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 God 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 analogical, and since God'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 analogy of the manner in which our own minds are related to these essences.
20. Essences are intrinsically Possible, not because God 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, [pg 096] because God 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 God freely willed them to be possible.[108] The actuality of all created things depends, of course, on the free will of God to create them; but that possible essences are what they are, and are related to each other necessarily as they are, because God 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 God 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 God; the actualization of possible essences is; but God 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 sanctity of God, as well as inconceivable to the human mind, that the necessary laws of thought and being—such as the principles of contradiction and identity, the principle of causality, the first principles of the moral order—should be what they are simply because God 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 God 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 analogies drawn from God's creation, and remember that our concepts, as applied to God, are analogical (2).
“We can know God only by analogy 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 God, 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 God 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 God 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 God, 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: ὑπερούσια, 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 analogy 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 God 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 [pg 098] 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 God 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 [pg 099] 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.