The word reason is, indeed, used in an objective as well as in a subjective sense. As subjective, it is a faculty of the soul; the objective reason is the ideal formula, and creates and constitutes the subjective reason. Cousin distinguishes between the two, but as between the personal and the impersonal—a mere modal distinction, not a distinction of substance. He identifies the objective reason with the
or Word of God, while it is really identical with the ideal formula, which embraces both being and existences, united and distinguished by the creative act of being, as explained in our former article. This asserts a distinction of subject and of substance between the objective and subjective reason asserted by Cousin. In the objective reason, God, in the subjective, man, is the actor; and there is all the difference of substance between them that there is between God and man, or between real, universal, and necessary being, and finite, contingent existence. They ought not to be both called by the same name, and we ourselves rarely so call them. We ourselves call the objective reason the ideal formula, or, briefly, the ideal; yet good writers and speakers do use the word in both senses. They say, "Man is endowed with reason," or has a "rational nature," in which they employ the term subjectively. They say, also, of such an assertion, "It is unreasonable, or it is contrary to reason;" that is, to the truth, or principle of things, in which they use it objectively, as they do when they speak of the principles affirmed in the ideal formula, and call them the reason, necessary and absolute ideas, or the principles of reason; for nothing necessary or absolute is or can be subjective.
We ourselves use the word in a subjective sense, and understand by it the faculty of reasoning, or the subjective principle of all our mental operations. It is not a simple power, but a complex power, embracing both the percipient and volitive capacities of the soul. In every rational operation of the soul, there is both perception and volition, and it is this fact that distinguishes reason from the simple power of perception, or intellectual apprehension. We see and we look, and we look that we may see; we hear and we listen, and listen that we may hear. The looking and the listening are peculiarly rational acts, in which the soul voluntarily, or by an act of the will, directs her intellectual capacities to a special intellectual purpose or end. This voluntary activity, or direction of the capacity to know, must not be confounded with free will; it is the voluntarium of the theologians, distinguished, on the one hand, from spontaneity, and on the other, from the liber arbitrium, or free will, which is the faculty of electing or choosing between right and wrong, and implies, whichever it chooses, the power to choose the contrary. It is the principle of all moral accountability. The voluntarium is a simple, voluntary activity, or power of directing our attention to this or that intellectual object, or of using the cognitive power in the service of science. The reason may be defined, then, the soul's faculty of using her intellectual and volitive powers for the explication and verification of the knowledge furnished by presentation.
With these preliminary remarks we proceed to consider some of the mental operations which give us what Professor Porter calls Thought-Knowledge. We do not question the fact of these operations, nor their importance in the development of our rational life; what we deny is, that they are a power or faculty of the mind, and that in performing them they are objects of the mind, or that they add anything to the matter of our knowledge.
The professor says, p. 383, "The power of thought [reason] as a capacity [faculty] for certain psychological processes, is dependent for its exercise and development on the lower powers of the intellect. These furnish the materials for it to work with and upon. We must apprehend the individual objects by means of the senses and consciousness [pure sensism] before we can think these objects." So in consciousness and sense-perception we do not think, and we must apprehend sensibles before we can think them! To intellectually apprehend an object is to think it. Intellectual apprehension and thought are one and the same fact. The professor continues, "We can classify, explain, and methodize only individual things, and these must first be known by sense and consciousness before they can be united and combined into generals." Here are two errors and one truth. The first error is in regarding consciousness as a cognitive power or faculty, and the second is in confining the individual things to sensibles, or the material world. We know in presentative knowledge not only the sensible but the supersensible, the intelligible, or ideal. The ideal principles cannot be found, obtained, or created by the mind's own activity, and are apprehended by the mind only as they are given intuitively by the act of the Creator; but being given, they are as really apprehended and known by the mind as any sensible object; nay, are what the mind apprehends that is most clear and luminous, so luminous that it is only by their light that even sensibles are mentally apprehensible or perceptible. The one truth is that the objects of the soul in her operations must first be known either by perception or intuition before they can be classified, explained, and methodized. Hence the operations of which the author treats under this head do not extend our knowledge of objects. They are all reflective operations, and reflection can only re-present what has already been presented.
The professor is right in maintaining that only individual objects are apprehensible, if he means that we apprehend things only in individuo or in concreto; for this is what we have all along been insisting on against him. Things are not apprehensible in general, but in the concrete. Hence Rosmini's mistake in making the first and abiding object of the intellect ens in genere, which is a mere possible ens, and no real being at all. It is simply conception or abstraction formed by the mind operating on the intuition of real being, which never is nor can be abstracted or generalized. Yet the author has argued under both presentative knowledge and representative knowledge that the mind, sometimes with, and sometimes without, anything distinct from and independent of itself, creates its own object; and that the object, as well as the act, may be purely psychical. Thus he tells us that in sense-perception we do not perceive the material thing itself, but the joint product of the material agent and the sentient organism; and that in representation the object represented may be unreal, chimerical, and exist only in the soul, and for the soul alone. And he dwells with great unction on the relief and advantage one finds in escaping from the real world to the unreal which the soul creates for herself. True, he says that whatever the object, real or unreal, abstract or concrete, it is apprehensible only as an individual object; but the unreal, the chimerical, the abstract, is never individual. Why does he call conceptions concepts, if not because he holds the conception is both the act and the object of the mind in conceiving? And does he hold the concept to be always individual, never general? Conception, in his system, is always a generalization, or a general notion, formed by the mind, and existing only in the mind. How, then, can it be an object of the mind? He says truly the object is individual, but "the concept (p. 391) is uniformly general." And yet, in the very first paragraph on the next page, he calls it an object of cognition! Farther on, he says, "The concept is a purely relative object of knowledge," whatever that may mean; and in the same section, section 389, he speaks of it "as a mental product and mental object.'" To our understanding, he thus contradicts himself.
Yet we hold that whatever the mind cognizes at all, it cognizes in the concrete, as an individual object. And therefore we deny that the ideas of the necessary, the universal, of necessary cause, and the like, which the author calls intuitions, and treats as first principles, necessary assumptions, abstract ideas, etc., are abstractions, mental conceptions, or generalizations; for there are no concretes or individual objects from which they can be abstracted or generalized. As we really apprehend them, when affirmed in the ideal formula by the divine act, and as we cannot apprehend what is neither being nor existence, as the author himself says, though continually asserting the contrary; and as every existence is a finite contingent existence, they must be real, necessary, and universal being. They cannot be generalizations of being; for nothing is conceivable more general and universal than being. Being, taken in its proper sense, as the ens simpliciter of the schoolmen, is itself that which is most individual and, at the same time, the most general, the most particular and the most universal. These so-called necessary ideas, then, are being; and in apprehending them as intuitively affirmed, we do really apprehend being. Hence, as being, real and necessary being, is God, whom the theologians call Ens necessarium et reale, God, in affirming the ideal formula, intuitively affirms himself, and we really apprehend him, not as he is in himself, in his essence, indeed, but as being, the ideal or the intelligible, that is, as facing our intelligence; or, in other words, we apprehend him as the subject of the judgment, Ens creat existentias, or as the subject of the predicate existences, united and distinguished by his creative act, the only real, as the only possible, copula.
The author makes man the analogon of God, and, indeed, God in miniature, or a finite God, and gravely tells us, p. 100, that "we have only to conceive the limitations of our being removed, and we have the conception of God." But as we are not being, but existence, we are finite and limited in our very nature; remove the limitations, and we are not God, but nothing. Eliminate the finite, says Père Gratry, and you have God, in the same way and by the same process that the mathematician has his infinitesimals. But this process of elimination of the finite gives the mathematician only the infinitely less than the finite number or quantity, and it would give the theologian not the infinitely greater but the infinitely less than the finite existence. Besides, the process could at best give us not God in his being, but a mere abstract God, existing only as a mental generalization. The universal cannot be concluded from the particular, nor the necessary from the contingent, because, without the intuition of the universal and the necessary, we have and can have no experience of the particular and the contingent—a fact we commend to the consideration of the inductive theologians.