The unreal is unintelligible, and, like all negation, is intelligible only in the reality denied. The soul, then, can think or know only the real, only real being, or real existences by the light of real being. If the soul can know only the real, she can know things only in their real order, and consequently the order of the real and of the knowable is the same, and the principles of the real are the principles of science. The soul is an intelligent existence, and the principles, causes, and conditions of her existence are the principles, causes, and conditions of her intelligence, and therefore of her actual knowledge. We have, then, only to ascertain the principles of the real to determine the principles of science. The principles of the real are given us in the first verse of Genesis: "In the beginning God created heaven and earth," and in the first article of the Creed, "I believe in one God, maker of heaven and earth, and all things visible and invisible." Or, as stated in strictly scientific terms, as affirmed in intuition, Being creates existences. The real and necessary being given in the scientific formula or intuition is indeed God; but this is not intuitively known, and can be known only discursively or by contemplation and reflection. We must not, then, in stating the first principles of the real, and of knowledge as given in intuition, use the term God, but being. We know by intuition being, but do not by intuition know that being is God. Hence the mistake of those who say we have intuition of God, or know by intuition that God is. We have intuition of that which is God, but not that what is given is God. Ontology is a most essential part of philosophy; but exclusive ontologists are as much sophists as are exclusive psychologists.
The first principles of reality are being, existence, and the creative act of being, whence the ideal formula or judgment, Being creates existences. This is the primum in the real order. All that is real and not necessary and self-sufficing being must be from being; for without real uncreated being there can be nothing, and existences are something only in so far as they participate of being. Things can exist from being, or hold from it, only by virtue of its creative act, which produces them by its own energy from nothing, and sustains them as existent. There is only the creative act by which existences can proceed from being. Emanation, generation, evolution, which have been asserted as the mode of procession of existences, give nothing really or substantially distinguishable from being. Existences, then, can really proceed from being only by the creative act, and, indeed, only by the free creative act of being; for necessary creation is no creation at all, and can be only a development or evolution of being itself. In theological language, then, God and creation include all the real; what is not God is creature or existence, and what is not creature or existence is God. There is no reality which is neither God nor creature, no tertium quid between being and existence, or between existence and nothing. The primum of the real is, then, the ideal formula or divine judgment, Ens creat existentias, for it affirms in their principle and their real relation all that is and all that exists. This formula is a proper judgment, for it has all the terms and relations of a judgment, subject, predicate, and copula. Being is the subject, existences is the predicate, and the creative act the copula, which at once unites the predicate to the subject and distinguishes it from it. It is divine, because it is a priori, the primum of the real; and as only the real is intelligible or knowable, it must precede as its principle, type, and condition, every judgment that can be formed by an existence or creature, and therefore can be only the judgment of God affirming his own being and creating the universe and all things, visible and invisible, therein.
Now, as the soul can only know the real, this divine judgment must be not only the primum of the real, but of the knowable; and since the soul can know only as she exists, in the real relations in which she stands, and knows only by the aid of the object on which she depends for her existence and activity, it follows that this judgment is the primum scientificum, or the principle of all real or possible science.
Is it asked, How is this known or proved, if not by psychological observation and analysis? The answer is, by the analysis of thought, which discloses the divine judgment as its idea, or necessary and apodictic element. This is not psychologism nor the adoption of the psychological method. Psychologism starts from the assumption that thought, as to the activity that produces it, whatever may or may not be its object, is purely psychical, and that the ontological, if obtainable at all, is so by an induction from psychological facts. The first assumption is disproved by the fact just shown, that thought is not produced or producible by the psychical activity alone, but by the joint action of the two factors subject and object, in which both are affirmed. The other assumption is disposed of by the fact that what is found in the analysis of thought is not particular facts or phenomena from which the first principles are concluded by way of induction, which could give us only a generalization or abstraction, but the first principles themselves intuitively given.
Philosophers generally assert that certain conditions precedent, or certain ideas a priori, are necessary to every fact of experience or actual cognition. Kant, in his masterly Critik der reinen Vernunft, calls them sometimes cognitions, sometimes synthetic judgments, a priori, but fails to identify them with the divine judgment, and holds them to be necessary forms of the subject. Cousin asserts them and calls them necessary and absolute ideas, but fails to identify them with the real, and even denies that they can be so identified. Reid recognized them, and called them the first principles of human belief, sometimes the principles of common sense, after Father Bouffier, which all our actual knowledge presupposes and must take for granted. Professor Porter also recognizes them, holds them to be intuitively given, calls them certain necessary assumptions, first truths or principles without which no science is possible, but fails to identify them with the divine judgment, and seems to regard them as abstract principles or ideas, as if abstractions could subsist without their concretes, or principles ever be abstract. We deny that they are abstract ideas, necessary assumptions, or necessary forms of the understanding or cognitive faculty, and hold them to be the principles of things, alike of the real and the knowable, without which no fact exists and no act of knowledge is possible. They cannot be created by the mind, nor formed by the mind operating on the concrete objects of existence, nor in any manner obtained by our own mental activity; for without them there is no mind, no mental activity, no experience. Dr. Porter, after Reid, Kant, Cousin, and others, has clearly seen this, and conclusively proved it—no philosopher more conclusively—and it is one of the merits of his book. He therefore justly calls them intuitions, or principles intuitively given; yet either we do not understand him, or he regards them as abstract truths or abstract principles. But truths and principles are never abstract, and only the concrete or real can be intuitively given. Those intuitions, then, must be either real being or contingent existences; not the latter, for they all bear the marks of necessity and universality; then they must be the real and necessary being, and therefore the principles of things, and not simply principles of science. Dr. Porter makes them real principles in relation to the mental act; but we do not find that he identifies them with the principles of the real. He doubtless holds that they represent independent truths, and truths which are the principles of things; but that he holds them, as present to the mind, to be the principles themselves, we do not find.
Dr. Porter's error in his Part IV., in which he discusses and defines intuitions, and which must be interpreted by the foregoing parts of his work, appears to us to be precisely in his taking principle to mean the starting-point of the soul in the fact of knowledge, and distinguishing it from the principle of the real order. He distinguishes between the object in mente and the object in re, and holds that the former is by no means identical with the latter. He thus supposes a difference between the scientific order and the real, and therefore that the principle of the one is not necessarily the principle of the other. This is to leave the question still open, whether there is any real order to respond to the scientific order, and to cast a doubt on the objective validity of all our knowledge. The divine judgment, or ideal formula, we have shown, is alike the primum raale and the primum scientificum, and therefore asserts that the principles of the two orders are identical, and that the scientific must follow the real, for only the real is knowable. Hence science is and must be objectively certain.
The intuitive affirmation of the formula, being creates existences, creates, places the soul, and constitutes her intelligent existence. The author rightly says every thought is a judgment. There is no judgment without the copula, and the only real copula is the copula of the divine judgment or intuition, that is, the creative act of being. Being creating the soul is the principle of her existence; and as we have shown that she can act only as she exists, the principle of her existence is the principle of her acts, and therefore of her knowing, or the fact of knowledge. There is, then, no thought or judgment without the creative act for its copula. The two orders, then, are united and made identical in principle by the creative act of being. The creative act unites the acts of the soul, as the soul itself, to being.
The difficulty some minds feel in accepting this conclusion grows out of a misapprehension of the creative act, which they look upon as a past instead of a present act. The author holds that what is past has ceased to exist, and that the objects we recall in memory are "created a second time." He evidently misapprehends the real character of space and time. These are not existences, entities, as say the scholastics, but simple relations, with no existence, no reality, apart from the relata, or the related. Things do not exist in space and time; for space and time simply mark their relation to one another of coexistence and succession. Past and future are relations that subsist in or among creatures, and have their origin in the fact that creatures as second causes and in relation to their own acts are progressive. On the side of God, there is no past, no future; for his act has no progression, and is never in potentia ad actum. It is a complete act, and in it all creatures are completed, consummated, in their beginning, and hence the past and the future are as really existent as what we call the present. The Creator is not a causa transiens, that creates the effect and leaves it standing alone, but a causa manens, ever present in the effect and creating it.
Creation is not in space and time, but originates the relations so-called. The creative act, therefore, can never be a past or a future act, an act that has produced or that will produce the effect, but an act that produces it always here and now. The act of conservation, as theologians teach, is identically the act of creation. God preserves or upholds us in existence by creating us at each instant of our lives. The universe, with all it contains, is a present creation. In relation to our acts as our acts or our progressiveness toward our final cause or last end, the universe was created and will remain as long as the Creator wills; but in relation to God it is created here and now, and as newly created at this moment as when the sons of the morning sang together over its production, by the divine energy alone, from nothing; and the song ceases not; they are now singing it. There is nothing but this present creative act that stands between existences and nothing. The continuity of our existence is in the fact that God creates and does not cease to create us.
We have only to eliminate from our minds the conceptions that transport the relations of space and time to the Creator, or represent them as relations between Creator and creature, where the only relation is that of cause and effect, and to regard the creative act as having no relations of space and time, to be able to understand how the divine judgment, intuitively affirmed, is at once the principle of the real and of the scientific, and the creative act, the copula of being and existence, is the copula of every judgment or thought, as is proved by the fact already noted, that in no language can an assertion be made without the verb to be, that is, without God.