Now those philosophers who hold certain distinctions to be virtual, and not real, thereby ascribe to cognitive experience a larger sphere of constitutive [pg 145] or constructive influence than would be allowed to it by advocates of the reality of such distinctions. But by doing so are they to be regarded as calling into question the objective validity of human knowledge? By no means: the fact that the human mind can understand reality only by processes of abstracting, generalizing, comparing, relating, analysing and synthesizing—processes which involve the production of logical entities—in no way vitiates the value of these modes of understanding: it merely indicates that they are less perfect than intuitive modes of understanding which would dispense with such logical entities,—the modes characteristic of pure, angelic intelligences, or the knowledge of the Deity. The objective validity of human cognition is not interfered with either by enlarging or by restricting the domain of the mind's constitutive activity in forming such logical entities; nor, therefore, by claiming that certain distinctions are real rather than virtual, or vice versa. It must be remembered, moreover, that the virtual distinction is not purely logical: it has a foundation in the reality, a “fundamentum in re”; and in so far as it has it gives us an insight into the nature of reality.
No doubt, any particular distinction cannot be virtual and at the same time simply real: either view of it must be erroneous: and possibly both, if it happen to be de facto a purely logical distinction. But the error of confounding a virtual distinction with a real is not so great as that of regarding either as a purely logical distinction. Now the tendency of much modern philosophy, under the influence of Kant, has been to regard all the categories in which the mind apprehends reality as being wholly and exclusively forms of cognition, as being in the reality neither formally nor even fundamentally; and to infer from this an essential, constitutional inability of the mind to attain to a valid knowledge of reality. But if, as a matter of fact, these categories are in the reality formally, nay, even if they are in it only fundamentally, the inference that issues in Kantian subjectivism is unwarranted. And those categories we hold to be in the reality at least fundamentally; we therefore reject the Kantian phenomenism of the speculative reason. Moreover, we can see no valid ground for admitting the Kantian division of the human mind into two totally separate cognitive compartments, the speculative and the practical reason, and ascribing to each compartment cognitive principles and capacities entirely alien to the other. To arrive at a right theory of knowledge human cognitive experience as a whole must be analysed; but provided the analysis is really an analysis of this experience it may be legitimately directed towards discovering what the mental conditions must be—i.e. the conditions on the side of the knowing subject, the subject having the experience—which are necessarily prerequisite for having such experience. And if it be found by such analysis that cognitive experience presupposes in the knowing subject not merely a sentient and intelligent mind, but a mind which perceives, imagines, remembers reality in certain definite ways; which thinks reality in certain modes and through certain forms which by its own constitutive activity it constructs for itself, and which it recognizes by reflection to be its own constructions (e.g. distinctions, relations, affirmations and negations, abstractions, generalizations, etc.: intentiones logicae, logical entities),—there is no reason whatever in all this for inferring that because the mind is so constituted, because it has these modes of cognition, it [pg 146] must necessarily fail to reach, by means of them, a true, valid, and genuine knowledge of reality. From the fact that human modes of cognition are human, and not angelic or divine; from the fact that reality can be known to man only through these modes, these finite modes of finite human faculties,—we may indeed infer that even our highest knowledge of reality is inadequate, that it does not comprehend all that is in the reality, but surely not that it is essentially illusory and of its very nature incapable of giving us any true and valid insight into the nature of reality.
Fixing our attention on the virtual distinction we see that the mind is supposed by means of it to apprehend, through a plurality of distinct concepts, what it knows somehow or other to be one being. Now if it knows the reality to be really one, it knows that the formal object of every distinct concept of this reality is really identical with the objects of all the other concepts of the latter. This condition of things is certainly verified when the mind can see that each of the distinct concepts, though not explicitly presenting the objects of the others, nevertheless implicitly and necessarily involves all these other objects:[156] for by seeing that the distinct concepts necessarily involve one another objectively it sees that the reality apprehended through all of them must necessarily be one reality. This is what takes place in the imperfect virtual distinction: the concepts prescind from one another formally, not objectively. But suppose that the distinct concepts prescind from one another objectively, so that they cannot be seen by any analysis to involve one another even [pg 147] implicitly, but present to the mind, so far as they themselves are concerned, adequately distinct modes of being—as happens in the perfect virtual distinction, e.g. between organic life, sentient life, and intellectual life (in man), or between animality and rationality (in man),—then the all-important question arises: How do we know, in any given case of this kind, whether or not these adequately distinct thought-objects are identical with one another in the reality? What is the test for determining whether or not, in a given case, these objects, which are many for abstract intellectual thought, are one being in the real order? The answer seems to be that internal and external sense experience can and does furnish us with embodiments of these intellectual manifolds,—embodiments each of which we apprehend as a being that is really one, as an individual subject of which they are conceptually distinct predicates.
It would appear, therefore, that we cannot reach a true conception of what we are to regard as really one, or really manifold, by abstract thought alone. It is external and internal sense experience, not abstract thought, which first brings us into direct and immediate mental contact with actually existing reality. What we have therefore to determine is this: Does sense experience, or does it not, reveal reality to us as a real manifold, not as one being but as beings coexisting outside one another in space, succeeding one another in time, interdependent on one another, interacting on one another, and by this interaction causing and undergoing real change, each producing others, or being produced by others, really distinct from itself? In other words, is separateness of existence in time or space, as revealed in sense experience, a sufficient index of the real manifoldness of corporeal being, and of the really distinct individuality of each such being?—or are we to take it that because those space and time distinctions have to be apprehended by thought in order that not merely sense but intellect may apprehend corporeal beings as really manifold, therefore these distinctions are not in the reality given to us? Or, again, is each person's own conscious experience of himself as one being, of his own unity, and of his distinctness from other persons, a sufficient index that the distinction between person and person is a real distinction?—or are we to take it that because his feeling of his individual unity through sense consciousness must be interpreted by the thought-concepts of “one”—“individual”—“person”—“distinct” from “others,” these concepts do not truly express what is really given him to interpret? Finally, if we can infer from the actually existing material reality which forms the immediate datum of direct experience, or from the human Ego as given in this experience, the actual existence of a real mode of being which is not material but spiritual, by what tests can we determine whether this spiritual mode of being is really one, or whether there is a real plurality of such beings? The solution of these questions bears directly on the validity of the adequate or “greater” real distinction, the “distinctio realis major seu absoluta”.
The philosophy which defends the validity of this distinction,—which holds that the distinction between individual human beings, and between individual living things generally, is in the fullest and truest sense a real distinction,—is at all events in conformity with universally prevailing modes of thought and language; while the monism which repudiates these spontaneous interpretations of experience as invalid by denying all real manifoldness to reality, can make itself intelligible only by doing violence to thought and language alike. Not that this alone is a disproof of monism; but at all events it creates a presumption against a system to find it running counter to any of those universal spontaneous beliefs which appear to be rooted in man's rational nature. On the other hand, the philosophy which accords with common belief in proclaiming a real plurality in being has to reconcile intellect with sense, and the universal with the individual, by solving the important problem of individuation: What is it that makes real being individual, if, notwithstanding the fact that intellect apprehends reality as abstract and universal, reality nevertheless can exist only as concrete and individual? ([29-33]).
38. The Real Distinction.—In the next place it must be remembered, comparing the virtual distinction with the real, that philosophers have recognized two kinds of real distinction: the major or absolute real distinction, and the minor real, or modal distinction. Before defining these let us see what are the usual signs by which a real distinction in general can be recognized.
The relation of efficient causality, of efficient cause and effect, between two objects of thought, is sometimes set down as a sure sign of a (major) real distinction between them.[157] And the reason alleged is that a thing cannot be the efficient cause of itself: the efficient cause is necessarily extrinsic to the effect and cannot be really identical with the latter. It is to be noted that this test applies to reality as actually existing, as producing or undergoing change, and that it is derived from our sense experience of reality in process of change. But since our concept of efficient causality has its origin in our internal experience of our own selves as active agents, as causing some portion of what enters into our experience, the test seems to assume that we have already introduced into this experience a real distinction between the self and what is caused by the self. It is not clear that the relation of efficient cause to effect, as applied to created causes, can precede and reveal, in our experience, the relation of what is really one to what is really other, in this experience. If the reality revealed to us in our direct experience, the phenomenal universe, has been brought into existence by the creative act of a Supreme Being, this, of course, implies a real distinction between Creator and creature. But it does not seem possible in this case, or indeed in any case, to prove the existence of the causal relation antecedently to that of the real distinction, or to utilize the former as an index to the latter.
Two distinct thought-objects are regarded as really distinct (1) when they are found to exist separately and apart from each [pg 149] other in time or space, as is the case with any two individuals such as John and James, or a man and a horse; (2) when, although they are found in the same individual, one of them at least is separable from the other, in the sense that it can actually exist without that other: for example, the soul of any individual man can exist apart from the material principle with which it is actually united to form this living human individual; the individual himself can exist without the particular accidental modes, such as sitting, thinking, speaking, which actually affect his being at any particular instant of his existence.
From this we can gather in the first place that the distinction between two “individuals,”—individual “persons” or individual “things”—is a real distinction in the fullest and plainest sense of this expression, a major or absolute real distinction. It is, moreover, not merely real but actual. Two existing “individuals” are always actually divided and separate from each other, while each is actually one or actually undivided in itself. And they are so “independently of the consideration of the mind”.
In the second place, assuming that the mind can apprehend, in the individuals of its experience, a unity resulting from the union or composition of separable factors or principles, whether essential or accidental [[27 (b)]]; and assuming that it can know these factors to be really separable (though actually one and undivided), that is, separable in the sense that each of any two such factors, or at least one of them, could actually exist without the other,—it regards the distinction between such factors as real. They are really distinct because though actually one and undivided they are potentially manifold. If each has a positive entity of its own, so that absolutely speaking each could exist without the other, the distinction is still regarded as an absolute or major real distinction. For example, the human soul can exist without the body; the body can exist without the soul, being actualized by the new formative principle or principles which replace the soul at death; therefore there is an absolute real distinction between the soul and the body of the living human individual: although both factors form one actual being, still, independently of the consideration of the mind the one factor is not the other: each is really, though only potentially, other than the factor with which it is united: the relation of “one” to “other” though not actually verified of either factor (since there is only one actual being: the existing individual [pg 150] man), is potentially and really verified, i.e. verifiable of each. Again, the individual corporeal substance can, absolutely speaking, exist without its connatural accident of external or local extension; this latter can, absolutely speaking, exist without its connatural substance;[158] therefore these are absolutely and really distinct.