(2) Is not any possible essence (e.g. “water,” or “a triangle”) so necessarily what it is that even if it never did and never will exist, nay even were there no human or other finite mind to conceive it, it would still be what it is (e.g. “a chemical compound of oxygen and hydrogen,” or “a plane rectilinear three-sided figure”)—so that there must be some Necessarily Existing Intelligence in and from which it has this necessary truth as a possible essence?[97] These essences, as known to us, are so far from being grounded in, [pg 091] or explained by, the things of our actual experience, that we rather regard the latter as grounded in the former. Do we not consider possible essences as the prototypes and exemplars to which actual things must conform in order to be actual, in order to exist at all?[98]
(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 Analysis 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 God—the Supreme, Necessary, Eternal, Omniscient, and Omnipotent Being. But we are here inquiring whether a mind which has not yet so [pg 092] analysed 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 analysis and comparison, involved as it is in the very nature of being and thought, and expressed as it is in the principles of identity 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 God 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, [pg 093] 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 τόπος νοητός, 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 [pg 094] 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 prone 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 passages 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 naïvely, 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 (τῷ καλῷ τὰ καλὰ γίγνεται καλά). 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 God 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 τόπος νοητός, or mundus intelligibilis. This, of course, is not Plato's thought; it is what St. Augustine substituted 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 Ontologicum, the Divine Being Himself, is also the primum logicum, 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 [pg 095] 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.