As the conception is always general, it can never be the object of the mind in the fact of thought. It is a product of the mind operating on the individual object or objects with which the mind has thought, and is never the object itself. The same may be said of generalization, abstraction, and every form of reasoning. But if this be so, in what are conceptions, abstractions, etc., known? If they are known at all, they must be objects of knowledge; if not known at all, how can we think or speak of them? They are known in knowing their concretes, as the author himself tells us. As concepts, abstractions, generalizations, or general notions, they do not exist in nature, and cannot be known or thought. But they exist as qualities or properties of things, and are known in knowing the things themselves. Thus we know round things; all round things have the same property of being round; we may, then, consider only this property common to all round things, and form the general conception of roundness; but we do not see or apprehend roundness, and the object of thought is always the round thing. So of all so-called universals that are abstractions, conceptions, or generalizations. The object known is the concrete; the abstraction, abstracted from it, being nothing, is not known or even thought.
But Cousin, in his Philosophie Scholastique, has very properly distinguished general conceptions or general notions from genera and species. The former are real only in their concretes, and knowable only in them; the latter are real, and actually exist a parte rei. Genus has relation to generation, and is as real as the individual, for it generates the individual. Hence, we cannot agree with Leibnitz, when he makes the genus or species consist in resemblance, and declares that resemblance real. The individual does not merely mimic the genus, but is produced by it. The genus is always causative in relation to the species, and the species, in relation to the individual. The intelligible is always causative in relation to the sensible, which copies or imitates it. The genus is not the possibility of individuals, nor are they its realization. It is not a property or a quality of men as individuals, for it is, in the order of second causes, the cause producing them, and therefore cannot be generalized from them, or be a general notion or conception, like roundness, the generalization or abstract of round. Without the genus there could be no generation, as without a generator there could be no genus. Yet, though genera and species, the only universals, properly so-called, are, as the old realists held, real, existing a parte rei, and are distinguishable from the individuals, as the generator from the generated, the species from the specificated; they are not separable, and do not exist apart from them. Adam was an individual, lived, acted, sinned, repented, and died, as an individual man; yet was he the generic, as well as individual, man; for he was the whole human race, and the progenitor of all men that have been born or are to be born.
But while we adopt, in relation to genera and species, the doctrine of the mediaeval realists, we hold with regard to other so called universals with St. Thomas, who says they exist in mente cum fundamento in re. The fundamentum in re of conceptions, abstractions, and generalizations is precisely the individual objects apprehended by the mind from which reason abstracts or generalizes them. The only point which we now make against the author is that the object of thought or knowledge is not the conception or notion, but the object from which the reason forms it; and that in it nothing is thought beyond that object. Philosophy has been divested of its scientific character, made infinitely perplexing and most difficult to be understood, as well as utterly worthless, by being regarded as the science, not of things, but of these very conceptions, abstractions, and general notions, which, apart from their individuals or concretes, are pure nullities. We insist on this, because we wish to see philosophy brought back to the real, to objects of experience in their relation to the ideal formula; and our principal quarrel with the professor is, that his philosophy is not real, is not the science of realities, but of conceptions and abstractions.
We can hardly pause on what the professor says of judgment and the proposition. We can only remark in passing that every thought, every perception, even, is a judgment—a judgment that the object thought or perceived is real or really exists. Every affirmation is a judgment, and every judgment is an affirmation; for denials are made only by affirming the truth denied. Pure negations are unintelligible, present no counteraction to the mind, and cannot be thought. "The fool hath said in his heart, God is—not." It is only by asserting that God is that we can deny that he is. Every negation is the contradiction of what it affirms. So-called negative judgments are really affirmative. We do not mean that denials cannot be made, for we are constantly making them; but they can be made only by affirming the truth; and the denial that transcends the truth affirmed in the denial is simply verbal, and no real denial at all. Universal negation is simply impossible; and hence when we have shown that any system of philosophy leads logically to nihilism, or even universal scepticism, we have refuted it. Logicians tell us that of contradictories one must be false; but it is equally just to say, that of contradictories one must be true; for truth cannot contradict itself, and only truth can contradict falsehood.
But we pass on to Reasoning, which the professor holds to be mediate judgment, and to which we hold all the reflective operations of reason may be reduced. What a mediate judgment is, we do not know. Reasoning may be necessary as the means and condition of judging in a certain class of cases, but the judgment itself is in all cases direct. The error of the professor here, as throughout the whole of this Part III., and, indeed, of his whole treatise, is that he treats every question from the point of view of conception, or the general notion, instead of the point of view of reality, as he cannot help doing as an inductive psychologist.
Reasoning is a reflective operation. It operates on the matter presented by ideal intuition and experience; it clears up, explains, verifies, and classifies what is intuitively affirmed, together with what experience presents. Its instrument is language. We can think without language, and so far De Bonald was wrong, unless he understood, as the professor does, by thought, an act of reflection; but we cannot reflect or reason without language of some sort to re-present to the mind's contemplation the ideal or intelligible intuition. This re-presentation is not an act of the soul herself, nor the direct and immediate act of the Creator, as is the ideal intuition. It is effected only by language in which the ideal or intelligible is embodied and represented, and of which it is the sensible sign or representation. In other words, the ideal is an object of reflection only as taught through the medium of language; for we must bear in mind that man is not pure spirit or pure intelligence, but spirit united to body, and that he must have some sort of sensible representation in order to reflect. Hence the peripatetic maxim, nihil est in intellectu, quod non prius fuerit in sensu, which does not mean that only sensibles are cognizable, but that nothing can be reflectively thought, or as the Italians say, re-thought, (ripensare,) without sensible representation. That God is, can be proved with certainty by reason; for we have immediate intuition of that which is God in the intuition of real and necessary being; but we cannot reach the conclusion that the intuitively affirmed object really is God without reflecting on the intuition, and this we cannot do unless it is re-presented or held up to our contemplation in language, or without its being sensibly represented by the word God. Language is the necessary instrument of reason; we cannot reason without it, and only rational existences have language properly so called. No animal deprived of "the discourse of reason" has even articulation.
Those philosophers, or pretended philosophers, who regard language either as a human invention or as the spontaneous production of human nature, have never duly considered its office in the development of thought, and in the rational operations of the soul. Men could not have invented language without reflection, and without language they cannot reflect. It needs language to be able to invent language. The other theory is no better. The soul does not secrete language as the liver secretes bile, for language has in it more than human nature. The spontaneous productions of nature may be less than nature, but cannot be more. There is a philosophy in language broader and deeper than human thought, a philosophy that embraces elements which are known only by revelation, and which human nature does not contain. All language is modelled after the ideal formula. Its essential elements are subject, predicate, and copula, or the noun, adjective, and verb. The verb and adjective may be, and often are, combined in the same word, but they can be resolved always into the predicate and copula. The copula is always the verb to be, or its equivalent in other languages than our own, and this verb is the only verb in any language.
The verb to be is precisely the name of God himself, the SUM QUI SUM. We cannot make, then, a single assertion but by the Divine Being, and he enters as the copula into every one of our judgments without which no affirmation can be expressed. But God is supernatural, and is the author of nature; the ideal formula which is repeated in every judgment is not contained in human nature, is not in the human mind as in its subject, but is above our nature, and by affirming itself creates our nature, both physical and intellectual. How then could our nature, operating simply as second cause, produce spontaneously language which in its essential nature expresses what is beyond and above itself? Men, especially philosophers, or rather theorizers, have corrupted and still continue to corrupt language, as we can see in the book before us; but we have never yet heard of any one by the spontaneous action of nature secreting or producing a language, or of any one having a language without being taught it. Yet nature is all to-day that it ever was, and as fresh, as vigorous, as prolific. Even the fall has not deprived it of any of its primitive faculties, capacities, properties, or tendencies. If language is a spontaneous production of human nature, we ought to have some instances of children growing up and speaking a rich and philosophical language without having ever learned it. For ourselves, we have a huge distrust of all those theories which assume that nature could and did do in the past what she does not and cannot do in the present. Our savants employ themselves in seeking the types of domestic animals in the wild races; why not seek the type of the wild races in the domestic? Why suppose man could and once did domesticate races which he finds it difficult, if not impossible, to domesticate now? We do not believe much in the modern doctrine of progress, but we believe just as little in the wonderful superiority of nature and men in ante-historical times, which is sometimes assumed, especially by the champions of progress.
Language is neither a human invention nor a natural production, but was created by God himself and infused into man along with the affirmation of the ideal formula, when he made him and placed him in the Garden, and it has been perpetuated by tradition, or by being handed down from father or rather mother to child. It comes to us from the hand of the Creator; he who made man gave him speech. We can explain the origin of language in no other way, as we can explain the origin of man only by saying with the catechism, God made him. As language is the instrument of reason, and re-presents to his contemplation the ideal which the Creator fitted it to symbolize, its corruption or confusion has a most disastrous effect on philosophy. It was confounded at Babel, and men lost the unity of speech, and with it the unity of the ideal, and were dispersed. The Gentiles lost the unity of language, and they lost with it the unity of the ideal, or the copula of the divine judgment, and labored to explain, as our modern savants are laboring to explain, the existence and laws of the universe without the creative act of God. Language, corrupted re-presented to the ancient Gentiles, and as it does to our modern physiologists and psychologists, the ideal only in a mutilated form, and hence the fatal error of Gentilism and of modern so-called science, which asserts pantheism. It is necessary, in order to have a true philosophy, to have some means of preserving the purity and infallibility of speech, and at no former period was such means more necessary than it is now.
The instrument of reasoning is language; its form is the syllogism, which is given in the ideal formula. All the matter of knowledge is given in presentation, and the syllogism does not advance it; but it explains, distinguishes, arranges it according to the real relations of the objects known, clears up what is obscure, and verifies what is uncertain, doubtful, by reducing the whole to its principle or principles. The principle and model of the syllogism are in the ideal. Being and existences are the extremes, and the creative act is the medius terminus. The major represents being, the minor existences, and the middle term produces the conclusion. To this regular form of the syllogism every form of argument is reducible. If the major is universal, and the minor is proved, the conclusion is necessary and apodictic.