Ontology, or the Theory of Being

by P. Coffey

In our analysis of change ([10]) we saw why no finite, created agent can be the adequate cause of the new actualities or perfections involved in change, and how we are therefore obliged, by a necessity of thought, to infer the existence of a First Cause, an Unchanging, Infinite Source of these new actualities.[477]

The principle upon which the argument was based is this: that the actuality of the effect is something over and above the reality which it had in the passive potentiality of its created material cause and in the active powers of its created efficient cause antecedently to its production: that therefore the production of this actuality, this novum esse, implies the influence—by way of co-operation or concursus with the created efficient cause—of an Actual Being in whom the actuality of all effects is contained in an eminently perfect way. Even with the Divine [pg 389] concursus a created cause cannot itself create, because even with this concursus its efficiency attains only to the modifying or changing of pre-existing being: and in creation there is no pre-existing being, no material cause, no real passive potentiality to be actuated. But without this concursus not only can it not create; it cannot even, as an efficient cause, actuate a real pre-existing potentiality. And why? Because its efficiency cannot attain to the production of new actuality. It determines the mode of this actuality, and therein precisely lies the efficiency of the created cause. But the positive entity or perfection of this new actuality can be produced only by the Infinite, Changeless, Inexhaustible Source of all actuality, co-operating with the created cause[478] ([103]).

But, it might be objected, perhaps created efficient causes are themselves the adequate and absolutely independent principles of the whole actuality of their effects? They cannot be such; and that for the simple reason that they are not always in act. Were they such they should be always and necessarily in act: they should always and necessarily contain in themselves, and that actually and in an eminently perfect manner, all the perfections of all the effects which they gradually produce in the universe. But experience shows us that created causes are not always acting, that their active power, their causality in actu primo is not to be identified with their action, their causality in actu secundo; and reason tells us that since this is so, since action is something more than active power, since a cause acting has more actuality than the same cause not acting, it must have been [pg 390] determined or reduced to action by some actuality other than itself. This surplus of actuality or perfection in an acting cause, as compared with the same cause prior to its acting, is the Divine concursus. In other words, an active power which is really distinct from its action requires to be moved or reduced to its act (which is actio) no less than a passive potentiality required to be moved to its act (which is passio), by some really distinct actual being. A created efficient cause, therefore, by passing from the state of rest, or mere power to act, into the state of action, is perfected by having its active power actualized, i.e. by the Divine concursus: in this sense action is a perfection of the agent. But it is not an entitative perfection of the latter's essence; it is not a permanent or stable elevation or perfection of the latter's powers; it is not the completion of any passive potentiality of the latter; nor therefore is it properly speaking a change of the agent as such; it is, as we have said already, rather an index of the latter's perfection in the scale of real being.[479] Action really perfects the patiens; and only when this is identical in its concrete individuality with the agens is the latter permanently perfected by the action.

The action of created causes, therefore, depends on the action of the First Cause. We derive our notion of action from the former and apply it analogically to the latter. If we compare them we shall find that, notwithstanding many differences, the notion of action in general involves a “simple” or “unmixed” perfection which can, without anthropomorphism, be applied analogically to the Divine Action. The Divine Action is identical with the Divine Power and the Divine Essence. In creatures essence, power and action are really distinct. The Divine Action, when creative, has not for its term a change in the strict sense ([10], [11]), for it produces being ex nihilo, whereas the action of creatures cannot have for term the production of new being ex nihilo, but only the change of pre-existing being. The Divine Action, whether in creating or conserving or concurring with creatures, implies in God no real transition from power to act; whereas the action of creatures does imply such transition in them. Such are the differences; but with them there is this point of agreement: the Divine Action implies in God an efficiency which has [pg 391] for its term the origin of new being dependently on this efficiency.[480] So, too, does the action of creatures. Positive efficient influence on the one side, and the origin, production, or “fieri” of new actual being on the other, with a relation of real dependence on this efficiency: such is the essential note of all efficient causality, whether of God or of creatures.[481]

103. (b) Actio Immanens and Actio Transiens.—Let us compare in the next place the perfectly immanent spiritual causality of thought, the less perfectly immanent organic causality of living things, and the transitive physical causality of the agencies of inorganic nature. The term of an immanent action remains either within the very faculty which elicits it, affecting this faculty as a habit: thus acts of thought terminate in the intellectual habits called sciences, acts of free choice in the habits of will called virtues or vices.[482] Or it remains at least within the agent: as when in the vital process of nutrition the various parts and members of the living organism so interact as procure the growth and development of the living individual which is the cause of these functions.[483] In those cases the agent itself is the patiens, whereas every agency in the inorganic universe acts not upon itself, but only on some other thing, transitively. But immanent action, no less than transitive action, is productive of real change—not, [pg 392] of course, in the physical sense in which this term is identified with “motion” and understood of corporeal change, but in the metaphysical sense of an actuation of some passive potentiality ([10], [11]).[484]

What, then, do we find common to the immanent and the transitive causality of created causes? An active power or influence on the side of the agent, an actuation of this active power, either by the action of other causes on this agent, or by the fulfilment of all conditions requisite for the action of the agent, and in all cases by the concursus of the First Cause; and, on the side of the effect, the production of some new actuality, the actuation of some passive potentiality, dependently on the cause now in action.

Thus we see that in all cases action, or the exercise of efficient causality, implies that something which was not actual becomes actual, that something which was not, now is; and that this becoming, this actuation, this production, is really and essentially dependent on the influence, the efficiency, of some actual being or beings, which we therefore call efficient causes.

104. Erroneous Theories of Efficient Causality. Imagination and Thought.—Are we certain of anything more about the nature of this connecting link between efficient cause and effect, which we call action? Speculations and theories there are indeed in abundance. Some of these can be shown to be false; and thus our knowledge of the real nature of action may be at least negatively if not positively perfected. Our concept of action is derived, like all our concepts, from experience; and although we are conscious of spiritual action in the exercise of intellect and will, yet it is inseparably allied with sentient action and this again with organic and corporeal action. Nor can we conceive or describe spiritual action without the aid of imagination images, or in language other than that borrowed from the domain of corporeal things, which are the proper object of the human intellect.[485] Now in all this there is a danger: the danger of mistaking imagination images for thoughts, and of giving a literal sense to language in contexts where this language must be rightly understood to apply only analogically.

In analysing the nature of efficient causality we might be tempted to think that we understood it by imagining some sort of a flow or transference of some sort of actual reality from agens to patiens. It is quite true that in describing action, the actual connecting link between agens and patiens, we have to use language suggestive of some such imagination image. We have no option in the matter, for all human language is based upon sense consciousness of physical phenomena. When we describe efficiency as an “influence” of cause on effect, or the effect as “dependent” on the cause, the former term suggests a “flowing,” just as the latter suggests a “hanging”. So, too, when we speak of the effect as “arising,” “originating,” “springing,” [pg 393] or “emanating,” from the cause.[486] But we have got to ask ourselves what such language means, i.e., what concepts it expresses, and not what imagination images accompany the use of it.

Now when we reflect that the senses testify only to time and space sequences and collocations of the phenomena which we regard as causally connected, and when we feel convinced that there is something more than this in the causal connexion,—which something more we describe in the terms illustrated above,—we must inquire whether we have any rational ground for thinking that this something more is really anything in the nature of a spatial transference of some actual reality from agens to patiens. There are indeed many philosophers and scientists who seem to believe that there is such a local transference of some actuality from cause to effect, that efficient causality is explained by it, and cannot be intelligibly explained otherwise. As a matter of fact there is no rational ground for believing in any such transference, and even were there such transference, so far from its being the only intelligible explanation of efficient causality, it would leave the whole problem entirely unexplained—and not merely the problem of spiritual, immanent causality, to which it is manifestly inapplicable, but even the problem of corporeal, transitive causality.[487]