LECTURE IV.
GOD THE PRINCIPLE OF PRINCIPLES.
Object of the lecture: What is the ultimate basis of absolute truth?—Four hypotheses: Absolute truth may reside either in us, in particular beings and the world, in itself, or in God. 1. We perceive absolute truth, we do not constitute it. 2. Particular beings participate in absolute truth, but do not explain it; refutation of Aristotle. 3. Truth does not exist in itself; defence of Plato. 4. Truth resides in God.—Plato; St. Augustine; Descartes; Malebranche; Fénelon; Bossuet; Leibnitz.—Truth the mediator between God and man.—Essential distinctions.
We have justified the principles that govern our intelligence; we have become confident that there is truth outside of us, that there are verities worthy of that name, which we can perceive, which we do not make, which are not solely conceptions of our mind, which would still exist although our mind should not perceive them. Now this other problem naturally presents itself: What, then, in themselves, are these universal and necessary truths? where do they reside? whence do they come? We do not raise this problem, and the problems that it embraces; the human mind itself proposes them, and it is fully satisfied only when it has resolved them, and when it has reached the extreme limit of knowledge that it is within its power to attain.
It is certain that the principles which, in all the orders of knowledge, discover to us absolute and necessary truths, constitute part of our reason, which surely makes its dwelling in us, and is intimately connected with personality in the depths of intellectual life. It follows that the truth, which reason reveals to us, falls thereby into close relation with the subject that perceives it, and seems only a conception of our mind. Nevertheless, as we have proved, we perceive truth, we are not the authors of it. If the person that I am, if the individual me does not, perhaps, explain the whole of reason, how could it explain truth, and absolute truth? Man, limited and passing away, perceives necessary, eternal, infinite truth; that is for him a privilege sufficiently high; but he is neither the principle that sustains truth, nor the principle that gives it being. Man may say, My reason; but give him credit for never having dared to say, My truth.
If absolute truths are beyond man who perceives them, once more, where are they, then? A peripatetic would respond—In nature. Is it, in fact, necessary to seek for them any other subject than the beings themselves which they govern? What are the laws of nature, except certain properties which our mind disengages from the beings and phenomena in which they are met, in order to consider them apart? Mathematical principles are nothing more. For example, the axiom thus expressed—The whole is greater than any of its parts, is true of any whole and part whatever. The principle of contradiction, considered in its logical title, as the condition of all our judgments, of all our reasonings, constitutes a part of the essence of all being, and no being can exist without containing it. The universal exists, says Aristotle, but it does not exist apart from particular beings.[44]
This theory which considers universals as having their basis in things, is a progress towards the pure conceptualism which we have in the beginning indicated and shunned. Aristotle is much more of a realist than Abelard and Kant. He is quite right in maintaining that universals are in particular things, for particular things could not be without universals; universals give to them their fixity, even for a day, and their unity. But from the fact that universals are in particular beings, is it necessary to conclude that they, wholly and exclusively, reside there, and that they have no other reality than that of the objects to which they are applied? It is the same with principles of which universals are the constitutive elements. It is, it is true, in the particular fact, of a particular cause producing a particular event, that is given us the universal principle of causality; but this principle is much more extensive than the facts, for it is applied, not only to this fact, but to a thousand others. The particular fact contains the principle, but it does not wholly contain it, and, far from giving the basis of the principle, it is based upon it. As much may be said of other principles.
Perhaps it will be replied that, if a principle is certainly more extensive than such a fact, or such a being, it is not more extensive than all facts and all beings, and that nature, considered as a whole, can explain that which each particular being does not explain. But nature, in its totality, is still only a finite and contingent thing, whilst the principles to be explained have a necessary and infinite bearing. The idea of the infinite can come neither from any particular being, nor from the whole of beings. Entire nature will not furnish us the idea of perfection, for all the beings of nature are imperfect. Absolute principles govern, then, all facts and all beings, they do not spring from them.
Will it be necessary to come to the opinion, then, that absolute truths, being explicable neither by humanity nor by nature, subsist by themselves, and are to themselves their own foundation and their own subject?
But this opinion contains still more absurdities than the preceding; for, I ask, what are truths, absolute or contingent, that exist by themselves, out of things in which they are found, and out of the intelligence that conceives them? Truth is, then, only a realized abstraction. There are no quintessential metaphysics which can prevail against good sense; and if such is the Platonic theory of ideas, Aristotle is right in his opposition to it. But such a theory is only a chimera that Aristotle created for the pleasure of combating it.
Let us hasten to remove absolute truths from this ambiguous and equivocal state. And how? By applying to them a principle which should now be familiar to you. Yes, truth necessarily appeals to something beyond itself. As every phenomenon has its subject of inherence, as our faculties, our thoughts, our volitions, our sensations, exist only in a being which is ourselves, so truth supposes a being in which it resides, and absolute truths suppose a being absolute as themselves, wherein they have their final foundation. We come thus to something absolute, which is no longer suspended in the vagueness of abstraction, but is a being substantially existing. This being, absolute and necessary, since it is the subject of necessary and absolute truths, this being which is at the foundation of truth as its very essence, in a single word, is called God.[45]