4. We are accused of misstating Cousin's doctrine of substance and cause. Here is our statement and the reviewer's charge:
"'M. Cousin,' continues The Catholic World, 'professes to have reduced the categories of Kant and Aristotle to two—substance and cause; but as he in fact identifies cause with substance, declaring substance to be substance only in so much [the italics are ours] 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 a cause, it is not necessary to insist on this, and it may be admitted that he recognized two categories.'
"What is exactly meant by these two contradictory statements it is not easy to guess; but let Cousin speak for himself: [Footnote 36]
[Footnote 36: VI. Lecture, Course of 1818, on the Absolute.]
"'Previous to Leibnitz, these two ideas seemed separated in modern philosophy by an impassable barrier. He, the first to sound the nature of the idea of substance, brought it back to the notion of force. This was the foundation of all his philosophy, and of what afterward became the Monadology. ... But has Leibnitz, in identifying the notion of substance with that of cause, presented it with justness? Certainly, substance is revealed to us by cause; for, suppress all exercise of the cause and force which is in ourselves, and we do not exist to ourselves. It is, then, the idea of cause which introduces into the mind the idea of substance. But is substance nothing more than cause which manifests it? .... The causative power is the essential attribute of substance; it is not substance itself. In a word, it has seemed to us surer to hold to these two primitive notions; distinct, though inseparably united; one, which is the sign and manifestation of the other, this, which is the root and foundation of that.'
"One would think this sufficiently explicit for all who are not afflicted with the blindness that will not see." (P. 539.)
We see no self-contradiction in our statement, and no contradiction of M. Cousin. We maintain that M. Cousin really, though probably not intentionally or consciously, reduces the categories of Kant and Aristotle to the single category of substance, and prove it by the words italicized by the reviewer, which are our translation of Cousin's own words. Cousin says, in his own language, in a well-known passage in the first preface of his Fragments Philosophiques, "Le Dieu de la conscience n'est pas un Dieu abstrait, un roi solitaire, rélegué pardelà la création sur le trône desert d'une éternité silencieuse, et d'une existence absolue qui ressemble au néant même de l'existence: c'est un Dieu à la fois vrai et réel, à la fois substance et cause, toujours substance et toujours cause, n'étant substance qu'en tant que cause, et cause qu'en tant que substance, c'est-à-dire, étant cause absolue, un et plusieurs, éternité et temps, espace et nombre, essence et vie, indivisibilité et totalité, principe, fin, et milieu, au sommet de l'être et à son plus humble degré, infini et fini, tout ensemble, triple enfin, c'est-à-dire, à la fois Dieu, nature, et humanité. En effet, si Dieu n'est pas tout il n'est rien." [Footnote 37] This passage justifies our first statement, because Cousin calls God substance, the one, absolute substance, besides which there is no substance. But as our purpose, at the moment, was not so much to show that Cousin made substance and cause identical, as it was to show that he made substance a necessary cause, we allowed, for reasons which he himself gives in the passage cited by the reviewer from his course of 1818 on the Absolute, that he might be said to distinguish them, and to have reduced the categories to two, instead of one only, as he professes to have done. But the reviewer hardly needs to be told that, when it is assumed that substance is cause only on condition of causing, that is, causing from the necessity of its own being, the effect is not substantially distinguishable from the substance causing, and is only a mode or affection of the causative substance itself, or, at best, a phenomenon.
[Footnote 37: Fragments Philosophiques, t. i. p. 76.]
5. Accepting substance and cause as two categories, we contend that Cousin requires a third; namely, the creative act of the causative substance, and contingent existences, as asserted in the ideal formula. Ens creat existentias. To this the reviewer cites, from Cousin, the following passage in reply:
"In the fifth lecture of the course of 1828, M. Cousin says: