The professor divides, not very scientifically, his work into four parts.
Part I. treats of Presentation and Presentative Knowledge;
Part II., of Representation and Representative Knowledge;
Part III., of Thinking and Thought-Knowledge; and
Part IV., of Intuition and Intuitive Knowledge.
He says, p. 77, "The leading faculties of the intellect are three: the presentative or observing faculty, the representative or creative faculty, and the thinking or generalizing faculty. More briefly, the faculty of experience, the faculty of representation, and the faculty of intelligence." But experience is not a faculty; it is the result of the exercise of all our faculties, and a source of intelligence. Intelligence, as a faculty, is the intellect itself; as a fact, it is indistinguishable from experience, which is improperly restricted by some psychologists of the inductive sort to the knowledge of the external world through the senses, but extends to all acquired knowledge, whatever the faculty exercised in acquiring it or the object perceived. The real distinction is not between experience or empirical knowledge and intelligence, but between empirical knowledge or experience and the ideal principles which are given intuitively by the Creator, and neither acquired nor developed by the soul's own action. Distinctions should be real, not arbitrary or abstract.
We are able to know objects of various kinds and sorts, but the knowing is always the same fact, and by the same cognitive faculty, whatever the object known, the order to which it belongs, or the means and conditions of its cognition. The learned professor's division, making four sorts of knowledge, since he makes intuition empirical, or an act of the soul, appears to us, therefore, without any real foundation. All knowledge or actual knowing is presentative, and is in all cases by direct contemplation of the object in the light of ideal intuition. Demonstration only strips the object of its envelopes, removes the prohibentia, and presents it to direct contemplation. In the longest chain of reasoning, each link is, in the empirical sense, intuitively apprehended. The apprehension is always immediate, and the several mental processes serve only to bring the subject and object together, face to face. These processes, however named or whatever their character, never extend the matter of knowledge beyond the objects presented.
The presentative faculty the author subdivides into consciousness and sense-perception. But consciousness is not a presentative faculty, nor a faculty, nor a subdivision of a faculty at all. It is simply the recognition of the soul, as reflected from the object, of herself as subject. At most, it simply presents the subject of the thought. Sense-perception presents only material or sensible objects. The professor's doctrine is then that of Locke, who derives all our ideas from sensation and reflection, and confines all our knowledge to sensibles with the soul and her operations. Reflection only operates on the sense-perceptions without extending the matter of knowledge beyond them. This is pure sensism, which we are somewhat surprised to find held by an eminent professor in Yale College. Does Dr. Porter know his doctrine is sensism, and therefore materialistic? He says, though not truly, we apprehend the soul in consciousness as a spiritual being, but is the soul the only non-sensible he means to assert?
But, as we showed in our former article, the soul recognizes herself only as subject, and therefore only as the correlative of object. She knows her own operations only in the same correlation. Take away the object and you lose the subject or fact of consciousness. This, we fear, the professor does. He defines, p. 131, sense-perception to be "an act of objective knowledge, in which the soul knows and only knows;" but adds, "if the soul knows, it knows some being as its object. But what being does it affirm? We answer, The being which, is the joint product of the material agent and the sentient organism. … In perception proper we do not know the excitant apart, nor do we know the organism apart, only the result of their joint action. This we know as an object, with which the mind is confronted both as a sentient and as a percipient." But as there can be no thought without the conjunction of the intellective subject and the intelligible object, if the mind does not apprehend 'the material object itself, there can be no such joint product as pretended, and, consequently, no object at all. The object then vanishes, and leaves only the subject, which is, we need not say, pure idealism. As the subject is the correlative of object, and recognizes itself only in thinking the object, if the object vanishes, the subject, too, must vanish, and leave behind it only the sensation transformée of Condillac. But as sensation, however transformed, is still sensation, and as sensations are incapable of standing alone, or of subsisting without the subject, the sensations themselves must go, and nihilism alone remains—the result to which all psychologisms and ontologisms are necessarily tending, and in which Sir William Hamilton says all philosophy necessarily ends, if we may trust a passage which we saw quoted from him not long since in The New Englander, by a Princeton professor, in a striking article on The Present State of Philosophy, in which the writer has well stated the problem presented, but which he neither solves nor attempts to solve; a problem, the solution of which is in the ideal formula, or the real synthesis of principles of things and of science, of which he seems never to have heard.
The professor draws a proper distinction between sensation as feeling and sensation as perception, but we cannot agree with him that sensation as feeling is an affection of the soul. Those psycho-physiologers make a great mistake who call the body "The House I live in." The union of soul and body is too intimate for that. I am not soul, as distinguished from the body, nor am I body, as distinguished from the soul; but I am the union of the two. A General Council defines the soul to be "forma corporis," the informing and animating principle of the body. Yet there is a distinction between them. We can predicate of the one things which we cannot of the other. There is, indeed, no sensation without thought, or an act of the soul; but the sensation itself, as distinguished from the perception, is felt, not merely localized, in the body, not in the soul. When I feel the twinges of the gout, I feel them, not in my soul, but in my toe. We must distinguish two classes of affections, frequently confounded; the one sensible, of the body, the other spiritual, of the soul. The sensible affections or emotions, such as joy and grief, sorrow and delight, pain and pleasure, are of the body animated and informed by the soul. They indeed imitate in the sensible order the affections of the soul, but have in themselves no moral character. Hence, the masters of spiritual life make no account of what is called sensible devotion, and see in it nothing meritorious, and no reason why the soul, in its itinerary to God, should seek it. But very different is the other class, often called by the same name, and which may or may not be accompanied by sensible emotion. This difference is at once understood by all who have learned to distinguish between the love of the senses and the love of the soul, the love Plato meant when he represented the soul, in his fine poetical way, as having two wings, intelligence and love, on which it soars to the empyreum. This love, in one degree, is chivalric love, which the knight cherishes for his mistress whom he worships as a distant star; in a higher degree, it is heroic love, a love that braves all dangers for the beloved, whether friend or country; in a still higher degree, and informed by grace, it is charity or saintly love, with which the saint burns and is consumed as he contemplates the Beauty of Holiness, or "the First Good and the First Fair." This is not sensible love, and its glory is in struggling against the seductions of the senses, or the flesh, and by the grace of God winning the victory over them, and coming off conqueror through Him who hath loved us and given his life for us.
The professor has entered largely into the physiology of the senses, and the joint action of the soul in the fact of knowledge, and the process of the mind in forming what he calls percepts; but as all he says under these heads, whether true or not true, throws no light on the intellectual act itself, we pass it over, and proceed to his Part II., Representation and Representative Knowledge.
"Representation or the representative power," the author says, p. 248, "may be defined in general [that is, the genus] the power to recall, represent, and reknow objects which have been previously known or experienced in the soul. More briefly, it is the power to represent objects previously presented to the mind." Clearly, then, representation adds nothing to the matter previously presented by the presentative power. But the author continues: "It is obvious that, in every act of this power, the objects of the mind's cognition are furnished by the mind itself, being produced or created a second time by the mind's own energy, and presented to the mind's own inspection. It follows that representation, in its very essence, is a creative or a self-active power."
We cannot say that this is obvious to us. The definition of representation given by the author makes it what, in the language of mortals, is called memory; and we have never learned that memory is a creative power, or that in memory the mind creates the objects it remembers. To recall or to reknow is not to create. Even that the soul is self-active—that is, capable of acting from itself alone—is by no means obvious; nay, is impossible, unless we take the soul to be the first cause, instead of merely a second cause; and, even if it were self-active, it would not follow that it creates. God is self-active because self-existent, or being in its plenitude; but he is not necessarily a creator. He has infinite scope for his infinite activity in himself, and he is free to create or not to create as he pleases. That the mind does not in memory create the objects remembered, is evident from the fact that the facts remembered are, as the author himself admits, facts or objects previously known or experienced. The fact of memory, or the fact remembered, is the same fact that was known in presentation, accompanied by the recognition of it as an object previously present and known, and not now known for the first time. There is no creation a second time any more than there was the first time, or when the object was presented.