The professor says, p. 251, "The objects of the representative power are …. mental objects. They are not real things, nor real percepts, but the mind's own creations after real things. They are spiritual or psychical, not material, entities; but in many cases, they concern material beings, being psychical transcripts of them, believed to be real or possible." Does he mean this as a true description of the facts of memory? Probably not. Then his definition needs amending, for it does not include all that he means by representation. His definition includes only memory; but his description includes, beside memory, reflection, fancy, and imagination, things which have nothing in common except the fact that the mind operates in them all on matters which have been previously presented. Reflection and memory are in no sense creative faculties; fancy and imagination are sometimes so called, but even they do not create their own objects. Reflection is the mind operating on the ideal principles re-presented in language, and in their light, on the facts of experience in their synthetic relations with them. Memory is simply, as a faculty, the power to retain and to re-present, more or less completely and distinctly, the facts of experience. Its objects are those facts themselves, not a mental representation or transcript of them. The author confounds re-presenting with representation. In the one, the object previously presented is re-presented, or presented anew; in the other, the object itself is not presented for more elaborate consideration, but a certain mental transcript, image, or resemblance of it, which is the product of the mind fancying or imagining, yet is never its object in correlation with which it acts. This distinction alone upsets the author's whole theory of science, or Wissenschaftslehre, and renders worse than useless more than nine-tenths of his volume. His whole theory is vitiated by confounding representation, in the sense of showing or exhibiting by resemblance or similitude, with the etymological sense, that of re-presenting, and in taking the representation as the object of the soul in the intellectual act, which it never is. Neither reflection nor memory represents, in his sense of the word, the objects previously presented; they only re-present them.
In point of fact, we never know anything by mental representation; for we either know not at all, or we know the thing itself. Representation only replaces the phantasms and intelligible species of the schoolmen, for ever made away with, we had supposed, by the Scottish school of Reid and Hamilton, and the professor himself has given excellent reasons for not accepting them. Plato, indeed, asserts that we know by similitude, but in a very different sense. The idea is impressed on matter as the seal on wax, and the impression is a perfect fac-simile of the idea; and by knowing the impression, we know the idea impressed. But he never made either the idea or the impress of it on matter the product of the mind itself. He makes either always objective, independent of the mind, and apprehensible by it. In other words, he never held that the mind creates the similitude by which it knows, but, at most, only that by observation the mind finds it. The peripatetics never, again, made their phantasms and intelligible species mental creations, or represented them as furnished by the mind from its own stock; but always held them to be independent of the mind, and furnished to it as the means of apprehending the object. If they had referred their production to the mind itself, they would have called the species intellective, not intelligible species. The soul has, indeed, the faculty of representation; but in representing its correlative object, it is not the representation, but the thing, whatever it may be, that it attempts to represent. The product of the mind may be a representation, but the object of the mind is not. In all the imitative arts, as poetry, painting, sculpture, the artist seeks to represent, but operates always in view of that reality of which he produces the representation or resemblance.
The author himself distinguishes memory from representation, though very indistinctly. "Representation," p. 303> "recalls, memory recognizes." Here he uses representation in the sense of re-presenting; for what is recalled is not the mental representation or semblance, but the object itself; so, really, there is no representation in the case, and the professor should not have treated memory under the head of representation. "I see a face, and I shut my eyes and picture it to myself." This is not an act of representation, but of memory. There is a re-presenting, but no representation, in memory; for, so far as the fact is not reproduced in memory, there is no memory, but simply fancy or imagination. The objects of reflection are simply the objects originally presented with only this difference, that, in presentation, the fact of consciousness is myself as subject knowing, whereas in reflection it is myself as subject reflecting, and, in memory, myself as subject remembering.
Fancy and imagination are, in a loose way, called creative faculties; but properly creative they are not. Creation is production of substantial existences or things from nothing that is, without any materials, by the sole energy of the creator. Fancy and imagination can operate only on and with materials which have been or are presented to the mind. Fancy is mimetic and simply imitates imagination, as throughout the universe the lower imitates the higher, as the universe copies the Creator, or seeks to actualize the type in the Divine mind; and hence St. Thomas says, Deus similitudo est omnium rerum. God creates all things after the type or ideal in his own mind, and idea in mente divina nihil est aliud quam essentia Dei. Hence, man is said to be made after the image and likeness of God, ad imaginem et similitudinem, though he is not the image of God; for that is the Eternal Word, who, St. Paul tells us, is "the brightness of his glory and the express image of his substance," or being. (Heb. i. 3.) Fancy is mimetic, and plays with sensations and sensibles; but though it combines them in its own way, as a winged horse, the objects combined are always objects of experience. Imagination is of a higher order than fancy, and operates on and with objects of experience, sensibles, intelligibles, and the ideal principles intuitively given. It sweeps through the whole range of creation, descends to hell, and rises to heaven; but its objects are always those which have been presented to the mind, which it can only arrange and combine in new forms of its own. But the representations it produces are its products, not its object. In producing them, the mind has a real object as its correlate, as in presentation. Let the professor, then, abandon the absurdity which runs through his book that a mental creation or representation is the object of the soul in producing it. The object of the soul is the object whose activity joined to its own produces it.
Take the artist. The object in his richest and sublimest productions is the beautiful which he sees, which is his soul's vision and his soul's love, and which he seeks to express on canvas, in a statue, a temple, an oration, a poem, or a melody. Tell us not, as so many aesthetic writers do, that the artist projects from his own soul, or creates the beauty which he struggles to express in his work, and which he can never express to his satisfaction. The ideal infinitely transcends the expression. The soul contemplates the beautiful, but does not create it. The beautiful, as Plato somewhere says, "is the splendor of the Good." It is the splendor of the True and the Good, that is, of God; though Gioberti, in his Del Bello, seems to divorce it from the ideal, and, while asserting the reality of the object, would appear to resolve the beautiful into the subjective impression on the sensibility, produced by the apprehension of the object, which supposes that beauty exists only for sensible existences. It is as real as God himself, and as objective as the ideal formula. It is the divine splendor, inseparable from the Divine Being. Everything God has made participates, in a higher or lower degree, of beauty, because it participates of being; but beauty itself in its infinity is only in God himself, which exceeds all the power of men and angels to represent. The artist, by the noetic power of the soul, which, if a true artist, he possesses in a higher degree than ordinary men, beholds, contemplates, and loves it. It is; as we have just said, the vision of his soul and the object of his love. He detects it in creatures, in the region of fancy, in the mind, and in the soul itself, and adores it in the ideal. The power of detecting it in sensibles is fancy; in the ideal, is imagination. In seeking to represent it or express it in his productions, it is the real, the objective, he seeks to express or embody. He may form in his mind a representation of it, but that representation is not the object of the mind in either fancy or imagination, nor is it a pure mental representation, not only because it is formed after the real, but because it is formed only in conjunction with the activity of the real. [Footnote 282]
[Footnote 282: The artist ought always to be highly moral and devout, but whether so or not depends on the motive with which he acts, or purpose for which he seeks to embody the beauty he sees. The relation of aesthetics to ethics, of art to religion is easily understood. Art is not, as some Germans would persuade us, religion, nor is the culture of art true religious worship. Art may be licentious, and is, when it embodies only the sensual passions and affections of our nature, and the more so in proportion to the exquisite touch and skill in the execution. In no case can the brilliancy and perfection of the execution atone for the moral deformity of the object represented. Art which appeals simply to the senses, and inspires only sensible devotion, is not necessarily immoral, but is not positively moral or religious. But art which seeks to embody or express the ideal, the splendor of the real, the true, the good, whether as presented in the ideal intuition, or as participated by the creatures of God, can hardly fail to be moral and religious in its effect as well as in its ideal. God is worshipped in spirit and in truth, even worshipped in his works, for he enters into all his works as their cause, and their being is in him. We praise God in his saints, in all his works of nature or grace. The art is not the worship, but it is an adjunct to worship, and hence religion in all ages has called into its service the highest and richest forms of art.]
These remarks are sufficient to show that all that Dr. Porter says of the faculty of Representation is, when not confused or false, of no moment. He darkens instead of elucidating his subject. We pass on, therefore, to his Part III., on Thinking and Thought-Knowledge.
The mental operations treated by the author under the head of Thinking and Thought-knowledge, are those which Locke calls by the general name of reflection, and are conception, abstraction, or generalization, judgment, reasoning, deductive and inductive, and scientific or systematic arrangement. They are not faculties, but operations of the mind. The proper English name for the faculty on which they depend, so far as usage goes, is not thought, nor the power of thought—for every intellectual act, whether representative or presentative, is a thought—but understanding or reason. The old word was understanding, but it is objectionable, because it includes, according to present usage, only the intellectual activity of the soul, and implies nothing of voluntary activity. Reason is the better term; for it combines both the intellectual and the volitive activity of the soul.
The objection of the professor that "reason is used for the very highest of the rational functions, or else in a very indefinite sense for all that distinguishes man from the brute," does not appear to us to be conclusive. Every intellectual act, the highest as the lowest, is thought, an act of one and the same thinking faculty. The objects and conditions of knowledge may vary, but the faculty of knowledge does not vary with them. Reason is not used in a more indefinite sense when used for all that distinguishes man from the brute, than is thought as used by the professor. Man is well defined to be animal rationale, or rational animal; but this does not mean that man is animal plus reason, but the animal transformed by reason; and hence there is a specific difference between the sort of intelligence which it seems difficult to deny to animals, and the intelligence of man. All human intelligence is rational, the product of reason. Coleridge and our American transcendentalists, after Kant, attempted to distinguish between understanding [Verstand] and reason [Vernunft], and to restrict understanding to that portion of our knowledge which is derived through the senses, and reason to an order of knowledge that transcends all understanding, and to which only the gifted few ever attain. But they have not been successful. Knowledge of the highest objects, as of the lowest, is by the same faculty, and we may still use reason in its old sense, as the subjective principle of all the operations the professor calls thinking.