Chapter IV. Reality As One And Manifold.
25. The Transcendental Attributes or Properties of Being: Unity, Truth, and Goodness.—So far, we have analysed the notions of Real Being, of Becoming or Change, of Being as Possible and as Actual, of Essence and Existence. Before approaching a study of the Categories or Suprema Genera Entis, the highest and widest modes in which reality manifests itself, we have next to consider certain attributes or properties of being which reveal themselves as co-extensive with reality itself. Taking human experience in its widest sense, as embracing all modes that are cognitive or allied with consciousness, as including intellect, memory, imagination, sense perception, will and appetite, as speculative, ethical or moral, and esthetic or artistic,—we find that the reality which makes up this complex human experience of ours is universally and necessarily characterized by certain features which we call the transcendental attributes or properties of being, inasmuch as they transcend all specific and generic modes of being, pervade all its categories equally, and are inseparable from any datum of experience. We shall see that they are not really distinct from the reality which they characterize, but only logically distinct from it, being aspects under which we apprehend it, negations or other logical relations which we necessarily annex to it by the mental processes whereby we seek to render it actually intelligible to our minds.
The first in order of these ontological attributes is unity: the concept of that whereby reality considered in itself becomes a definite object of thought. The second in order is truth: which is the conception of reality considered in its relation to cognitive experience, to intellect. The third is goodness: the aspect under which reality is related as an object to appetitive experience, to will.
Now when we predicate of any reality under our consideration that it is “one,” or “good,” or “true”—in the ontological [pg 115] sense to be explained,—that which we predicate is not a mere ens rationis, but something real, something which is really identical with the subject, and which is distinguished from the latter in our judgment only by a logical distinction. The attribution of any of these properties to the subject does not, however, add anything real to the latter: it adds merely some logical aspect involved in, or supposed by, the attribution. At the same time, this logical aspect gives us real information by making explicit some real feature of being not explicitly revealed in the concept of being itself, although involved in, and following as a property from, the latter.
There do not seem to be any other transcendental properties of being besides the three enumerated. The terms “reality,” “thing,” “something,” are synonymous expressions of the concept of being itself, rather than of properties of being. “Existence” is not a transcendental attribute of being, for it is not co-extensive with reality or real being. And although reality must be “either possible or actual,” “either necessary or contingent,” “either infinite or finite,” etc., this necessity of verifying in itself one or other member of any such alternatives is not a property of being, but rather something essentially rooted in the very concept of reality itself. Some would regard as a distinct transcendental attribute of being the conception of the latter as an object of esthetic contemplation, as manifesting order and harmony, as beautiful. This conception of being will be found, however, to flow from the more fundamental aspects of reality considered as true and as good, rather than directly from the concept of being itself.
26. Transcendental Unity.—When we think of anything as one we think of it as undivided in itself. The unity or oneness of being is the undividedness of being: Unum est id quod est indivisum in se: Universaliter quaecunque non habent divisionem, inquantum non habent, sic unum dicuntur.[133] When, therefore, we conceive being as undivided into constitutive parts, and unmultiplied into repetitions of itself, we conceive it as a being, as one. For the concept of being, formally as one, it does not seem necessary that we conceive being as divided or distinct from all other being. This second negation, of identity with other being, rather follows the conception of being as one: being is distinct from other being because it is already itself one: it is [pg 116] a prior negation that formally constitutes its unity, namely, the negation of internal division or multiplication of itself: God was truly one from all eternity, before there was any other being, any created being, distinct from Him. The division or distinction of an object of thought from whatever is not itself is what constitutes the notion of otherness.[134]
It is manifest that being and unity are really identical, that when we think of being we think of what is really undivided in itself, that once we introduce dividedness into the object of our concept we are no longer thinking of being but of beings, i.e. of a multitude or plurality each member of which is a being and one. For being, as an object of thought, is either simple or composite. If simple, it is not only undivided but indivisible. If composite, we cannot think of it as a being, capable of existing, so long as we think its parts as separate or divided: only when we think of them as actually united and undivided have we the concept of a being: and eo ipso we have the concept of being as one, as a unity.[135]
Hence the scholastic formulæ: Ens et unum convertuntur, and Omne ens est unum. The truth embodied in these is so self-evident that the expression of it may seem superfluous; but they are not mere tautologies, and in the interests of clear and consistent thinking our attention may be profitably directed to them. The same remark applies to much in the present and subsequent chapters on the transcendental attributes of being.