Part 5 (1/2)

(3) Finally, the relations which we apprehend as obtaining between them, we see to be necessary and immutable relations. They embody necessary truths which are for our minds the standards of all truth. Such necessary truths cannot be grounded either in the contingent human mind, or in the contingent and mutable actuality of the things of our immediate experience. Therefore we can and must infer from them the reality of a Necessary, Immutable Being, of whose essence they must be imitations.

If, then, this ideal order of intrinsically possible essences is logically and ontologically prior to the contingent actualizations of any of them (even though it be posterior to them _in the order of our knowledge_, which is based on _actual experience_), there must be likewise ontologically prior to all contingent actualities (including our own minds) some _Necessary Intelligence_ in which this order of possible essences has its ideal being.

19. CRITICAL a.n.a.lYSIS OF THOSE INFERENCES.-The validity of the general line of argument indicated in the preceding paragraphs has been seriously questioned. Among other criticisms the following points have been urged(99):-

(1) _Actual_ things furnish the basis of irrefragable proofs of the existence of G.o.d-the Supreme, Necessary, Eternal, Omniscient, and Omnipotent Being. But we are here inquiring whether a mind which has not yet so a.n.a.lysed actual being as to see how it involves this conclusion, or a mind which abstracts altogether from the evidence furnished by actual things for this conclusion, can prove the existence of such a being from the separate consideration of possible essences, their attributes and relations. Now it is not evident that to such a mind possible essences reveal themselves as having _eternal_ ideal being. Such a mind is, no doubt, conscious that it is not itself the cause of their possibility. But it sees that actual things _plus_ the abstract character of its own thought account sufficiently for all their features as it knows them. To the question: Is not their ideal being _eternal_? it can only answer: That will depend on whether the world of actual things can be shown to involve the existence of an Eternal Intelligence. Until this is proved we cannot say whether possible essences have any ideal being other than that which they have in human minds.

(2) The actual things from which we get our concepts of possible essences do not exist _necessarily_. But, granted their existence, we know from them that certain essences are _de facto_ possible.

They are not _necessarily_ given to us as possible, any more than actual things are necessarily given to us as actual. Of course, when they are thought of at all, they are, as objects of thought, necessarily and immutably identical with themselves, and related to one another as mutually compatible or incompatible, etc. But this necessity of relations, hypothetical as it is and contingent on the mental processes of a.n.a.lysis and comparison, involved as it is in the very nature of being and thought, and expressed as it is in the principles of ident.i.ty and contradiction, is just as true of actual contingent essences as of possible essences;(100) and it is something very different from the sort of necessity claimed for possible essences by the contention that they must be conceived as having ideal being _necessarily_. The ideal being they have in the human mind is certainly not necessary: the human mind might never have conceived these possible essences.

But must the human mind conceive a possible essence as having _some_ ideal being _necessarily_? No; unless that mind has already convinced itself, from a study of _actual_ things, that an Eternal, Necessary, Omniscient Intelligence exists: to which, of course, such essences would be eternally and necessarily present as objects of thought. If the human mind had already reached this conviction it could then see that ”even if there were no human intellect, things would still be true in relation to the Divine Intellect. But if both intellects were, _per impossibile_, conceived as non-existent truth would persist no longer.”(101) Suppose, therefore, that it has not yet reached this conviction, or abstracts altogether from the existence of G.o.d as known from _actual_ things; and then, further, imagines the actual things of its experience and all human intellects and finite intellects of whatsoever kind as non-existent: must it still conceive possible things as possible? No; possibility and impossibility, truth and falsity will now have ceased to have any meaning. After such attempted abstraction the mind would have before it only what Balmes describes as ”the abyss of nothing”. And Balmes is right in saying that the mind is unable ”to abstract all existence”. But the reason of the inability is not, as Balmes contends, because when it has removed actual things and finite minds there still remains in spite of it a system or order of possible essences which forces it to infer and posit the existence of an Eternal, Necessary Mind as the source and ground of that order. The reason rather is because the mind sees that the known _actual_ things, from which it got all its notions of possible essences, necessarily imply, as the only intelligible ground of their actuality, the existence of a Necessary Being, in whose Intelligence they must have been contained ideally, and in whose Omnipotence they must have been contained virtually, from all eternity. From contingent _actuality_, as known to it, the mind can argue to the eternal actuality of Necessary Being, and to the impossibility either of a state of absolute nothingness, or of an order of purely possible things apart from all actuality.

(3) Of course, whether the mind has thus thought out the ultimate implications of the actuality of experienced things or not, once it has thought and experienced those things it cannot by any effort banish the memory of them from its presence: they are there still as objects of its thought even when it abstracts from their actual existence. But if, while it has not yet seen that their actuality implies the existence of a Necessary, Omniscient and Omnipotent Being, it abstracts not only from their actual existence but from the existence of all finite minds (itself included), then in that state, so far as its knowledge goes, there would be neither actual nor ideal nor possible being. Nor can the fact that an ideal order of possible things still persists in its own thought mislead it into concluding that such an ideal order really persists in the hypothesis it has made. For it knows that this ideal order still persists for itself simply because it cannot ”think itself away”. It sees all the time that if it could effectively think itself away, this ideal order would have to disappear with it, leaving nothing-so far as it knows-either actual or possible. Mercier has some apposite remarks on this very point. ”From the fact,” he writes, ”that those abstract essences, grasped by our abstractive thought from the dawn of our reason, have grown so familiar to us, we easily come to look upon them as pre-existing archetypes or models of our thoughts and of things; they form a fund of predicates by which we are in the habit of interpreting the data of our experience. So, too, the hypothetically necessary relations established by abstract thought between them we come to regard as a sort of eternal system of principles, endowed with a sort of legislative power, to which created things and intelligences must conform. But they have really no such pre-existence. The eternal pre-existence of those essence-types, which Plato called the 'intelligible world,' the t?p?? ???t??, and the supposed eternal legislative power of their relations, are a sort of mental optical illusion. Those abstract essences, and the principles based upon them, are the products of our mental activity working on the data of our actual experience.

When we enter on the domain of _speculative reflection_ ... they are there before us; ... but we must not forget that reflection is _consequent_ on the spontaneous thought-activity which-by working abstractively on the actual data of sensible, contingent, changeable, temporal realities-set them up there.... We know from psychology how those ideal, abstract essence-types are formed....

But because we have no actual memory of their formation, which is so rapid as practically to escape consciousness in spontaneous thought, we are naturally p.r.o.ne to imagine that they are not the product of our own mental action on the data of actual experience, but that they exist in us, or rather above us, and independently of us. We can therefore understand the psychological illusion under which Plato wrote such pa.s.sages as the following: 'But if anyone should tell me why anything is beautiful, either because it has a blooming, florid colour, or figure, or anything else of the kind, I dismiss all other reasons, for I am confounded by them all; but I simply, wholly, and perhaps navely, confine myself to this, that nothing else causes it to be beautiful, except either the presence or communication of that abstract beauty, by whatever means and in whatever way communicated; for I cannot yet affirm with certainty, but only that by means of beauty all beautiful things become beautiful (t? ?a?? t? ?a?? ????eta? ?a??). For this appears to me the safest answer to give both to myself and others, and adhering to this I think that I shall never fall [into error].... And that by magnitude great things become great, and greater things greater; and by littleness less things become less.'(102) St. Augustine's doctrine on the invariable laws of numbers, on the immutable principles of wisdom, and on truth generally, draws its inspiration from this Platonic idealism.”(103)

But this Platonic doctrine, attributing to the abstract essences conceived by our thought a reality independent both of our thought and of the actual sense data from which directly or indirectly we derive our concepts of them, is rejected as unsound by scholastics generally. When we have proved from actual things that G.o.d exists, and is the Intelligent and Free Creator of the actual world of our direct experience, we can of course consider the Divine Intellect as contemplating from all eternity the Divine Essence, and as seeing therein the eternal archetypes or ideas of all actual and possible essences. We may thus regard the Divine Mind as the eternal t?p?? ???t??, or _mundus intelligibilis_. This, of course, is not Plato's thought; it is what St. Augustine subst.i.tuted for Platonism, and very properly. But we must not infer, from this truth, that when we contemplate possible essences, with all the characteristics we may detect in them, we are contemplating this _mundus intelligibilis_ which is the Divine Mind. This was the error of the ontologists. They inferred that since possible essences, as known by the human mind, have ideal being independently of the latter and of all actual contingent reality, the human mind in contemplating them has really an intuition of them as they are seen by the Divine Intellect Itself in the Divine Essence; so that, in the words of Gioberti, the _Primum Ontologic.u.m_, the Divine Being Himself, is also the _primum logic.u.m_, or first reality apprehended by human thought.(104)

Now those authors who hold that the ideal order of possible essences contemplated by the human mind is seen by the latter, as so contemplated, to have some being, some ideal being, really independent of the human mind itself, and of the actual contingent things from which they admit that the human mind derives its knowledge of such essences,-these authors _do not hold_, but _deny_, that this independent ideal being, which they claim for these essences, is _anything Divine_, that it is the Divine Essence as seen by the Divine Intellect to be imitable _ad extra_.(105) Hence they cannot fairly be charged with the error of ontologism.

Renouncing Plato's exaggerated realism, and holding that our knowledge of the ideal order of possible essences is derived by our mind from its consideration of _actual_ things, they yet hold that this ideal order is seen to have some sort of being or reality independent both of the mind and of actual things.(106) This is not easy to understand. When we ask, Is this supposed independent being (or reality, or possibility) of possible essences the ideal being they have in the Divine mind?-we are told that it is not;(107) but that it is something from which we can _infer, by reasoning_, this eternal, necessary, and immutable ideal being of these same essences in the Divine Mind.

The considerations urged in the foregoing paragraphs will, however, have shown that the validity of this line of reasoning from possible essences to the reality of an Eternal, Divine, Immutable Intelligence is by no means evident or free from difficulties. Of course, when the existence of G.o.d has been proved from actual things, the conception of the Divine Intelligence and Essence as the ultimate source of all possible reality, no less than of all actual reality, will be found to shed a great deal of new light upon the intrinsic possibility of possible essences.

Since, however, our knowledge of the Divine is merely a.n.a.logical, and since G.o.d's intuition of possible essences, as imitations of His own Divine Essence, completely transcends our comprehension, and is totally different from our abstractive knowledge of such essences, our conception of the manner in which these essences are related to the Divine Nature and the Divine Attributes, must be determined after the a.n.a.logy of the manner in which our own minds are related to these essences.

20. ESSENCES ARE INTRINSICALLY POSSIBLE, NOT BECAUSE G.o.d CAN MAKE THEM EXIST ACTUALLY; NOR YET BECAUSE HE FREELY WILLS THEM TO BE POSSIBLE; NOR BECAUSE HE UNDERSTANDS THEM AS POSSIBLE; BUT BECAUSE THEY ARE MODES IN WHICH THE DIVINE ESSENCE IS IMITABLE _ad extra_.-(_a_) The ultimate source of the _extrinsic_ possibility of all contingent realities is the Divine Omnipotence: just as the proximate source of the extrinsic possibility of a statue is the power of the sculptor to educe it from the block of wood or marble. But just as the power of the sculptor presupposes the _intrinsic_ possibility of the statue, so does the Divine Omnipotence presuppose the intrinsic possibility of all possible things. It is not, as William of Ockam ( 1347), a scholastic of the decadent period, erroneously thought, because G.o.d can create things that such things are intrinsically possible, but rather because they are intrinsically possible He can create them.

(_b_) Not less erroneous is the _voluntarist_ theory of Descartes, according to which possible essences are intrinsically possible because G.o.d freely willed them to be possible.(108) The _actuality_ of all created things depends, of course, on the free will of G.o.d to create them; but that possible essences are what they are, and are related to each other necessarily as they are, because G.o.d has willed them to be such, is absolutely incredible. Descartes seems to have been betrayed into this strange error by a false notion of what is requisite for the absolute freedom and independence of the Divine Will: as if this demanded that G.o.d should be free to will, _e.g._ that two _plus_ two be five, or that the radii of a circle be unequal, or that creatures be independent of Himself, or that blasphemy be a virtuous act! The intrinsic possibility of essences is _not_ dependent on the Free Will of G.o.d; the actualization of possible essences is; but G.o.d can will to actualize only such essences as He sees, from comprehending His own Divine Essence, to be intrinsically possible.

But it derogates in no way from the supremacy of the Divine Will to conceive its free volition as thus consequent on, and illumined by, the Divine Knowledge; whereas it is incompatible with the wisdom and sanct.i.ty of G.o.d, as well as inconceivable to the human mind, that the necessary laws of thought and being-such as the principles of contradiction and ident.i.ty, the principle of causality, the first principles of the moral order-should be what they are simply because G.o.d has freely willed them to be so, and might therefore have been otherwise.

From the fact that we have no direct intuition of the Divine Being, some philosophers have concluded that all speculation on the relation of G.o.d to the world of our direct experience is necessarily barren and fruitless. This is a phase of agnosticism; and, like all error, it is the exaggeration of a truth: the truth being that while we may reach real knowledge about the Divine Nature and attributes by such speculation, we can do so only on condition that we are guided by a.n.a.logies drawn from G.o.d's creation, and remember that our concepts, as applied to G.o.d, are a.n.a.logical (2).

”We can know G.o.d only by a.n.a.logy with contingent and finite beings, and consequently the realities and laws of the contingent and finite world must necessarily serve as our term of comparison.

But, among finite realities, we see an essential subordination of the extrinsically possible to the intelligible, of this to the intrinsically possible, and of this again to the essential type which is presupposed by our thought. Therefore, _a pari_, we must consider the omnipotent will of G.o.d, which is the first and universal cause of all [contingent] existences, as under the direction of the Divine Omniscience, and this in turn as having for its object the Divine Essence and in it the essential types whose intrinsic possibility is grounded on the necessary imitability of the Divine Being.

”When, therefore, in defence of his position, Descartes argues that 'In G.o.d willing and knowing are one and the same; the reason why He knows anything is because He wills it, and for this reason only can it be true: _Ex hoc ipso quod Deus aliquid velit, ideo cognoscit, et ideo tantum talis res est vera_'-he is only confusing the issue. We might, indeed, retort the argument: 'In G.o.d willing and knowing are one and the same; the reason why He wills anything is because He knows it, and for this reason only can it be good: _Ex hoc ipso quod aliquid cognoscit, ideo vult, et ideo tantum talis res est bona_,' but both inferences are equally unwarranted. For, though willing and knowing are certainly one and the same _in G.o.d_, this one and the same thing is formally and for our minds neither will nor intellect, but a reality transcending will and intellect, a substance infinitely above any substances known to us: ?pe???s?a, _supersubstantia_, as the Fathers of the Church and the Doctors of the Schools call it. But of this transcendent substance we have no intuitive knowledge. We must therefore either abandon all attempts to find out anything about it, or else apprehend it and designate it after the a.n.a.logy of what we know from direct experience about created life and mind.

And as in creatures will is not identical with intellect, nor either of these with the nature of the being that possesses them; so what we conceive in G.o.d under the concept of will, we must not identify in thought with what we conceive in Him under the concept of intellect, nor may we with impunity confound either in our thought with the Nature or Essence of the Divine Being.”(109)

(_c_) Philosophers who deny the validity of all the arguments advanced by theists in proof of the existence of a transcendent Supreme Being, distinct from the world of direct human experience, endeavour to account in various ways for the intrinsic possibility of abstract essences.

Agnostics either deny to these latter any reality whatsoever (16), or else declare the problem of their reality insoluble. Monists of the materialist type-who try to reduce all mind to matter and its mere mechanical energies (11)-treat the question in a still more inadequate and unsatisfactory manner; while the advocates of idealistic monism, like Hegel and his followers, refer us to the supposed Immanent Mind of the universe for an ultimate explanation of all intrinsic possibility. Certainly this must have its ultimate source in some mind; and it is not in referring us to an Eternal Mind that these philosophers err, but in their conception of the relation of this mind to the world of direct actual experience. It is not, however, with such theories we are concerned just now, but only with theories put forward by theists. And among these latter it is surprising to find some few(110) who maintain that the intrinsic possibility of abstract essences depends ultimately and exclusively on these essences themselves, irrespective of things actually experienced by the human mind, irrespective of the human mind itself, and irrespective of the Divine Mind and the Divine Nature.

As to this view, we have already seen (19) that if we abstract from all human minds, and from all actual things that can be directly experienced by such minds, we are face to face either with the alternative of absolute nothingness wherein the true and the false, the possible and the impossible, cease to have any intelligible meaning, or else with the alternative of a Supreme, Eternal, Necessary, Omniscient and Omnipotent Being, whose actual existence has been, or can be, inferred from the actual data of human experience. Now the theist, who admits the existence of such a Being, cannot fail to see that possible essences must have their primary ideal being in the Divine Intellect, and the ultimate source of their intrinsic possibility in the Divine Essence Itself. For, knowing that G.o.d can actualize intrinsically possible essences by the creative act, which is intelligent and free, he will understand that these essences have their ideal being in the Divine Intellect; that the Divine Intellect sees their intrinsic possibility by contemplating the Divine Essence as the Uncreated Prototype and Exemplar of all intrinsically possible things; and that these latter are intrinsically possible precisely because they are possible adumbrations or imitations of the Divine Nature.

(_d_) But are we to conceive that essences are intrinsically possible precisely because the Divine Intellect, by understanding them, makes them intrinsically possible? Or should we rather conceive their intrinsic possibility as antecedent to this act by which the Divine Intellect understands them, and as dependent only on the Divine Essence Itself, so that essences would be intrinsically possible simply because the Divine Essence is what it is, and because they are possible imitations or expressions of it? Here scholastics are not agreed.

Some(111) hold that the intrinsic possibility of essences is _formally_ const.i.tuted by the act whereby the Divine Intellect, contemplating the Divine Essence, understands the latter to be indefinitely imitable _ad extra_; so that as the actuality of things results from the _Fiat_ of the Divine Will, and as their extrinsic possibility is grounded in the Divine Omnipotence, so their intrinsic possibility is grounded in the Divine Intellect. The latter, by understanding the Divine Essence, would not merely give an ideal being to the intrinsic possibility of essences, but would make those essences _formally_ possible, they being only _virtually_ possible in the Divine Essence considered antecedently to this act of the Divine Intellect. Or, rather, as some Scotists explain the matter,(112) this ideal being which possible essences have from the Divine Intellect is not as extrinsic to them as the ideal being they have from the human intellect, but is rather the very first being they can be said _formally_ to have, and is somehow intrinsic to them after the a.n.a.logy of the being which mere logical ent.i.ties, _entia rationis_, derive from the human mind: which being is intrinsic to these ent.i.ties and is in fact the only being they have or can have.