The Catholic World.
Vol. V., No. 26.—May, 1867.
Original.
An Old Quarrel.
Those of our readers who have studied with the care their importance demands the papers on the "Problems of the Age" which have appeared in this magazine, can not have failed to perceive that the great questions now in discussion between Catholics and non-Catholics lie, for the most part, in the field of philosophy, and require for their solution a broader and profounder philosophy than any which obtains general currency outside of the church. We think, also, that no one can read and understand them without finding the elements or fundamental principles of a really Catholic philosophy, which, while it rests on scientific truth for its basis, enables us to see the innate correspondence or harmony of reason and faith, science and revelation, and nature and grace—the principles of a philosophy, too, that is no modern invention or new-fangled theory which is brought forward to meet a present emergency, but in substance the very philosophy that has always been held by the great fathers and doctors of the church, and professed in Catholic schools and seminaries.
Yet there is one point which the writer necessarily touches upon and demonstrates as far as necessary to his purpose, which was theological rather than purely philosophical, that, without interfering in the least with his argument, already complete, may admit of a more special treatment and further development. We refer to the objectivity and reality of ideas. The reader acquainted with the history of philosophy in the middle ages will perceive at once that the question of the reality of ideas asserted by the writer takes up the subject-matter of the old quarrel of the nominalists, conceptualists, and realists, provoked by the Proslogium of St. Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, in the eleventh century, really one of the profoundest thinkers, greatest theologians, and ingenious philosophers of any age.
St. Anselm wished to render an account to himself of his faith, and to know and understand the reasons for believing in God. He did not doubt the existence of God; he indeed held that God cannot be thought not to be; he did not seek to know the arguments which prove that God is, that he might believe, but that he might the better know and understand what he already believed. Thus he says: "Necque enim quero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam. Nam et hoc credo quia nisi credidero, non intelligam." We believe that we may understand, and we cannot understand unless we believe—a great truth which modern speculators do not recognize. They reverse the process, and seek to know that they may believe, and hold that the first step to knowledge is to doubt or to deny.
In his Monologium, St. Anselm had proved that God is, and determined his attributes by way of induction from the ideas in the human mind, but it would seem not wholly to his satisfaction, or, at least, that in writing that work he discovered, or thought he discovered, a briefer and more conclusive, method of demonstrating that God is. He had already proved by psychological analysis, in the way Cousin and others have since done, that the human mind thinks most perfect being, a greater than which cannot be thought. This he had done in his Monologium. In his Proslogium he starts with this idea, that of ens perfectissimum, which is, in fact, the idea of God. "The fool says in his heart there is no God;" not because he has no idea of God, not because he does not think most perfect being, a greater than which cannot be thought, but because he does not understand that, if he thinks it, such being really is. It is greater and more perfect to be in re than it is to be only in intellectu, and therefore the most perfect being existing only in the mind is not a greater than which cannot be thought, for I can think most perfect existing in re. Moreover, if most perfect being does not exist in re, my thought is greater and more perfect than reality, and consequently I can rise above God, and judge him, quod valde est absurdum.
Leibnitz somewhere remarks that this argument is conclusive, if we first prove that most perfect being is possible; but Leibnitz should have remembered that the argument ab esse ad posse is always valid, and that God is both his own possibility and reality. Cousin accepts the argument, and says St. Anselm robbed Descartes of the glory of having produced it. But it is evident to every philosophical student that the validity of the argument, if valid it is, depends on the fact that ideas are objective and real, that is, depends on the identity of the ideal and the real.
Roscelinus, or Rosceline, did not concede this, and pronounced the argument of St. Anselm worthless. Confounding, it would seem, ideas with universals, he denied their reality, and maintained that they are mere words without anything either in the mind or out of it to respond to them, and thus founded Nominalism, substantially what is now called materialism. He rejects the universals and the categories of the peripatetics, and recognizes only individual existences and words, which words, when not the names of individual things, are void of meaning. Hence he denied the whole ideal or intelligible world, and admitted only sensibles. Hobbes and Locke were nominalists, and so is the author of Mill's Logic. Mr. Herbert Spencer is a nominalist, but is better described as an atomist of the school of Leucippus and Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius. We know very little of Rosceline, except that he lived in the eleventh century, was born in Brittany, the native land of Abelard and Descartes, and incurred, for some of his speculations concerning the Trinity, the censures of the church. None of his writings have come down to us, and we know his doctrine only from the representations of others.
Guillaume de Champeaux, in the following century, who professed philosophy for a time at St. Victor, and was subsequently Archbishop of Paris, is the founder, in the middle ages, of what is called Realism, and which counts among its disciples Duns Scotus and William of Occam. He is said to have maintained the exact opposite of Rosceline's doctrine, and to have held that ideas, or universals, as they then said, are not empty words, but entities, existing a parte rei. He held, if we may believe Abelard, that not only genera and species, but such abstractions as whiteness, soundness, squareness, etc., are real entities. But from a passage cited from his writings by Abelard, from which Abelard infers he had changed his doctrine, Cousin, in his Philosophie Scholastique, argues that this must have been an exaggeration and that Guillaume only held that such so-called universals as are really genera and species have an entitative existence. This is most probably the fact; and instead, then, of being driven to change his doctrine from what it was at first, as Abelard boasts, it is most likely that he never held any other doctrine. However this may be, his doctrine, as represented by Abelard, is that which the old realists are generally supposed to have maintained.