The Abbé Hugonin, when nominated to an episcopal see in France, was also required to make a formal renunciation of ontologism, which he had taught in his writings, as a condition of receiving the confirmation of the pope, and complied without hesitation. The Abbé Branchereau, a distinguished French Sulpitian and professor of philosophy, voluntarily submitted a statement of the doctrine contained in his Prelections to the examination and judgment of the Holy See, and, when the judgment condemning his system was made known to him, promptly submitted and suppressed his work. In fact, there has been everywhere a most ready and edifying submission given to [pg 363] the judgment of Rome on a system which was rapidly spreading and gaining ground, and toward which a great number of the finest minds among Catholic scholars felt the strongest attraction. The reason of this may be found in the fact that those who had embraced this system or were inclined toward it were generally good Catholics, holding sound theological principles, and imbued with the love of truth and the love of the church, loyal to conscience, and well grounded in Christian humility and obedience. Consequently, ontologism, as a system, prevailing among Catholics and in Catholic schools, is dead, and rapidly passing into oblivion—a great gain for science, as well as for religion, since it removes a great obstacle in the way of the revival of the genuine and sound philosophy which alone contains the real and solid wisdom of the Grecian sages, the fathers of the church, and the gigantic masters of the mediæval schools, combined, harmonized, and reduced to method.
It is time now to explain in what the essence of ontologism consists. In the words of M. Fabre, a professor at the Sorbonne, “Ontologism is a system in which, after having proved the objective reality of general ideas, we establish that these ideas are not forms or modifications of our soul; that they are not anything created; that they are necessary, unchangeable, eternal, absolute objects; that they are concentrated in the being to which this name belongs in its simple signification (l'être simplement dit), and that this infinite Being is the first idea apprehended by our mind, the first intelligible, the light in which we see all the eternal, universal, and absolute truths. Ontologists say, then, that these eternal truths cannot have any reality outside of the eternal essence, whence they conclude that they do not subsist except as united to the divine substance, and consequently that it can only be in this substance that we see them.”[98]
We will now give the first two, the fourth, and the fifth of the propositions condemned at Rome, and which, with the other three, were taken from the prelections of a professor in a French seminary, never published, but extensively circulated in lithograph or MSS., and which, the reader will see, express the identical doctrine summarized so concisely and ably by M. Fabre:
I. The immediate cognition of God, at least habitual, is essential to the human intellect, so that without this it cannot know anything, since it is the intellectual light itself.
II. That being which we intellectively perceive in all things, and without which we perceive nothing intellectively (quod in omnibus et sine quo nihil intelligimus), is the divine being.
IV. The congenital knowledge of God as simply being (ens simpliciter) involves every other cognition in an eminent manner, so that by it we have implicit knowledge of every being, under whatever respect it is knowable.
V. All other ideas are only modifications of the idea in which God is intellectively perceived (intelligitur) as simply being (ens simpliciter).
Similar propositions to these are found in the fifteen submitted by M. Branchereau to the judgment of the Holy See, viz.:
1. In the act of thought two [pg 364] things are to be essentially distinguished—the subject thinking and the object thought.
2. Again, the object thought is distinguished into two things—that which is being simply, and that which is being in a certain respect.