But there are no such facts as is assumed to be observed and analyzed. The author speaks of objects which are purely psychical, which have no existence out of the soul herself; but there are and can be no facts, or acts, produced by the soul's own energy alone. The soul, for the best of all possible reasons, never acts alone, for she does not exist alone. "Thought," says Cousin, "is a fact that is composed of three simultaneous and indissoluble elements, the subject, the object, and the form. The subject is always the soul, [le Moi,] the object is something not the soul, [le non-Moi,] and the form is always the relation of the two." The object is inseparable from the subject as an element of the thought, but it exists distinct from and independent of the soul, and when it is not thought as well as when it is; otherwise it could not be object, since the soul is all on the side of the subject. The soul acts only in conjunction with the object, because she is not sufficient for herself, and therefore cannot suffice for her own activity. The object, if passive, is as if it were not, and can afford no aid to the fact of thought. It must, therefore, be active, and then the thought will be the joint product of the two activities. It is a grave mistake, then, to suppose that the activity in thought is all on the side of the soul. The soul cannot think without the concurrent activity of that which is not the soul. There is no product possible in any order without two factors placed in relation with each other. God, from the plenitude of his being, contains both factors in his own essence; but in creatures they are distinct from and independent of each other.
We do not forget the intellectus agens of St. Thomas, but it is not quite certain what he meant by it. The holy doctor does not assert it as a faculty of the soul, and represent its activity as purely psychical. Or if it be insisted that he does, he at least nowhere asserts, implies, or intimates that it is active without the concurrence of the object: for he even goes so far as to maintain that the lower acts only as put in motion by the higher, and the terrestrial by the celestial. Hence the praemotio physica of the Thomists, and the necessity in conversion of praevenient grace—gratia praeveniens.
But even granting that there is the class of facts alleged, and that we have the power to observe and analyze them, as, in the language of Cousin, "they pass over the field of consciousness," we cannot by induction attain to their principle and causes; for induction itself, without the first principles of all science, not supplied by it, can give us only a classification, generalization, an hypothesis, or an abstract theory, void of all reality. The universal cannot be concluded, by way of induction, from particulars, any more than particulars can be concluded, by way of deduction, from the universal. Till validated in the prima philosophia, or referred to the first principles, without which the soul can neither act nor exist, the classifications and generalizations attained to by induction are only facts, only particulars, from which no general conclusion can be drawn. Science is knowledge indeed; but the term is generally used in English to express the reduction of facts and particulars to their principles and causes. But in all the secondary sciences the principles and causes are themselves only facts, till carried up to the first principles and causes of all the real and all the knowable. Not without reason, then, has theology been called the queen of the sciences, nor without warrant that men, who do not hold that all change is progress, maintain that the displacement, in modern times, of this queen from her throne has had a deleterious effect on science, and tended to dissipate and enfeeble the human mind itself. We have no philosophers nowadays of the nerve of Plato and Aristotle, the great Christian fathers, or the mediaeval doctors, none of whom ever dreamed of separating theology and philosophy. Even the men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a grasp of thought, a robust vigor of mind, and a philosophic insight into the truth of things and their higher relations that you look in vain for in the philosophers of the eighteenth century and of our own. But this by the way. When things are at the worst, they sometimes mend.
Psychology, not psychologism, is a science, though not an inductive science, nor a science that can be attained to by the study of the soul and her phenomena in the bosom of consciousness. The psychologists—those, we mean, who adopt the psychological method, a method seldom adopted before the famous cogito, ergo sum of Descartes—seem incapable of comprehending that only the real is cognizable, and that abstractions are not real but unreal; and therefore that the first principles of science must be real, not abstract, and the first principles of things. Thus Professor Porter appears to see no real connection between them. True, he says, (p. 64,) "Knowledge and being are correlatives. There must be being in order that there may be knowledge. There can be no knowledge which is not the knowledge of being. Subjectively viewed, to know implies certainty; objectively, it requires reality. An act of knowing in which there is no certainty in the agent, and no reality in the object, is impossible in conception and in fact." This would seem to assert that only being can be known, or that whatever is known is real being, which is going too far and falling into ontologism. Only being is intelligible per se; but existences which are from being and participate of being, though not intelligible in or by themselves, since they do not exist in and by themselves, may yet be really known by the light of being which creates them. We know by being, as well as being itself.
But be not alarmed. The professor's being, the only object of knowledge, his reality without which there is no cognizable object, is nothing very formidable; for he tells us, in smaller type, on the same page, that "we must distinguish different kinds of objects and different kinds of reality. They may be formed by the mind, and exist [only] for the mind that forms them, or they may exist in fact and space for all minds, and yet in each case they are equally objects. Their reality may be mental and internal, or material and external, but in each case it is equally a reality. The thought that darts into the fancy and is gone as soon, the illusion that crosses the brain of the lunatic, the vision that frightens the ghost-seer, the spectrum which the camera paints on the screen, the reddened landscape seen through a colored lens, the yellow objects which the jaundiced eye cannot avoid beholding, each as really exists as does the matter of the solid earth, or the eternal forces of the cosmical system." The "eternal forces" of the cosmical system can be only God, who only is eternal. So the illusions of fancy, the hallucinations of the lunatic, and the eternal, self-existent, necessary being whom we call God, and who names himself I AM THAT AM, SUM QUI SUM, are alike being, and equally real!
The learned author tells us elsewhere that we call by the name being beings of very different kinds and sorts, owing to the poverty of our language, which supplies but one name for them. He will permit us to say that we suspect the poverty is not in the language. We have in the language two words which serve us to mark the precise difference between that which is in, from, and by itself alone, and that which exists in, from, and by being. The first is being, the other is existence. Being is properly applied only to God, who is, not Supreme Being, as is often said, but the one only being, the only one that can say, I AM THAT AM, or QUI EST; and it shows how strictly language represents the real order that in no tongue can we make an assertion without the verb TO BE, that is, only by being, that is, again, only by God himself. Existence explains itself. Existences are not being, but, as the ex implies, are from being, that is, from him in whom is their being, as Saint Paul says, "For in him we live, and move, and are," "vivimus, et movemur, et sumus." Reality includes being and all that is from and by being, or simply being and existences. Nothing else is real or conceivable; for, apart from God and what he creates, or besides God and his creatures, there is nothing, and nothing is nothing, and nothing is not intelligible or cognizable.
Dr. Porter understands by reality or being only what is an object of knowledge, or of the mind in knowing, though it may have no existence out of the mind, or, as say the schoolmen, a parte rei. Hence, though the soul is certain that the object exists relatively to her act of knowing, she is not certain that it is something existing in nature. How, then, prove that there is anything to correspond to the mental object, idea, or conception? In his Second Part, which treats of the representative power, he tells us that the objects represented and cognized in the representation are purely psychical, and exist only in the soul and for the soul alone. These, then, do not exist in nature; they are, in the ordinary use of the term, unreal, illusory, and chimerical, as the author himself confesses. If the object of knowledge can be in any instance unreal, chimerical, illusory, or with no existence except in and for the soul itself, why may it not be so in every instance, and all our knowledge be an illusion? How prove that in any fact of knowledge there is cognition of an object that exists distinct from and independent of the subject? Here is the pons asinorum of exclusive psychologists. There is no crossing the bridge from the subjective to the objective, for there is no bridge there, and subject and object must both be given simultaneously in one and the same act, or neither is given.
Dr. Porter, indeed, gives the subjective and what he calls the objective, together, in one and the same thought; but he leaves the way open for the question, whether the object does or does not exist distinct from and independent of the subject. This is the difficulty one has with Locke's Essay on the Understanding. Locke makes ideas the immediate object of the cognitive act; for he defines them to be "that with which the mind is immediately conversant." If the soul can elicit the cognitive act with these ideas, which it is not pretended are things, how prove that there is any real world beyond them? It has never been done, and never can be done; for we have only the soul, for whose activity the idea or concept suffices, with which to do it, and hence the importance to psychologists of the question, How do we know that we know? and which they can answer only by a paralogism, or assuming the reality of knowledge with which to prove knowledge real.
For the philosopher there is no such question, and nothing detracts so much from the philosophical genius of the illustrious Balmes as his assertion that all philosophy turns on the question of certainty. The philosopher, holding that to know is to know, has, after knowing, or having thought the object, no question of certainty to ask or to answer. The certainty that the object exists in nature is in the fact that the soul thinks it. The object is always a force or activity distinct from and independent of the subject, and since it is an activity it must be either real being or real existence.
The error of the author, as of all psychologers, is not in assuming that the soul cannot think without the concurrence of the object, or that the object is not really object in relation to the soul's cognitive power, but in supposing that the soul can find the object in that which has no real existence. He assumes that abstractions or mental conceptions, which have no real existence aside from the concrete or reality from which the mind forms them, may be real objects of the soul in the fact of knowledge. But no abstractions or conceptions exist a parte rei. There are white things and round things, but no such existence as whiteness or roundness. These and other abstractions are formed by the mind operating on the concretes, and taking them under one aspect, or generalizing a quality they have in common with all concretes of their class, and paying no heed to anything else in the concrete object. But these abstractions or general conceptions are cognizable and apprehended by the mind only in the apprehension of their concretes, white or round things. They are, as abstracted from white things or round things, no more objects of thought or of thought-knowledge than of sensible perception. We speak of abstractions which are simply nullities, not of genera and species, or universals proper, which are not abstractions but real; yet even these do not exist apart from the individual. They and their individuals subsist always together in a synthetic relation, and though distinguishable are never separable. The species is not a mere name, a mere mental conception or generalization; it is real, but exists and is known only as individualized.