences are continued, and what we call conservation is in reality only creation. So that the original and persisting relation between God and the soul, God and existences, is the relation of creator and creature. God, by his creative act, creates existences from nothing, and establishes a relation ad extra between them and himself. It is only on condition of the reality of such relation that thought is possible, for it is only by virtue of that relation that we exist at all, or that there is any thinker, except real and necessary being. The relation of creation is then the copula in the real order or in the judgment as the judgment of real and necessary being, and therefore its real apprehension must be the copula of the judgment regarded as ours, or else the order of cognition will not correspond to the order of things. The three terms of the judgment objectively considered are, then, Being, the subject; contingent existences, the predicate; and the creative act of being, the copula. And we may assume as our formula of thought, or primum philosophicum, and as the basis of all sound logic, Ens creat existentias, or Being creates existences.
This formula has been objected to as pantheistic, as placed first in the order of cognition when it should be last, and as being given as a philosophical when it is a theological truth, known only as supernaturally revealed. It is not easy to understand how it can be pantheistic. The essence of pantheism is in the denial of second causes or the production by the Creator of real effects ad extra. The formula, therefore, cannot have a pantheistic sense, unless it denies the predicate existence, or the subject apprehending as existing distinct from God and operating as second cause. This it certainly does not do, for it is given as a formula of thought, and its very purpose is to assert that the mind intuitively apprehends the subject thinking and the object thought as really united by the creative object, and this necessarily asserts the reality of the soul or subject of the intuition distinct from the object God, and its activity as second cause, for without such activity it could not think or be the subject of an intuition. The principle we proceed upon is, that the order of cognition must agree with the order of things, for we hold, with St. Thomas, that the intellect is essentially true, and that truth is in the correspondence of the thought to the thing. We have proved that, in apprehending the object or thing, we invariably and necessarily apprehend ourselves as subject apprehending; that we can never apprehend what is not ourselves without apprehending ourselves, nor ourselves without apprehending what is not ourselves; that is, every thought affirms the subject simultaneously with the object, and the object simultaneously with the subject. The formula then no more denies the subject than the object. It expressly asserts existences distinguished from as well as united to God by his creative act, as really placed ad extraby his creative act, which creates them from nothing, — the direct contradiction of pantheism, which denies that any effects are produced ad extra, or that there is any thing really produced distinguishable ad extra from God.
The charge of pantheism, we have been told, is warranted by the fact that the verb in the formula is placed in the present tense. The present tense, it is contended, expresses an action unfinished, whose effect is in the process of completion, but is not yet completed. Ens creat existentias, means, God is creating existences, and this means that the existences are only in the process of creation, therefore that they are only incomplete or inchoate existences. Such existences cannot act, and therefore the whole thinking activity asserted is that of God, which, as it denies the proper activity of second causes, is pantheism. But this conclusion, if possible, is not necessary. The verb is placed in the present tense, not to express the act as incomplete in relation to its proper effect, but to express the fact that the act is a present act. The act may be present and yet terminate in its complete effect. The effect is simply the extrinsic terminus of the causative act. Existences cannot be supposed to be once created, and then to be able to subsist of themselves, without the creative energy that produced them. Their conservation is their continuous creation. Being only the extrinsic terminus of the creative act, they are, if separated from it, simply nothing. They are produced and subsist only by virtue of the creative energy of that act, and the cessation of that act would be their annihilation. When I consider myself as having existed, I use the perfect tense, and say, God has created me; but when I wish to consider myself simply as existing, I say, God creates me; for he does literally create me at this very moment, and if his creative act were not a present act to me, and did not this moment create me from nothing, I should not exist, or be an existence at all. The act of creation and conservation is the one creative act, and hence to every actual existence the creative act is necessarily a present act, and can be expressed only in the present tense. The Church indeed, as does Genesis, uses the perfect tense, and says creavit instead of creat; but because, though she expresses the same fact that the formula does, she does not express( it from the same point of view, and it did not enter into her purpose in defining the dogma of creation to assert the identity of creation and conservation; and when it is not necessary to express that identity, the perfect tense must be used.
Our modern Scholastics, who imagine that they detect pantheism in the formula Ens creat existentias, have, we must believe, studied it rather for the purpose of finding some error in it, than of ascertaining its real meaning. Their psychological habits and prejudices very naturally dispose them against it, and the fact that they have found some of its most distinguished modern advocates among the worst enemies of the Christian religion and civilization, is not very well fitted to win their respect for it . They seem to have hastily inferred, from the fact that Gioberti — an able but a bad man — used the present tense of the verb, that he meant in his formula to represent Being simply as the immanent cause of existences, in the sense of Spinoza, who opposes causa immanens to causa transiens. Immanent cause, as thus opposed, means only a cause that operates within its own interior, without placing any real effects ad extra. In this sense existences are not an external creation, but effects produced by Being within its own bosom, as modes or modifications of itself, which is pure pantheism. So far as the present tense decides any thing, the creative cause asserted in the formula might be understood in this sense, and we suppose our scholastic friends do so understand it. But the character of the cause is determined by the nature, not the tense of the verb. The verb to create, according to all Christian usage, means to place real effects ad extra, and therefore can no more have the sense of Spinoza in the present than in the perfect tense. The word existences, from ex-stare, to be from another, by its own force expresses an external effect, distinct, though, like every effect, inseparable, from its cause. Attention to the real sense of the verb to create and of the substantive existences, placed in the plural number expressly to render the idea of plurality distinct, would, we think, have removed all ambiguity occasioned by placing the verb in the present tense, and convinced our scholastic friends that no pantheistic or heterodox sense can fairly be extracted from the formula, regarded as expressing the reality apprehended in the primitive intuition.
The only point on which a reader might doubt Gioberti's orthodoxy is as to the relation of the copula of the judgment, regarded as our judgment, with the real relation of things, or copula of the judgment, regarded as the judgment of God. Thought is composed of three elements, subject, object, and their relation, the soul, God, and the relation between them. Now there can be no doubt that the relation between God and the soul in the real order is the Divine creative act; but if we say that this act is the relation in the order of cognition, we make the judgment God's judgment, not ours, and therefore fall into pantheism. Gioberti, as far as we have examined him, does not seem to us to be very clear on this point, and we are not sure that he does not identify the real relation of the intuitive subject and the intelligible object with the copula of the judgment or the form of the thought. He gives Ens creat existentias as his primum philosophicum, and calls it a Divine Judgment, and seems to represent the mind as purely passive in regard to it. If so, what is the human judgment, or what is the part of the human intellect in the formation of thought? We have no call to defend Gioberti, and even if he has erred here, it is only an error in his interpretation of the formula, not an error in the formula itself. We have not studied Gioberti's works with any great care, for we felt from the first, long before they were prohibited, that he was a dangerous man, whom it would never do to take as a master, and certainly we cannot bind ourselves to any defence of his philosophy. It seems to us that his explanation of cognition makes intuitive thought an act of God rather than of man, and that he sometimes comes very near identifying the order of cognition with the order of things. Nevertheless, we must remember that he gives Ens creat existentias as the ideal formula, which with him means the formula as the intelligible object of the intuition, — not the apprehension, but that which is apprehended; and so taken, it has and can have no pantheistic sense. Whether he sufficiently distinguishes, in the fact of intuition, the intellective action of the subject from the concurrent activity of the intelligible object in the production, not of things, but of intuition, may, perhaps, be a question, and therefore it may be a question whether he has or has not been justly accused of pantheism. But however this may be, it is certain that the formula itself, regarded as the formula of things and the reality asserted in every thought, is in no sense pantheistic.
The objection, that this formula is placed first, at the beginning of the order of cognition, instead of last, or at its conclusion, will vanish the moment we learn to distinguish between direct and reflex intuition. Nobody pretends that, in the historical development of the understanding, we commence with a reflex intuition, or a clear and distinct cognition of this formula, or that the mind is able to say to itself at the first moment of its existence, Ens creat existentias. All direct intuition is obscure and indistinct, and although this formula is obscurely and indistinctly apprehended from the first, we are far enough from being aware from the first of the fact. Some men never attain to a reflex intuition of it during their whole lives, and no one ever would or could attain to such intuition of it, if not taught it through the medium of language. It had been lost from the language of the Gentiles, and no Gentile philosopher ever attained to it. All the Gentile schools alike are ignorant of the fact of creation, and even for Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle there is no God the creator. Not being able to reflect on the intelligible or idea without the sensible representation of language, the formula, as a formula of the reflective understanding, is not attainable till it is represented in language, and a language that has not lost it. But it is represented in language, and children learn it in the Catechism, at a very tender age.
That it is a truth of theology, and known only as supernaturally revealed, we grant; but it does not therefore follow that it is not a truth of the natural order. Superintelligible and supernatural are not by any means the same. There may be truths of philosophy, that is, of the natural order, distinct from the truths of the supernatural order, or the new creation, which we could never by our natural intellect find out, but which when revealed to us we may discover to be evident to natural reason. We do not believe any man could ever have attained to a reflex, that is, a clear and distinct cognition of the formula, without supernatural revelation, and therefore the holy Apostle tells us, "By faith we understand that the world was framed by the word of God." Hence creation is a dogma of faith; but when revealed and represented to us in language, we find it to be really expressed in every one of our direct intuitions, and therefore it is also a truth of philosophy. All the truths of revelation are not also truths of philosophy, but some of them are, for the revelation is not restricted to the Christian mysteries, properly so called. And hence the necessity we before remarked, of adding to the demonstrative method of the Scholastics the traditional or historical method, and the impossibility of constructing a complete science of the natural order without the reflected light of supernatural theology. It is the impossibility of erecting philosophy, in our present state, into a complete and independent science even of natural things, that makes us refuse to embrace any school, or to profess any system of our own. We should as soon think of disengaging our politics or our private and social duties from our theology, as of disengaging our philosophy.
One point more and we have done. We have given as the reality apprehended in every thought, Being creates existences. Here is the basis of all logic. But there are here two errors to be guarded against. The formula as given is the formula of the real order, or the Divine judgment. All the activity it expresses is the Divine activity. It is not the cognition, but that which in cognition is cognized. In other words, it is the formula of the intelligible; but to the intelligible corresponds the intellective, to the order of things the order of cognition. What we have here to guard against, then, is placing, as to the order of cognition, the copula either wholly in the intellective or wholly in the intelligible. The former is the error of the Scholastics, and the latter is the error of the Pantheists. We have found the copula of the Divine judgment; it is the creative act of Being placing existences ad extra. The copula of the human judgment is the reverberation of the copula of the Divine judgment, or imitation of it by us as second causes. But what is the nexus or copula which binds the human judgment to the Divine, that is, the intelligible and the intellective? The creative act of Being, says Gioberti, if we understand him; but that makes Being create the intellection, denies our intervention as second causes, and implies pantheism. The intellective, the intellectus agens of the Schoolmen? But that is pure Fichteism, and supposes the subject renders actual, that is, creates its object. The solution is in regarding thought as the joint product of both the intelligible and the intellect, and therefore that cognition, formally the act of the mind as second cause, is yet produced only by the active cooperation or concurrence of the intelligible, as is the case with every act of second causes. It is not the intellectus agens that renders the intelligible intelligible in actu, as the Scholastics teach, but the intelligible is itself by its own light intelligible in actu, and it is the concurrence of its intelligibility in actu with our own intellective faculty that forms the intuition. As the intelligible concurs only through its creative act, the creative act of God as the objectively concurring force of thought unites our cognition to the Divine judgment, as it does ourselves as existence to the Divine Essence. In this connection of our judgment with Divine judgment lies the explanation of all thought and of all reasoning, as well as the truthfulness of our cognitions.
The explanation of this connection itself, which involves the whole mystery of knowledge and of the whole activity of second causes, we shall not by any means attempt, for if it does not surpass the powers of the human mind, it most assuredly surpasses ours. Its explanation, however, is in the explanation of the Divine cooperation. But the reader will perceive that, in representing the intelligible as intelligible in actu, we reject the intellectus agens of the Scholastics as a created light, or participated reason, and therefore the intelligible species and phantasms. To intellectual vision as to external, there are necessary the intellect, the object, and the light. As to the purely intelligible, Being, it is intelligible per se, by its own light, and a mediating light distinct from the mind and the object is needed only in apprehending existences, and the light by which we see these is the same Divine light of Being, diffused over them by the Divine creative act. But as we apprehend not the purely intelligible in itself, owing to its excess of light and our weakness, we apprehend God only in the light of his creative act, and therefore only in relation to the things he has made. But as that light proceeds from his essence, and is simply his relation ad extra to the things he has made, in apprehending it we do really apprehend him. We apprehend them, not by their phantasms, but by his light, which through the creative act illumines them. And thus, while we maintain that we do really apprehend him, we do not pretend any more than our scholastic friends that we apprehend him separate from the apprehension of his works.