Nor is it true to say that all our knowledge is given in the primitive intuition. What is given in the primitive intuition is simply the ideal, self-evident truths, as say some, first principles of all science, which are at the same time the first principles of all reality, and could not be the first principles of science if they were not the first principles of reality, say others. Even they who assert that the ideal formula, Ens creat existentias, is intuitive, never pretend that anything more than the ideal element of thought or experience is intuitive. The ideal formula is simply the scientific reduction of the categories of Aristotle and Kant to three, and their identification with reality; that is, their reduction to being, existence, and the creative act of being, which is the real nexus between them. These three categories must be given intuitively, or à priori, because without them the intelligence is not constituted, and no science, no experience, is possible. But in them, while the principles of all science are given, no knowledge or apprehension of particular things is given. The intuition constitutes, we would say creates, the faculty of intelligence, but all science is acquired either by the exercise of that faculty or by divine revelation addressed to it.
Reduced to its proper character as asserted by M. Cousin, intuition is empirical, and stands opposed not to reflection, but to discursion, and is simply the immediate and direct perception of the object without the intervention of any process, more or less elaborate, of reasoning. This is, indeed, not an unusual sense of the word, perhaps its more common sense, but it is a sense that renders the distinction between intuition and reflection of no importance to M. Cousin, for it does not carry him out of the sphere of the subject, or afford any basis for his ontological inductions. He has still the question as to the objectivity and reality of the ideal to solve, and no recognized means of solving it. His ontological conclusions, therefore, as a writer in The Christian Examiner told him as long ago as 1836, rest simply on the credibility of reason or faith in its trustworthiness, which can never be established, because it is assumed that to the operation of reason no objective reality is necessary, since the object, if impersonal, may for aught that appears be included in the subject. Notwithstanding his struggles and efforts of all sorts, we think, therefore, that it must be conceded that Cousin remained in the sphere of psychology, and that the facts the study and analysis of consciousness gave him, have in his system no ontological value, for he fails to establish their real objectivity. His passage from psychology is a leap over a gulf by main strength, not a regular dialectic passage, which he professes to have found, or which he promises to provide, and which the true analysis of thought discloses.
M. Cousin professes to have reduced the categories of Kant and Aristotle to two, substance and cause, or substance and phenomenon. But, as he in fact identifies cause with substance, declaring substance to be substance only in so much as it is cause, and cause to be cause only in so much as it is substance, he really reduces them to the single category of substance, which you may call indifferently substance or cause. But though every substance is intrinsically and essentially a cause, yet, as it may be something more than cause, it is not necessary to insist on this, and it may be admitted that he recognizes two categories. Under the head of substance he ranges all that is substantial, or that pertains to real and necessary being, and under the head of cause the phenomenal, or the effects of the causative action of substance. He says he understands by substance the universal and absolute substance, the universal, necessary, and real being of the theologians, and by phenomena not mere modes or appearances of substance, but finite and relative substances, and calls them phenomena only in opposition to the one absolute substance. They are created or produced by the causative action of substance. If this has any real meaning, he should recognize three categories, as in the ideal formula, Ens creat existentias, that is, being, existence, or creature, and the creative act of being, the real nexus between substance or being and contingent existences, for it is that which places them and binds them to the creator. In the ideal formula the categories are all reduced to three, which really include them all and in their real relation. Whatever there is to be known must be arranged under one or another of the three terms of the formula, for whatever is conceivable must be being, the creative act of being, or the product of that act, that is to say, existences. The ideal formula is complete, for it asserts in their logical relation the first principles of all the knowable (omne scibile) and all the real (omne reale), and of all the knowable because of all the real, for what is not real is not knowable. M. Cousin's reduction to substance and cause, or being and phenomena, besides being not accurately expressed, is unscientific and defective.
We do not think M. Cousin ever intended to deny the creative act of being, or the reality of existences, or what he calls phenomena, but he includes the act in his conception of substance. God is in his own intrinsic nature, he maintains, causative or creative, and cannot, therefore, not cause or create. Hence, creation is necessary. Being causative in his essence, essentially a cause, and cause being a cause only inasmuch as it causes or is actually a cause, God is, if we may so speak, forced to create, and to be continuously creating, by the intrinsic and eternal necessity of his own being. This smacks a little of Hegelianism, which teaches that God perfects or fills out his own being, or realizes the possibilities of his own nature, in creating, and arrives at self-consciousness first in man—a doctrine which our Boston transcendentalists embodied in their favorite aphorism, "In order to be you must do"—as if without being it is possible to do, as if imperfection could make itself perfection, or anything by itself alone could make itself more than it is!
But the doctrine that substance is essentially cause, and must from intrinsic necessity cause in the sense of creating, is not tenable. We are aware that Leibnitz, a great name in philosophy, defines substance to be an active force, a vis activa, but we do not recollect that he anywhere pretends that its activity necessarily extends beyond itself. God is vis activa, if you will, in a supereminent degree; he is essentially active, and would be neither being nor substance if he were not; he is, as say Aristotle and the schoolmen, most pure act; and hence the theologians discover in him a reason for the eternal generation of the Son, and the eternal procession of the Holy Ghost, or why God is necessarily indivisible Trinity; but nothing in this implies that he must necessarily act ad extra, or create. He acts eternally from the necessity of his own divine nature, but not necessarily out of the circle of his own infinite being, for he is complete in himself, the plenitude of being, and always and everywhere suffices for himself, and therefore for his own activity. Creation, or the production of effects exterior to himself, is not necessary to the perfection of his activity, adds and can add nothing to him, as it does and can take nothing from him. Hence, though we cannot conceive of him without conceiving him as infinitely, eternally, and essentially active, we can conceive of him as absolute substance or being without conceiving him to be necessarily acting or creating ad extra.
M. Cousin evidently confounds the interior act of the divine being with his exterior acts, or acts ad extra, or creative acts. God being most pure act, says the eclectic philosopher, he must be infinitely active, and if infinitely active he must develop himself in creation; therefore, creation is necessary, and God cannot but create. This denies while it asserts that God is in himself most pure act, and assumes that his nature has possibilities that can be realized only in external acts. It makes the creation necessary to the perfection of his being, and assumes either that he is not in himself ens perfectissimum, or most perfect being, or that the creation, the world, or universe, is itself God; that is, the conception of God as most perfect being includes both substance and cause, both being and phenomenon. Hence, with the contradiction of which M. Cousin gives more than one example, and which no pantheistic philosopher does or can escape, in asserting creation to be necessary, he declares it to be impossible; for the phenomena substantially considered are God himself, indistinguishable from him, and necessary to complete our conception of him as absolute substance, or most perfect being.
In the preface to the third edition of his Philosophical Fragments, M. Cousin says the expression, "Creation is necessary," is objectionable, as irreverent, and appearing to imply that God in creating is not free, and he willingly consents to retract it. But we cannot find that he does retract it, and, if he retracts the expression, he nowhere retracts the thought. He denies that he favors a system of fatalism, and labors hard to prove that though God cannot but create, yet that in creating he is free. God, he says, must act according to his own essential nature, and cannot act contrary to his own wisdom and goodness; yet in acting he acts freely. There is a distinction between liberty and free will. Free will is liberty accompanied by deliberation and struggles between opposite motives and tendencies. In God there can be no hesitancy, no deliberation, no struggle of choice between good and evil. Yet is he none the less free for that. There are sublime moments when the soul acts spontaneously, with terrible energy, without any deliberation. Is the soul in these sublime moments deprived of liberty? The saint, when, by long struggles and severe discipline, he has overcome all his internal enemies, and henceforth acts right spontaneously, without deliberating—is he less free than he who is still in the agony of the struggle, or are his acts less meritorious? Is the liberty of God taken away by denying that he is free to act contrary to his nature?
Whether the distinction here asserted between liberty and free will is admissible or not, or whether all that is alleged be true or much of it only error, we pass over, as the discussion of the question of liberty would lead further than we can now go; but in all he says he avoids the real question at issue. Certainly, there can be no hesitancy on the part of God, no interior struggle as to choice between good and evil, no deliberation as to what he shall do or not do; nothing that implies the least possible imperfection can be in him. Certain, again, is it that God is not free to alter his own nature, to change his own attributes, or to act contrary to them, to the eternal essences of things, or to his own eternal ideas. But that is not the question. The real question is, Is be free to create or not create at his own will and pleasure? Among the infinite number of contingents possible, and all according with his own essential attributes, is he free to select such as he chooses, and at his own will and pleasure give them existence? This is the only question he had to answer, and this question he studiously avoids, and fails, therefore, to show that they are wrong who accuse him of asserting creation as the necessary and not the free act of God. The charge of asserting universal fatalism and pantheism he therefore fails to meet. He fails to vindicate the liberty of God, and therefore, though he asserts it, the liberty of man. All pantheism is fatalistic, and the doctrine of Spinoza is not more decidedly pantheistic than the system adopted and defended by Cousin.