But even granting this, how from this particular act of causation conclude universal cause, or even from universal cause necessary cause? I by willing produce the volition to raise my arm, therefore everything that begins to exist must have a cause. The argument from the particular to the universal, non volet, say the logicians, and still less the argument from the contingent to the necessary.
Take the idea of the perfect. That we have the idea or category in the mind is indisputable, and it evidently is not derivable by abstraction or generalization from the facts of experience. We have experience only of imperfect things, and no generalizing of imperfection can give perfection. Indeed, without the category of the perfect, the imperfect cannot even be thought. We think a thing imperfect, that is, judge it to be imperfect—and every thought is a judgment, and contains an affirmation—because it falls short of the ideal standard with which the mind compares it. The universal is not derivable from the particular, for the particular is not conceivable without the universal. We may say the same of the immutable, the eternal, the infinite, the one, or unity.
By abstraction or generalization we simply consider in the concrete a particular property, quality, or attribute by itself, and take it in universo, without regard to anything else in the concrete thing. It must then be a real property, quality, or attribute of the concrete thing, or the abstraction will have no foundation in reality. But the universal is no property, quality, or attribute of particulars, the immutable of mutables, the eternal of things temporary, the necessary of contingents, the infinite of finites, or unity of multiples, otherwise particulars would be universals, mutables immutables, temporals eternals, contingents necessary, finites infinite, and multiples one—a manifest contradiction in terms. The generalization or abstraction of particulars is particularity, of mutables is mutability, of temporals temporality, of contingents contingency, of finites finiteness, of multiples plurality or multiplicity. The overlooking of this obvious fact, and regarding the universal, immutable, eternal, etc., as abstractions or generalizations of particulars, mutables, temporals, and so on, has given birth to the pantheistic philosophy, than which nothing can be more sophistical.
The ideas or categories of the universal, the immutable, and the eternal, the necessary, the infinite, the one or unity, are so far from being abstractions from particular concretes that in point of fact we cannot even think things as particular, changeable, temporal, contingent, finite, or multiple without them. Hence, they are called necessary ideas, because without them no synthetic judgment à posteriori or fact of experience is possible. They are not abstractions formed by the human mind by contemplating concrete things, because the human mind cannot operate or even exist without them, and without them human intelligence, even if supposable, could not differ from the intelligence of the brute, which, though many eminent men in modern science are endeavoring to prove it, cannot be accepted, because in proving we should disprove it.
The question now for philosophy to answer, as we have already intimated, is, Are these ideas or categories, which precede and enter into every fact of experience, forms of the subject or human understanding, as Kant alleges, or are they objective and real, and, though necessary to the existence and operation of the human mind, are yet really distinct from it, and independent of it, as much so as if no human mind had been created? This is the problem.
St. Thomas evidently holds them to be objective, for he holds them to be necessary and self-evident principles, principles per se nota, as may be seen in his answer to the question, Utrum Deum esse sit per se notum? and we need strong reasons to induce us to dissent from any philosophical conclusion of the angelic doctor. Moreover, Kant by no means proves his own conclusion, that they are forms of the subject. All he proves is that there is and can be no fact of human knowledge without them, which may be true without their being subjective. He proves, if you will, that they are constituent principles of the human understanding, in the sense that the human understanding cannot exist and operate without their initiative and concurrence; but this no more proves that they are forms of the subject than the fact that the creature can neither exist nor act without the creative and concurrent act of the creator proves that the creator is an inherent law or form of the creature. To our mind, Kant confirms a conclusion contrary to his own. His masterly Kritik der reinen Vernunft establishes simply this fact, that man's own subjective reason alone does not suffice for science, and that man, in science as in existence, is dependent on that which is not himself; or, in a word, that man depends on the intelligibleness of the object, or that which renders it intelligible, to be himself intelligent, or knowing. Man is, no doubt, created with the power or faculty of intelligence, but that power or faculty is not the power or faculty to know without an intelligible object, or to know what is not knowable independently of it. Hence, from Kant's facts, we conclude that the ideas or categories, without which no object is intelligible and no fact of intelligence possible, are not subjective, but objective, real, and independent of the subject.
The matter is simple enough if we look at it freed from the obscurity with which philosophers have surrounded it. Thought is a complex fact, the joint product of subject and object. God is his own object, because he is self existent and self-sufficing: is in himself, as say the theologians, actus purissimus, most pure act, which permits us up to a certain point to understand the eternal generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Ghost. God, being self-existent and self-sufficing, needs and can receive nothing from without his own most perfect being. But man is a dependent being, a creature, and does not and cannot suffice in himself for either his own existence or his own intelligence. He cannot think by himself alone or without the concurrence of the object, which is not himself. If the concurrence of the object be essential to the production of my thought, then that concurrence must be active, for a passive concurrence is the same as no concurrence at all. Then the object must be active, therefore real, for what is not real cannot act or be active. Then the object in my thought is not and cannot be myself, but stands over against me. Now, I know that I think these ideas, and that they are the object in my thought without which I cannot think at all. Therefore, they are objective and real, and neither myself nor my creations, as are abstractions.
This conclusion is questioned only by those persons who have not duly considered the fact that there can be no thought without both subject and object, and that man can never be his own object. To assume that he can act, think, or know with himself alone, without the concurrence of that which is not himself and is independent of him, is to deny his dependence and to assume him to be God—a conclusion which some think follows from the famous "Cogito, ergo sum" of Descartes, and which is accepted and defended by the whole German pantheistic school of the present day. Indeed, as atheism was in the last century, so pantheism is in the present century the real enemy philosophy has to combat. In concluding the reality of the object from the fact that I think it, I am far from pretending that thought cannot err; but the error is not in regard to what I really think, but in regard to that which I do not think, but infer from my thought. I think only what is intelligible, and what is intelligible is real, and therefore true, for falsehood, being unreal, is unintelligible, and therefore cannot be thought. But in converting my thought into a proposition, I may include in the proposition not only what I thought, but what I did not think. Hence the part of error, which is always the part not of knowledge, but of ignorance. It is so we understand St. Augustine and St. Thomas.[Footnote 37]
[Footnote 37: Vide St. Augustine, in lib lxxxiii. Qq., quaest. xxii., and St. Thomas, Summa p.1 quaest. xvii, a. 3 ln. c. The words of St. Augustine are, "Omnis qui fallitur, id quo fallitur, non intelligit." Hence the Intellect is always true.]