Ontology, or the Theory of Being

by P. Coffey

Thomists lay still greater stress, perhaps, upon the second consideration referred to above, as a reason for regarding being as an analogical concept when affirmed of Creator and creature, or of substance and accident: the consideration that the finite is dependent on the infinite, and accident on substance. If being is realized in a true and proper sense, and intrinsically, as it undoubtedly is, in whatever is distinguishable from nothingness, why not say that we should affirm being or reality of all things “either as a genus in the strict sense, or else in some sense not analogical but proper, after the manner in which we predicate a genus of its species and individuals?... Since the object of our universal idea of being is admitted to be really in all things, we can evidently abstract from what is proper to substance and to accident, just as we abstract from what is proper to plants and to animals when we affirm of these that they are living things.”[59]

“In reply to this difficulty,” Father Kleutgen continues,[60] “we say in the first place that the idea of being is in truth less analogical and more proper than any belonging to the first sort of analogy [i.e. of attribution], and that therefore it approaches more closely to generic concepts properly so called. At the same time the difference which separates both from the latter concepts remains. For a name applied to many things is analogical if what it signifies is realized par excellence in one, and in the others only subordinately and dependently on that. Hence it is that Aristotle regards predication as analogical when something is affirmed of many things (1) either because these have a certain relation to some one thing, (2) or because they depend on some one thing. In the former case the thing signified by the name is really and properly found only in one single thing, and is affirmed of all the others only in virtue of some real relation of these to the former, whether this be (a) that these things merely resemble that single thing [pg 041] [metaphor], or (b) bear some other relation to it, such as that of effect to cause, etc. [metonymy]. In the latter case the thing signified by the name is really in each of the things of which it is affirmed; but it is in one alone par excellence, and in the others only by depending, for its very existence in them, on that one. Now the object of the term being is found indeed in accidents, e.g. in quantity, colour, shape; but certainly it must be applied primarily to substance, and to accidents only dependently on the latter: for quantity, colour, shape can have being only because the corporeal substance possesses these determinations. But this is not at all the case with a genus and its species. These differ from the genus, not by any such dependence, but by the addition of some special perfection to the constituents of the genus; for example, in the brute beast sensibility is added to vegetative life, and in man intelligence is added to sensibility. Here there is no relation of dependence for existence. Even if we considered human life as that of which life is principally asserted, we could not say that plants and brute beasts so depended for their life on the life of man that we could not affirm life of them except as dependent on the life of man: as we cannot attribute being to accidents except by reason of their dependence on substance. Hence it is that we can consider apart, and in itself, life in general, and attribute this to all living things without relating it to any other being.”[61]

“It might still be objected that the one single being of which we may affirm life primarily and principally, ought to be not human life, but absolute life. And between this divine life and the life of all other beings there is a relation of dependence, which reaches even to the very existence of life in these other beings. In fact all life depends on the absolute life, not indeed in the way accident depends on substance, but in a manner no less real and far more excellent. This is entirely true; but what are we to conclude from it if not precisely this, which scholasticism teaches: that the perfections found in the various species of creatures can be affirmed of these in the same sense (univocé), but that they can be affirmed of God and creatures only analogically?”

“From all of which we can understand why it is that in regard to genera and species the analogy is in the things but not in our thoughts, while in regard to substance and accidents it is both in the things and in our thoughts: a difference which rests not solely on our manner of conceiving things, nor a fortiori on mere caprice or fancy, but which has its basis in the very nature of the things themselves. For though in the former case there is a certain analogy in the things themselves, inasmuch as the same nature, that of the genus, is realized in the species in different ways, still, as we have seen, that is not sufficient, without the relation of dependence, to yield a basis for analogy in our thoughts. For it is precisely because accident, as a determination of substance, presupposes this latter, that being cannot be affirmed of accident except as dependent on substance.”

These paragraphs will have shown with sufficient clearness why we should regard being not as an univocal but as an analogical concept, when referred to God and creatures, or to substance and accident. For the rest, the divergence between the Scotist and the Thomist views is not very important, because [pg 042] Scotists also will deny that being is a genus of which the infinite and the finite would be species; finite and infinite are not differentiae superadded to being, inasmuch as each of these differs by its whole reality, and not merely by a determining portion, from the other; it is owing to the limitations of our abstractive way of understanding reality that we have to conceive the infinite by first conceiving being in the abstract, and then mentally determining this concept by another, namely, by the concept of “infinite mode of being”[62]; the infinite, and whatever perfections we predicate formally of the infinite, transcend all genera, species and differentiae, because the distinction of being into infinite and finite is prior to the distinction into genera, species and differentiae; this latter distinction applying only to finite, not to infinite being.[63]

The observations we have just been making in regard to the analogy of being are of greater importance than the beginner can be expected to realize. A proper appreciation of the way in which being or reality is conceived by the mind to appertain to the data of our experience, is indispensable to the defence of Theism as against Agnosticism and Pantheism.

3. Real Being and Logical Being.—We may next illustrate the notion of being by approaching it from another standpoint—by examining a fundamental distinction which may be drawn between real being (ens reale) and logical being (ens rationis).

We derive all our knowledge, through external and internal sense perception, from the domain of actually existing things, these things including our own selves and our own minds. We form, from the data of sense-consciousness, by an intellectual process proper, mental representations of an abstract and universal character, which reveal to us partial aspects and phases of the natures of things. We have no intuitive intellectual insight into these natures. It is only by abstracting their various aspects, by comparing these in judgments, and reaching still further aspects by inferences, that we progress in our knowledge of things—gradually, step by step, discursivé, discurrendo. All this implies reflection on, and comparison of, our own ideas, our mental views of things. It involves the processes of defining and classifying, affirming and denying, abstracting and generalizing, analysing and synthesizing, comparing and relating in a variety of ways the objects grasped by our thought. Now in all these complex functions, by which alone the mind can interpret rationally what is given to it, by which alone, in other words, it can know reality, the mind necessarily and inevitably forms for itself (and expresses [pg 043] in intelligible language) a series of concepts which have for their objects only the modes in which, and the relations by means of which, it makes such gradual progress in its interpretation of what is given to it, in its knowledge of the real. These concepts are called secundae intentiones mentis—concepts of the second order, so to speak. And their objects, the modes and mutual relations of our primae intentiones or direct concepts, are called entia rationis—logical entities. For example, abstractness is a mode which affects not the reality which we apprehend intellectually, but the concept by which we apprehend it. So, too, is the universality of a concept, its communicability or applicability to an indefinite multitude of similar realities—the “intentio universalitatis,” as it is called—a mode of concept, not of the realities represented by the latter. So, likewise, is the absence of other reality than that represented by the concept, the relative nothingness or non-being by contrast with which the concept is realized as positive; and the absolute nothingness or non-being which is the logical correlative of the concept of being; and the static, unchanging self-identity of the object as conceived in the abstract.[64] These are not modes of reality as it is but as it is conceived. Again, the manifold logical relations which we establish between our concepts—relations of (extensive or intensive) identity or distinction, inclusion or inherence, etc.—are logical entities, entia rationis: relations of genus, species, differentia, proprium, accidens; the affirmative or negative relation between predicate and subject in judgment;[65] the mutual relations of antecedent and consequent in inference. Now all these logical entities, or objecta secundae intentionis mentis, are relations established by the mind itself between its own thoughts; they have, no doubt, a foundation in the real objects of those thoughts as well as in the constitution and limitations of the mind itself; but they have themselves, and can have, no other being than that which they have as products of thought. Their sole being consists in being thought of. They are necessary creations or products of the thought-process as this goes on in the human mind. We see [pg 044] that it is only by means of these relations we can progress in understanding things. In the thought-process we cannot help bringing them to light—and thinking them after the manner of realities, per modum entis. Whatever we think we must think through the concept of “being”; whatever we conceive we must conceive as “being”; but on reflection we easily see that such entities as “nothingness,” “negation or absence or privation of being,” “universality,” “predicate”—and, in general, all relations established by our own thought between our own ideas representative of reality—can have themselves no reality proper, no actual or possible existence, other than that which they get from the mind in virtue of its making them objects of its own thought. Hence the scholastic definition of a logical entity or ens rationis as “that which has objective being merely in the intellect”: “illud quod habet esse objective tantum in intellectu, seu ... id quod a ratione excogitatur ut ens, cum tamen in se entitatem non habeat”.[66] Of course the mental process by which we think such entities, the mental state in which they are held in consciousness, is just as real as any other mental process or state. But the entity which is thus held in consciousness has and can have no other reality than what it has by being an object of thought. And this precisely is what distinguishes it from real being, from reality; for the latter, besides the ideal existence it has in the mind which thinks of it, has, or at least can have, a real existence of its own, independently altogether of our thinking about it. We assume here, of course—what is established elsewhere, as against the subjective idealism of phenomenists and the objective idealism of Berkeley—that the reality of actual things does not consist in their being perceived or thought of, that their “esse” is not “percipi,” that they have a reality other than and independent of their actual presence to the thought of any human mind. And even purely possible things, even the creatures of our own fancy, the fictions of fable and romance, could, absolutely speaking and without any contradiction, have an existence in the actual order, in addition to the mental existence they receive from those who fancy them. Such entities, therefore, differ from entia rationis; they, too, are real beings.

What the reality of purely possible things is we shall discuss later on. Actually existing things at all events we assume to be given to the knowing mind, not to be created by the latter. Even in regard to these, however, we [pg 045] must remember that the mind in knowing them, in interpreting them, in seeking to penetrate the nature of them, is not purely passive; that reality as known to us—or, in other words, our knowledge of reality—is the product of a twofold factor: the subjective which is the mind, and the objective which is the extramental reality acting on, and thus revealing itself to, the mind. Hence it is that when we come to analyse in detail our knowledge of the nature of things—or, in other words, the natures of things as revealed to our minds—it will not be always easy to distinguish in each particular case the properties, aspects, relations, distinctions, etc., which are real (in the sense of being there in the reality independently of the consideration of the mind) from those that are merely logical (in the sense of being produced and superadded to the reality by the mental process itself).[67] Yet it is obviously a matter of the very first importance to determine, as far as may be possible, to what extent our knowledge of reality is not merely a mental interpretation, but a mental construction, of the latter; and whether, if there be a constructive or constitutive factor in thought, this should be regarded as interfering with the validity of thought as representative of reality. This problem—of the relation of the ens rationis to the ens reale in the process of cognition—has given rise to discussions which, in modern times, have largely contributed to the formation of that special branch of philosophical enquiry which is called Epistemology. But it must not be imagined that this very problem was not discussed, and very widely discussed, by philosophers long before the problem of the validity of knowledge assumed the prominent place it has won for itself in modern philosophy. Even a moderate familiarity with scholastic philosophy will enable the student to recognize this problem, in a variety of phases, in the discussions of the medieval schoolmen concerning the concepts of matter and form, the simplicity and composition of beings, and the nature of the various distinctions—whether logical, virtual, formal, or real—which the mind either invents or detects in the realities it endeavours to understand and explain.

4. Real Being and Ideal Being.—The latter of these expressions has a multiplicity of kindred meanings. We use it here in the sense of “being known,” i.e. to signify the “esse intentionale,” the mental presence, which, in the scholastic theory of knowledge, an entity of whatsoever kind, whether real or logical, must have in the mind of the knower in order that he be aware of that entity. A mere logical entity, as we have seen, has and can have no other mode of being than this which consists in being an object of the mind's awareness. All real being, too, when it becomes an object of any kind of human cognition whatsoever—of intellectual thought, whether direct or reflex; of sense perception, whether external or internal—must obtain this sort of mental presence or mental existence: thereby alone can it become an “objectum cognitum”. Only by such mental [pg 046] mirroring, or reproduction, or reconstruction, can reality become so related and connected with mind as to reveal itself to mind. Under this peculiar relation which we call cognition, the mind, as we know from psychology and epistemology, is not passive: if reality revealed itself immediately, as it is, to a purely passive mind (were such conceivable), the existence of error would be unaccountable; but the mind is not passive: under the influence of the reality it forms the intellectual concept (the verbum mentale), or the sense percept (the species sensibilis expressa), in and through which, and by means of which, it attains to its knowledge of the real.